Denunciation will make me powerful!

One of my students is headed back to Venezuela this weekend. She said if she ever starts her own company and becomes rich, she will be my patron.

Harlequin Knights reports that, at a recent UCLA lecture, Zizek castigated all the "experimental American poets" who are in love with Hugo Chavez. My student is not in love with Hugo Chavez and neither am I. Like Joseph, I wonder who he means. However, some of us must be prone to a romantic love of his rhetoric, that seems certain.

Here in the San Diego suburbs, having recently returned from a trip to Target, it's tempting to get all teary-eyed about Chavez addressing a crowd of protesters in his customary red shirt screaming "Gringo, go home!" or "Those who want to go directly to hell, they can follow capitalism" and "Those of us who want to build heaven here on earth, we will follow socialism."

This fire and brimstone rhetoric appeals to my Feminist WASP guilt complex. Yes, yes, I think, let the denunciations continue! Denounce me! I want to be denounced!

But I'm also tired, and have just had a big capitalist breakfast.

I work hard. And a lot. I want a big capitalist breakfast and also health care.

I wonder where a journal like Cross-Cultural Poetics might stand (or have stood) on loving Chavez or not. Has there been a recent issue of XCP?

In fact, what are the current magazines that feature a combination of poetry, critical pieces, reviews, and other stuff. I mean magazines in the tradition (if I can even say that) of XCP, Chain, Tripwire, Ecopoetics, Tinfish, Verdure, The Poker Magazine, Jacket, How2....

I have a copy of Pilot 2006 on my desk that I'm still going through. This might count. A fairly wide range of material. A fairly rigorous attempt at discussing poetics. Uneven but risky, so I like it.

Well. Given my list, it looks like that when I talk about magazines "that feature a combination of poetry, critical pieces, reviews, and other stuff" I often mean magazines connected to Buffalo. Or, magazines edited by people who are well versed in experimental poetics since 1920.

With the exception of Jacket and How2, I don't think any of the magazines above would make my favorites list. But Lorraine, what are your favorite contemporary magazines that are still active/in print? Um, um...

How2
Jacket
Foursquare
Tarpaulin Sky
Pilot
Big Bridge
Fiction International
Submodern Fiction (which, yes, Mark edits and I will soon co-edit and which is on hiatus but will have another issue by this fall)

Foggy

It, the fog, came in yesterday or the day before and hasn't gone out or up.

Today was the last day of the ESL session I've been teaching. I almost always find myself really liking my ESL students.

I'll be taking the next month off from ESL, but I'll still be teaching online & doing writing/editorial work and some design. But I need some head space. Mark and I are heading up to Portland next week to give readings and have fun. So I have several days to think about my own writing again and remember what it is.

Time for a beer. Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout. That's the only good thing about fog, it's better for drinking stout.

Apres Le Shower

Last of the famous

I watched "America's Next Top Model" last week and that show about the Pussycat Dolls, who, I'll admit, I'd never even heard of until seeing the promotions for the show, although I did hear the "don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me" (which I often mis-speak as "don't you wish your boyfriend was hot like me") song in Oman on New Years Eve at a bar full of equal parts rich British girls and their pretty boy boyfriends from Dubai spending a fashionable holiday in quaint, nearby Muscat, men in various forms of Islamic dress, prostitutes, and engineers (both men and women) from India. The dance floor was crowded and the grope-factor was high, so I stayed away. My kind hosts bought me a monstrously expensive scotch, which I didn't really drink because everyone else was super blasted, and I designated myself the designated driver.

Has anyone written about Jean Rhys and "I walked with a zombie"?

It is very spring-like here, but all those people in the water today without wetsuits are crazy.

The tactile need not be at the expense of the visual and vice versa et al

My hamstring attachment is feeling better, for now, but I haven't tried hanumanasana this week. Leaping between worlds requires a lot of flexibility, even if it's a figurative leap:

"It was the greatest leap ever taken. The speed of Hanuman's jump pulled blossoms and flowers into the air after him and they fell like little stars on the waving treetops. The animals on the beach had never seen such a thing; they cheered Hanuman, then the air burned from his passage, and red clouds flamed over the sky . . ."

Laura and Rodrigo gave a good reading (or good readings) to the largest crowd yet at CSUSM--almost 80 people. It was good to see them and talk poetry. I might even say that the conversation was pleasurable, stimulating, and productive.

This morning was not pleasurable, however.

Two of my students also ride the 302 bus and one asked me, "why are there so many insane on the bus," so I told her about the shelters, hospitals, drug rehabilitation centers, and women's shelters along the 302 route. She said she was "relieved" that there was a good explanation. "Relieved" was a vocabulary word this week, and I'm always happy when students find the exactly right moments to use new words. I think it makes them happy, too.

Today I am tired from being aware of the contexts and codes of identity and trying to productively refuse them

Moving Walkways / Rock Heals

I've got some poems and sound files from Moving Walkways, my recent chapdisk from narrow house recordings, as well as a few new poems and recordings up at Rock Heals this week.

I just got my copies of the chapdisk in the mail yesterday, and they really look beautiful, especially the hand letter pressed inserts from Newlights Press.

$7.00 plus $2.00 shipping and handling
if in maryland add .5% sales tax = $9.35 total

purchase any 2 narrow house titles for $20 (shipping included)
offer only good with check or money order

send check or money order along with your order form to

narrow house recordings
1 summerfield road
gwynn oak, maryland 21207

if you purchase more than one c.d. shipping is free
please include your full name address, phone number, and email,
how you heard about us and if you are interested in future projects.

It is March, and you are still cold and crazy

1. I'm going to be making designs for the Yoga Center that will eventually be silk screened (by someone other than me) onto T-shirts. Bring on the scalable vector files!

2. My left sit bone attachment--i.e. the top of my hamstring, where it connects to my femur/thighbone--is sore. Really really sore. It is usually sore, but not usually really really sore.

3. I am wearing contacts. This is new for me. I think that not wearing glasses makes me look tired. Now that I wear contacts, I need to learn more about eye makeup. Other than day-old mascara, I don't really have the necessary techniques down.

Mom and I visited Mission San Luis Rey.

Mom, Mark and I visited the Zoo.

A good visit!

Now, it's back to grading and cleaning, booking tickets to Portland.

Santa Annas are here, briefly, so it's warm and dry.

Happy Ayyam-i-Ha!

Mom's here, and we spent a pleasant morning in La Jolla.

