Spooks By Me

New Blog Space

2010-07-06T16:33:00.001-07:00

I've finished moving my blog permanently to www.spooksbyme.org, Come visit me there!

Moving from Blogger to Wordpress

2010-06-23T11:17:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone--I'm in the process of moving from Blogger to Wordpress (and trying to keep all my permalinks). This blog will continue to be hosted at spooksbyme.org, but there might be a period of a day or two when the blog is down. No doubt you'll be able to survive, but I thought I'd let you all know!

I'll be in the Bay Area this Saturday and Sunday!

2010-06-18T19:48:00.002-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand Presents...

Jeffrey Schrader & K. Lorraine Graham

Sunday, June 20, 2010

6:30 pm, Admission 5 USD

@ 21 Grand, 416 25th Street, Oakland

Jeffrey Schrader’s newest book is Art Fraud (BlazeVOX 2010). This summer his newest work will be gridpattern (www.ErgArts.com). He has previous work in a handful of diy journals & websites. He has some older chapbooks. He’s worked as a factory employee, an outdoor adventure guide for young, urban troublemakers, an arts academy teacher, a bike messenger, a student, an archivist, a recipient of unemployment benefits, and an accountant. He does not blog, but enjoys reading yours. He has occasionally helped out with The Uglyman Collective, Another Thing Books, and (currently) Cricket Online Review. He presently lives in Oakland, CA, but he won’t live there forever. He has received no grants or awards.

K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take-Home Project. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Area Sneaks, Foursquare and elsewhere. She currently lives in southern California with her partner, Mark Wallace, and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet.

Daily

2010-06-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

I've been sucked into facebookland conversations about the Rethinking Poetics Conference. If I lived closer to New York or actually had some kind of academic job that required me to go to such conferences or if I'd been invited or if tickets to New York were really cheap and I'd had a place to stay, I might have gone. Conferences are all slightly doomed. If I ever get to/have to throw a poetry conference, it would be 1) interdisciplinary 2) mix readings/performance/art with critical discussion 3) have time for dancing and parties 4) have good food available--either on site or easily accessible off-site 5) there should be at least one good bar nearby, and preferably several 6) there should be some time for sleeping in and some time for napping.

Now that I think of it, both Post Moot I and II as well as Positions were pretty close to fulfilling all of my criteria. And Press was fun, too. I think it's also notable that Post Moot and Positions didn't call themselves conferences. Post Moot was a "convocation" and Positions was a "colloquium." What about festivals? I know the word "festival" brings up, perhaps, images of people dancing around in the California wilderness, wearing motley, and juggling--but hey, a lot of those motley-wearing jugglers are my friends, and they often throw good parties. I mean, if I had the funds to spare, I'd definitely be going to at least Wanderlust and Burning Man this year.

Enough of that. Mark and I ate the last of the apricot-blackberry tart I made for my birthday, and it was delicious. Otherwise, I've been eating a lot of strawberries. I also made a killer roasted-potato salad with corn (also roasted), zucchini, red onion, green beans and tomatoes. Dressing was made of of tarragon, apple-cider vinegar, mustard, olive oil, hot sauce, etc. Yum.

On Sunday, I managed to get into a full version of Eka Pada Rajakapotasana, with both hands and my head on my foot. Here's a picture of what the full pose looks like for those of you who aren't yogis. Of course, my hips weren't perfectly square or perfectly on the ground, but still, moments of physical opening like that make me hopeful

What else? I did decide to get a pair of Toms. Gold ones.

Post Moot 2010: Day 1

2010-06-09T09:08:00.000-07:00

Mark and I arrived just as the Flarf & friends reading was getting started--so we missed all of the morning's events. I was already in overwhelmed mode. What I mean is that I miss the poetry world a lot here in San Diego, and seeing so many people I love and respect all at once makes me hyper and manic. So many friends, all at the same time! Hyper and manic is a good way to feel at a conference, though.

I didn’t read first, but I’ll describe my reading to get that description out of the way. Because I was suddenly hyper and manic, I was also rather nervous. And I hadn’t had time to put on any make up. So that’s the first thing I did when I got on stage—powder and mascara, which I smudged all over my left eye because my hand was shaking. Performing my own nervousness or needs onstage (for make up, for dancing, for a drink of whiskey, for a comforting stuffed animal) is something I’ve been playing with for a while. It doesn’t make me less nervous, but it does ground me and help me move from the world of my own weirdness to a world of staged public weirdness. I the long poem from Terminal Humming about the “standard government tortured dictator forced to lick boots.” I don’t read it out loud very often, because it’s creepy and not the kind of funny that people laugh at much. But in this particular context, that was good. I’m not going to try and complete with the kinds of laughs the audience wants to laugh when Kasey, Mel, Rod and Adeena are reading. Instead, I tried to be the tense and weird contrast.

Kasey read from of his anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which, yes, do retain meter and rhyme. I think of the Sonnagrams as structurally conceptual and tonally flarfy. They play with the idea of sonnet as political and social commentary, sometimes through direct address of other writers.

Mel read a variety of pieces, including “Superpoke” and the one I love about Jesus and pimp handshakes. I haven’t had many chances to hear Mel read since I left DC, but I feel like there’s something new (to me) about her use of dynamics and timing—a sophisticated sense of the various performative arcs of the poems, of how the audience is reacting, and how to really work the tension between those two things. And her dress was gorgeous.

Monica Moody mentioned “Adeena Karasick’s preternatural and sexy verbal fireworks” in her post on the Post Moot blog; I think it’s an apt description of Adeena’s poems and performance style. Layered, sexy. Adeena’s poems contain aural & connotative linguistic chain reactions which, to me, feel like they could keep going until they include all of language, given time and space.

“Rod’s Flarf poems make me cry.” That’s what I wrote in my notes. Nothing about which specific poems he read. Grover’s bottom? Voting machine poems? Later, when I write about Rod’s other reading, I’ll talk about what I consider to be his flexible tonal range.

After the reading, I was very ready for some wine, and so glad to head over to the Miami Inn for drinks and more readings. Laura Moriarty and Carla Harryman gave brief readings (more about their work later when I write on their longer performances), and Tom Orange played saxophone. I pretty sure we talked about Pee Wee Russell at some point during the evening.

Mark and I snuck out at around midnight to get a reasonable night’s sleep so that we could be in good form tomorrow morning for the 9am (6am our time) panel/performance.

"I" "Am" Still "Here"

2010-06-08T19:45:00.001-07:00

Spring quarter at UCSD is finished. Which means my first year of my second time in graduate school is finished.
I am reading in Oakland on June 20 with Jeffrey Schrader at The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. I will remind you of this next week.
My birthday is this Friday, June 11.
I did type up my notes from Post Moot, but they are not even in a bloggable format.
Most of you have, by now, seen my Post Moot Photo Set on Flickr.
I'm working on a prose piece about Papua New Guinea, fruit, mining, and manifest destiny. The whole project creeps me out.
Also still working on my "White Girl" project, which now includes many footnotes.
I've been hooping more again, and it feels good.

Friday Lester (On Hoola Hoop in Sepia) / How can my blog be treated as a serious poetry blog if I continue to post pictures of Lester the Parrot?

2010-05-14T13:23:00.001-07:00

e real question is this: why doesn't Lester get more fan mail?

Although Lester would like his own blog, "The Daily Lester," I think that Friday Lester is enough.

Friday Lester

2010-04-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

A Post Moot report is coming, but in the meantime, here's a Friday Lester picture:

Post Moot

2010-04-21T21:16:00.001-07:00

I'm so very excited to be heading off to the post_moot convocation at tomorrow for four days of poetry + performance + friends + awesomeness! The photoset from post moot 2006 will give you an idea of what I'm (happily) in for.

Participants:

Stan Apps • Oana Avasilichioaei • Mike Basinski • Holly Bass • John M. Bennett • Black Took Collective • Sean Bonney • Tammy Brown • Mairéad Byrne • cris cheek • Daniel Citro • A.M.J. Crawford • Jordan Dalton • Maria Damon • Ian Davidson • Ryan Downey • Lara Glenum • Alan Golding • K. Lorraine Graham • Duriel Harris • Carla Harryman • Jeff Hilson • Jen Hofer • Josef Horaçek • William R. Howe • Jade Hudson • Christine Hume • Peter Jaeger • Mark Jeffery • Bonnie Jones • Pierre Joris • Adeena Karasick • KBD sonic collective • Brian Kincaid • A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz • José Luna • Dawn Lundy-Martin • Mel Nichols • Hoa Nguyen • Chris Mann • Monica Mody • K. Silem Mohammad • Laura Moriarty • Judd Morrissey • Erin Mouré • Jason Nelson • Mel Nichols • Tom Orange • Jessica Ponto • Luke Roberts • Jaime Robles • Ric Royer • Linda Russo • Lisa Samuels • Standard Schaefer • Jonathan Skinner • Danny Snelson • Todd Seabrook • Jessica Smith • Rod Smith • Kate Sopko • Rodrigo Toscano • Lawrence Upton • Catherine Wagner • Mark Wallace • Dana Ward • Barrett Watten • Brian Whitener • Steve Willey • Tyrone Williams • Ronaldo Wilson

Friday Lester

2010-04-16T17:59:00.000-07:00

Lester has a thing for pulling paper over his head.

I'm participating in two off-site readings at AWP this year--come say hello

2010-04-04T10:02:00.001-07:00

To those of you who are heading to AWP this week, I hope to see you at the conference or at an off-site event. Mark is also participating in a panel on "Hybrid Aesthetics and its Discontents" on Friday morning, which I'll be at, as well as the Flarf and Conceptual Poetry Panel on Saturday morning. And finally, I'm reading in two off-site events, so do come say hello:

Wednesday, 7:00PM-10:00PM: Dusie Pussipo Stonecoast Femiganza
Location: at Packing House Center for the Arts, 835 E. 50th Ave. Denver, CO 80216
Cost: FREE! Everybody welcome!
Featuring: Bronwen Tate, Ann Bogle, Jennifer Karmin, Marthe Reed, Annie Finch, Amy King, Cara Benson, Mackenzie Carignan, Danielle Pafunda, Deborah Poe, Ana Bozicevic, Teresa Carmody, Kate Durbin, Megan Volpert, Sarah Rosenthal, Krystal Languell, K. Lorraine Graham, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Robin Reagler, Cheryl Pallant, Shanna Compton, Lara Glenum, Deb Marquart, Elizabeth Searle, and Mel Nichols.

Saturday: 3:30PM-6:00PM Flarf & Conceptual Writing @ MCA Denver
Location: Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
Cost: $5 (includes cost of admission to museum)
A group reading in coordination with the Saturday 9am AWP panel on Flarf & Conceptual Poetry. Reception to follow in rooftop cafe. Conceptual Cocktails & Flarftinis will be served.
Featuring: Christian Bök, Brandon Downing, K. Lorraine Graham, K. Silem Mohammad, Mel Nichols, Vanessa Place, Mathew Timmons, Christine Wertheim

I Style My Hair With Surf Wax

2010-04-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

My anthology arrived yesterday--I'd forgotten that there is a whole visual art section, which is exciting. I'm especially taken with "Starfish," the mixed-media piece by Hope Atherton, whose work is completely new to me. But I'm not going to try and do a mini review of the anthology now. I am going to attempt to respond to some of the comments left on the previous post. What a lot of you are suggesting, and I agree, is that the distinctions between suburban/urban aren't so clear cut--but some of you also point out that imaginary constructions of suburban/urban have real material ramifications. Looking through the anthology I think that an interrogation of some of these imaginary constructions is relevant to some of what the poems in here are doing.

Again, what I'm doing here is writing through some preliminary thoughts, thinking through these ideas as I write and as we all converse.

A large part of my interest in the coding of shared cultural references stems from the fact that growing up, I either lived in a very small town in Maine (graduating high school class had less than 100 people), or I lived outside of the United States--sometimes in isolated places like Papua New Guinea, and sometimes in huge, urban places. In high school and later in college, I'd obsess about dumb things like how I'd read Naguib Mahfouz and Paul Bowles but not much Shakespeare, and I assumed this was because I'd had an education inferior to that of my peers. I was rather uptight. And getting back to Riot Grrrl music--I was listening to it, but I almost never went to shows, even when I was in college in DC. I was too spaced out, too uptight, taking ridiculously heavy course loads, spending 10-12 hours a week in Chinese class, and leaving the country whenever I could. Pam described her experiences with the Riot Grrrl scene as being peripheral--which is what mine were--and like her I also got the sense that it was an inclusive, coalition-building community.

Ana's comment about how, to quote her directly "city/authentic - suburb/inauthentic might not be the most useful or functional binary anymore" resonates with me. I'm pretty wary of authenticity to begin with--in part for some of the reasons Ana goes on to mention: "one might conclude that only people who can't afford to make a choice are authentic, unadulterated. Unstained by having the privilege of choosing a brand."

The suburbs are actual places where many people live, grow up and experience the world. Now that I live in a suburb, I'm especially interested in cultural reference points and, yes, consumption choices of everyone else who also lives here--not surprisingly, some people are here because of their ability to choose and some people are here because they can't afford to make a choice.

Before I moved to Carlsbad and the San Diego area in general, I'd never really lived in a suburb, though I guess I did live in Gaithersburg, MD for a year. When I was 13, the distant Maryland suburbs of DC seemed like an exciting place because I could actually get to DC on my own via the Metro.

Pam and Joseph, in their comments, spoke a bit about the ways in which the differences between suburban and urban in LA--and I'd also include San Diego county--are collapsing, maybe have collapsed. The OC has urban density and cultural diversity with the infrastructure of something that feels more like a traditional suburb. San Diego has that same density (though not nearly on the same scale) and infrastructure, but it's not nearly as diverse as the OC or LA--it's significantly whiter, though that demographic is shifting.

What I'm getting to now is an idea Patrick and Pam articulated well. Patrick said: "Pam's remarks on appropriation illuminate the ways in which authenticity and sub-/urban imaginaries have material ramifications. I want to add a personal observation: that it works both ways." And he continues: "The temporary center serves as a figure ground relationship to the authenticity of one's relative privilege. If one marks their origins as suburban in some way, the "urban" becomes fated: the ground to the figure of purchasing power. And one strives to transform that into purchase on one's power of self-determination, despite it all. The point seems to understand that that privilege exists, for whom and how is it exercised."

Yes. For my 8th-grade self, the suburbs were cool because the suburbs were close to the city and offered a way to the urban. I marked my origins, somewhat arbitrarily, as rural, even though the were really a weird combination of rural and and global. Expat communities rework class in complex ways that, of course, imply colonialism: people who'd never be able or want to have servants can have servants, make more money, eat fancier food, and interact with people of a class they'd never be able to interact with at home. I was in school with then President Salinas de Gortari's son and went to a lot of ridiculous parties in everyone's huge houses in Polanco. My family didn't have a maid, but our apartment at Number 5 Plaza Carlos Finlay had a maid's room--my brother lived there over the summer before going back to live with my mom for the school year.

Ana's description of how how "living in a very uniform Italian suburb in Long Island, after many years in Brooklyn, and this experience has actually jumpstarted [her] thinking about kitsch" also resonates with me. To be autobiographical, again: I went through a year in DC of maintaining a Stevie Nicks haircut, and I've always loved crochet ponchos and bell-sleeved shirts. Last year, I cut my hair short, but instead of it looking cool I decided that I looked like a perky soccer mom--not that I even really know what that means. I've at last embraced the beachy blondness of my hair, which I style with a product I've used since DC called "surf wax." Of course, it isn't really surf wax, and I don't surf, though I think that this summer will finally be the summer that I learn.

Pop questionnaire for the poets:

2010-03-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

How many of you grew up in the suburbs and left them for the city. And when? And many of you didn't grow up in the US at all, which is great, and I wonder how/if a suburban/urban tension might be relevant for you, too.

I think one (not the only) underlying element of recent debates about queerness and the Gurlesque anthology is a suburban/urban dynamic. Still thinking this through, though, and still waiting for my copy of the anthology to arrive.

I'm slapping my head a little here about, for example, how riot grrrl music and culture can be a reference point for many of us, but have it mean very different things (duh). I've always associated queer with riot grrrl--but a lot of the people that love Sleater-Kinney, for example, don't know that Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein are gay. Or they don't, maybe, care. I find this telling.

Animal Communication

2010-03-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

Everyone Enjoys Being in a Grotto

2010-03-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

Am I Trying Too Hard?

2010-03-09T16:56:00.001-08:00

That is me doing a rather failed chest roll.

I've been thinking about the word "precious," and I'm curious about the ways different communities of writers use it--usually negatively. I'll be up front, I really despise the word "precious." However, I'm guilty of calling other people's work precious, and my work's been called precious, but what really are we talking about?

I think that "precious" is code for "pretentious." And we all have different ideas about what exactly is pretentious. Pretension has a lot to do with our notions of boundaries, and those notions are informed by culture. The first time I wrote anything that had references to China and Chinese, someone called the piece pretentious. I've been noodling away with a piece that does in fact use some Chinese language, but it's not going to see the light of day for a while, and when it does, I know someone is going to say it's precious and/or pretentious. No doubt it was probably pretentious of me to study Chinese in the first place.

