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

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.

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

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

This CD is Dirty

I had a great time at the reading yesterday--the audience was larger than when I read at DCAC last October (ahem), and very low-key. I did not wear the fancy shoes I brought, but left them on stage as a kind of talismanic object (like the small, magnetic statue of Hotei Buddha that I used to take with me to exams as an undergrad). I also played a sound piece I made called "I still have a problem with agriculture," complete with two flute parts in D minor and vocals. It's meant to have something performed over it, but I just played it; I'd never done anything like that before. It was good, I think, and quite goofy. But now that I've done it once and didn't die of horror I can do it again. Maybe at the Evergreen conference in May.

After the reading, a guy complimented me on my performance and said, "So, are you a writer?" I wasn't sure what to make of this question, given the context, but I decided not to be a jerk. I just said, "yes." Then smiled and said, "thanks so much for coming" and left to go get some wine.

I also got up at 7 this morning for a workshop with Sienna Sherman. It was interesting to practice with a group of absurdly accomplished yogis (yeah, I know, it's yoga and some might say I shouldn't talk about accomplishment, but there's plenty of ways to value accomplishment and plenty of accomplishment in yoga). We did a lot of psoas and hip opening leading up to several back bends, including a few back bend inversions I'd never done before. Recently, I've been focused on opening up my hamstrings and external rotators, but I've been neglecting the front of my legs and hips. Thigh and psoas stretches are my new friend.

Tonight at Agitprop!

Please join us for a literary reading in the company of "Colby Jackson's Alien People" (ceramic sculpture) at Agitprop in North Park, co-sponsored by the gallery and local poetry presses 1913, Kuhl House, and Tougher Disguises.

Susan Maxwell & K. Lorraine Graham
Saturday April 5th 7pm
2837 University Ave in North Park
(entrance to the gallery is actually on Utah)

Susan Maxwell's first book of poems, Passenger, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2005 as winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series. Maxwell earned her BA in Peace and Conflict studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured in such publications as 1913 a journal of forms, American Letters & Commentary, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Bay Poetics Anthology, Verse, VOLT, as well as other journals and art installations. She's currently a doctoral student in Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley.

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of several chapbooks, including "Diverse Speculations Descending Therefrom" (Dusie), "Terminal Humming" (Slack Buddha), "See it Everywhere" (Big Game Books), and "Large Waves to Large Obstacles" (forthcoming from Take Home Project), and the recently released chapdisk "Moving Walkways" (Narrowhouse Recordings). Graham has just completed the extended manuscript of "Terminal Humming" and writes the blog http://terminalhumming.blogspot.com/ from her home in Carlsbad, CA.

This event is free and open to the public. Donations to the gallery are greatly appreciated.

The wind

blows. So we went for a goodly hike in the Daley Ranch. One day we'll make it to the desert, but not when there are 40 mph winds. The weather here is stupid. I don't understand it.

One of the days I spent in the Ramlat al Wahaybah was very, very windy. I understand why desert mythologies are about the wind and wind-demons. There's no rain, snow, etc, just the wind. And it can be a problem. A headscarf can help. And a low riding vehicle.

The reading was fun

The reading was fun.

Tomorrow is Monday. Before I wrote "Monday" I wrote "Munday." I think I was thinking of "fun," and the general lack of it on Mondays (though I think Tuesday is actually a worse day than Monday). But hence the "mun" in the "Munday" I erased. I suppose "mun" could be "money," too.

The reading was fun.

NEW Triple Threat Reading Series

Mark has a good blog post about the ways in which San Diego is and is not a poetry city. I'm simply posting the information about the reading this Saturday--I'll be there, hopefully with freshly manicured hands and pedicured toes. Yes--a reading in San Diego is that exciting.

NEW Triple Threat Reading Series--sponsored by 3 San Diego Small Presses: 1913 Press (ed. Sandra Doller), Kuhl House Press (ed. Ben Doller), Tougher Disguises Press (ed. James Meetze) announces its inaugural event...

Come one, come all to the first reading in North Park's new and explosive series. We begin with Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson who are reading in support of their fresh new collaborative book Figures for a Darkroom Voice.

Agitprop Gallery in North Park
2837 University Ave. San Diego, California 92104
(entrance to the gallery is actually on Utah)
7:00pm Saturday, March 1st.

Noah Eli Gordon's first book, The Frequencies, was published by San Diego's own Tougher Disguises Press in 2003. Since then, he has had five other books appear, including Novel Pictorial Noise, which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series, and published last year by Harper Perennial. Last year also saw the release of Figures for a Darkroom Voice, a book
written in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson. He writes a column on chapbooks for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, and his reviews and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Publishers Weekly, Boston Review, and Denver Quarterly. He teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado in Denver. See him reading with Joshua Marie Wilkinson here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aSENrRf0pNw


Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa, 2006), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). He holds a PhD from University of Denver and lives in Chicago where he teaches at Loyola University. His first film, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, a documentary about the band Califone, is due out next year. He curates Rabbit Light Movies, a website devoted to short poem-films, and recently co-edited an anthology of conversations between younger poets and their elders, which is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. See him reading with Noah Eli Gordon here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=aSENrRf0pNw

Today it was 41 Degrees

And there was hail.