I miss being called whitey

When, oh when, will high-waisted pants trickle down to plebeian fashion? I feel like I've been seeing them on models in magazines for at least the past three years, and yet there is still no Gap high-waisted jean, no high-waisted trouser from Express. Target, where are you in all of this? I've had enough of sheer jersey! I love high-waisted pants, as long as they're cut slim, although it's ok if they have straight legs. They make fairly short individuals like me look tall(er)!

I had a pair of brown velvet high-waisted pants, but they were vintage and they've ripped and are unwearable. I have some deep navy high-waisted sailor pants (you know, with the buttons in front), but they are made of wool, and really not practical for California.

Today, I tried to spell fluctuate as "fluxuate."

Mark's home!

I bought a TV guide this week because I didn't try to buy a paper until late on Sunday and of course all the papers were gone because everyone bought one for the Oscars coverage and predictions etc. It felt weird to buy a TV guide.

Also, today I actually enjoyed driving to and from work. It was raining. In other parts of the county it was snowing. None of my students had heard of Sinatra's "Lady is a Tramp," but they did appreciate my explanation of the line "hate California, it's cold and it's damp." But I had to explain the word "tramp" and also the positive connotation of "lady" first.

I had some realization about something today, but I forgot it

Mom arrives on Thursday--I'm planning a weekend of walks, food, and the zoo.

But my beautiful crocodile.
My crocodile out of heart,
Where does your pride go?

Would someone please create a citrus scent that lasts?

I admire and respect people who can throw good parties. I also admire and respect people who have fun at parties.

Also, letterpresses and letterpressed things. And not just the inserts to my CD, either.

Platforms. They give hight, but it is still possible to walk in them. They are not so good for driving, however.

I'm certain Lester is now saying "You be good," which is what I say to him as I head out the door.

Except for the sound of a metronome.

Any kind of rhythmic tapping sound upsets me. My brother drove me to tears once by tapping on the car window while we waited in the bank parking lot for our mother. I suppose I was older than six but younger than eleven.

This is cheesy, but during savasana after a restorative yoga class this evening, I had a memory of leaving New Zealand shortly after my parents divorced. I remembered green. The carpet in the Auckland airport is green, and the landscape of New Zealand is green. The view out the windows of the Auckland airport, even, is lush. Tropical even though the trees are mostly deciduous. So, green, and a vaguely cliche phrase my father said which I've often repeated but only just realized was something he said then at that particular moment: "I hate goodbyes." I haven't thought of this in ages, maybe ever, so I'm writing it publicly so I can't say I never thought it.

No wonder I am obsessed with airports. I have no idea why rhythmic tapping upsets me--now, it reminds me that time is passing, but when I was somewhere between six and eleven, why did it upset me so much?

Various Ye Haws

Ye haw #1: The letter pressed inserts for my chapdisk, Moving Walkways, from narrow house recordings are finished, which means the CD is finished, which means you can get a copy!

Ye haw #2: Mark and I are reading in the Spare Room series in Portland on March 25. This is kind of a ways away, but I am still happy about it!

Ye haw#3: Smoked salmon is good!

Ah, Maureen Dowd, I don't always agree with you,

but I agree with most of your opinion on chick-lit.

But I haven't read The Devil Wears Prada or the Bridgette Jones Diaries. I don't drink cosmopolitans, though I'm sure I would like them well enough, and I never watched Sex and the City. One day, I met my friend for coffee, and she said she was worried about moving because she needed her Sex in the City lifestyle.

I tried to read romance novels for a while but couldn't. My friends are perhaps bored of me saying this, but even the story about the romance between the vampire and the Buddhist monk ended in marriage.

Chick lit is different from romance, though. The heroines of romance novels are usually virgins until they meet their future husband. Or, at the very least, the hero has to be the genesis of some kind of standard sexual awakening for the heroine. The romance novel heroine can be a princess or a peasant, but her hero is generally a man of power. Chick-lit heroines are urban, in their 20s and 30s, wealthy or on their way to being wealthy, hyper-conscious of their image, and sexually promiscuous even as they long for stability and a fairly generic sort of man to save the day.

I'm not anti-genre fiction, you all know that I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. Traditionally, these genres have tended to simply leave women out: The Lord of the Rings isn't a story about girls or women, duh. But thanks to writers like Anne McCaffrey, Robin McKinley, and Marion Zimmer Bradley and endless more, I can read stories about women who travel to far away places and save the word. And yes, usually there is romance, but the heroine and hero get to save the world together.

So, no Sex in the City or cosmopolitans for me. And no chick-lit. Basically, no stories about women learning to become happy heterosexual capitalists (although I make semi-exceptions for Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice). Oh, the endless self-obsessing. Does he like me? Doesn't he like me? Which man (among the endless options of boring men) should I sleep with? Which boring rich man (who is also sensitive and artistic) should I eventually marry and have babies with after I fuck a lot of these other boring men? Ugh!

I never read coming of age books either. I started to read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Heidi, Little Women Under the Lilacs, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, etc but found them boring, yes, even Little Women, G-d forgive me. These books are all much better though, than romance novels and chick lit. I like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice better than all these books, but not nearly as much as Wuthering Heights or House of Mirth.

The virgin birth of five Komodo dragons....

How could I have missed this news?

Somehow, Flora, a Komodo dragon at Chester Zoo in northern England became pregnant. She's never even been "exposed" to a male komodo dragon.

"While it wasn't unusual for female dragons to lay eggs without mating, scientists understood they were witnessing something important when they realized Flora's eggs had been fertilized.

"DNA paternity tests confirmed the lack of male input, although the brood are not exact clones of their mother."

Thanks to Susan Smith Nash for pointing it out.

We're back at home. Things seem more or less ok. It smells weird.

I don't think my ESL students are going to go for the unit on Jimmy Carter.

It is raining and it is Monday. But not everywhere. The special collections at UMD on Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and this.

I am trying to read Alma because I am writing a revew for Traffic.

We are preparing to leave the building this weekend while management pumps toxic gas into it to kill termites. Bagging up all of our dry food and the food in the fridge and the freezer is a pain.

Also, I bashed my knee this morning. It is fine now, but I hobbled through teaching. It wasn't as bad as the time I burned my hand and went to teach with it in a bag of frozen tater tots, however.

Lester is a young male bird in springtime with no girl bird to love. He's been a bit overwrought, and last night he sang rather loudly to his rainbow colored chew toy. I wonder if Arnold, the parrotlete Ryan lives with, ever gets this way. It's supposed to be quite common for parrotletes and amazons.

It is February, and you are cold and going crazy

In Southern California, it is relatively warm. Also, I don’t hate my work life and I love my boyfriend.