Preciousness is also related to affect, artificiality, and over-refinement: if a poem is precious, the suggestion is that there's something inappropriately costumed or ornamental (read "trivial") about it--it's paying attention to detail or playing with language that, for whatever reason, is irrelevant. That "precious" tends to have feminine metonymic associations seems quite obvious. That point alone is enough to make me suspicious of it as a vague descriptive term.

I don't think anything can be irrelevant in poetry, though I suppose it's possible to have something irrelevant to a particular poem in a poem, but I'm not even sure about that. Irritating, strange, failed, unexpected, frustrating yes, but not irrelevant. Parataxis, especially when it involves a variety of supposedly trivial details, always risks failure, that's why I like it.

Part of what poetry can do is address things that we can't/don't/aren't allowed to/don't know how to/are afraid to/ talk about in other discourses. Sometimes this means poetry's doing heavy creative thinking on big concepts like hopelessness, violence and racism in the US (Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, for example), or poetically witnessing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Carol Mirakove's Occupied). But equally important are books like Nada Gordon's Folly, a book that really picks at stubbornly gendered dichotomies like folly/reason, trivial/serious, affect/authenticity in ways that are hilarious, strange, intelligent, and purposely very difficult to pin down. Folly is proof that social critique doesn't have to be the opposite of throwing a party, even though a lot of people, especially those smitten with Reason, would like it to be.

Preciousness is also related to a sense of "trying too hard"--if you're going to impress, you shouldn't give it away that you want to impress. If you're going to wear make up, it should look "natural." I remember having a debate with my mother about this when I was around 12 and busy attempting to wear eyeshadow and nail polish in a way that probably made me look like a confused tart. Eventually I said something like, "but mom, the point of painting my nails red is so that they do not look natural."

The dance movement piece I performed with a lacrosse ball as part of my movement for theater class went well, and I got a lot of useful feedback. However, one of the critiques I received was that one of the movement/shapes I'd held for a sustained period of time clearly looked like a strain, like I was "trying too hard." It's true--I was trying too hard, and I wanted everyone to know it. I wanted to, sigh, be vulnerable, and wanted the piece to be as precarious as possible. That shape was one way of letting the audience see the structure and process of the piece in that moment. I purposely chose a shape that was difficult for me to hold, and I choreographed a variety of ways of falling out of it. I don't believe in self-harm, so I made a conscious decision to not just fall out of the shape. What's weird about that is that my attempt to be direct and honest was read, by some, as artificial.

I've only ever used the word precious to describe someone's work in private conversation, but I'm going to make an effort to not use it as a descriptive word relative to writing again.

Want to impress me? Throw a really good party.

2010-02-24T18:58:00.000-08:00

I have finished the introduction for Ben Lerner.

I attempted to practice my lacrosse ball choreography piece, but I couldn't practice too much, because my hamstring is really, really still messed up. I hope that I'm in decent shape for tomorrow, and I hope that performing tomorrow doesn't mess it up even more.

I did get some suggestions about what to do for my pedagogical performance, but no thanks to you all, my dear blog readers. Facebook, twitter, and listservs are where it's at now. At least in terms of advice about conceptual pedagogical performances.

I graded.

I did not write a poem, but I will write one after I write this post.

I was reminded of how difficult it is to organize anything. And how I like to organize things anyway, because I like things to happen. Want to impress me? Throw a really good party. Even if you don't want to impress me, throw a really good party, anyway.

Give me suggestions, happy hamstrings, lacross balls, etc...

2010-02-23T18:19:00.001-08:00

1. For the cross-genre workshop I'm taking this quarter, I'm preparing a "pedagogical performance" (i.e. a presentation, but more fun), on Notes on Conceptualisms, by Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place, & Yoko Ono's Grapefruit. I've got a partner, and in theory I'll be focusing more on Notes, and my partner will focus more on Grapefruit. Any ideas on what we should do? I've gotten some good suggestions thus far involving unitards, go-gurt, and skipping class (because, of course, thinking about the pedagogical performance is more important than the actual performance). If I get enough suggestions, I can at least make a conceptual piece based on the suggestions.

2. In the documentary class, I'm working with a group to make a mockumentary about two animal communicators competing for the "Animal Communicator of the Year" award. Yes, I am one of the animal communicators. It's often very funny. I think posting the final project on YouTube is a requirement.

3. The test run of the movement/performance piece with lacross ball went well. I was happy because the sections that I thought were rough or unclear were the sections that the class also thought were rough or unclear. When I write, I know I can trust my sense of when something is finished, when it's working, whatever working means in that particular piece. With movement, I'm less confident about making decisions. So, it's especially helpful to know that my instincts about this particular piece resonated with others.

4. My left hamstring is bothering me again. It's more than bothering me, but I'm not yet willing to say I've injured it yet. But ouch--it was painful enough that I couldn't run today or do any complex contact improvisation. I'm going to take a hot bath, rest it, and hope it's feeling better for the next lacross ball movement performance piece on Thursday. I need to give the piece a title.

5. I am writing an introduction for Ben Lerner, who is coming to read in UCSD's New Writing Series this Thursday.

6. General thoughts on MFA Land: Well, as numbers 1-3 & 5 suggest, I'm having quite a bit of fun. As I've said, I find it more fun to be a graduate student than to be an adjunct.

I had one of those dreams last night where I find myself taking care of a huge number of birds.

2010-02-12T12:51:00.001-08:00

The dream often goes like this: I discover that, unknown to me, there is another bird in the cage with Lester, and that all this time I have been feeding and taking care of only Lester, and not this other bird, who is almost dead. In the dream, I always nurse the neglected bird back to health, but there are always close calls. Sometimes the extra bird, or birds, are not in Lester's cage, but in some other part of the house--frequently under the bed. Once, I was on a pirate ship pitching and heaving in the middle of the storm, and I had to prevent several parrots from drowning and going overboard. In another version, I'm swimming through rough seas while two parakeets sit on my head, singing.

In last nights dream, I heard parrots outside, so I went out to see them. There were two hyacinth macaws sitting in the tree about the apartment building dumpster. They looked quite ragged, but I eventually coaxed them down and took them into our apartment. I found an extra, hyacinth-macaw sized jungle gym and put it in one corner of the room. The macaws began to play on the gym and settle in quite happily. Lester didn't mind them, either. After the macaws were relaxed and preening, Mark came in with two rainbow conures. I found a large cage for them and some extra toys, etc, and soon they were settling in, too. Some version of this kept happening--either I'd go outside and see two parrots and bring them in, or Mark would. At a certain point, our entire apartment was filled with parrots--two to three in each cage (Lester was the only one not sharing his space).

The last bird that Mark brought in was a huge pelican--but in the dream it looked more like a cross between a pelican and a stork, since the bird was very tall. The pelican's beak was cracked, and there were stitches all around her neck. We nursed the pelican/stork back to health, and eventually removed the stitches.

I suppose if I were a mother, I might dream about having ridiculous numbers of babies that I had to take care of. In my dream head, I know that birds are a stand in for "responsibility," among other things.

Does anyone else have dreams like this?

"Does gender affect x, y and z?" Yes, gender affects everything

2010-02-02T20:03:00.000-08:00

What have I been doing recently? I have been making poems, making films (and getting much better at it), hooping, doing acro yoga, choreographing, hanging out with friends, and organizing readings at Agitprop. I've also been working (as in the making money sense--teaching, bits of contract work, my RA duties at UCSD), riding the bus, finally taking advantage of student health insurance by updating some prescriptions, and doing a worse job than usual of putting my clothes away. I also gave myself a large bump on the forehead by walking into a metal lamp post--not my best moment. So, I've been away from blogland.

I am indeed tired of conversations about gender and blogging, gender and publishing, gender and self-promotion. But I'm not tired of the topics--or, at least, I still think the topics are essential. I wish that we lived in a happy land of gender (and racial and socioeconomic) equality, but we don't. So, conversations and actions continue. And will always have to, because even if the world were perfect, we'd still have to work to maintain perfection. But I don't turn to blogland to have great conversations--especially not about gender.

Yes, of course there are exceptions, and I turn to specific blogs for conversation--typically blogs written and moderated by friends that I knew before we interacted in blogland. I've met some people through blogland, and that's been great, but even there, the lasting virtual connections that I make tend to be the result of a whole network of community and social connections that exist alongside the virtual ones.

I do not turn to Harriet or Silliman's blog for conversation. I turn to them for information, but not conversation. In fact, unless I become a paid blogger for Harriet, I'm unlikely to ever join any comment stream on any post there, ever. The comment streams there tend to be repetitive and frustrating. I really do prefer to talk to someone at a bar, or cafe, or over food. I'd rather argue with someone that way, too.

Women do blog, and blog in interesting ways. Smart women and men know this, and read accordingly.

There's almost never any substantial debate in the comment stream on this blog because I rarely make statements like, "Workshopping sucks," "MFA programs are bogus and anyone who does one is a tool." "Women are smarter than men," "white space on the page is lame," "Flarf is more avant-garde than the avant-garde," etc. Blogs that make these kinds of statements are more likely to have overrun and often irritating, unproductive comment threads. My blog is too random, and I post too many pictures of my parrot for that to usually happen. This is fine with me.

The post on this blog that gets the most hits and has the most comments is "Today, I tried to spell fluctuate as 'fluxuate.'"

I think that repeated, community-minded actions and groups of people really do help shift gender (and racial, and socioeconomic) imbalances in the world of writing (and, when I'm feeling idealistic, the world). I can think of numerous examples that have been important to me personally and recently, in no particular order and off the top of my head: HOW2, Delirious Hem, Foursquare, the Press Conference 1, 2 and now 3, the Positions Colloquium in Vancouver, Bridge Street Books, The Flarf Collective, Pussipo, Ruthless Grip reading series in DC, In Your Ear reading series in DC, Palm Press, Tangent Press, Les Figues Press, the Cal Arts Conferences, Area Sneaks, the Poetic Research Bureau, my own attempts in conjunction with others to do a series at Agitprop here in San Diego, the Agitprop Gallery itself, Krikri, and any dinner hosted by Jerry and Diane Rothenberg.

Workshopping is Weird

2010-01-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

I've decided to think of workshopping as like a reading where one doesn't always read but people tell you what they think in detail anyway.

Currently reading, for class Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Woot!

It's raining.

Filmed today. Editing tomorrow. Using a camera isn't as awkward as I thought it would be.

I had two vaccinations yesterday, and my arms are sore. Ouch. Ouch.

Aliens! Desert! California!

2010-01-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

I want to visit the Integratron! And it's all because of someone in my documentary class, whose name I can't now remember, who brought it up. How can I not have heard of the Integratron!

According to its website, the Integraton is " an acoustically perfect tabernacle and energy machine sited on a powerful geomagnetic vortex in the magical Mojave Desert." Van I've never even been, but I already want to write about it--like the Salton Sea, it's one of those places that, well, if I could kind of understand it and write about it, then I feel I might understand something essential about Southern California. The history, briefly:

George Van Tassel was an aeronautical engineer and test pilot who worked for Lockheed, Douglas Aircraft and alongside Howard Hughes at Hughes Aviation. After retiring from his aviation career, Van Tassel and is family moved to a place called Giant Rock--a 7-story high, freestanding boulder--in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California, where they opened an airport and restaurant.

Van Tassel initially learned about the rock from a prospector and desert dweller named Frank Critzer, who had created a cave-like dwelling under the boulder. Because Critzer was a prospector, he always had a lot of dynamite, and one day he died in an explosion. Van Tassel eventually acquired the land surrounding the boulder from the Bureau of Land Management, and went on running the airport and the cafe.

Until....he began hosting/conducting meditation sessions in 1953 in the rooms underneath Giant Rock, which "led to UFO contacts and finally to an actual encounter with extra-terrestrials when, in August of that year, a saucer landed from the plant Venus, woke Van Tassel up and invited him onto the ship. There the aliens gave him the technique for rejuvenating living cell tissues."

Aliens! Desert! California! Prospectors! Meditation meetings! Men in the aeronautics industry! Huge boulders! UFO conventions that were eventually held at Giant Rock! The word on the street that Giant Rock was a sacred site for the Native American people(s) who originally lived in the area! The weird utopian, anti-government, anti-tax subtext of so much UFO literature!

My happiness is largely dependent on my ability to express negativity and to feel crappy

2010-01-18T19:44:00.001-08:00

I don't trust people who don't express negative emotions. Of course, there are a variety of ways of expressing negative emotions that don't always involve heated arguments or punching and being punched.

I have similar feelings about sarcasm and irony--both tend to make me feel comfortable because they're a form of sharing social negativity and combining it with humor. Humor itself has to do with social and aesthetic values. The world is full of incongruities between our understanding/expectation and what actually happens or exists. When I'm sarcastic and someone else gets it, we're having a moment of a shared understanding of some particular incongruity or another. What could be more comforting?

But I've been thinking about all of this a lot recently, especially in light of my feelings about my residency here in the San Diego region. There are numerous things I deeply dislike about my life here, but this weekend has been a good weekend, because it was a combination of almost everything I love: talking with friends about stuff that is irritating and stuff that isn't, time outside, movement, art and food. The only thing missing was a poetry reading--a big gap, certainly, but also offset but the fact that the art show was good.

It was also a three-day weekend.

Happy hour on Thursday! I won't sing the praises of D Street Bar and Grill in Encinitas. It's big, it was in a good location for most of us, they serve a variety of different drinks, have solid food, and a reasonable happy hour. So, it's fine with me. Happy hour is a perfect environment during which to express negativity in an energetic, friendly way. Dinner again with friends on Friday--more talking, more friendly negativity. Stayed up too late.

All that socializing and friendly negativity put me in a good mood for Saturday: Mark and I went to Batiquitos lagoon for a leisurely walk and some birdwatching: unusually peaceful crows, a juvenile northern harrier, a very large flock of semipalmated plovers, whimbrels, several terns (maybe Caspian? I couldn't tell), lots of little bushtits, a golden-crowned kinglet, several brown pelicans who were fishing, and an anna's hummingbird. We also saw some other kind of hummingbird--I couldn't identify him, but I know he was a male because he was doing display dives. He'd fly up really really high and then dive down really fast, making an ark at the bottom and a kind of whistling sound.

That afternoon, I went to Swami's Beach for a hoop class and jam. I had a gorgeous time and learned a variety of new ways to break--but now I have weird bruises on the insides of my upper arms, very similar to the kind I used to get on my hands when I started doing more off-body work. Next weekend I'm going to a workshop with Julia Hartsell at the Circus Fund in Del Mar. If I had my way, I'd be taking just about every class they offer there!

On Sunday I saw the splash from a whale breaching (I missed the actual breach), but a few minutes later s/he did a fantastic tale slap.

Today, we somehow avoided the rain (well, almost) and took the train down to see the Tara Donovan exhibit at MCASD Downtown. I'd seen the piece made with pins before, and I still love it, but my favorite was Haze, made entirely out of clear plastic straws, and completely beautiful:

After the show, we walked around, and I eventually ate a hamburger. On the way home from the train station, it rained and rained. We actually got soaked.

Now, I use it with some regularity--when appropriate.

2010-01-07T17:23:00.000-08:00

1. Before moving to California, I never used the word "motherfucker."

2. A new quarter at UCSD has begun. I am taking 1) a multi-genre workshop that all MFAs must take with Anna Joy Springer 2) The second class in the movement for theater sequence, still with Charlie Oates, 3) a seminar in the Visual Art Department on subcultures with Ruben Ortiz-Torres.

3. Beyond that, I'm TAing for an intro poetry class with Michael Davidson and still RAing for the New Writing Series. And I'm teaching online, and doing bits of contract work here and there.

4. I have blisters from playing Zen Chaos in movement for theater. Someday I will describe Zen Chaos in detail, and write down all the rules. It's a bit like ultimate frisbee with two hacky sacks instead of one frisbee, and cartwheels are a regular part of the game.

5. In the multigenre workshop, I said that my goal was to make my work somehow a combination of the Bee Gees and Sun Ra. I got very excited.

6. No doubt you have all seen the video of "Stayin' Alive." But just in case you haven't:

Eying or Eyeing

2009-12-26T17:34:00.000-08:00

1. This is the first holiday season since we moved to California that Mark and I have spent together. It's been a nice combination of laying low (cooking, movies, walks) and socializing--we spent a nice Christmas Eve with the California branch of Mark's family, and this evening we're going over to the Rothenbergs'. In a few more days, we're headed to Ensenada. I've long fantasized about blowing off the entire winter holiday season and instead getting out of the country, so this is a step in the right direction.

2. All the climate change involved in the travel from here to Florida and back again has irritated my skin. I've got a patchy red rash that almost resembles hives. It's uncomfortable, and it makes it difficult to wear makeup.

3.Back from a hoop class with Michelle. After a year of thinking that working with more than one hoop would be completely impossible, it's so much fun to be playing with two and have it start to make some kinetic sense.

4. My attempt to keep my hair short is finished. Having short hair requires getting regular hair cuts by stylists who actually know what they're doing, and stylists who know what they're doing cost money. My hair is neither super curly nor super thick, so nearly any fool can cut it when it starts to get long. Therefore, I am growing my hair out again.