And yet many people are still in T shirts.

Tomorrow Mark and I are going to drink cava, but that has nothing to do with the weather.

Ce Soir

Poets in the Galleries
6:00 p.m.

Focusing on women poets living in California, SDMA and the UCSD Department of Literature are proud to present award-winning poets Sandra Doller and Fanny Howe.

Sandra (nee Miller) Doller's first book, Oriflamme, was published by Ahsahta Press in 2005, and her second book, Chora, is forthcoming from Ahsahta in 2009. She was a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University in spring 2007 and a recipient of the Paul Engle-James Michener Fellowship in 2004. She currently teaches in the literature and writing department at California State University, San Marcos.

Fanny Howe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose, several novels and prose collections, short stories, books for young adults, and a collection of literary essays. Additionally, she has won several awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice.
$5 members/$10 nonmembers/$7 students

I am either high spirited or fried

But I'm ready. For. The. Semester. To. Be. Over.

I know that we need rain here in San Diego, but I hope that it doesn't rain on Friday. I want to go hear/see Nathaniel Mackey read at UCSD. I've never actually heard him before, and it's not as if San Diego is so bursting with readings that I wish to miss one.

Most of SoCal geography isn't really conducive to the kind of safe, suburban living it's supposedly known for

If you click on the map below, it will become larger and you'll be able to see the detail. A few of you, my dear readers, and family, have sent emails and text messages requesting more specific information--thank you so much for thinking of us! Truly, Mark, Lester and I are fine. Our little coastal section of Carlsbad is not threatened by fires at all. I am very glad that we don't live inland, even a little.

Cal State San Marcos, as well as FLS Miracosta, where I teach ESL, are both closed, as are most of the county schools. So we're not teaching. I'm still doing my freelance projects and online teaching, and I'm glad. I need something to do when I'm not exercising so that I don't just watch the TV obsessively or get into blog fights. The Yoga Center was closed for a while, but they've reopened with a limited schedule, so I'm going to go practice this morning.

Lester Has Distinct Musical Preferences

Like many parrots, he always enjoys well-crafted, melancholy pop like the Jayhawks and Wilco. Lester, who is named for Lester Young, listens to a lot of jazz. While I was gone, Mark realized that Lester prefers the tenor sax to the alto sax. The higher registers of Benny Carter, for example, made him nervous--they sound too much like alert calls perhaps.

San Diego Weather Mythology

Several people on the plane with me from DC to San Diego were reporters or red cross workers. Still others were their for conferences--some of which had been canceled by the time we landed. One guy, whose conference had not been canceled, was very chatty and wished to brag about the dinner reservations he had for this evening. He said, "the weather here is always better than everywhere else" and I said, "well, today it's not." We'd flown over several firelines coming into the airport--the pilot had pointed them out--and the entire plane smelled like smoke. He insisted that it was a beautiful day. Most people immediately began coughing when they excited the airport. The weather was not nice, and yet they insisted it was.

Snow Beer Day vs. Fire Beer Day

In Washington, DC we'd sometimes have "Snow Beer Day" if classes and/or work were canceled due to inclement weather. Blizzards and snow storms don't scare me. They come, they drop a lot of snow. Depending on where you live, you lose your power, but then you just make a fire. If you live in DC, the whole city shuts down, but it is OK. A snow day is a good time to hang out at a friend's house and drink tasty beers.

The concept of Snow Beer Day doesn't translate well to San Diego. We don't really have much snow. We have fires! Unlike snowstorms, fires directly kill people and animals and plants and destroy structures. Fighting them (you don't "fight" a snowstorm) requires helicopters and "firebombing" airplanes. Finally, fires mean that huge numbers of people can't just hang out at home, and those that can hang out at home can't just get on the road to see a friend, because roads are blocked.

It's difficult to translate the relaxed, friendly feelings of Snow Beer Day to Fire Beer Day. Yesterday, Mark and I went to Las Olas for our regular happy hour. The bar was abnormally crowded with people drinking and having their own Fire Beer Day. Fire Beer Day has a kind of reckless desperation--it's not warm and friendly at all. We enjoyed our Tecates and fish tacos in spite of the smoke and ash and helicopters flying overhead, and everyone else did, too. But no one was relaxed.

I suspect that Fire Beer Day is really Fire Tequila Day, but that doesn't have the same ring to it.

Yes there are fires

We are on the coast. The very coast. So, everything is coated in ash, and smoky, but Mark, Lester & I are well. That is not the case for the rest of San Diego county, however.

There were about 10 middle-aged women protesting outside of Planned Parenthood today

when I went to pick up my birth control after work. Birth control is a weird term. When I'm feeling hostile I refer to it as "anti-baby pills," but my birth control isn't pill-form and I don't use it because I'm anti-baby. I don't want to have children, ever, but I am not anti-child. Maybe I am anti-baby culture. The protesters had predictable anti-abortion signs and signs advocating abstinence.