Actually, today it is quite warm. And tomorrow it will be 75.

One of my students wanted to talk about Man Ray yesterday. We were talking about Ford Economics and the 1920s, and he said, "But what about art and culture in the US then? What about Dada and Surrealism?" Bless you, my ESL students!

As Mark and I were driving to the restaurant for a post-reading dinner, we saw short man in a green hooded sweatshirt with bunnies all over it. Also, he was wearing a backwards baseball cap. He was crossing the road into the shopping center.

As I was riding home from teaching today, I rode through town and picked up some millet for Lester. While waiting for the light to change, a woman looked at me suspiciously. Or at least she squinted her eyes and shook her head a bit. Then, she said, "Shouldn't you be in school?" I looked at her and said, "I wish I were still in school." Then the light changed.

Today, as I was running, a guy stuck his head out of his silver pickup truck and yelled "Yeaaahhhh Bluuuueeeee!" I was wearing a blue shirt.

Mark and I celebrate our anniversary on Valentine's Day, because that really is our anniversary,

and it's all because of an anti-Valentine's Day party. I ignored other would-be suitors and instead told Mark about the research I was doing for my thesis on Yakub Beg and Kashgaria's diplomatic relationship with the British in India. I already liked him, but the fact that he was actually interested in Yakub Beg didn't hurt. So every year we celebrate: today we celebrated by getting up very early and going to work and then going to a reading. We like to extend our celebrations over the course of a week, so we'll probably make some dinner tomorrow and exchange tokens of esteem.

As I've already mentioned, one of Mark's best qualities is the fact that he is not passive-aggressive. He does not get upset about something and then pretend to not be upset while he does nasty pesky things meant to be annoying. So, perhaps it's a strange quality to love in a person, but I really really appreciate the fact that Mark understands anger and hostility, because this means that he doesn't take his anger and hostility out on other people.

Mark is also a very good writer. I could not love a writer without loving their work. I like the fact that Mark is interested in both lyricism and social & political critique, but that these things don't occur in the work as either strident statements or abstract longings.

Mark is a good organizer. He's confident enough to get off his ass and do things--another quality I love. Like all of us, Mark does his share of complaining, but he doesn't whine. If Mark throws a party, it is a good party. He works well with others who are also willing to get off their ass. When he throws a party, he teams up with other people, and they throw a good party together. He starts reading series.

He talks to people he doesn't know at readings because he wants them to come back if they want to come back. He pays attention to social contexts outside of his immediate poetry and academic contexts.

We're going to hear Heriberto Yepez this afternoon at UCSD. I've been looking forward to this reading for a while, even if it does come in the middle of a ridiculously busy week! Too many late nights and early mornings for both Mark and I. I mostly know Yepez' critical work. I still haven't bought his book from Heretical Texts, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers, but I probably will this afternoon.

This from Yepez' "Translation as Matricide (the Sequal!)" Originaly in Chain #10:

Translation should become the transformation of one first language into (at least) two other languages.
Translation as the practice where the permanent presence of the first language takes place in the context of a second language.

Or this from "On Character"

“autobiography”. we should read this term the other way around, and say something like this: writing is always autobiographical. never writing on me. but: graphos (text) constructing bios (life) that appears as auto (on-itself). autobiography: language writing on itself and thus becoming “alive”.

and also this:

a character is not getting away from us, nor going (more) inside. none of us can be written. in order for “us” to be written (down) (=subjected) (controlled), in order for any of “us” to become text / even just one /, (we) need the presence of the others, their co-existence, due to the ghostly fact that there’s no single-one. no-one (none) can be written. always some of us left behind.

Mark is my favorite because he is not passive aggressive.

He is also the best because he likes animals and watching animal shows with me.

Also, he has a wide-ranging taste in music, and understands that while I like avant-garde jazz very much, I don't always want to listen to Sun Ra at the end of the day.

Mark does not make fun of me for spending an hour in the bathroom applying flash eyelashes which is about how long it takes me--I can never get the knack of those things!

He supported my decision to not look for a regular office job when I moved here, even though I was worried that I wouldn't be able to piece together an income from freelance work. Several times, when I interviewed for perfectly decent full-time jobs that I didn't want, he supported my decision not to take them.

Also, Mark encourages nap-taking in the middle of the day, especially when I've been up late but had to work early.

Long post that probably no one will comment on

I think precision in poetics these days is rather difficult (this post will illustrate that it is at least difficult for me), although that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't important. I feel like I could (should) write an essay about the lack of precision in our generation's poetics. Of course, there's value in a lack of precision too, as long as it's intentional. I think.

Instead of writing that essay I will blog about Flarf, because for me it's a useful current example of a poetry that often successfully combines/draws from a variety of experimental contexts and techniques and does so with awareness.

The idea of Flarf does seem to encourage fairly strong responses. Combining procedural techniques and an awareness of the relationship between structure and meaning with any content you and Google can find (and any other substitutions & changes you want) and then delivering it all in a poem packed with satire and a good dose of New York school wit and energy on the level of the line (and possibly a performance that emphasizes artifice) is clearly threatening.

I wonder if people come into contact with Flarf just aren't familiar with the histories of procedural work, Language poetry, and 1rst and 2nd generation New York School. Sometimes I feel like people get fussy about Flarf because it's something they heard about at a party in New York and think it has some kind of widespread popularity. I suppose Flarf is increasingly popular, and it's gotten critical attention, but let's keep things in perspective. It's not taking over the poetry world anymore than Language poetry has really taken over the academy. I'm kind of pessimistic. I don't think poetry really takes over anything, I tend to think it gets let in from time to time, and in between those moments it's usually squashed or (more likely now) ignored.

For those of us who are very familiar with the histories of procedural work, Language poetry, New York School, and most US and European avant-garde movements and lineages since 1800 onwards (ok, so maybe I'm still working on developing that level of familiarity)...well, a lack of familiarity obviously isn't a factor in our various reactions to Flarf. For me, I initially didn't think of Flarf as being something unique, although now I think it can be.

However, I'll pause to note an obvious point--just because you're (we're) writing work that might be considered avant-garde or experimental doesn't mean that you (we) necessarily understand the history and context of the kind of work you are making. We have to keep reading/ looking/ listening.

One of the first mature poems I wrote, (which is in my chapbook, Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take Home Project etc etc) was a procedural translation of a Chinese character. I did this because I wanted to write a poem and I was studying Chinese, not because I knew anything about the history of procedural work, or translation, or Ezra Pound, or Orientalism. But all of these contexts of which I was more or less unaware still come to bear on the poem, whether I want them to or not.