5. For Christmas, Mark got me: 1) Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds, by Bernd Heinrich 2) Feelings Are Facts: A Life, by Yvonne Rainer and 3) The Silk Road Gourmet: Volume One: Western and Southern Asia, by Laura Kelle. They're all super cool books that I've been eying a long time.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T15:02:00.000-08:00

Lester, with traces of the roasted red pepper soup he had for lunch still on his beak.

2009-12-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

Still in Florida. Last we had a rainy thunderstorm of the sort that never happens in southern California. All the heat and the green here is kind of amazing. The shore birds are nearly the same, although I saw a lot of Solitary Sandpipers, which I haven't seen around Carlsbad. They must be migrating.

Headed to Florida on Thursday morning.

2009-12-06T20:50:00.000-08:00

1. Backbend (wheel) with feet at the wall into a backbend with feet on the wall into handstand into a walkover. It feels good to have a super challenging Sunday yoga class.

2. Still playing around with some off-body moves with two hoops. Coordination with on-body moves comes a lot easier.

3. Nearly finished with my paper on Nightwood. I didn't really have time to do anything especially ambitious. I wonder if I could do a critical independent study in the winter or spring quarter? It's interesting how an image search for "Nightwood" doesn't immediately give me any results that have anything to do with Djuna Barnes' novel.

4. In the last movement for theater class of the quarter, I sprained my toe, but I also stood on someone's shoulders and tossed a ball back and forth between my hands. It was kind of amazing when I finally relaxed and settled into the posture--my bones were perfectly lined up above the person basing me.

5. Dear professors: please tell your TAs about your plans for grading at the end of the quarter early so that they can schedule their travel plans accordingly. Dear TAs, ask the professor you are working with about this at the beginning of the quarter so that you don't accidentally make plans that mess with the professor's plans.

You can stop reading whenever you want

2009-11-29T19:07:00.003-08:00

Whenever I let one poem take up a whole page--or, rather, when I really let white space take up the whole page, I think something like: "This is lame. And precious. And I know that 'precious' has very gendered connotations." And then I change it back so that the page has text all over it. I don't want there to be very many rests in my work. I don't want to encourage my readers to rest in my poems. I want them to be, at best, carried away, overwhelmed, energized, breathless. Turned on.

Yesterday, Lester demanded a shower

2009-11-09T19:39:00.003-08:00

Pauvre Pierrot

2009-11-02T10:10:00.008-08:00

It's been a while since I've blogged. Blame work, school, and a bike accident that wasn't but could have been very nasty. I have some fabulous bruises, but that's all.

This morning I've been reading Rachel Zolf's blog The Tolerance Project, a collaborative writing project with eighty writers, artists, and thinkers from across Canada and the United States. Rachel is the author of Human Resources, and winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. So, why is she in an MFA program? Rachel Zolf is Canadian, and when her female partner got a tenure-track job at a university in the USA, she was not able to legally move with her to New York because their relationship is not legally recognized by US immigration authorities. Becoming a student was really her only other option for obtaining a visa. In her Statement to MFA Workshop October 13, she writes:

...what is most important for my project is that it is a collaborative take on the MFA as an institution within larger state apparatuses. That is the key concept behind my project, a deconstruction of how “authors” and “voices” are created through the process of the MFA, linked with how difference is “tolerated” (or not) in general in the US. I wanted to provoke a look at how the MFA works as a process, by deliberately blowing up the authorial creation and feedback process beyond this room. There is a long tradition in the art world of looking at the workings of art institutions such as art museums and art collecting practices and the creation of the artist as a commodity.

If Carolyn Forche had been more present at George Mason and they'd had more funding for me, I might have gone there instead of doing an MA at Georgetown. In fact, I think my critique of MFA programs only became fully developed when I left the east coast and found that not even community colleges wanted to hire me to teach. On the east coast, no one cared that I didn't have an MFA. Most of the major east coast cities have active poetry and arts communities that aren't centered on MFA programs. In other words, I don't think I was fully aware of the degree to which MFA programs were becoming the norm and the ways in which creative writing is professionalized in the US.

I suspect that the farther you get from the city in the US, the more likely MFA programs and educational institutions will be central to art communities. That's an undeveloped argument, I know. But where are the poets going to hang out if you have to drive to the bar? You hang out at school, I guess. Some one give me counter examples.

I'm taking a brief break from typing up my comments to the other people in my poetry workshop--I'm still irritated by the way submitting individual poems to workshop really discourages things like abrupt tonal shifts and strange juxtapositions. I fall into descriptions: this poem is doing this here and that there, that poem is doing that there and this here. I look for strangeness and moments of disorientation. I ask about other poems and refer to previous poems and try to extend the context of the poem as far beyond the workshop as I can. I don't like how workshopping encourages writing for workshopping.

I do like having an immediate group of readers. That's nice. Everyone in my class is intelligent, thoughtful and creative. But more feedback doesn't equal better feedback. Just like after every reading I give there's almost always a woman who is slightly older that me whom I've never met who wants to give me a lot of specific suggestions about the pace of my reading, my clothing, and how I need to learn to breathe differently. I know that my feedback on other people's work has as much to do with me as it does to do with their poems. Obviously.

I am enjoying all the reading and discussion that I'm doing for both the workshop and the other seminar on Modernist aesthetics and art movements. I'm remembering things that I like, reading things I've read, reading a lot of things I haven't read. In some cases, I'm evaluating my relationship to things that I respected but thought I wasn't that interested in.

Example: it turns out that I might actually be more excited by Fanny Howe's work than I previously thought.

Example: now that I've had to read some more Donald Revell, I can be much more articulate about why I really dislike it.

Example: I've never written about Modernist theater or performance. In fact, out of all the major a-g Modernist, I've probably read Artaud and Beckett the least. It's exciting, then, to read them and others and think about a genre that I haven't thought much about.

When I was doing my MA at Georgetown, I felt pressured to make every seminar paper full of amazingly brilliant critical insight that would somehow be relevant to the field. Now I don't mind if I use my term paper as an excuse to think about and learn about things that I want to think about and learn about. I don't care so much about the field. If I have any academic career ahead of me at all, which is doubtful, it's certainly not going to be based on my ability to write normative academic articles. So, in the meantime, I get to read Artaud and Beckett. I get to think about Jacques Copeau and the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, especially the years it was in New York, and also Charles Dullin. How Artaud's name comes up constantly in the work of the artists and actors who were busy reviving/changing/rejecting pantomime and thinking about a more physical theater centered on actors and gesture.

Chessie the Manatee

2009-10-20T19:02:00.005-07:00

Way back on October 3, 2005, during the last autumn I lived in DC, I wrote a brief blog post about Chessie, a manatee who swam up the James River all they way to Richmond, Virginia--although now I can't find any verification that this was an official Chessie sighting.

Chessie, originally from Florida, was radio tagged and tracked by the US Geological Survey's Sirenia Project--although he apparently got rid of his tracking device in 2001. In 1995, Chessie swam all the way to Rhode Island. According to the Chessie Watch page (which hasn't been updated since 2004), there hasn't been an official Chessie sighting since August, 2001, although a younger manatee has been sighted in and around Virginia Beach. You can read more about Chessie's in his bio.

Anyway, I bring to your attention a comment left this afternoon by Mr. Case of Virginia Beach, VA on that very old blog post of mine. He says:

"I saw a manatee today at noon at Rocketts Landing; it was swimming slowly downriver."

Well, Chessie, if that was you, we wish you well. In fact, whoever you were, we wish you well, and recommend that you start heading south before the water gets too cold. Go, manatee, go!

Specific Information

2009-10-18T08:40:00.003-07:00

My adventures in MFAland continue to be interesting--I've posted the last two sequences of things that I workshopped in Rae Armatrout's class to my poetry drafts blog, See it Everywhere. I've been doing some visual stuff, but I'll need to noodle with that a bit longer before I post it anywhere.

In Rae's class we're reading Claudia Rankine's, Don’t let me be lonely and John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, Donald Revell, & Lyn Hejinian from the Hybrid anthology. And then also Hejinian's Against Closure essay. Predictably, I deeply dislike the Revell. I've heard Claudia Rankine read from Don't let me be lonely at least once. The doodle above is from when she read at UCSD on January 25, 2006--that must have been one of the first readings I went to after moving here. That book is, among other things, a devastating examination of American loneliness, and so a good introduction to living in the San Diego suburbs.

This week is Futurism and Dada week in the Modern Art Movements and Aesthetics with Michael Davidson. We're reading some of Peter Bürger's Theory of the avant-garde; The argument of this book is incredibly familiar to me at this point, but it's good, I suppose, to be actually reading it. We're also looking at Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, Loy's Feminist Manifesto, and several pieces by Schwitters, Huelsenbeck, Tzara, Khlebnikof, Ball, etc.

In Movement for Theater we continue to focus on honing "neutral" movement. We've also started working on some basic tumbling and acrobatics--somersaults, standing on each others' shoulders, and some basic flying techniques that resemble what I've practiced in acro yoga. And handstands, which I'm always glad to do. All of this is incredibly fun and stimulating, but I'm not yet seeing a path towards how I'm going to use it in my own work. Thus far, my attempts at movement in performance feel muddy and confusing.

Research into my family history has yielded interesting information: 1) Comanche great grandmother 2) Dutch ancestors, in addition to the Scottish ones that I already knew about--they all came through New York 3) A lot of my ancestors on both sides of the family lived in and around Tippah, Mississippi. The ones that didn't stay in New York went south, typically. 4) References to marriages in Jamaica--but no specific information.

I think that the "neutral" walk is much harder than standing on someone's shoulders.

2009-10-09T11:30:00.004-07:00

1. I'm a bit embarrassed by how much my weeks at UCSD leave me completely exhausted.

On Thursday, I got up early as usual to go to my theater/movement class. We stood on each other's shoulders and practiced "neutral" walking, which isn't really neutral at all--more like walking without character, or walking with the character of a white man from Europe or North America with excellent posture and an unusual level of evenness.

That afternoon, I was completely useless, much like a squashed bug or a pile of warm laundry. I know those aren't especially unique comparisons, but that is what I was like. A friend from high school once described me as being like "an elf after the holiday season." So, I was like a squashed bug, a pile of warm laundry, or an elf after the holiday season.

2. Wednesday was the first event in the New Writing Series at UCSD.

Part of my funding for my MFA comes from a research assistantship connected with this series. Nikolai, my fellow RA, and I have been running around all over campus for the past three weeks trying to get everything organized. Like so many administrative and organizational jobs, the tasks themselves aren't difficult--what's difficult is getting everyone and everything to coordinate in at least a semi-functional way. Example: getting a key to the performance space where there readings are held required signatures from three different people, one of whom doesn't really have an office and rides around campus on a small green utility cart, as well as a tutorial on the sound system for the space.

About an hour before the reading, Nikolai and I went to set up the space. However, the numeric code to the door, which had worked on Tuesday, did not work on Wednesday. Inexplicably, the art department had given me a code that would work for only one day instead of the entire quarter. Because I'd left my cell phone at home that morning, I had to borrow a phone to call facilities, and finally the police, to let us into the building. The police and facilities kept asking me for "the number of the building." The performance space in the visual arts facility, of course, does have a number, but it's not located anywhere on the building. Randomly, I had a map of the department in my bag, which had the numbers of the buildings. The Visual Arts Facility at UCSD is confusing enough to need its own map.

The policeman tried thirteen keys before he found the one that would open the space. All of this happened about 10 minutes before the reading was supposed to start. Fortunately most of the faculty as well as the readers, Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, were a little late arriving.

3. I am emotionally available for irony

Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire!

I am quite sure that I use irony as a way of identifying with others as well as distancing myself from them.

My work also sounds so mean and ironic. It is mean and ironic, but it isn't all mean and ironic.

2009-10-06T19:22:00.004-07:00

Today was our first day actually workshopping in the poetry workshop I'm taking. It wasn't so bad. Everyone's comments were, in general, insightful and mostly helpful. There were a few that were very helpful.

All that said, I don't think my work is well suited to a workshop format. I write in long, messy sequences. I don't really write discrete poems--so I have to submit these weirdly excerpted chunks. Things that seem strange shifts in tone, diction & form, etc, usually are, but they also typically have resonances with what's happening later. I write very very loose rough drafts that get revised a lot--a lot--and I also do a substantial amount of reorganization.

I suppose what I have is a fairly boring kind of nervousness. I'm really not used to showing people rough drafts of my poems. I'm used to showing them third or fourth drafts--given the way I write, I'm not sure how useful a first draft is to really look at.

In and around our exhaustion with work, Mark and I have been talking about emotional availability in poetry. We haven't particularly defined what this is, and it's not "authenticity" or the opposite of irony or sarcasm, but whatever it is I feel like my recent work lacks it a bit. I want the sense that anything can come into the poem--I'm good at letting in things like roadkill, or the extreme exhaustion of the person sitting next to me on the bus this evening who kept falling asleep on my shoulder all the way from La Jolla to Carlsbad. However, I'm not so good at letting in the sunset over the beach out the window, or the pelicans and cormorants.

Yeah, I haven't read Notes on Conceptualisms. I would, however, like a "Sobject" T-shirt.

2009-10-04T18:58:00.004-07:00

In MFAland, gradschooland. Reading and rereading, among many things, Henry James' "Beast in the Jungle" (which I mistyped as "Beach in the Jungle") and The New Sentence.

I like how "sentence" is "oración" in Spanish, and that it's feminine. La Nueva Oración. In English, a sentence is more about the conventions of writing than speaking. The closest English word to oración is, of course, oration, though oration is rather formal, dignified and ritualized. Latin orationem--"speaking, discourse, language, prayer."

The Sufficiently Hierarchical New Sir Sequels

2009-09-28T11:04:00.006-07:00

This is the first complete week of classes at UCSD--but I don't have to be on campus on Monday, so I'm here trying to clean and organize my desk and put away my clothes.

Thus far, the only class I've attended is a graduate movement for theater class with Charlie Oats. It was incredibly fun, and the mime/walking exercises we did were challenging. On Tuesday I have a poetry workshop with Rae, and on Wednesday a class on Modern art movements with Michael. I'm TAing for John Granger's nonfiction class and one of two RAs for the New Writing Series.

Even though I've barely started, I'm already feeling exasperated--not with classes, but with being back in the structure of a university and having to deal with the irritations of interacting and being confined by said structure. Please note, I don't wish that I were still teaching ESL, or that I were still working in business, or even in public policy. It's just been a while since I've had to deal directly with the particular passive-aggressive type of behavior that academic bureaucracies (and probably most types of bureaucracies) enable. In a university, communication tends to happen indirectly and is always filtered through a variety of complicated channels--rarely does someone tell you directly what to do. Of course, there are things that you are absolutely supposed to do, and there are hierarchies, but one can't admit them directly (at least not in the humanities). It takes a while to realize the difference between a suggestion and a command.

I won't bore you all with the details of all the running around me and the other RA have done for the New Writing Series thus far, but it's been quite amazing. I'm looking forward to the Winter quarter when in theory we'll both know what we're doing, how things work, and where things are.

I organized my manuscript files, and found a half-finished manuscript called The Death of a Toad that's a kind of mashup flarf conceptual piece. I don't know what it is. As a manuscript, it suffers from theory head and a lack of energy, but it's full of ridiculous language. One section is called "The Sufficiently Hierarchical New Sir Sequels."

I feel dramatic and melancholy, and like most of the people I love and events I want to go to are on the east coast. It's been too long since I walked home from a party.

Tengo preguntas

2009-09-21T13:01:00.006-07:00

¿Por qué el perro está raspando y en qué está raspando?
¿Hay un perro en la piscina?
¿Cuándo alguien escribirá una review del Tarareo Terminal?
¿Come se dice "How long will it take me to master hoola hooping around one leg?" en Español?

Summer is over, but I went to the beach today.

2009-09-19T16:46:00.002-07:00

SPD sold out of my book, so Rod has sent them more!
I am impatient for reviews.
Or, at least, stop telling my friends and my boyfriend what you think of my book and tell me instead.
No autumnal clothes for me for a few more months. The best I can do is wear jeans and sometimes a light sweater, but that's pretty much true all year round here.
Remembering how funny Dada is: "Dada will kick you in the behind and you will like it." I like the fact that they say "behind" instead of "ass."
Jerry is coming all the way from Amherst to visit!

Now that I'm beginning something new, it might as well be over.

2009-09-18T19:58:00.003-07:00

Not bored with Language Poetry. Not bored with John Cage, either.
I haven't even started classes at UCSD yet, and I already have to look for funding for next year from a grant database made for PhD students, not MFAs. Oh well. If I don't get funding for next year, I just won't go back.
Been grading all. Day. Long. That's why I couldn't meet with you at 4pm.
Convinced that real estate limits mobility. Unless one is rich or bought one's real estate in the 70s, 80s or before.
Missing good bookstores.

Trip Report Part Five: Back in Paris

2009-09-15T07:40:00.006-07:00

I've been promising the final installment of our trip report, so here it is!

Mark and I like to begin and end our overseas trips in the same place. This is partly practical, of course, since it's usually more cost effective to fly in and out of the same city. But I think it's nice to end one's travels in a place that doesn't require all the initial effort that getting to know a new place as a traveler usually does. After an easy train ride from Brussels-Midi to Gare du Nord (during which we ate sandwiches and some of the chocolate I'd bought), we easily exited the station (no complicated navigational moments) and walked down the hill to the same hotel in the 10th. It was too early to check in, so Mark went to check email, and I sat at a cafe and had a croque monsieur and a cafe creme, even though it was a little late for cafe cremes.