I don't advocate abstinence, but I'm hardly pro-abortion. No one is pro-abortion. Everyone is in favor of life. Life is good (it's abstract, but life generally has a positive connotation). Pro-life is not the logical opposite of pro-choice.

I was at dinner with some poet friends once and someone said, bitterly, "women don't matter, only babies." I was 23 and living in an urban area that voted Democrat and Green and so I thought, "Wow, that is kind of uptight." However, I now understand that statement. San Diego papers frequently run articles implying that Feminism has gone too far.

Feminism hasn't even arrived in San Diego county yet.

When I left Planned Parenthood with a bag of birth control and a bike ride by the lagoon and the entire weekend ahead of me, I felt quite pleased with myself. I wasn't the one stuck in a strip mall parking lot on a lovely Friday afternoon with an anti-abortion sign.

In response to the four people who responded to me without really listening to me and assuming I was speaking in sterotypes because they can only

think in sterotypes:

1. I did not learn Castillian Spanish, I learned Spanish in La Serena, Chile and Mexico City. And I wasn't even talking about how native speakers of Spanish speak Spanish, I was talking about how Spanish names are Californiaized and pronounced, and how it's impossible to pronounce anything the way the locals do. La Costa is "La Cost ah" instead of "La coast a."

2. I wasn't talking about you being old and from the 70s, I was talking about how downtown San Diego looks on a Saturday.

3. Not all artists use and abuse drugs. Corporate people and doctors and so on also abuse drugs.

4. Writing and reading is not snotty. Saying that people who write and read are snotty is snotty.

Half of my brain is out of my eye

Tomorrow, Mark and I are going to head town to the San Diego City Book Fair. I'm curious about Oakley Hall, and I'm also interested in Rebecca Solnit--I liked Wanderlust: A History of Walking. And Amiri Baraka will be there, with music. 1913, Les Figues, and i.e. Press will all be there to represent. There aren't really any San Diego lit events that I feel like I both want to go to and am obligated to go to. This is one.


The streets in La Jolla are collapsing. This happens around here. Really, people, one shouldn't build homes on the side of hills in SoCal. The hill will either be blown away or washed away, and it will happen in your lifetime. "This time, officials said, the city will use much tougher grading and filling standards than those in effect in 1961 when building was allowed to continue after a similar slide destroyed seven homes under construction." I don't believe it. Builders, developers, and contractors can build anything anywhere in SD county, out of whatever material they want. The cheaper and more shortsighted the better!

Dear Future Non Employers

Asking for salary histories is a waste of time--my time and your time. You already have a budget for the advertised position. Why waste time not posting a salary range, receiving and going through resumes, then interviews, then asking for salary ranges which are usually way out of your budget? Why?

Answers:

1. Because you have a lot of money and don't care if you waste even your own time or if your business / magazine makes any money.
2. I know you don't care if you waste my time.
3. Because you want to pay someone 20k for a job that in DC would be at least 40k even though the cost of living here is actually the same.
4. Because you don't really think it's worth it to hire someone who might do a good job and stay longer than a year.
5. You don't want to pay for my health insurance. Frankly, you are disturbed that I'm not married. You were hoping that I was a marginal stay at home mom forced to work 20-30 hours a week to make ends meet.

Suprise

The only major advantage to having an office job (other than the obvious advantage of having a regular salary) is access to printers and photocopiers. My Dusie chapbook is going slower than usual. I'm hoping to assemble it next week.

Dan and Mike left this morning. I wish everyone I liked lived down the road from each other and me, too.

I'm getting caught up on email. I have five jobs this week. Three big ones and three small ones.

I'm teaching in the afternoons for the next few weeks, which means I don't have to get out of bed early.

There are more people on the bus during the day than at 6:45 am. Or at least there were today.

Riding the bus in north county San Diego is a suburban California version of drifting. It's slow, you can't move fast, your route is not direct, you come in contact with a public you'd never otherwise see or touch. I passed one of my coworkers on my bike today. He lives a block away, and I passed him on my bike just as he was getting out of the car. It took us the same amount of time to travel the 6.5 miles.

A situation in which further progress is impossible

"San Diego, in a word, is a natural 'cul-de-sac.' This is a term that its promoters have always despised, but it accurately describes the bay's isolation by its bordering maze of high mountains and deep canyons." P. 23 (in Mike Davis' section), Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See.

This is why all trains run through LA.

Today I went for a walk on the beach. I saw several flocks of pelicans, many California squirrels, and also a rabbit.

The blue trolley line that runs from down town San Diego to the border is in bad shape and needs to be repaired. But apparently we need more freeways instead of better public transportation.
The blue line "has an average weekday ridership of 58,400, more than the trolley system's two other lines combined."

~

Other people have clean fingernails. Why can't I?

~

I made designs for yoga t-shirts today. Tank tops, actually.

~

My left hamstring attachment kills. Sitting for long periods of time is really uncomfortable. Not in a sharp way, in a dull, annoying way.