I'm going to reminisce and say that one day Katie, Drew, Rod, Tom, possibly Ryan & Cathy and perhaps other people came over to our place to watch something. Sports. It wasn't the Superbowl. I think it was spring, so it was probably baseball. I can't remember why Katie and Drew were in DC. I remember nothing about the occasion, except that we watched some sports, talked about Flarf, and that Mark and I didn't have very much furniture. And then I got a chapbook from Casey in the mail--a poem written with Google search results from the phrase "And then I wrote." It was all very sweet and lyric as I remember it, actually. Sometime after that I heard him give a reading from Deer Head Nation and I thought that the poems were funny and scary.

Prior to Flarf being called Flarf and developing into itself (?!), several people were having fun playing around with search engines and automatic translations. One I remember is Juliana Spahr's We Are All . . ., a chapbook from 1999, a series of poems made by moving notes she'd made back and forth through a machine translator--English-French etc. This seems like a contradiction, but when I heard/read Deer Head Nation (I keep going back to that book because it was my first major experience reading and hearing Flarf), I didn't think anything technically new was happening--I thought "oh, process, Google, someone has made a book of poems using these things we've been playing with on the Internet. Interesting!" At the same time, the tone and content of the poems, I thought, was noticeably different from a kind if witty, politically aware irony of writers whose work I already enjoyed like Kevin Davies and Tim Davis. Maybe other people had a similar reaction?

Most of the procedural work I can think of, with the exception of Flarf, doesn't tend to be especially interested in satire, although it is sometimes funny. Actually, I should say that, with the exception of some contemporary procedural work, most procedural work (I can think of) isn't satirical. I don't think "MacLow" and then "Satire." I think the fact that Flarf is usually both procedural and satirical is probably worth noting.

Lester preens. I am going to take a nap soon. Also, I will brush my teeth.

Quite a few people get to my blog with searches involving teeth and dental floss.

Dear readers, you know that I don't usually weigh in on most poetry conversations going on in blogland, but the comment stream over on Jessica's blog is interesting, so I'll send you there. I think can define flarf fairly precisely, but before I do, I will talk about why Mark is so great.

Mark is so great because he is supportive--he's always telling me that I'm great. This would be boring and dull if he didn't mean it, but I he does. And by telling me I'm great I don't mean that he's always saying I'm intelligent and creative and beautiful and that he loves me, though he says all of those things. I mean that he says them and acts like he believes them, which he does.

It's good to be with someone that wants to be around me because we have shared interests, not because it's an obligation. So Mark and I talk about poetry, and animals, and food, and travel, and music, and exercise, and psychology, and other things with each other because we like these things and we like each other.

Now, as I said, I think I can define flarf fairly precisely:

1. It started in New York, more or less.
2. It is process oriented, and in a tradition of process-oriented work that includes Cage and MacLow.
2. The procedural mechanisms it uses are are different than the ones anyone could have used before, because Google and the internet have not always existed.
3. The source content is also, of course, very different.
4. It is satirical, often.
5. It also shares some concerns with Language Poetry (and procedural texts). There's an interest in how structures create discourses, how manipulation of structure can help change discourses, or at least make us aware of them.

“When mutual recognition is not restored, when shared reality does not survive destruction, then complementary structures and ‘relating’ to the inner object predominate. Because this occurs commonly enough, the intrapsychic, subject-object concept of the mind actually conforms to the dominant mode of internal experience…The loved one is continually being destroyed, but its survival means that we can eat our reality and have it too” (Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects, 43-45).

My raincoat doesn't really work when I'm on my bike

My handstand is getting better. There is progress elsewhere as well. Backbends. The continued development of actual muscles in my abdomen and back.

Because this is Valentine's Day Week, for the next seven days I will speak unabashedly about Mark, how much I like him, and how fabulous and wonderful he is in general, because he is my valentine, and because, strangely and ironically, Valentine's Day is our anniversary.

I am going to make Persian rice (polo) this evening maybe

I cannot find my digital camera. It was on the verge of breaking, but now it is both almost broken and lost. Dear photographer friends, recommend a digital camera for me that is no more than $500.

I bought birthday presents for my sisters today. The toy section at Target confused me--I wanted to get them some travel card cames, but I had to navigate the aisles and aisles of pink plastic crap. In the end, I got them some clothes, some scrapbook/journals, and of course I'm sending along some books.

I also splurged on a pair of socks for myself. O sock splurge!

Too many jobs / Some reoccuring themes

Lester is plump and green. He's managed to play on his jungle gym more or less unsupervised for two days in a row. I enticed him to the jungle gym with dried chilies, walnuts and dried cherries.

Alma is a large book.

Wall to wall carpet sucks. Carpets should be art. While in Oman I drank tea with two different keepers of carpet shops while they displayed many carpets for me to examine and judge. If I said anything like, "that is an interesting red color," they'd find more carpets with that color in it. For a while I even fantasized that it would be ok for me to spend $1500 on a carpet. And then I realized 1) it would be perfectly ok for me to spend this if I had it and 2) where would I put such a carpet? Answer: on the wall to wall carpet.

In spite of the carpet, I am very fond of where Mark and I live. There are many windows, the bedroom is cool and pleasant for sleeping, I have my own study where I can work and keep my books and action figures, the balcony is large, and the kitchen is not shut off from the dinning room.

Whenever I have a lot to do, I get the urge to bake

Our new stove was installed today after more than a week with no oven. Today, I'm thinking about cakes that require blood oranges and tube pans. I have blood oranges, but no tube pan--most have nonstick coating that's lethal to birds, and no cake is worth Lester's life, of course. I can't get solid information about silicone--some people say it's ok for birds and some don't. So, for now, my fancy cakes have to be about aluminum and parchment paper, whatever their ingredients. I have a sweet tooth.

Mark and I did split a very large and tasty red velvet cupcake on Sunday from Auntie Em's in Eagle Rock, where Joseph took us to breakfast before we headed home. Terri Wahl, the owner of Auntie Em's, used to front The Red Aunts. I have #1 Chicken and Ghettoblaster in my CD collection. Good cupcakes.

We're going to hear James Meetze and Amra Brooks at UCSD this afternoon. The last time I saw James was at that Vietnamese place in Chinatown in LA everyone goes to because it's so very convenient and where they often assume you want iced coffee even when you do not. People in San Diego see each other, but we don't bump into each other. I suppose I bump into people when I'm riding around town. And the bus drivers know me. I am happy with the pho there (the Vietnamese place in Chinatown), even though Joseph says there are better places, and I'm sure that's true.