Another reason to return to a place you've already been to is because, inevitably, there are things you haven't done and seen that you want to do and see. Once checked into our hotel, we walked down to the Marais to visit the Carnavalet Musée de l'Histoire de Paris. The museum is in an old, Renaissance style hotel, and is full of paintings and other objects related to, duh, the history of Paris. The photograph above is a small section from Dubois' "L'espoir du bonheur dédié à la Nation." On the boat are Louis XVI and Jacques Necker. I am not sure who the robust, bare-chested ladies are supposed to be.

That evening, we headed down to the Latin quarter with Joe and Laura for some drinks and food.

By the time we got to the actual food part, it was rather late, but that didn't affect the taste of my duck confit, or the cheese plate we shared at the end of the meal. I wish I could remember where ate, but I see why that restaurant is a favorite of Joe and Laura's--it was warm, inviting, full of people, and served thoughtfully prepared versions of classic French food.

The next morning, we headed out to the Bois de Boulogne for a picnic, where we met Cole Swenson and Laura Sims and her partner. I don't think I'd seen Cole since Mark and I moved to San Diego. And even if my memory is wrong, it had certainly been a long time. It wasn't especially sunny, but we managed to talk, eat pate and lounge about successfully. Joe and Laura's son, Julian, played with the travel hoop I'd brought with me--it's the orange and red thing you see on my bag.

That evening, Mark and I had a very lovely dinner at an Italian restaurant back in the 10th, just off the canal. I don't enjoy going out for Italian food usually, especially in San Diego, where it's usually mediocre, overpriced and the waiters push bottles of wine on you that you don't want. I think that, somehow, the mediocre overpriced Italian restaurant is really a definitive element of San Diego food culture--and probably all US cities. Mediocre overpriced Italian food is ideal for those with unadventurous taste looking for a fancy meal. But enough of my rant. We had a leisurely meal of basically just a pasta course and some wine. The waiter didn't chastise us for only ordering one course, didn't try to sell us another bottle of wine, brought us a second carafe of water when we needed it, and generally left us alone to have a pleasant evening together.

On our final day in Paris, we went to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. Mark emphatically joked that he wasn't going to kiss any slimy tombstones, which was fine, but we did see evidence of other people kissing tombstones. I confess that I might have tried to at least touch the memorial for Abelard and Heloise, but it was being restored, so I couldn't get close enough.

Oscar Wilde's grave had the most kiss marks and attention--even more than Morrison's grave, which only had a trio of German punk girls burning candles.

No one was visiting Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, or even Colette, which was the last grave we visited:

I'll leave out the irritating story of our many failed attempts to eat lunch after our visit to the cemetery, and also of how difficult it was to buy tickets in advance for the train back out to the airport. Instead, I'll skip right to the end and tell you that we visited Joe and Laura again that evening for a drink and some final goodbyes, and that we made a salad for dinner in our hotel room.

So, how was our trip to Paris, Belgium and Amsterdam? It was wonderful. Alice Notley didn't move to Paris until she was in her 40s, so I have a bit of time to plan how Mark and I might move to Amsterdam (or Brussels, or Paris, or Barcelona--which we didn't visit on this trip, of course, but which is nonetheless one of my favorite places). Until we move, though, we'll just have to scheme about how to go back. Soon.

Countdown to MFA Land

2009-09-14T15:28:00.002-07:00

I don't start classes at UCSD in earnest for two more weeks, but I have plenty to do in between now and then with orientations, paperwork, and obsessively calculating the best bus and train routes to get me from Carlsbad to La Jolla sans car. When I lack blogging energy, I resort to lists. So, a list:

The picture above is of Lester, of course, on his jungle gym in my study. He's been especially happy and defensive of his jungle gym, and the small stuffed elephant he's perched on, ever since he realized that he could pull paper over his head there--just like he does in his cage.
I've been teaching a weekly hoop dance class with Kristen every Thursday from 4:15-5:15 pm. We meet at Magee Park (258 Beech Avenue Carlsbad, on the West side of the 101 before the lagoon). I think I have about two readers from Carlsbad, but out and hoop with us. Bring your friends. The class is offered on a donation-basis through Bodacious Living Yoga.
Speaking of yoga, two nights ago I dreamed that I was practicing on a very large flying carpet which was flying over a jungle landscape.
My father's other brother, David, passed away last week from cancer. David's always been a bit of a mythological figure for me. When he and my dad were kids, David drove a railroad spike through Dad's shoulder (not long after they had started Sunday school). In the early 90s, a horse fell on his head and he was in a coma for two years. After he woke up, he came to live with me, my brother, Dad and Mary in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The night before he arrived I dreamed he barbecued our dog, Cabal. In fact, he and Cabal got along well. For a period of several months, David slept in our living room and wore his cowboy hat to my brother's cross country meets and my flute recitals. Eventually, he left when a woman got in touch with him about his son. He ended up living in Angle Fire, New Mexico, panning for gold and carving walking sticks. My aunt said that he passed away peacefully, surrounded by friends. I am dedicating all my yoga practices to him this week.

2009-09-08T17:51:00.004-07:00

A post about the last leg of our trip, again in Paris, is coming. In the meantime, please read Mark's post, Maintaining Quality of Education in California’s Public Universities, which has several links to information about how to become more involved in the struggle to maintain a quality education for California students enrolled at state universities.

Warning: the editorial in the Sacramento Bee is totally maddening.

Trip Report Part Four: Brussels

2009-08-24T13:11:00.008-07:00

I loved Brussels instantly. If you're skeptical of my ability to love a place I don't really know, then know that I felt immediately at ease there--relaxed and strangely unalienated in a way that's difficult to feel in unfamiliar places. Bruxelles (yes, I'm going to spell it differently every other time I write it) was very familiar in many ways--it's a cosmopolitan, international, multicultural political city with a reputation for being cool but not as cool as it's close neighbors Paris and Amsterdam. I don't want to overstate the ways in which it's similar to DC, but the similarities are there.

When Mark and I arrived at Bruxelles-Midi, it was nice to actually get out and leave the station instead of waiting in it, as we had already done twice, to catch a train somewhere else. It's not a huge city (a little over one million people live there), but it's incredibly diverse. Aside from the French and Dutch speaking Belgians, there are people from all over Europe as well as north Africa, Turkey, Asia, and elsewhere. There are some estimates that about half of the people who live in Brussels are not from Belgium, and a substantial number of people who live in Bruxelles speak neither French nor Dutch as a first language. All over Bruxelles, people speak to each other in second, third or fourth languages, and it's difficult to make accurate assumptions about where people are from. I love this.

We experienced a slightly higher than normal level of disorientation when we left the station, and it wasn't clear whether we needed to catch the metro, tram or premetro to get up to our hotel in Ste-Catherine. My first encounter with a stranger in Bruxelles was indicative of all the others: I asked a woman, in French, which metro, tram or premetro we should get on, and which direction we should go. She was incredibly polite and patient and didn't switch into English or ask where I was from. Instead, she showed me on the map where we had to go, and pointed me toward the premetro station (which was, counter-intuitively, underground).

Ste. Catherine (shown above) was easy to get to, and, as it turns out, a hip place to stay--not that I knew that when I booked our hotel. I just chose that location because I didn't want to stay in one of the overpriced and touristy places on the Grand Place. The neighborhood had a nice combination of both homey and fancy bars and restaurants, as well as several Asian food markets.

In fact, the presence of Asian food markets made Ste. Catherine (and Brussels in general) seem very different from Paris, for example. In Paris, you should speak French, and if you would like to eat food that is not French, you should order it in a French way. Paris does have plenty of culturally mixed neighborhoods--but they are exactly that--specific neighborhoods, like Belleville. Aside from kabob shops, ethnic restaurants and markets in Paris don't seem to exist much outside of those specific neighborhoods. I love French food, and could gladly live on crepes, cheese and charchuterie until I died from a heart attack. Still, I felt it was significant to see such cultural variety in food in a neighborhood without any special multicultural distinction.

We met Philip Meersman and Rozalina Petrova (both shown in the very first picture) in front of the church on Ste. Catherine and walked towards Place St-Géry. Philip was one of the people who performed after Mark and I read in Ghent. I hesitate to characterize Philip's work--I wouldn't call him a sound poet, because that seems too narrow a term for the kind of diverse work he makes. While he clearly is interested in the relationship between sound, image, language and meaning (the poem he performed in Ghent was in six languages) he also works in theater and plastic arts. It's a bit cheesy of me, but I'm going to quote Mark's description of the performance, since I think it is both accurate and insightful:

Philip Meersman also performed a poem that was not technically a sound poem but that solidified my impression about the relation between sound poetry and cultural context. His poem was in six different languages, not all of which were known to any single person in the room except for him, with the result that at least some portion of his poem was only a sound poem for every member of the audience. It wasn’t meant as a display of language virtuosity, though it certainly was also that, but as a very pointed exploration of what it means to be able to understand other people or not.

Even after just a few hours in Brussels, it was easy for me to see why a writer would want to work with a variety of languages. Here's a brief quote from one of Philip's poems, "La paradoja del paradero del comienzo (Una localización española)," to give you more of an idea of some of the stuff he does:

Preguntas y problemas:

Dónde está el coche
Dónde está mí
Dónde está me
Dónde está yo?
teoría atómica
teoría cuántica
teoría de la relatividad
teoría del caos

Dónde está la profesora
Dónde está la consejera
Dónde está el examen

This poem (you can read the rest of it here) makes me want to return to a project I stared ages ago working with some of the text in Practical Chinese Reader Volumes One and Two.

The weather was wonderful, and Philip and Rozalina are both great conversationalists, so after scoring an outdoor table at a bar across from Les Halles St-Géry, we easily passed several hours talking (and drinking--in my case, a pleasantly sour geuze). Afterward, I had a notebook full of recommendations for everything from where we should eat to which chocolate shop was the best. For posterity, here is a picture of the Halles St-Géry, the point from which all distances in Belgium are measured:

Eventually, Philip and Rozalina had to head home to prepare for work as well as the huge Ghent Festival. We parted ways, and Mark and I went off to eat some very delicious Thai food. The two women sitting at the table next to us could have easily been State Department bureaucrats. They were EU bureaucrats, of course; I felt right at home. Later we wandered back towards Ste. Catherine to a local bar off the square. I don't remember the name, but the few folks in there seemed overly suprised that any tourists would be there at all. Two men sitting next to us struck up a conversation, which me more or less managed in French, Spanish and English--a pretty typical encounter in Brussels.

The next morning I went out to the original flagship location of Le Pain Quotidien, just around the corner from our hotel, for coffee and a croissant. After that, Mark and I walked over to the Grand Palace (immediately above) and farther along to the Royal Quartier and the new Musée René Magritte at the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. I have an unfortunate mental block with Surrealist painters--I love how Magritte plays with the difficulty of reconciling words, images and objects, but did he have to paint so many nude women? The history of art is the history of painting nude women, I suppose, and I like Magritte enough to be frustrated with him. Still, the new museum houses the largest collection of his work that exists, including a few films. In fact, if I'd had the luxury and time to go back, I would have especially liked to spend more time with the films.

After the museum, we attempted to eat some sandwiches in the lovely Parc de Bruxelles and only barely managed. It rained, but we found shelter under some trees. Here's Mark post-lunch:

After lunch, we went back in to see the main collection of the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts. The collections were strangely organized and difficult to navigate. For me, the highlight of this visit was Hieronymus Bosch's Temptation of St. Anthony.

On our way back to the hotel, we walked past La Fleur en Papier Doré, the bar where René Magritte and later members of the COBRA movement hung out. We didn't have a drink there, though; it was kind of expensive. After a rest, a shower, and a quick run on my part to Elisabeth Chocolatier for chocolate and cookies, we went back out to La Mort Subite for a pre-dinner beer. The geuze was the best I had the entire trip. Why isn't geuze more readily available here in the US? Sigh.

After La Mort Subite, we wandered (we did a lot of wandering in Brussels) back over to the area around the Grand Palace to sit in another bar and, yes, drink another beer--they had Delirium Tremens on tap! Later, we ate dinner outside at a different but equally tasty Thai restaurant back in Ste. Catherine. It poured rather fantastically right after we finished our meal, so we took shelter at Bizon Blues--a bar that was styled like an American place even though they seemed to play mostly British rock. We enjoyed some jenever and then a Rochefort 10. The Rochefort 10 was good, but I think the 8 is still my favorite; it's just as flavorful, and less boozy.

We ended our evening at the Monk, and I really don't remember what I drank there--that's the kind of effect that a Rochefort 10 has! Still, I loved how the bartender moved in and out of different languages without even flinching. The Monk was cool, but not too cool:

Mark and I spent less time in Brussels than anywhere else on our trip, but, as I've already said, I really enjoyed my time there. Having spent much of my life as an expat, it was so comforting to be in a city where everyone spoke a different language and where, for the most part, that was ok. I could live in Brussels, and I mean that in a practical way as well as an oh-I-wish-I-wish kind of way. The weather there sucks, but I live in a place known for its great weather, and truly, if weather is the first thing that people mention about a place, you know that means that the rest of it is maybe not worth mentioning.

Lester speaks about the California budget crisis

2009-08-14T17:00:00.003-07:00

O Say Can You See: DEADLINE EXTENDED to August 20!

2009-08-13T13:35:00.002-07:00

Dear Readers--

You have perhaps seen the announcement for this forum that I'm co-curating for with Becca Klaver for Delirious Hem. I wanted to let you all know that the deadline has been extended, so send us all some fabulous work. Details are below!

O SAY CAN YOU SEE:
Nonverbal Reviews and Adaptations of Women's Poetry

***Deadline extended to August 20!***

Mina Loy, Surreal Scene, n.d. Collage on painted background, 12 5/8 x 9 1/2 in.
Courtesy of the Jean Farley Levy Estate © Estate of Mina Loy.

What book, chapbook, performance, or poem by a woman poet published/presented in the last year or two has left you speechless? How might that speechlessness manifest itself visually, sonically, or through another nonverbal medium?

Please create a response to this piece; your response can act like a review, adaptation, homage, investigation, companion piece, Frankenstein, child, or any mash-up of the aforementioned. In August, all responses submitted will be featured as part of a forum here on Delirious Hem.

FAQ

Are all words banned?
Although the projects should not be text-based, words are not banned.

I want to create a response to a poem published in 2007. Is this too early?
Nope. We mean "published in the last year or two" loosely.

Can I create a response to a book written by:
a) a man?
b) a biological male who identifies as a woman?
c) a drag queen?
a) No. b) Yes. c) Yes, if they self-identify as a woman.

Can non-Pussipo members participate?
Yes. If you'd like to forward this call, feel free.

Can men participate?
Yes.

What file formats can you accept?
For videos, Blogger can accept AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media, 100 MB maximum size. For images, jpg, gif, bmp and png images, 8 MB maximum size.

Responses might include videos, songs, performances, photographs, or photographs of visual pieces, but are not limited to these, so please query if you're not sure if Blogger can support your format.

Questions, submissions, stating your interest: Please contact K. Lorraine Graham (klorraine[at]gmail[dot]com) and Becca Klaver (beccavista[at]yahoo[dot]com).

Due date for submissions: August 20, 2009.

Please feel free to forward this call!

Trip Report Part Three: Amsterdam

2009-08-05T12:52:00.010-07:00

I'm going to resist blogging about fashion, teaching ESL again, health care, the f-ed up state of California, Flarf, and disjunction and instead focus on the third part of my trip with Mark: Amsterdam. When we were still in the planning stages of the trip, Tom Orange said (over the phone) "well, are you going to Amsterdam?" We blinked, a little stupidly perhaps, and started planning to go to Amsterdam. And I'm so glad we did. While I loved Paris, I felt quite at home in Amsterdam among the bicycles, cheese shops, drugs, prostitution, pragmatism, canals, fries, art, boutiques selling fashionable bicycle-friendly clothing and the fabulous socialist health care system.

On the 13th, we took a very easy train from Ghent to Amsterdam, through Brussels. In theory, it's quicker to go through Antwerp, but in reality it rarely is--Helen said that the train connections in Antwerp don't always work very well, and the communication between Belgian and Dutch trains is often, well, off.

After a disorienting exit on the south side of the train station in Amsterdam, we found our way to our apartment in the Jordaan district, which was close enough to the city center to walk but far enough away so that it was a bit calmer and there were fewer 20-some British youths smoking up. All of Amsterdam is ridiculously beautiful, Jordaan in particular--it's full of canals, bars, cafes, vintage clothing stores, boutiques, and cheese shops (more on those later). We walked around the neighborhood, bought a few things to keep in our apartment refrigerator (beer, milk, cereal & bananas). That evening, we headed down to De Pijp to meet with Cralan Kelder.

Cralan was one of the editors of Versal, the print publication of wordsinhere, a writer’s collective based in Amsterdam. Cralan grew up in Amsterdam, if I remember correctly, went to school in the states, and then returned to Amsterdam. It was interesting to talk with him about the different writing and arts communities there. He pointed us towards Boekie Woekie, an artist-run bookstore of artist books and visual poetry. It was closed every time we went by, but it seemed very cool.