Oooh, and I forgot to mention that we ate at Koko's in Van Nuys--the Middle Eastern Restaurant owned by Ara's uncle. It really was one of the best Middle Eastern meals I've ever had. One of the salad/dips we had was something with pomegranates, walnuts, and peppers. Maybe it was mahammar or mouhamara? I say mouhamara, because Ara said it probably contained pomegranate syrup and not whole pomegranates. And given the texture, I think he must be correct.

I must buy some pomegranate molasses!

But not until after the termite exterminators have come and gone.

Yes, next weekend, everyone will have to clear out of our apartment complex because they're going to spray nasty stuff all over everything. I have to bag up all our spices and everything in the fridge and freezer and any toiletries. It will suck. But at least we're going to stay with a friend nearby, and not a hotel.

The latest batch of tinysides from Big Game Books and Alice Notley's Alma, or the Dead Women came in the mail today. Anne Gorrick and Joseph S. Cooper are two people whose work I've heard about, but haven't seen much of, so I was glad to see them in the batch.

Anne Gorrick's Loco Locust: An Autobiography, with it's eye/ear interplay ("tiki kiwi inca chant / Chain a niacin catkin / canna yawn / with tin hyacinth") reminds me a bit of Adeena Karasick's work. I remember The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle, 2001) being over the top with puns, consonance and alliteration and this all happening in more than one language. I'm just remembering how much I learn from Karasick's work every time I read it or see it performed--her work is intensely physical. This from an interview with Nada Gordon in readme #2 (Winter 2000):

"I’ve never used the sentence as a unit of structured text. mostly i am interested in the minutiae of the letters, how they intersect, how they brush up against and caress each other … these letters which t/ravel together, mysteriously united, one stretched towards the other, one emerging from the other’s side, one suckling the other; folding in on these letters i belong to that carry me and dance both within the pages of this text and as social, historical effects of reference."

In Loco Locust, Anne Gorrick seems to be particularly interested in geography and travel, and bodies don't show up quite as much as they do in Karasick's work, and when they do, they're detached voices and nearly unsexualized. Anyway, I enjoyed reading this, and I'm curious about how Gorrick would read/perform it.

Ryan Walker's Pop Music and Cathy Eisenhower's Sheet & Tube make me feel competitive (and make my heart well with DC pride)! Cathy's work always, for me, has a lightening fast pace that is both precise and casual and meant to be spoken. I think her line breaks are especially good here--they lean against my natural rhythmic tendencies. For example, in the second stanza, rhythmically I want a break between "stomach holes" and "took." Except that "took" goes perfect right where it is and keeps the diction tricky. Here are the first two stanzas:

some wean some
water the river
dirty (me) to keep(ing)
that it was there
not in a good town

to fall upon with
stomach holes took
down from skidding cardiac
will it hurt yes a fucking lot
but till you die

Ryan's poems kind of remind me of Henri Micheaux, but Ryan's poems are strange and psychologically insightful even when they're not being surreal. There's usually an I in them commenting on strange situations in a tone which makes it sound all rather ordinary. "I like it when people who are younger than me comment on my affect" starts with the claim that "I have really good eyes / I can see a wingless fly." By the end, there are "hot lava monsters / and the planets / turn into sea monsters" and the "you" who is you the reader, might be drawing "little mustaches / on the electrons" but it's not really going to matter!

I updated the blog. I am still fussing with the template.

LA was fun, as always.

I have vitamin infused mud all over my face. In the middle of the day!

My email is running very slowly and Mark and I are headed to LA in a few hours--he'll be talking/reading for LA Lit at Betalevel this Saturday at pm. Come say hello. And if you can't make it (for a good reason--say--you live on the east coast), you can always listen to the podcast later.

I'm at least a half day behind on correspondence, which is behind but not as behind as usual.

I cannot find my digital camera!

I need to eat some lunch!

Mark and I and Joseph and Ara and maybe even other people too are going to Ara's uncle's (I think it's his uncle's) Armenian restaurant in the valley this evening. It is very exciting!

I mean all of this, exactly.

Some possible explanations

The 302 bus goes from Oceanside to Escondido. Oceanside is home to a branch of a fairly prominent community organization called the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) that works with people who have various psychiatric disorders. Escondido is home to several drug rehab centers. Vista (in between both places) is where many people who've made it through rehab or treatment programs from both places resettle--there are several state subsidized condos there.

On the bus today were a very clean cut man in his 40s, wearing new jeans and new white sneakers and a woman about the same age, rather large, wearing bright clashing floral prints. He said he is living in a rehab center in Escondido, she said she'd just graduated from a year long program at NAMI in Oceanside and was now living in Vista. "You just keep taking your meds," said the man, "and you'll be OK. God bless you."

Would-be high school thugs skipping class also ride the 302 bus during the day. A few days ago in the rain (did I blog about this already?) two kids were heading back to school after having been gone, both wearing black hooded sweatshirts. One white kid, one latin-American, both only 15 or 16. The white kid asked his friend, "So, has your mom been with anyone since your parents split up?" "I don't know, asshole! She's been on some dates, but I don't know if she's been with anyone."

Then they played some heavy metal music loudly and the bus driver yelled at them. The white kid got nervous and said, "yeah, listen to her, turn it down, man."

At the high school bus stop, their friends were getting on as they were getting off. They all greeted each other with various handshakes. A short, red haired white kid with freckles and a red bandanna said, "hey man, we're going to my house." "Why?" said the white kid on the bus. "Uh, cuz it's the place to go."

I KNOW I can't be the only one who likes both punk and heavy metal.

Although I'm probably more a heavy metal sort, at least in the traditional sense of both those terms. Dancing round the maypole is closer to heavy metal than punk. And as I've said many times in public and private conversations, I know how to dance around a maypole. And you all know I'm a flutist and have the large number of floral dresses and skirts one would expect a flutist (in the traditional sense of the term) to have.

When someone does A and only A for a while and someone else does B and only B for a while, their children end up with A and B.

Systems bore me. I sometimes need them. Not everything I need bores me, fortunately.

Nearly done with my cover letter for the community college jobs. After I finish writing a cover letter, I feel disembodied. Cover letters are uncomfortable points of contact with discourses from which I feel various degrees of alienation. Of course, my alienation isn't limited to the professional world.

I am not alienated by Lester. We communicate exceptionally well with each other, and we're not even close to being the same species.

I feel this way (alienated--who wrote this?) even after this particular cover letter, where I get to talk about things I care about and even find interesting: teaching. how I do it. literacy. why working at a community college isn't at all a kind of second choice wish.