Although Cralan, his partner and his children were all getting reading to fly to the US the next day, he still made time to hang out with Mark and I. The three of us and his daughter went in search of some Ethiopian food, but unfortunately the restaurant was closed. Never mind. Instead, we wandered through the Sarphatipark to a falafal place not far from the Albert Cuypmarkt. It's too bad that I don't have a decent picture of Cralan, or of the falafals or the french fries we had, which were easily the best we ate on the entire trip. But I do have a picture of the park:

The sun was out even later in Amsterdam than in either Paris or Ghent, so we still had plenty of light in the sky when we had to eventually leave Cralan to his packing. We headed back to our neighborhood and found a bar in which to spend the rest of our evening hours. I love travel because it brings be in contact with ideas, things and people that are unfamiliar to me, but I also love the way time slows down in a new place. While we sat at that bar on our first evening in Amsterdam, it felt a bit like we'd always been sitting in a bar on a pleasant summer evening in Amsterdam. It was a pleasant feeling.

The next morning we walked down to the Van Gogh museum--Cralan had lent us his annual passes, so we didn't have to wait in the long line to get in. The museum has an impressive collection of Van Gogh, obviously, but also a collection of other 19th-century art--mostly by Van Gogh's friends and contemporaries. I'm always disturbed by the story of Van Gogh's life--and thinking about it makes me thankful that I am both physically and mentally well--but I was happy to see several pieces I'd never seen, including "Wheatfield with Crows."

After the museum, we walked back up into the Jordaan district, and stopped at De Kaaskamer Van Amsterdam, a cheese shop that specializes in local Dutch varieties--I wanted to buy something of everything, but instead I limited myself to several different types of farmhouse Goudas--one old (Rypenaer V.S.O.P.), one young (Le Vieux Gris) and then an organic medium-soft gouda-like cheese called Boeren that the cheese guy suggested. How happy am I in this picture?

We eventually made our way to a small bar called De Zotte that stocked a variety of Belgian beers (no, we weren't sick of Belgian beer. In fact, we are still not sick of Belgian beer). The bar was quiet, and a good place to spend a rainy late afternoon.

We ate a very basic and healthy dinner of sandwiches at a sort of loungey place by a canal. More memorable was the very tasty cold jenever we had at a very cozy brown cafe later that evening.

The rain stopped rather late in the evening, so our last stop was at a lively outdoor cafe back in Jordaan. I was done with alcoholic at that point, so I got some fresh mint tea--something that people all over Amsterdam seem to drink at any time of day.

The next morning (the 15th of July), we headed to Cafe De Balie to meet Megan Garr and Sarah Ream, both writers, and editors of Versal magazine, which I mentioned above. Versal seems to do a good job of being a forum for many of the translocal European literary communities as well as other writers and writing communities outside of Europe that have a complex relationship to being local or, er, not local--there are commonalities that exist which aren't necessarily the same as a totalizing kind of globalization. Megan's editorial in issue 7 of Versal has some interesting thoughts about translocality and is worth getting a hold of.

In my post on Brussels, I'll talk more about how relatively calm and at home I feel in communities and places where there's a kind of localism that isn't completely based on geography, culture or even language. For now, here's a picture of Megan, Sarah and Mark enjoying mint tea and translocal conversation:

Eventually, Megan and Sarah had to head on their way, and Mark and I wandered down the road to Cafe De Jaren for some lunch and to meet Jaap Blonk, Rozalie Hirs, Samuel Vriezen, and Frank Keizer. Mark blogged in some detail about the sound, music and poetry work that all of these writers do. I began thinking more about some of my own attempts to work with sound and music in recent performances--some more interesting than others, obviously--and again came to the conclusion that I would like to work with some of the languages I know other than English. But how? Well, we'll see. I'm looking forward to playing with some of these ideas when I start at UCSD in the fall.

After lunch, Rozalie had to head off, but Samuel, Jaap, and Frank took us over to Poëzie Perdu (above), a bookstore and performance space that hosts writers, musicians and other artists throughout the year. There's a fairly extensive archive of podcasts from previous events on the website. Here's a picture of Frank and Samuel showing us around the bookstore, which left me wishing that I could read Dutch, and also eager to start some translation projects from languages that I actually can read:

That afternoon, we wandered back to our apartment via the red-light district, which was noticeably full of British people and actually quite tame. In the evening, we headed back to the edge of that same district for dinner, where I ordered a "goat cheese burger" that ended up being made entirely of cheese, instead of just a burger with goat cheese on top of it. Next to us at the restaurant was a table of about six or seven standardly handsome young men who kept up a running commentary of all the women who walked by. They were offensive, but I liked how the moved between Dutch and a very American style English. After dinner we went into another brown cafe for some jenevers. You can see the old bottles of genever in the window of this picture:

As I've already said, I'm glad that we went to Amsterdam, and I'm glad that we managed to connect with so many writers and artists there--not an easy thing to do during the summer when many people are on vacation and out of town. Since this post has taken me forever to write, I'm now going to try and end it quickly (and gradually correct typos later): I loved being in Amsterdam, was really excited by the poets and musicians I met and could easily see living there.

In the next few days I'll post something about Brussels!

Trip Report Part Two: Ghent

2009-07-28T09:17:00.002-07:00

This second installment of my trip report is a bit longer than the first, and more detailed. Why? Because--admit it--you probably know nothing about Ghent, so a few extra details won't hurt.

On July 9th, Mark and I took a train from Gare du Nord to Brussels and from there a train to Ghent. For the past three years I've had a substantial number of French-speaking Belgian students, mostly from Brussels, in my EFL classes. But Ghent is in the Flemish part of Belgium, a place where most of my French-speaking students have never been, so I was glad to experience this other part of the country first hand.

Belgian politics is quite complicated--there are six separate governments (and parliaments), each with their own federal, regional and linguistic divisions. Some things, like education, are dealt with by the linguistic divisions. Roads and infrastructure are managed by the regional divisions and the federal divisions deal with things like finance and law. Even though there's currently no working national federal government, the country operates very smoothly.

Things did seem to be running very smoothly in Ghent. The city has a well-preserved medieval center but it also has a large university and much larger than Bruges, to which it's inevitably compared. Even in the summer with many of the students gone, Ghent felt like a thriving small city.

We were fortunate enough to say with Helen White during our visit. I initially "met" Helen virtually, through the work that she does with Krikri, a fabulous organization that highlights a range of contemporary poetic ativity through festivals, performances, projects and workshops. In 2008 they organized the Zaoem festival, and Helen was kind enough to use some of my pieces for the visual poetry exhibition. More recently, Helen organized Infusoria: an Exhibition of Visual Poetry by Women from Three Continents, which brought together work some of the most compelling contemporary visual poets from Belgium, Canada, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Turkey and the United States. My special edition of Foursquare snuck in there, too.

So, Helen is clearly a stellar organizer and curator. She's also a fabulous host, which I'll talk more about in a minute. However, I also want to mention her own work. Helen's visual poems manage to be complex and delicate at the same time. One of my favorite pieces by her is "A Planet Like Pluto":

You can learn more about Helen and her work through her website.

Helen, as I said, was a fabulous host. During the three days we spent there, Helen took us all over the city, cooked tasty quiche, and maintained a refrigerator stocked full of cheese and beer. I won't tell you about every beer we drank or every cathedral that we went in, but here are some of the highlights of our time in Ghent.

1. Beer. Belgium's reputation for good beer is completely justified. While in Ghent, I drank numerous Trappist and abbey beers that I'd never had before, as well as a variety of lambics and gueuzes. My favorite was by far Rochefort 8. Rochefort 8 is perfectly malty and not at all boosey. We sat outside, even though it was really very cold, and drank beer at Het Waterhuis Ann de Bierkant:

We sat inside at Trollekelder and drank beer when it was raining. Helen very wisely chose to have a coffee:

We had beer with lunch and dinner, beer with friends, beer after the reading. You get the idea.

2. The reading was incredibly fun. I'd never before read to an audience of predominately speakers of languages other than English, so it was a challenge to put together a performance that would work in that context. Mark performed some pieces from Temporary Worker Rides a Subway as well as The End of America. I performed some sections from Terminal Humming and also my 2006 Dusie Chapbook, Diverse Speculations Descending Therefrom.

This photo is blurry, but it captures the mood of my performance quite well:

After Mark and I performed, other people in the audience also came up and gave short readings/performances. I was grateful to hear work from so many poets who were new to me. Here is Jelle Meander, a poet and musician--and one of the other Krikri organizers--performing a sound poem:

Xavier Roelens, Olaf Risee, Tine Moniek, also performed that evening, as well as (if I remember correctly), two other men who recited some more traditional Flemish poetry. The event ended with an improvisation around the pig we'd all been admiring. There's a lot to be said about the work people performed that evening, and especially about the context of sound poetry in Belgium (and, as we later learned, the Netherlands). In a country with three official languages (Flemish, French and German) and rather intensely local debates about what language is spoken where and by whom, sound poetry seems both daring and practical. Mark and I talked about this a lot on the trip, with each other and with the poets we met. You can read more of Mark's thoughts on the subject at his blog.

And then, we went to the bar, drank beer, and played with a mysterious blue balloon. It was a very late and lovely night. (Left to right: Lies Van Gasse, Tine Moniek, Xavier Roelens & Olaf Risee):

3. Medieval and Renaissance Architecture and Art. As I've already said, Ghent has a well-preserved medieval downtown. On just about every walk, we spent a lot of time admiring the buildings and the canals. The Sint Baafskathedraal (Saint Bravo Cathedrdal) was especially interesting. The cathedral was built, of course, in stages over hundreds of years. We went there to see "The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb," an early Flemish polyptch panel painting by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck. My favorite panel depicts the pagan writers and the prophets of the Torah rushing forward to worship and adore the mystic lamb of God. Virgil is in there somewhere. I love how calm and unexcited their faces are.

Sint Baafskathedraal is also lovely in its own right.

We also went up the tower of the Belfort in Ghent. I'm not especially afraid of heights, but even I was a bit daunted by the height and the very narrow walkways along the outer edge of the bell chamber. Here's the view overlooking the town hall, which is the large building on the left.

3.2 Helen, Mark, Xavier Roelens and I took a trip to the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, which has a great collection of Medieval and Renaissance Flemish work, including several by Hieronymus Bosch (but not "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," which we saw in Brussels, and which I'll write about later). Bosch's work is beautifully detailed and grotesque--it did look proto-surrealist, although his depictions of heaven and hell are probably pretty consistent with the medieval literature of his contemporaries.

The museum also had an exhibition of works on paper by Raoul de Keyser, the artist in residence. In retrospect, I realize I was a bit familiar with de Keyser's work because of an exhibition of his paintings about two (or three?) years ago in New York. I didn't see the exhibition (because I live in San Diego), but there's a brief article about it in the Brooklyn Rail. Most of the pieces at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten were pencil or charcoal on paper, and I could see how he moved from doing work that was mostly figurative to work that is more abstract.

4. Mark and I had read about jenever, a kind of gin, before we'd left on our trip, and were eager to try some. With Helen, we went to a bar that specializes in jenevers, next door to Het Waterhuis Ann de Bierkant (where we first drank beer). There are two types of jenever: "Oude" (Old) and "Jonge" (Young). Confusingly, though, this distinction has nothing to do with age, but with distilling techniques. Either way, I prefered aged versions of both types, and in general prefered the oude jenevers to the jounge ones. Some jenevers are flavored with fruit or chocolate, but those weren't my favorites. On a rainy afternoon or evening, of which there are many in Beligium, sipping a jenever in a warm, cozy bar feels perfect.

5. Helen took Mark and I to meet Godfried-Willem Raes and his robot orchestra at the Logos Foundation. The foundation specializes in collaborative music and dance concerts that involve interaction between people and the robots. Godfried and his team have developed not only the robots, but a variety of human interfaces, including microwave radar and wireless gesture control. Yes--wireless gesture control! Although he's still working on perfecting this technology we saw Godfried conduct the orchestra with very subtle movements of his hands. These are some of the instruments:

And here's Godfried in the back setting up the orchestra to perform. Note all of the wires coming out of the computer.

Several composers have written pieces specifically for the robot orchestra, which now has forty robots, including organs, bell-machines, a double string hurdy-gurdy, the player piano, a vibraphone, an accordeon and a sousaphone. You can read a more in-depth description of the robots here on the Logos Foundation website. Finally, Helen, who has performed with the orchestra, wrote a longer piece about it for the Infusoria blog that I urge you to read.

I'm grateful to the creative energy and generosity of Krikri, and especially Helen, for making our visit to Ghent possible. I think that I'll have to find a way to be back in Ghent sometime soon.

Look for the third installment of this trip report, on Amsterdam, in the next few days.

Trip Report Part One: Paris

2009-07-24T07:09:00.007-07:00

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

Mark and I have been back in the San Diego for about two days. I've sorted through most of our digital pictures and am nearly over my jet lag. I'm conscious enough at least to do a trip report.

Paris looks exactly like Paris. And by that I mean there was nothing surprising about, for example, the blocks and blocks of mostly apartment buildings that unfailingly had their ground-floors devoted to cafes and retail, or the Cathédrale de Notre Dame, the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, the Seine, or the signs above the Metro stations in their gorgeous art deco lettering. Even the geography of Paris felt familiar--I knew that 27 Rue de Fleurus was in the 6th Arondissmont, that the Bois de Bologne is the bois of Nightwood, that Kiki was from (duh) Montparnasse.

Of course, having knowledge of and accurate expectations about a place isn't the same thing as actually being in that place. Here are a few highlights and observations of the first part of our trip:

1. The blocks and blocks of cafes and bars--they're a very pleasant combination of public and private space. People hang out in them like many Americans hang out in their living rooms and kitchens. A cafe is where you eat, of course, but it's also where you meet your friends and family, relax at the end of the day, do your reading, etc. Most cafes have very similar menus, so you can sit down almost anywhere and know that you can eat at least a reasonably competent version of an omelet, crepe, or stew. For the most part, there are no TVs and no music, even in bars, just the constant sound of people talking to each other.

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

2. People really make use of their available public space, especially in the warm weather--I think this is what I loved most about Paris. Mark and I sayed in the 10th, near our friend Joe Ross and within walking distance of Gare du Nord, Gare de L'Est and the Canal St Martin. There were people sitting by the canal all day, every day, but especially at lunch time and in the evening. It was especially warm during our first few days in Paris, and the scene at the canal was like a huge block party. Anyone who didn't want to be in a cafe or couldn't afford it was eating, drinking, and talking down by the water. In some cases, people bought a drink from a cafe and then took it down to the canal, or they brought some food with them and brought it into a cafe to eat with a drink.

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

2.1. Mark and I spent a great evening in Belleville, just on the other side of the canal, with Nicholas Manning. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from this evening because I managed to drop my digital camera and the memory card fell out. I didn't realize the card was gone until the next morning. Ugh. The 10th and Belleville were, to me, the most livable neighbourhoods we visited in Paris. The 10th is more gentrified than Belleville, but both neighbourhoods are multi-ethnic and mostly residential (i.e. there are no major tourist sites in them).

Unlike Brussels, which I'll write about in a future post, Paris does not fully embrace food from other cultures (except various kinds of kebabs--and most kebab shops also sell crepes, which is telling). Part of the point of the cafe culture is--yes, to socialize--but it's also to be able to eat simple, reliable French food. Most cafes aren't about culinary or cultural adventure. In Belleville, though, you'll find Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian and African resturants, and a variety of people eating in them. Bellville is still inexpensive enough to allow people from, again, a variety of different contexts to live there. Bellville was even more like a block party than the Canal St. Martin.

3. There is art all over Paris, and it's inevitable that you'll happen upon an interesting object or place without even trying. While wandering around Montmartre, for example, we saw this house which built for Tristan Tzara by Adolf Loos.

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

3.1 And here's mark in front of Victor Hugo's house on the Place des Voges:

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

4. We went to the Louvre and the Tuileries out of a sense of duty, but I enjoyed the Rodin museum and garden much more. I love the way that modernism starts creeping into his work, and how many of his pieces just seem to be crawling their way out of the stones. There were numerous casts of Victor Hugo, always with the same stern face no matter how much busy-ness might have been going on in the rest of the sculpture. There was also a cast of Balzac in a monk's robe, which struck me as deeply hilarious.

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

5. The museum also had several rooms devoted to Camille Claudel. I remember renting and watching Isabelle Adjani's film version of Camille Claudel (1988) during my first or second year of high school. But, beyond that, I knew very little about her. It was good to see so many of her works on display.

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

6. Our reading went well--I wasn't expecting much of a crowd, because Paris really empties out in July. However, there was a very pleasant number of people there, including many folks I hadn't expected to see who were in Paris on vacation or visiting family--including Mark Lamoureux, Susan Briante, and Farid Matuk. Mark read from a variety of different books and manuscripts, including Notes from the Center on Public Policy and Felonies of Illusion. Felonies of Illusion is one of my favorite Mark Wallace books, but I'll have to blog about that another time. I read from Terminal Humming, of course.

6.1 Here are several folks milling about after the reading: Mark, Joe Ross, Nicholas Manning, Andrew Zawaki, and in front a woman I was never introduced to. (She seemed interesting, and I think she said she was from Boston. Does anyone know who she is?)

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

6.2 After the reading, Mark and I went to get some food with Michelle Noteboom, Frederic Forte and their very very new baby. Mark and I shared a huge, decadent plate of charcuterie. I'm certain that I could happily (though not healthily) live off of cheese, charcuterie, bread and wine. Fred's a member of Oulipo, and it was interesting to talk with him about that, and about publishing in France. Once you publish a first book, then you can count on someone publishing really every book that you ever write. Fred has a press ready to publish his manuscripts in progress. There isn't much of a chapbook culture in France, or even a small press culture--in part because writers don't seem to feel the need for one. This theme came up again and again in conversations with writers and artists in Ghent, Brussels and Amsterdam, too. I'm split between outright jealousy at the huge amounts of support and respect that writers in Europe recieve from their governments, pulishers, and art organizations, and an acknowledgement of the benefits of DIY culture here in the United States. I have more to say about this, but it's enough to constitute another post, so I'll return to it later.

7. Mark and I spent a lot of time with Joe Ross, Laura, their two children, and their dog, Ceasar. Joe is an old friend of Mark's from Washington, DC. (Incidentally, Joe and Laura moved from DC to San Diego before eventually moving to Paris. I find this fact comforting). It was really wonderful to be able to visit with them. I was also quite smitten by Ceasar:

From July Paris-Ghent_Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris 2009

In Ghent

2009-07-11T02:44:00.003-07:00

And having a lovely time....I suspect I won't be posting many pictures, notes, comments, reflections about this whole trip until after the trip is over, but they're coming!

Readings in Paris and Ghent

2009-07-01T06:10:00.001-07:00

In Paris

IVY WRITERS PRESENTS
An end-of-the season special all-English language reading
with authors Mark Wallace & K. Lorraine Graham
Tuesday, July 7 7:30 p.m.
At : Le Next
17 rue Tiquetonne 75002 Paris
M̊ Etienne Marcel / RER Les Halles
Gratuit! Free!
(+infos sur le blog: http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com/)

Friday, July 10
K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace
Galerie Link
Blekersdijk 39
9000 Gent
tel. +32 9 223 59 42
galerielink@skynet.be
Hosted by: KRI KRI

Impromptu afterparty: please do stay in the Galerie Link after the readings for a glass of wine, homemade cookies and the most wide-ranging and unexpected performances you can imagine. Bring all your friends and a short text or piece of music, and treat us to whatever the microphone can take.

What is an impromptu? Anyone who wants to will have a maximum of three minutes to perform their own work. The idea is for everyone to get a chance to do their thing and to hear as wide a range of poetry and music as possible. At our first impromptu evening in April, we heard everything from a children's story in English and an anti-papist declamation in French to Flemish majorettes and a sound poetry tarot card reading. So take a deep breath and hold onto your seats.

Where: Galerie Link, Blekersdijk 39, Ghent, Belgium
When: Friday 10 July 2009, 20:00
Admission: voluntary contributions welcome

Upcoming Readings, Interviews, and other Sundries

2009-06-25T20:01:00.004-07:00

1. I'm going to LA this weekend to hear Bruce Andrews and Deborah Meadows read at the Poetic Research Bureau on Friday, and to give a reading with Amaranth Borsuk & Hugh Behm-Steinberg on Saturday. Follow the links for details, and please do come if you're in the LA area.

2. Mark Wallace has put up a post which thinks about Terminal Humming within the context of avant-garde poetry in Washington, DC.

3. Elisa Gabbert has posted an interview that we did earlier this spring--we talk about my book, food, visual poetry, and a few other things, too.

Terminal Humming is now available from Edge Books

2009-06-23T20:00:00.002-07:00

Terminal Humming
K. Lorraine Graham

ISBN: 978-1-890331-31-5

96 pgs, Cover by the author
2009

regularly $16.00

$12 direct from Edge Books, postpaid.

All "this shining and this _utter [!]." Terminal Humming is a very exciting book and I love it. Eavesdropping and borrowing from diverse discourses, K. Lorraine Graham has created a complex "essay on scrounging." It is a wonderfully violent "attempt to unleash inner badness" in poems that are hot and audacious, in a girly way: "Wonder Woman boots twirl twirl." Terminal Humming is just the right amount of weird. In it, "kinks become beautiful and obvious," and "language [hums] as angry form." Read this "downwind chess urine bird bathing extravaganza" of a book! NADA GORDON

Map and start K. Lorraine Graham’s Man-cunt. Honeybucket defoliates broadcast. Too personal? She keeps it normal and lumpy. Scattered disco balls mutilated by grisly pixies. This shining and this clutter. Their cunning bodies, well stocked. She rammed her glistening ovipositor into his abdomen. Imbued doll I am not. Warning! Warning! I clash looking for just a regular body in a supergirl outfit. All soft and twisted and inexpensive and consumable with a nice bike and nice bike gear. Hottie wanting sweet inside sprawl (Female until further notice) mixing information substitutes. Automatic shredder joy rehearsing pitch incineration. Squirming again and again (editing) editing (editing) (editing) something (editing) very (editing). Edit looks stupid. Change the finish. Overcome emotion by funding. Written in a kind of stripper life often scattered communication prosthetics mutilated by beauty. You find them here. ABIGAIL CHILD

Using irony, charm, and unexpected associations, the poems of Terminal Humming challenge any sense of women's situation being normal or transparent. These ambitious and invasive poems make us attentive to the steady drone of put-downs and put-ons that form so much of our discourse. Parcels of ostensibly innocuous information reveal their condescension or malice on Graham's pages, drawing us into the contours of an everyday life that is fine, okay enough—yet threatened nonetheless. And yet the poems have the strength of their whimsy, an outraged whimsy which ever-so-casually threatens back. This is the everyday as counter-attack! STAN APPS

I'm reading at the Poetic Research Bureau on Saturday, June 27 2009 at 4:00pm with Amaranth Borsuk & Hugh Behm-Steinberg.

2009-06-22T13:04:00.008-07:00

I'm reading at the Poetic Research Bureau on Saturday, June 27 2009 at 4:00pm with Amaranth Borsuk & Hugh Behm-Steinberg.

I have a UPS tracking number for my book, which is supposed to arrive tomorrow.

We're putting together the last details of our upcoming trip to Paris and Ghent, where Mark and I are giving readings (details soon). If you're going to be in Paris in early July, let us know!

I turned in final grades for two of my online classes yesterday. The third one ends this week, which means I'll have to turn in grades when I'm in LA. Then, no teaching--either in person or on line--for a month or so.

The June weather in San Diego has been cold--as much as 10 degrees below average. Too cold for the beach. Except for yesterday. And today. But today is Monday so it doesn't matter.

I would, of course, be happy to divide my time between somewhere and somewhere, but I wouldn't use that phrase in my bio.

2009-06-18T13:54:00.002-07:00

My European students all tend to speak multiple languages. They started studying one or two foreign languages as early as age 6. They come from families that are multilingual. In most European countries, you can drive a few hours or take a quick plane flight and be in a different country with a different language. Or, in some cases, you can go to a different part of your country where people will speak a different language.

The only reason I speak multiple languages is because 1) my dad's engineering job took us outside of the US 2) I was lucky to receive foreign language instruction in middle school and high school (i.e. before I got to college) and 3) I attended a bilingual school in Mexico City 4) I attended a French school in Guangzhou 5) At university, I spent 10 class hours every week-and sometimes more-- studying nothing but Chinese language. Most Americans don't have my luck, opportunity, or, perhaps, obsessions.

Some white people here in San Diego speak Spanish, but not as many as I expected, given that this is one of the few places in the US where you can be in another country within an hour. I rarely use Spanish here. I tried a few times when I first moved, but people were offended--I've blogged about this before. For three years now I've been buying bread from a guy at the farmer's market. Finally, yesterday, I spoke Spanish with him--but only because it was obvious that I'd understood an entire Spanish conversation he'd just had with someone else in front of me. He charged me a whole $2.00 less for the bread.

In a few weeks, when Mark and I are in Paris, I'll get the chance to use French again. I've been reviewing some grammar and vocabulary. Still, I know that the first few days will be frustrating and I'll barely be able to speak or understand anything. But after those first few days my linguistic memory will kick in, and 90% of what I know will come back. It always does, rather mysteriously.

Language and poetry communities are on my mind because of this upcoming trip and because of recent conversations on Exoskeleton. Mark and I will be reading in Paris and Ghent, and we'll be visiting people and poets in both those cities as well as Amsterdam and Brussels. I'm well traveled, and I've lived a substantial part of my life overseas--but most of the traveling I did was payed for by Bechtel, the company my father worked for. Perhaps you've heard of them? They're certainly not going to pay for me to travel for art. And even if they would, I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable taking their money.

It's not like I get to go to Europe every year and give poetry readings and talk to other writers in the flesh. I do not "divide my time" between anywhere and anywhere. I would, of course, be happy to divide my time between somewhere and somewhere, but I wouldn't use that phrase in my bio.

I Have Questions

2009-06-15T15:35:00.004-07:00

Does anyone perform the Ursonate slowly (Schwitters' version sounds slow, obviously, compared to Christian Bök's)--or the Presto like a Largo and the Largo like a Presto?

Does anyone ever perform the Ursonate with non-German pronunciation. Today on my run I was humming a particularly catchy section of the Presto and amusing myself by thinking of all the non-German ways I could pronounce it.

Why is my left eye all twitchy?

Is it possible for a normal human being like me to one day be able to do full hanumanasana (aka the splits)?

Will "people" like my book?

I'm not opening any of the birthday packages I've received until it is my birthday

2009-06-09T17:06:00.003-07:00

I want to open them now. Now! But I can wait a few more days.

I'm no longer looking at proofs--Terminal Humming is going to print right now, and I should have copies in hand soon, soon. In time for my reading in LA at the Poetic Research Bureau on June 27 at 4pm (more details later).

I'm debating what kind of a birthday cake to make this year. I love carrot cake. I have a recipe for a weird but interesting cake made from buckwheat. I'm drowning in berries, so perhaps I should make something involving those.

I can't bake anything that requires a nonstick pan (the fumes from nonstick coating asphyxiate birds, and they're probably not good for people, either)--but does anyone have cake suggestions?

Still Looking at Proofs

2009-06-03T14:25:00.004-07:00

It was pouring rain when I left on my bike this morning. For my morning commute, I wore converse, blue-green shorts, a thinly stripped black and white v-neck t-shirt, and a large, cream-colored rain coat. It was one of my least stylish bicycle outfits to-date. At the end of my morning commute, the hook thing that secures my bike bag to the rack of my bike broke. The office was not open when I first arrived, so I locked my bike up and sat at a picnic table under the trees a bit and wrote. I saw the small bunny that frequents that particular picnic table and ate the toaster waffles I'd packed as my breakfast (which were no longer crisp, but tasted fine).

The rain stopped and then started again. Someone came and opened up the office. I went in and taught my class. The sun came out, sort of. At the start of my afternoon commute, I attempted to tie my bag to my bike with the lace from one of my shoes--there was no rope or string or even strong rubber bands anywhere at the office. So, I tied the bag to the rack with my lace. Then I started to ride, but my shoe kept falling off. So I went back to the office and taped my shoe together with clear packing tape and started off again. The bag fell off the rack, so I walked my bike to the nearest bus stop and waited for the bus. While waiting, I wrote in my notebook and there was thunder and lightning--both rather unusual for this area. The bus came, and I had an unusual amount of difficulty getting my bike onto the bus bike rack. It also took me a while to undo all the knots in the shoelace that I'd used to tie the back to the bike rack.

The bus driver was not especially patient or sympathetic and told me to hurry up. I said, "I'm having a really shitty day" and he didn't respond. I don't usually swear, but I was tired and frustrated. I road the 302 bus back to the coast without incident, and got off. I used my raincoat and a scarf to attach my bag to the bike. This worked for about 7 minutes, which means I was not quite home before it fell off again.

After I got home, I ate some watermelon. Then I put on my backpack and got on my bike to go to the farmer's market. About 75 seconds after I left the house, it began to pour. I continued on to the market anyway. It only rained for about three minutes, but I was soaked. At the market I bought bread, arugula, asparagus, artichokes, corn and strawberries.

I'm curious about the origin of the handshake snap.

2009-05-31T13:12:00.002-07:00

1. I have a UPS tracking number for the proofs for Terminal Humming. I am doing a bad job not being nervous and excited about it all. Excited is good. Nervous--not so good.

2. It has not been sunny here since Memorial Day weekend. May and June here are the SoCal version of February: people are overwrought because they want it to be summer, they go swimming without wetsuits even though it's 65 degrees and the water is even colder, they drive worse than usual.

3. Being a woman in a microbrewery or bottle-shop is very similar to being a woman at an avant-garde jazz show, although the former is, admittedly, a much more social environment.

4. I'm not a skillfull handshake snapper yet, but I've only just started to get practice. Whenever someone goes in for the handshake snap with me, I kind of want to yell "whitey" at them, or at least have some third observer yell it at the both of us.

Friday Lester

2009-05-29T16:24:00.001-07:00

I have a tendency to be sarcastic, but I don't mind knowing that some kids I was kissing when I was 12 went on to become ecological engineers.

2009-05-28T18:35:00.005-07:00

When I was in fifth grade, I went to a winter solstice party at a friend's house in Maine. The friend was my boyfriend (in the 5th grade sense of the term), and his family actually lived in the same house that my aunt had lived in a few years before, so I knew the surrounding woods well. Me and my fifth grade boyfriend used to wander around the woods behind the house all the time. I remember once we went out barefoot during deer-hunting season. I just remember that I had pine sap all over my feet at the end of the excursion. Every so often we'd stop and yell "don't shoot me, I'm human." Anyway, it was the kind of party where there was ice staking and cider and spiced wine and cookies and probably pot. Me and my friends burned a lot of candles and made huge piles of wax on the floor. I remember talking with my fifth grade boyfriend's youngest brother, who was about four or five. He explained to me that he used to have a hundred pennies, but now he only had a dollar. He was unsatisfied. My fifth grade boyfriend and his brothers now work at the Metta Earth Institute, a retreat center in Vermont. I've blogged about my experiences at the Bay School before. Power to hippie education!

Now it's really really forthcoming

2009-05-26T19:16:00.002-07:00

Several days of relaxation and etc ruin me, a little. Yesterday while I was hooping on the beach I had a crowd of about 20 people watching me. Someone asked for my card, and if I could be booked at parties. I don't have hooping cards, and I have no idea how much I'd charge for hooping at an event, or how I'd even draw up a contract. There would have to be all sorts of specific clauses detailing that no one could touch me, that I'd have to have a certain amount of space to perform, and that I wouldn't hoop on weird raised platforms, and that were I to accidentally doc someone with my hoop, I wouldn't be liable for any injuries.

But I have other things on my mind--like my book (Terminal Humming, Edge Books), which was sent to the printer yesterday. Proofs by the end of the week, actual book in my hand, and hopefully yours, very soon.

6 x 6 Poetry Reading

2009-05-23T08:54:00.001-07:00

I'm going to be participating in this reading event this evening. If you're in north county, come on by!

Taken from an idea of poetry readings started by poets Sonnet Graham and Jeffrey McDaniels a few years back in New York, we are very excited about the first installment of our very own 6 x 6 Poetry Night, featuring twelve diverse and talented poets from all over San Diego County (well... one coming down from Los Angeles). We have put together six men and six women, and will alternate male/female with each poet reading for 6 minutes. This reading is in conjunction with our current series The Saturdays of May with Matt Curreri, and will also feature live music by Mr. Curreri & The Exfriends and Joanie Mendenhall.

Saturday, May 23rd @ The Andrews Gallery.

The night begins at 7PM and the performances will run until 10:30PM

A list of our participating poets:

- Amy Dixon
- Morgan Fritz
- Tomas Gayton
- K. Lorraine Graham
- Michael Horvitz
- Tomas Lucero
- Brad McMurrey
- Michael Meleck
- Camille Tallon
- Frank Tangherlini
- Gabriela Anaya Valdepeña, Winner of this year's San Diego Book Award for Best Poetry, for her book "Roses of Crimson Fire", written in collaboration with the Bay area poet Richard Denner.
- Amanda Walker

As always, this event is free and open to the public. Drinks and light food compliments of The Andrews Gallery.

SEE YOU THERE!

2009-05-21T14:17:00.006-07:00

Yesterday I saw a guy on a skateboard wearing a shirt that said "I heart Conceptual Marxism." In my ESL class earlier that day, "materialist" was a vocab word, and one of my students asked me if there was any relationship between "materialist" and "materialism." So, when I passed the guy on his skateboard, I said "Woo hoo! I heart historical materialism!" It was a nerdy and vague exchange.

Today I tried to suggest to my students that the expression "Tête de Turc" might suggest something about the way French speakers view Turkey, but they were skeptical. I think the figurative translation is something like "the person who is the brunt of all jokes" or else "scapegoat" or even "whipping boy."