6:30 was early

My ESL class is only 5 students--really almost a perfect size.

I am reading my Chinese book, 101 American Customs. Here the English text from "Passing Out Cigars":

"In primitive ceremonies an individual blessed with the arrival of a baby shared his fortune with the community, to avoid the envy of both his fellows and the gods. The smoke of a proud papa's pipe drifting toward the heavens was a sort of appeasement to the heavenly powers. Today's father's distribution of cigars to celebrate the arrival of a baby maybe regarded as a modern variant of this ritual."

And "Demolition Derbies":

"Demolition derbies are large-scale automobile rodeos that take place in large arenas. The entrants pay a fee to drive their dilapidated autos into each other, and the last car moving is declared the winner. Demolition derbies reflect the Americans' fascination with cars and provide a form of entertainment whose main appeal is that of wanton destruction."

Market Research

I spend a good two hours today filling out application forms for various community college jobs. Why, O why, if you ask for my CV, do you also want a tedious form containing the exact same information? I have a long, complicated employment history. I am so f-ing professional! Why do you want the form? To file, of course, but why else? It seems like a lot of effort for a position I'm unlikely to even interview for, but I need to go through the process.

I got a hand blender this weekend thanks to Mark's dad. It is very exciting. I made a smoothy this morning, and then I used the food processor attachment to blend spices for the marinade I made for the fish this evening. Yay! It chops! It blends! It fluffs and whips! It is small and easy to clean! Goodbye (broken) blender and food processor, goodbye!

I start teaching ESL again tomorrow. I am a morning person, sort of, but anytime before 7 is really too early. Tomorrow morning will be too early, but I will be awake. I will explain present unreal conditionals. The unit I'll teach is about sleep deprivation, so I'm sure we'll all have plenty to talk about.

I'm going through six months of chapbook acquisitions.

Right now I'm looking at several from the H_NGM_N Chapbook Series #1. I like the title poem of Dorothea Lasky's Art. Let's examine why I might like it.

First three lines:

There is a goodness in the world
Little boy named Bill, birthday June 9th,
Who has a smile like my father's

I read these and think, "ah, this is flarfy, who could ever use the noun 'goodness' without irony?" And then I think, "Bill's birthday is close to mine (June 11)." So far I cannot articulate a concrete reason why I might like this poem, other than the fact that 1) the word "goodness" makes me snicker and 2) it reminds me of my birthday. Specifically, it reminds me of my childhood birthdays, because Bill is a little boy and not a man." The poem continues:

And it is Matt who wants to marry me and there is goodness
Like the sun and the sound of children
Even evil children are good in their voices

So now I think, "oh, yes, this is flarf. More goodness and children. It's too precious not to be flarf. I find the move from goodness to the little boy who reminds the speaker of her father to marriage and then back to children stomach-churning and predictable. But it is ironic. But is it interesting enough? Not sure." The poem continues:

And the thought of beauty is something
That will always bring me back
Because beauty stitches and love regards

"Flarf flarf flarf. What the hell is 'beauty,' anyway, other than something that 'stitches.' And here I think of heart-shaped needlework hanging in a kitchen, maybe near the window that says something like 'bla bla bla love regards.' But is it nice to make fun of people who like to cross stitch little heartwarming (almost wrote "heartworming"), if clichéd phrases on things and hang them in their kitchen? It's smarmy; it makes me think of my own connection to smarmy-ness." The poem continues:

And Justin, age 7, made me a charcoal drawing
Of an ice-cream monster and said "Where's Dottie?"
So he could give it to me and I would hang it up
Needing is good you see
You know needing is good
It is good to need each other
It is good to love and I do
I do love

I have to go back and read this a few times because I misread "needing" for "needling.

"Children and animals show up in some flarf a lot, I suppose, because...children and animals are precious? Sentimentalized? I am thinking of 19th century American poems about dead children.

“I like the fairly standard lyric/incantatory repetition of "need" and "love" in the last four lines. And yes, I like how it ends in a tone of melancholy hope. I am a sucker for this kind of ending, and it seems rather sincere after all the goodness and children in the first half of the poem. It also makes me think of Lisa Jarnot’s work and Juliana Spahr’s recent work—though only because of the use of repetition (and yes, I know that other people use/have used it, and that it’s not new, etc). So, I like this poem, I suppose, but mostly because of its sound and mood, not because it is saying anything especially interesting.”

I’ve not talked about the title, “Art.” As in, this is some art? Oh, I’m done with my “reading” for now..

Whenever I start to think about mythology, I worry about my poetry.

After having Middle Eastern food for most of last week, I am going to make meatballs and a basic marinara sauce tonight. But we did get plenty of stuff to make more Middle Eastern food this coming week. Well, probably starting tomorrow.

I've had Typhon on the brain for the past few days. This is because I am still reading The Idea of Wilderness and am now reading about the Egyptians and the Greeks. Typhon isn't in the book, but he was Gaia's last son (by Tartarus, the big void under everything) after Zeus had driven all the Titans out of heaven. With Echidna (the worst female monster in Greek mythology ever) he fathered several major Greek monsters, including Cerberus and the Sphinx.

But I was thinking about Typhon because the book talks about several basic pairs of dynamic oppositions like:

nomad / farmer
water / land

And then it talks about shepherds and farmers in Genesis, and then I started thinking about the goats in Oman, and how in the cities and towns they often had no shepherd and just ran around eating garbage, but outside of the cities and towns they were usually accompanied by a shepherd. Often a woman.

And then I started to wonder, what animal would be considered the "Goat of the sea," and then I thought about Capricorn, which is sometimes called the "sea goat" for reasons I forget, but something to do with its position in the sky. And then there's a story of how Typhon chased Pan into the water and Pan's legs turned into a fish tail.

And Typhon is kind of associated with the sea. He sometimes causes storms or steals Zeus' thunderbolts.

The Ultimate

Small bird play gym!

We are not rockstars even though we rock

Not even a little.

Things I want to write about (starting with fears):

1. Fear of producing really crappy "visual" pieces and then having it be published because I am a woman.
2. Fear of going back and doing any kind of sound text stuff.
3. Continued interest in some kind of a "performative" aspect of reading, without really any interest in becoming a "performance" poet.
4. Continued interested in seeing/participating in pieces that use language and movement/dance/gesture (inspite of what I said in #3) that are not either 1) really cheesy 2) too much of a muchness or 3) overly-determined by theoretical implications.
5. I am glad that POD exists and is getting better, but it also means that I trade with people less often. Therefore, I have less new books and am reading fewer new books. This is not true of chapbooks. I can afford chapbooks and trade chapbooks. So I have read many new chapbooks.
6. I want to write more reviews, but I want to write reviews that are interesting and usefull, not just la la yippy yo, etc.
7. Fear of not seeing enough art. Fear and aggrivation.
8. Fear of paying taxes.
9. Frustration with poetry trends. This is vague, I know. All trends. Even the ones I like.
9.5. Fear of strange allergic reactions.
10. Feeling burdened by the weight of Muriel Rukeyser's Collected, but wanting that kind of weight. Wanting something saying something.

Things that are true

1. I like jelly beans.

2. I will be teaching ESL again soon. Starting next week. Getting up at 6:30 for a bike ride is going to be harder now than it was during the summer. Yes, it's warmer here than it is in many other theres, but it's cold enough in the dark and the morning. Especially on a bike. But I like a morning bike ride--it will wake me up. And I like teaching ESL, especially to intermediate-advanced adult students.

3. I like the educational Animal Planet shows, but not the reality ones like "Animal Cops."

4. Two new cookbooks have been helping me make more interesting veggies, especially greens.

I'm worried about the spine

Will it be too small? Is it too large? I don't trust/understand formulas I haven't had the chance to derive myself so I don't trust my particular calculation. Thoughts anyone? How did you all calculate your spines? Did it work? Advice?

Small Fry

Today Small Fry had a job interview in Solana Beach for a teaching position at a private high school--English, history, French, Spanish, & Chinese. Small Fry has never taught Chinese before.

After the interview, Small Fry road the bus home. Two women on the bus spoke to each other about all the times they'd been to the emergency room, and which emergency rooms they liked best, and how sometimes you just have to take a little extra medication to get high, and how sometimes they ride the bus just to have something to do.

One woman kept asking the bus driver "do you think we'll get to Carlsbad in time to catch the 4:30 bus?" and after a while he stopped answering. The man sitting behind Small Fry said, "that woman's trouble," as if he and Small Fry had some kind of shared understanding.

Between Palomar Airport Road and Cannon road there was a three car accident, so the bus had to be rerouted. Small Fry went up to the front of the bus and said to the driver, "Let me off!" He looked at her and said nothing.

Another woman on the bus, wearing a pink sweat suit and carrying a foot long black flashlight, glared at Small Fry. "He CAN'T let you off the bus," she said. "He can't let you off the bus with your shirt cut SO LOW!" She gestured at Small Fry with the flashlight. Small Fry did not think her shirt was cut low--she had just been at a job interview, and was dressed quite modestly.

Small Fry poked the bus driver with her index finger and said, "Let me off now, sir, I don't want to stay on this bus." Her voice was probably tired and small. At this point, the bus was in the middle of a major traffic jam on Palomar airport road, and the woman trying to make her 4:30 bus connection was even more upset.

"What did you want?" The bus driver finally said to Small Fry.

Small Fry looked at him and blinked. "Let me off," she said.

A man in a beat up suit came up to the front of the bus and stood behind Small Fry. He said, "Driver, let me off this bus, I have to piss really bad!" The driver opened the door and they both got out. The man smiled at me and said "have a good afternoon, babe!" Then he pulled down his pants.

Small Fry walked the mile and a half back home. Then she and her faithful parrot, Pudding, ate leftover chickpea stew.

The color of purple cabbage / eat me

is lovely. And the indigo color of water in which purple cabbage has been cooked is equally lovely. I almost dyed a shirt in it, but I don't know anything about the permanence of such a dye.

I made cabbage leaves stuffed with rice, green lentils, and various spices. Very good, although it will be some time before I can actually roll cabbage leaves (or grape leaves) so that the filling doesn't fall out.

The Paleolithic era was not a time of communal unity and oneness. It wasn't the dark ages either.

I've never even read Gustav Sobin's The Fly-Truffler, but it irks me. After young beautiful fragile wife (and former student) dies, hero eats truffles and thinks of her, thinks he is consuming her. (Dead) woman comes to embody the spirit of land and language.

Ugh!

Wilderness, cooking, company

Mark and I had a very typical pleasant Saturday for us--we went for a walk in the morning, did some errands, went out to breakfast, and then spent the afternoon sleeping or in contemplation. We saw a whimbrel! We also saw many ruddy ducks enjoying their duckdom.

I've been cooking Arabic food recently, and it was fun to test a few dishes out on Sara and Joe yesterday evening. We had the last of a salad made with arugula from their garden this evening. Yum! I miss gardening. More cooking and company soon, I hope.

Uh, and job applications, bids for contracts. I complain, but I still like it better than my previous full-time jobs. The more I am supervised, the less happy, productive and responsible I'm likely to be.

I'm reading The Idea of Wilderness, by Max Oelschlaeger--a late holiday gift from Mark. I've only just begun, and so am still in the Paleolithic era. It's interesting to me how much this first chapter reads like a Freudian/Lacanian description of pre-mirror stage/separation from mom. Even though Oelschlaeger goes to a great deal of trouble to say things like "The assumption that Paleolithic people were mere children in comparison to us, a later, adult phase of humanity, is dubious" (16), the descriptions of Paleolithic people's "harmony with rather than exploitation of the natural world" (17) and Magna Mater give me pause in a (perhaps boring) feminist way. I'll be interested to see how/if the book looks at the (perhaps rather predictable) parallels between wilderness and the feminine it seems to be setting up.

This quote from Lucy Lippard pleasantly skipped me up with the word "ambivalent":

"Visual art, even today, even at its most ephemeral or neutralized, is rooted in matter. Transformation of and communication through matter--the primitive connection with the substance of life, or prima materia--is the rightful domain of all artists. Add to this the traditional, and ambivalent, connection between women and nature, and there is a double bond for women artists." Oelschaleger quotes this on page 23, but it's from Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 51.

Right. I am not on vacation anymore.

I am also not sick anymore, or at least my cough is almost gone, and my lungs aren't so junky.

I dreamed/dreamt that my mom and I met in Heathrow airport to catch a plane to Papua New Guinea. The plane was delayed, or canceled, so the PNG airline booked us two train tickets to Urdu, and then a continuing flight from there to Port Moresby. I was very excited about taking a train to Urdu, and Mom was calm and kept making very funny sarcastic comments.

I think I know how Urdu came to be a place and not a language in my dream. Last week my sisters (Michelle and Sarah) were talking about studying Spanish. Sarah has also studied some Italian and commented on how similar the two languages are. So I told them all about Latin. About an hour later, Michelle made up a story about the island of Latin (actually, an archipelago from the way she described it, although she didn't use that word). In the story, Latin was an island in the sky surrounded by other islands (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc...).