There doesn't need to be an approved by Lorraine (or anyone) historical trajectory to make Gurlesque legit

2009-05-15T14:49:00.004-07:00

However, I'm unsatisfied with something about Lara Glenum's fascinating and enlightening description of the Gurlesque on Exoskeleton. So I'm going to try and think that through. My interests and concerns are really quite similar to those that Glenum describes: I'm very interested in a poetic practice that

1. is interested in gender--especially femininity
2. challenges and investigates traditional gender roles
3. messes with gender binaries and all sorts of other assumptions about power and hierarchy that stem from those gender binaries
4. is concerned with the relationship between performance and gender
5. uses camp
6. emphasizes/investigates corporeality and materiality--i.e. bodies--in relation to all of this
7. and so is also interested in the grotesque and the abject

And yet, as I'll readily admit, these particular concerns that I share with Gurlesque (as described by Glenum), don't seem especially new. Not that everything has to be new, and not everything has to have precursers--and someone with any energy will perhaps criticize me for wanting to even construct a Gurlesqueish lineage...but these concerns have existed in various forms of writing since at least Comte de Lautréamont, who is a rather obvious and easy starting point, and certainly before. Marie de France wrote a werewolf-romance poem!

So, what really leaves me unsatisfied? Maybe it's the potential for theory head that I feel? Where are the other inspirations and precursors for Gurlesque? I love Bakhtin, but I'm not satisfied with Bakhtin and (again, fascinating) description of Victorian London burlesque performances. How did we get to them? Bakhtin's description of the grotesque is, yes, incredibly helpful, but he doesn't define the grotesque, he just describes it--using specific literature. Even now when I hear the adjective "Rabelaisian" I'm more likely to assume that someone's been reading Bakhtin, not Rabelais. Snotty and whiney of me, I know.

I manage to lead just about every conversation about Feminism and the grotesque back to my feminist Modernist power trio of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and the Baroness Elsa, but I do wonder why their names--and others--don't come up more often in conversations about the Gurlesque. There seems to be a really thriving list of contemporary referential points.

There doesn't need to be an approved by Lorraine (or anyone) historical trajectory to make Gurlesque legit; that's not my point at all. I confess, though, that I like to make lists. One such list I've been working on--not yet finished, includes a very roundabout description of how I actually arrived at all of those poetic concerns listed above. For example, my interest in camp, performance and gender has a lot to do with Mae West and Star Trek.

More later. I need to take a shower.

Peace out.

2009-05-13T19:21:00.002-07:00

Oh, I am just grading. That is all. Mark (Wallace) wrote a response to the Delirious Hem forum, and I'd love to not be the first and only woman to comment on it.

I keep thinking about Plath

2009-05-10T18:58:00.003-07:00

I keep thinking about Plath, how she's just not a foundational poet for me--I had no Plath moments in high school or college--and I can't be the only white girl Feminist poet in the entire universe to feel this way. My relationship to Plath (and Sexton, and Rich) begins in retrospect (i.e. after I was already very much a poet and very much a Feminist. And I've always been white). And by the time I found them, they seemed..well...weighty, formal, rich, and alien. Sexton, thus far, remains my favorite.

More about this later.

Delirious Hem Poetics Forum #1: This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like

2009-05-06T15:42:00.002-07:00

I've enjoyed reading the responses thus far in Delirious Hem's recent forum:

Featuring:
Monday May 4: Mary Biddinger, Anne Boyer, & Brandi Homan
Tuesday May 5: Megan Kaminski, Becca Klaver, & Majena Mafe
Wednesday May 6: Gina Myers, Martha Silano, & Leah Souffrant
Thursday May 7: K. Lorraine Graham, Mytili Jagannathan, Elizabeth Treadwell, & Sarah Vap
Friday May 8: Teresa Carmody & co.

More recents

2009-05-04T19:51:00.003-07:00

Birds: indigo bunting, western bluebird, nesting egrets, nesting house finches

Food: farmhouse cheddar and strawberries and apricots

Drink: Tetleys

Asana: Marichyasana F; drop backs

Reading: French grammar review book, still reading the Sunday paper

Recent etc.

2009-05-03T13:33:00.002-07:00

Recent visitors: Heather Hurwitz, Colin Smith, Lee Ann Brown, Julie Patton, Brian Kim Stefans
Recent readings: Colin Smith, Lee Ann Brown, Julie Patton, Brian Kim Stefans, Geoffrey Dyer
Recent food: stuffed artichokes, mixed berry spoon cake, grilled vegetable pizza
Recent exercise: running
Recent asana: handstand (as usual)
Recent news: my book will be out soon
Recent dreams: dragonflies and something about Nada and Gary having a big dryer in their apartment.

Attacking the limes, serenading the limes

2009-04-27T14:10:00.003-07:00

Lester has developed an interest in limes. I don't know if he just likes the sound of the plastic bag, or the color of the limes or if it's something else. Anyway, he likes to attack the bag of limes for a while, and then when he calms down he sings to them.

Lester attacks the limes:

And then serenades them:

In fact, it's colder here than NY, DC, and most of Ohio

2009-04-25T19:17:00.005-07:00

I grilled a pizza (with leeks, sage, wild mushrooms and fontina). It worked reasonably well, but the dough was too puffy. And sticky. I'm used to focaccia dough being difficult to handle, but not pizza dough.

I am a zombie after the last three weeks.

Mark and I are going to Paris this summer. Terminal Humming will be out soon--I'm sending final files to Rod tomorrow. It's been a good spring.

It's cold enough for chili

2009-04-24T18:24:00.001-07:00

So I am having chili.

It's hot enough for a pastis

2009-04-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

So I am drinking a pastis.

Hark, hark, the dogs do bark

2009-04-19T20:58:00.002-07:00

But the caravan moves on.

Or else, the week just does.

Or else, time. Etc.

I suck at data entry

2009-04-15T19:37:00.008-07:00

Today I enjoyed eating the oatmeal in the cafeteria--its shockingly good. The only good thing in the entire cafeteria. I did not enjoy grading. I'm much better at grading assignments that I actually created. Grading assignments that I would never, ever in my left or right mind create is frustrating and irritating.

A friend who is studying Sociology said that online teaching is the new ghetto for women in academia. She said this not because she was being judgmental, but because she'd attended some kind of a lecture or read an article about it. Anyway, it sounds about right to me. Online teaching is almost like data entry. Don't Hardt and Negri say something about data entry workers being the new proletariat, or something like that, in Empire? Teaching as data entry! Data entry sabotage!

I suck at data entry. I don't ever post the right percentage of comments. Sometimes I post too early or too late. I probably blab on and on in my feedback. However, I do manage to connect with some of my students, and some of my students manage to improve their writing skills. And the pay at the schools where I've settled is pretty good. It's comparable to what I made adjuncting in normal on-ground classes in DC. However, it's certainly not nearly as much as what I make adjuncting an on-ground class in California. Schools pay adjuncts at lot more out here.

Today I also enjoyed practicing yoga with my eyes closed. I've done sun salutations with my eyes closed, but never a full practice. I did a very nice headstand for six breaths and then fell over. I'm almost never physically afraid of anything in yoga, though I am probably afraid of looking like an idiot. I don't mind if I hurt my butt (or whatever) when I fall, I just want to look amazing doing it. I have no idea how I looked. But c'etait bon to not know.

Also, today in class I taught my students the word "swollen," because one of them is having trouble with allergies, and hence has a swollen eye. The French word for swollen is gonflé. I had a weird memory of a french advertisement for a kind of cake: "Vahiné c'est gonflé!" The last time I had thought of this was when I was living in Guangzhou and going to the French school. I believe that one of the boys decided to call the other girl in my class Vahiné, which was, of course, an insult. At the time, I was just glad that they weren't calling me Vahiné, and happy that I actually got the context of the insult.

List

2009-04-14T18:10:00.002-07:00

Back to teaching ESL in the AM, which I prefer.
Back to getting out of bed early, which I don't prefer.
Terminal Humming is this close to going to print!
I cleaned my study.
I am nearly back to normal and not sick any more. What was that, anyway?
I ordered heirloom Lima beans from Rancho Gordo.
Michelle is making me a 33" travel hoop with 1/2 inch 125 psi tubing (ooh, hoop gear talk). It will be packable, light, fast and bouncy!
Colin Smith is coming to visit soon!
Mark and I did laundry today. I have not folded or put away my clothes.
I have hundreds of papers to grade by tomorrow.
It's overcast and kind of cold, for here, but a santa anna is supposed to come in tomorrow.
I have a timely interest in spring onions. They are good grilled, roasted, etc, etc.

I Don't Like Mulholland Drive (the Film)

2009-04-06T16:01:00.004-07:00

"Wait, you're telling me I went through all that mental anguish over a dream? What a cheat!"
-- Darkwing Duck, "Dead Duck"

Mark and I recently watched Brazil, a film I hadn't seen since high school. It was pretty awesome, but the end irritates me. It turns out that, gosh, Sam Lowry has been dreaming his happy, idyllic flight out of the city with Jill, and in fact he's perhaps been hallucinating/dreaming since the moment of his rescue. None of it's true, he's really just gone insane during his torture. I know that there are many examples of this particular trope, but at the time I couldn't help but think of the finale of Newhart, when Bob wakes up and we learn that the entire season has been a dream.

Watching Brazil made me think about Mulholland Drive, a film that I come close to loathing. Perhaps I'd loathe it less if I didn't love Lynch's other films so much, or if friends I love and respect didn't always talk about how great the visuals and non-linear elements of the film are. In general, I appreciate the whole broken dreams in Hollywood thing, and I like convoluted fantasies that conflate/confuse self-image with love object, desire is always a good theme, and I have no problem with a non-linear or non-narrative structure. But but....

I know that Lynch likes to work with cliches, dreamy surrealist fantasies, and dreamy surrealist visuals which ask viewers to try and decide for themselves the relationship between fantasy and reality. However, the relationship between fantasy and reality had better be interesting. Ultimately, I think that's what irritates me so much about the film. When the film really gets nonlinear and the line between fantasy and reality becomes even more porous, the film, for me, becomes boring and rather vapid, not fascinating. I know I'm being subjective, but the characters' fantasy structures are dull.

In fact, from the moment Betty and Rita take off their shirts, Mulholland Drive feels like a postmodern cliche. After a really hot sex scene, Rita puts on a blond wig that makes her look a lot like Betty (hint hint, Lynch may be saying something about identity and fantasy), and they go to Club Silencio where they are told that everything is an illusion. Oooh, deep. Betty becomes Diane, etc. The narrative gets even more dreamy and druggy. Diane's idolizing love for Camilla is as boring as Camilla's shallow indifference and cruelty. Betty gets to have hot sex, Diane can't even successfully jerk off. Camilla is all satisfied and voluptuous. Snore...

Many of my favorite stories, novels, and films play with dream sequences and/or drugs and/or insanity as a way of calling attention to the highly subjective nature of reality and experience--again, perhaps that's part of what irritates me when such sequences feel like cop outs. A random, incomplete list:

Young Goodman Brown
Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson)
The Wizard of Oz (Ok, so I'm no huge WOZ fan, but it's an obvious example)
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari
Alice in Wonderland
At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Peter Matthiessen)
Let it Come Down (Paul Bowles)
The Tartar Steppe (Dino Buzzati) and the film version Desert of the Tartars (Valerio Zurlini)
Poe and Borges stores are full of dreams and drugs. Gerard de Nerval, etc...
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)
The Last Wave (Peter Weir)
Solaris (Stanislaw Lem) also Andrei Tarkovsky's film version. The more recent Steven Soderbergh version is more vague.
Turn of the Screw, The Innocents (Henry James)
Lots of Philip K. Dick
Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam)
Nightmare on Elm Street (Duh)
Probably a lot of films by John Cassavetes that I haven't seen

I'm not so interested in hearing about why you think Mulholland Drive is a great film. But I am interested in hearing about your favorite dreamy, druggy films and books--ones that distort reality in ways that more fascinating, interesting, and illuminating than Mulholland Drive.

Friday Lester

2009-04-03T14:52:00.001-07:00

Lester contemplates the forpusfield with Wonder Woman

The Jeff Koons piece of Michael Jackson with Bubbles was more special than I could have imagined.

2009-04-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

I am sick, but I don't think it's because of last weekend, when Mark and I went up to LA to visit with Joseph and Rita, see a lot of art, hear a lot of poetry, and eat a lot of good food.

What we saw:

The Museum of Jurassic Technology
The Franz West, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures , and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum--all at LACMA.
The Dan Graham retrospective at MOCA.

What we ate:

Purple pickled eggs, chili, potato salad, pickles, and sandwiches at Philippe's. Mark had a classic beef dip with swiss cheese, and Joseph and I had lamb dips with blue cheese. We went at the height of the lunch rush; but we persevered, and the meal carried us all the way to dinner.
Burgers and onion rings at Umami Burger. Both were amazing, but the waiters were grumpy and inefficient. I'd go back for lunch in a heartbeat, though.
Brunch at Larkin's: I had "Maggie's Mess": Potatoes, scrambled eggs, onions,peppers, bacon hot links & chicken--pieces of fried chicken--with a bit of gravy and a biscuit.
Sausages and beer at Wurstküche.

What we heard at the Poetic Research Bureau:

Will Alexander
Guy Bennett
Paul Vangelisti
Diane Ward
Ben Ehrenreich
Ara Shirinyan
Andrew Maxwell
Sesshu Foster
Douglas Kearny
Roberto Leni
David Lloyd
Estrella del Valle
Seth Michelson
Dennis Philips
Saba Razvi
Martha Ronk
Matthew Shenoda
Daniel Tiffany
Molly Bendall

NaPoWriMo

2009-04-01T09:31:00.003-07:00

I’ve been noodling around with a new webspace and wordpress blog format for some time, and I’m not done noodling. However, it occured to me that I could use my wordpress space to post my poems during the month of April. The project that I posted to my other poetry blog, See it Everywhere, is more or less finished, and it doesn’t make sense to keep posting there. So, starting tomorrow, I’ll post poems here.

Eventually, I may ween myself away from this my blogger blog, but for now, poems will go in the new space:

http://spooksbyme.org/terminalhumming/

and everything else will go here.

Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney were here for a few days to give a reading at Cal State San Marcos. While they were here, I learned several things.

2009-03-23T13:22:00.001-07:00

1. A hipster is, basically, a kind of socialite, or sometimes just a wannabe socialite, with trendy alterna-style. Hipsters are to hip as beatnik is to beat.

2. Some of my peers are, like me, deeply suspicious and even totally against marriage.

3. I learned about The Sartorialist, which has an entire section devoted to people on bicycles. I'd never wear any of the outfits that the women have on, but I really wish I could get away with dressing like this guy. Don't worry, I can't. I'm not an art director living in Milan. My problem is that I don't just ride my bicycle down the street to the coffee shop/bar. I ride it six to twelve miles up and down San Diego county roads, and in between riding I teach. And, ahem, all the New York bikes featured on The Sartorialist were total hipster bikes. I think I need to do a whole blog post about stylish outfits that can survive six miles of hills on a real bicycle, plus a bus, and possibly even a train. Do any outfits actually exist?

4. I am late to the whole tag-cloud trend, but I am amused by it, still. "Body," "head" and various forms of "decapitate" are apparently some of my favorite words to use. I guess I'm not over that whole body-mind thing yet.

5. There are disputes over the right way to write an exquisite corpse poem. I enjoyed having the disputes, because it seems rather supremely ridiculous to argue about the correct way to play a Surrealist parlor game.

6. As Kathleen demonstrated, red lipstick is very wearable, and also, as Lucky Magazine recently noted, weirdly minimalist. I wore red lipstick today during my bicycle commute, and to teach. My students were fascinated and a little freaked out. We talked about color and tried to list all the kinds of red, blue, and yellow we could think of. People (ok, boys) yelled out their car windows at me. Was it the spring fever, or was it the red lipstick?

7. You can read more about their visit, as well as Kathleen's book tour, here.

I wanna be a male model

2009-03-17T19:08:00.002-07:00

Everyone has their own form of smelly disgustingness.

In an attempt to send off work in a timely manner and not irritate people who have kindly asked me for work, I've printed up several things. I think that See it Everywhere might be finished. It's my most unwieldy manuscript to date, and I really need someone to look at it who could help me make it both coherent and unwieldy at the same time.

I suppose that is what MFA workshops are for. Oh, I am exited by and fearful of the MFA workshop.

Everything I write is serial, too. I don't write discrete poems. So, I have trouble choosing sections to send to magazines when they say, "send 2-4 poems." I wish editors would give me a page or word count instead. I sound like I am complaining, but I'm not. I'm happy people like my work and publish it sometimes.

I have work in Abraham Lincoln #4, along with many other fabulous peoples. Buy a copy! A single issue is still only $5!

Seriously. Sunday.

2009-03-15T19:01:00.003-07:00

If I ever get to teach a developmental English class where I am allowed significant control over what I teach, I won't require them to answer questions like "What are the different kinds of paragraph development? What are the six sub-categories of expositional paragraph development?" Instead, I'd have them write a lot of personal essays, and maybe do one final project that was kind of persuasive or argumentative.

This week, I graded 93 essays describing "someone" the students "know" (not my instructions). I always find grading this assignment heartbreaking, because the paragraphs typically demonstrate that the people writing them have, like all of us, very deep and profound feelings, but they don't have language to articulate them. Moreover, the curriculum of the class that I'm teaching (which, again, I didn't write and which totally sucks) doesn't give them language to articulate them, or even really talk about the difference between abstract and concrete. The _best_ students describe their wives, husbands, boyfriends, parents, grandparents, children, in the most abstract ways: "To know him, you must get to know him" or "her hair is of fragrances unknown." It pains me to read sentences like this.

I've often ranted about how lacking the language to articulate something abstract means that you don't understand your feelings. I half believe that, but I also know that there are ways of articulating feelings that are not verbal. So, the challenge for many people when they write is to articulate feelings in writing that they don't express in verbal ways. I read my student's paragraphs and think about all the young students I have who marry so early, and then divorce so early, and have children, too. I think about the arguments they have with their lovers and spouses--and how they don't seem to have language to articulate to themselves, let alone to someone else, how they are feeling. It freaks me out!

I remember saying to one of my best students at CSUSM: "Dump your boyfriend and move to LA." I'm sure that was inappropriate of me to say, but I had to--she was so intelligent and smart. However, I know she didn't dump her boyfriend and move to LA. She said she liked "the lifestyle" here. She lived in Temecula. What was it that she liked about living in Temecula? It certainly wasn't the beach. So what did she mean by "the lifestyle?"

When I was young, I got bad advice from my family and friends. My students are young, and they also get bad advice from their family and friends. But the advice they get is worse. Too many of them are married with children before they are 25. If you have no college degree and 2 kids and you are 25, your life is going to be hard. It makes me so angry. I want to slap their parents and friends and the newspapers and their teachers. I remember thinking some version of "why didn't someone tell me X?" all the time when I was 25. Why don't more people tell their students and children and friends "dump your boyfriend and move to (insert city name here) or "you don't have to get married" or "I think it's a great idea to get the fuck out of here" ?

2009-03-09T16:25:00.001-07:00

Trying to type up drafts of drafts. I've put a few more up on my poem blog: See it Everywhere.

It's Sunday, Again

2009-03-08T20:33:00.004-07:00

This afternoon Mark and I got a daylight savings time 3:30 drink. I saw a little pig--it looked like a little dog until 20 feet away, and then it was clearly a little pig. I said hello--it came over to me and oinked into my hand and rubbed against me briefly while I scratched it's grey/pink bristly coat. I didn't have enough time to ask the guy with the pig questions, like "what kind of a pig is it?" and "will it get any bigger?" and "what does the pig like to do?" I did learn the pig's name. Dear readers, the pig's name is Hamlet.

I need games to play while I'm waiting for the bus in the fog at 6:45 am in the moring.

2009-03-05T18:37:00.004-08:00

In part because of a current writing project, and in part because of recent thoughts/discussions about the gurlesque and the grotesque, my recent game is this: if everyone in my family were characters from a horror film, novel, or short story, who would they be? I'm not going to tell you my thoughts just yet (or maybe ever, unless I finish the project and someone publishes it). But the question lead me to think about female characters in horror, and then female perpetrators of violence in horror, and then to dynamics where the violence is specifically or mostly female-female OR where the major dynamic in the film is a relationship between two women.

The two that immediately came to mind were Alien 1 (Ripley vs. the female alien monster) and Suspiria (female protagonist discovers that her ballet school is really a cover for a coven of witches). Below is a list of others that immediately came to mind. Tell me what I'm missing--and yes, I know that this list is full of mostly films in English from the Western part of the world, but I suspect if I started looking at some of the recent anime other's have pointed me towards, I'd find more:

Carrie (girl with telekinetic powers is abused by crazy Christian mother, eventually destroys her school, is stabbed in the back by her mother, but then telekinetically crucifies her mother with kitchen tools)
Succubus (duh)
Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (female vampire!)
Rosmary's Baby (Not so female-female violence, but it is a pregnancy horror)
It's Alive (Also about the horror of babies)
Friday the 13th (it's actually Jason's mom who is the killer, not Jason)
The Ring
Psycho (maybe only half makes the list, because the mom is dead, but she still exists as a taxidermied version of herself and in her son's head)
"Ligeia," by Edgar Allan Poe (also only half on the list--a woman inhabits another woman's body, but it's a male fantasy)
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Lair of the White Worm (mostly female-male violence, but some female-female violence)
Dagon AD (The fish girl--although it's mostly about her trying to convince her brother that he should mate with her so they can live under the sea together forever)
Dracula's vampire women should get a mention, even though they are clearly subordinate to him.
The Exorcist (Definite mother-daughter thing)

Agitprop Reading Series: Amina Cain & Saehee Cho, Saturday 3/7, 7pm

2009-03-03T16:16:00.001-08:00

We hope you can join us this Saturday, March 7 for the next reading in our regular space at Agitprop Gallery (2837 University Ave in North Park, entrance on Utah, a few blocks west of 30th Street), featuring Amina Cain and Saehee Cho. We often serve wine and snacks, and
donations to the gallery are always appreciated.

Amina Cain is the author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as 3rd Bed, Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, Dewclaw, Emohippus Greeting Card #2, The Encyclopedia Poject,La Petite Zine, Sidebrow, and Wreckage of Reason, and has been translated into Polish on MINIMALBOOKS. Recordings of her stories exist as part of the exhibition "A Diamond in the Mud" at Literaturhaus Basel, and the Moles Not Molar "Transmissions: Signal to Noise Ratio" radio show. Recently she co-curated When Does It or You Begin? (Memory as Innovation), a month long festival of writing, performance, and video. She lives in Los Angeles.

Saehee Cho is an MFA candidate at Calarts whose fiction has been featured in Shrapnel and Ex Nihilo. She holds a BA in Literature/Creative Writing from UCSD and currently resides in Los Angeles.

We hope to see you there and for all festivities afterward!

AGITPROP POETRY SERIES
Saturday, March 7
7:00pm
AGITPROP Gallery
2837 University Ave in North Park. Entrance on Utah.

I have a webpage! I have a css technical question!

2009-03-03T06:59:00.004-08:00

Today I have some announcements and some related technical questions.

1. Announcement: In the past six months, several people have asked me, where can I find your visual work, and I've said "uuuhh." So, I've been working on a webpage. It's still very much in progress, but if you'd like to read even more information about me:

http://www.spooksbyme.org

2. Technical Question: Does anyone know how to make a background stretch to fit not just the width of the screen but also the height? I have several different background images, so here's what I've done in my stylesheet:

body {
background-color: #339999;

#background2 {
background-image:url(Images/bg_about.jpg);
position:relative;
top:auto;
left:auto;
}

#background3 {
background-image:url(Images/bg_sand.jpg);
position:relative;
top:auto;
left:auto;
}

Then, I can make a div and give it either one of these backgrounds as an id and then make its width 100%. That works fine. But height 100% doesn't work.

Any thoughts?

I didn't talk about porters

2009-02-28T19:02:00.001-08:00

I love porters, too.

Only a douchebag would drink a light beer instead of a Hefe-Weizen

2009-02-26T18:50:00.006-08:00

I've been reading up about the calorie content of my favorite beers and alcoholic beverages as I move forward in my always-ongoing quest to maintain my girlish figure (hence all the running, the yoga, the bicycling, the walks on the beach, the hoola hooping) and still eat and drink the foods I love. Fortunately, I don't drink any soda, so I can devote all of my empty drinking calories to beer, wine, and spirits!

Let's just take it for granted that about four nights a week I have a glass of wine with dinner--but now we'll leave talk of wine aside (it needs a separate post) and move on to beer and spirits.

Tetleys and Boddingtons have become my favorite beers for weeknights, when I typically have no wine with dinner and only one drink in the evening after yoga (about 150 calories per pub can, if you're wondering). However, a Paulaner Salvator doppelbock is one of my favorite beers in the entire world. Drinking it makes me feel holy (but let me be clear, I have never been baptized). The Paulaner brewery is named after monks who revered St. Francis of Paula, and the monks were known as, yes, Paulaners. When fasting, the monks used to drink an earlier version of doppelbock to sustain them--doppelbocks have a lot of calories and high alcohol content. If I really want a beer but can't spare the calories, a Hefe-Weizen is my go-to beer, and of course Paulaner brews a good one.

Those of you who know me know that I love scotch. Old Pultney and Talisker are my current favorites, but I don't turn my nose up at Jonny Walker Red when I'm in a bar or need something to put in my flask for traveling. Scotch tastes fabulous, and when I go out I can have one or two over the course of the evening, enjoy myself, and watch everyone else get bombed. At 100 calories, a pour of scotch is quite healthful. However, I don't always want to endlessly savor my drink in the way that scotch encourages. So, what to drink then?

A gin and tonic used to be my favorite mixed drink. It's quaintly imperial very nostalgic. The quinine in the tonic prevents malaria, and as someone who once had to take the malaria pills of the 1980s (which made me hallucinate and vomit), I find quinine to be quite gentle (it's also good for nocturnal leg cramps, which I occasionally suffer from--especially in my calves). As healthful as it is, tonic has calories, and, sadly, I'm loosing my taste for it. It's too sweet, and it's pretty much impossible to get a good gin and tonic at a bar, where the tonic that comes out of the hose is nasty and syrupy. Soda water has no sugar, and no calories. And since I no longer live in tropical climes, I frequently enjoy a Hendricks (or perhaps Beefeater) and club soda with a slice of cucumber or lime.

And if I don't want a gin and club soda? I might have a brandy. Or I might have a whiskey and soda. On it's own, I often find whiskey too sweet (I'd rather have scotch), but mixed with soda, it's kind of perfect.

And I speak three languages and can do handstands

2009-02-23T14:51:00.005-08:00

I am definitely going to be in the MFA program at UCSD next year! I was very ambivalent about applying, but now I'm genuinely excited and looking forward to being in the program. I still have moments when I think something like

Why do I need an MFA when I have a BA and an MA and 4 years of teaching experience and a book coming out and special collections in Canada collecting my random chapbooks and visual poetry being shown in international exhibitions?

There are several answers to this question.

1. I don't actually need an MFA.
2. If I want to be eligible for jobs, I should have an MFA, which will barely make me eligible and I don't think it should matter but it does etc.
3. The job market sucks and I won't have a degree from either Harvard or Iowa, but going to UCSD does nothing to impact that particular problem.
4. I will have studied with Rae Armantrout, which will be cool.
5. An MFA will help me focus on my creative work in a different way, which I need.
6. San Diego is a community wasteland, so having a teeny bit more community will be, in theory, nice.
7. I may get to work in the library or archive, which would be great, and I've often wondered if library work would suit me. I used to think I was not "detail oriented," but that's crap. I just need to understand the larger context a bit before I can understand details.
8. I am looking forward to a change in my work life.
9. Now I won't have to imagine that all the people with MFAs think they are better than me while at the same time thinking how stupid this imaginary feeling I atribute to them is.
10. I think it will probably be fun.
11. It is fully-funded.

Skull Panda & Yo Gabba Gabba

2009-02-18T12:21:00.003-08:00

One of my students has an ipod-cover that looks like raw meat. It's very cute and very gross, and it made me think of the gurlesque and it occurs to me that I really want to quiz some of my students, especially my Japanese students, about different kinds of kawaii--I vaguely remember someone once using the term "kawaii-noir." But also, maybe the most relevant pop culture to gurlesque isn't so much Wonder Woman and Charlies Angels as it is Happy Tree Friends or South Park's "Woodland Critter Christmas" or Skull Panda (I so want a Skull Panda T-Shirt!) or, or yo gabba gabba:

or Teen Girl Squad:

Mark and I celebrate Valentine's Day week every year as a kind of anniversary...

2009-02-15T12:55:00.006-08:00

...in part due to a Valentine's Day/anti-Valentine's Day party that a friend hosted 9 years ago. So, yes, we've been together for 9 years.

This picture, which is a picture of a picture in one of our photo albums, is from summer 2001. We're in Washington, DC, of course, and we've just finished playing a softball game and have gone up to the Post Pub for "Office Hours," a regular Wednesday happy hour hang out and talk about poetry. I'm doing a kind of fake swoon, and Mark looks like he usually looks when he's thinking or about to say something funny and/or biting. I love this picture because look like ourselves, and we're in the middle of a very ordinary activity during an ordinary week that was all very happy.

Friday Koala

2009-02-13T17:53:00.003-08:00

My sisters and family have left Adelaide and moved to Perth, but this Koala can't move, and was trying to get some respite from the heat. Before they moved, my sisters told me that people all over Adelaide were putting out water for Koalas during the heat wave.

It's that time of year

2009-02-10T14:23:00.003-08:00

When I dream of real estate in Barcelona. From the very small and basic, the larger and slightly more expensive, yet not astronomical, to the expensive, and finally, the astronomical.

Happy Birthday Bryan!

2009-02-09T20:45:00.001-08:00

It's my brother's birthday, and since I couldn't reach him on the phone, I will offer my birthday greetings here (and in the card that I think has already reached him)!

I've been having very lucid dreams recently.

2009-02-08T12:28:00.005-08:00

A few nights ago, I dreamed that Mark and I were at the Embarcadero in San Francisco to meet Nicholas Manning (someone I only know, to the extent that I know him at all, through blogland). The Embarcadero was more like a souk--a lot like Fez, actually. While we were wandering around, I saw someone that looked French. This was my dream logic, because I can't actually describe what Nicholas looked like in my dream. He only vaguely looked like his blog picture, but when I saw him in the dream, I knew that he looked French and I walked up to him, touched him on the shoulder in a very formal way, and said "you are Nicholas Manning." He had a friend with him who had glasses but other than that was completely inconsequential to the dream.

After this greeting, the four of us walked outside to the deck of the market, but instead of San Francisco bay was a beach that looked more like the Carlsbad State beach. The light, sand, and water were a kind of rich golden color--a dreamy sort of late-afternoon pre-sunset color. Nicholas said, with great drama, "Ah, it is the Nile! Let us bathe!" In my dream, I had a moment of Wait, this isn't the Nile. Oh, maybe it is. Why not? I was reluctant to swim but then eventually did.

After that, we went back into the market/souk, and Nicholas began talking about rabbits and cats. He said something like "there is no animal better matched to the cat than the bunny. They are equals in every way, especially strength and ferocity." In response to this observation, I pulled out a series of wallet-sized, color holographic images of all the animals I've ever known--pets, friends pets, animals I've seen and remembered, etc. I put these pictures out on a card table in a way that suggested I was telling someone's fortune. We all examined the pictures.

I noticed that there was a bird sitting at the end of the table. The bird was Lester and also a tiger-colored tomcat I used to know named Benjamin. I noticed that the bird/cat had some pin feathers, so I reached out to scratch his head, and this is how the dream ended.

I'm not sure why Nicholas showed up in a dream--I rarely dream about poets, especially ones I don't know. I think it might have something to do with a post he wrote a few days ago about being 210 days away from finishing his PhD, about starting the process of becoming a French citizen, and ended with a description of his dream living/work space. Something I've been thinking about a lot recently.

Agitprop Reading Series, CARMODY & PLACE, Saturday 2/7, 7pm

2009-02-07T11:26:00.003-08:00

After a winter hiatus, the Agitprop reading series is back!

We hope you can join us this Saturday, February 7 for the next reading in the Agitprop Reading Series featuring VANESSA PLACE and TERESA CARMODY. We often serve wine and snacks, and donations to thegallery are always appreciated.

Please note that we are in a different venue for this reading than is usual. For this event only, the Agitprop Reading will take place nearby at at ART Produce Gallery on 3139 University Ave,on the corner of University and Herman, next to Cafe Carpe Diem.

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press), a 50,000-word, one-sentence prose poem; the post-conceptual novel LaMedusa (Fiction Collective 2), and, in collaboration withappropriation poet Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse (2009). Place is also a regular contributor to X-TRAContemporary Art Quarterly, and is collaborating with Los Angelesconceptual artist Stephanie Taylor on the film, “Murder Squaredance at the Spiral Jetty.” Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published by Other Press in 2010. Place is co-founderof Les Figues Press, described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”

Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem (Les Figues, 2005) and two chapbooks: Eye Hole Adore (PS Book, 2008) and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne by Teresa Carmody (Woodland Editions, 2008).Other work has appeared in various publications, including emohippusgreeting card 1 & 2, Bombay Gin, Fold, Slope, American Book Review, LAWeekly and Stolen Purse. She was one of the organizers of the original Ladyfest in Olympia, Washington, and co-organizer (with Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim) of Feminaissance, a colloquium on women, experiments and writing at the Los Angeles Museum ofContemporary Art. She is cofounder and co-director (with Vanessa Place) of Les Figues Press.

We hope to see you there and for all festivities afterward!

AGITPROP READING SERIES

Saturday, February 7. 7:00pm ART Produce Gallery
3139 University Ave. San Diego, CA 92104
On the corner of University and Herman, next to Cafe Carpe Diem in North Park

Friday Lester

2009-02-06T15:37:00.003-08:00

And final bonus snow bunting:

February in North America, even in sunny (currently rainy) SoCal, is a good month for flipping out.

I am making macaroni and cheese this evening, but a kind of fancy one, with manchego and leeks.

Today, if I had an extra 200,000 Euros, I would buy this.