~*~Womb Poetry Vol.1 : Hives & Covens~*~

dedicated in memory to kari edwards

* t h r u m *

: kari edwards : Eileen Tabios : Barbara Jane Reyes : Elizabeth Treadwell : Ann Bogle : : Alison Cimino :Susan B.A. Somers-Willett : Amy King : Kristy Bowen : Julie Choffel : : J.B. Rowell : Ebony Golden : Jenna Cardinale : Juliet Cook : Susan Morrison-Kilfoyle : : Holaday Mason : Toti O'Brien : Jessica Schneider : Karen McBurney : Sunnylyn Thibodeaux : : Sarah Mangold : Meagan Evans : Jennifer Bartlett : Marcia Arrieta : Michele Miller : : Priscilla Atkins : Anne Elezebeth Pluto : Marie Buck : Michalle Gould : Anne Heide : : Susan Meyers : Melissa Eleftherion : Susan Settlemyre Williams : J. Elizabeth Clark :

* s p a r k l e *

: Danielle Pafunda : Kathryn Miller : Julia Drescher : k. lorraine graham : Karen McBurney : : Michelle Caplan : Marcia Arrieta : Ashley Smith : Annette Sugden : Christine Bruness :

* c h i m e *

: a chapbook by Julia Drescher :

~*~W_O_M_B~*~
http://www.wombpoetry.com

Indulgence / It's been a year since I left DC

January 12, 2006
Just me and Lester in this now empty echoing space. I just made a last gin and tonic and then poured the last of the gin down the sink and remembered how I poured a bottle of Great Wall red wine down the sink one evening in Beijing and then road my bike around the 4th ring road. Bach's solo cello sonatas. I like obvious dramatic music as a background to all this leaving. Nights on the roof of the Ramada in Guangzhou watching the fires of the boat people. Watch them brush their teeth and then rinse their mouths out with green tea. Yes yes I know many things are lovely at a distance and who does the abstracting matters.

And one from either late January or early February 2006
The ocean goes all the way to where it stops. I'm wearing a floppy hat again today, and I greeted Pete the manager of our apt. complex this morning by saying "how have you been?" A high school friend found me on myspace and wrote "have you had any babies yet?" Someone I knew through someone I knew professionally once said "women don't matter, only babies." She ate a vegetable kebab and said it tasted good, but we were all suffering from February hostility. I found a drivers license, a pack of cigarettes, and a pack of gum in the parking lot. The kid was born on April 12, 1984, which means he hasn't been of age even a year. I'm going to throw the gum and cigarettes away and leave the license by the mailboxes. Maybe I'll carry it around for a while. I wonder if he has a megaphone in his car.

~

When an insane person you don't know follows you and screams at you, you can't scream back because when you scream back you might be insane. I used to frequently feel this way in CVS in DC. Sometimes the crazy person you don't know is angry enough at you to kill you--the Chicago mayor at the World's Fair, for example.

~

A male terrier with a rhinestone collar. "You probably don't want to pet him." But of course I did.

Oh, San Diego--You don't even know why you lose!

Loose/lose and element/elephant are two of my most frequent spelling errors.
~

New vocabulary: chuang3kung1men2--to intrude into an unguarded house for the purpose of steeling.

• Chuang3: a horse rushing out of a gate. To rush. Charge. Run a red light.
• Kung1: a hole with the phonetic radical gong (a pictograph of a carpenter's square. Work. Worker); Empty. Sky. In vain. Merely. Free time. Vacant. Unoccupied.
• Men2: A double-leafed door (door leaf, household). School of thought. Class, course.

I need a jumpstart, like, everyday

I "read" Lucky (the magazine about shopping). I am happy every time they feature a pair of nude-colored heels or platform shoes. Or, better yet, slingbacks.

I really do think about Lester the green bird as much as this blog suggests.

I like movies about teen angst.

New vocaublary: shimau--fashionable, stylish, vogue.
Ta shi yi ge hen shi mau de nu ren. "She is a very fashionable woman."

I'm back in San Diego. I won't go into details about the idiotic mistakes I made relative to my flight details. Or the idiotic mistakes made by British Airways. But I am home, feeling groggy and still a bit sick--I don't normally weep over movies, on the airplane or anywhere else, but I did weep off and on from London to LA, so I must have been tired. Paul Bowles' story/essay "All Parrots Speak" from Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World did me in:

"Two parrots live with me now. I put it thus, rather than, 'I own two parrots,' because there is something about them that makes them very difficult to claim as one's property. A creature that spends its entire day observing the minutiae of your habits and vocal inflections is more like a rather critical friend who comes for an indefinite stay" (p. 155 in the 1984 Ecco Press edition).

Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue is not Paul Bowles at his best, but it is still very good. It reminded me how good he is at creating visual texture and describing sounds.

Lester is in good health. He sang and went through his verbal repertoire from the time we picked him up to the time I'd finished putting his cage back together. Now he's sitting in his food dish, eating and singing. He also took a bath even though it's quite cold. I can't say if he missed me or not, but he was certainly glad to see us, and seems very healthy and well-adjusted. I think he was in good company while we were gone. According to the woman at the font desk, Lester's cage was next to that of a Sun Conure, and they spent a great deal of time talking with each other.

My plane leaves shortly after midnight tonight/tomorrow morning. Today I'm packing, headed back to Azaiba Beach to collect more shells to weigh down my bags, and going to dinner at a restaurant that serves "Omani" food. I'm not sure how Omani food differs from, say Lebanese food, or in what ways--people are very friendly, but not very forthcoming with cultural information, so I've learned to ask my questions in roundabout ways. I've been enjoying the street/cafe food here, but am interested to try other things.

Embellishment

From the sewing/garment section of the souk today:

• khol
• lipstick
• embroidery thread
• various sorts of beaded ribbons and trims
• stamps for making patterns on clothing (or paper)

There was a cruise ship in Mutrah today, so the port was full of people speaking German, and also men possibly from Kuwait (although they didn't come off the cruise ship). It was the first time since I've been here people assumed I was a tourist. Usually, they assume I live here or have family that does, and they want to know what project my father works on, etc. (Bechtel. Aluminum smelter in Sohar).

There doesn't seem to be a commonly accepted system of transliteration for Arabic like there is for Chinese, for example. Pinyin makes no phonetic sense to an English speaker--but I'm not sure any system of Chinese transliteration would. But pinyin is helpful. Arabic words written in the Roman alphabet will be spelled several different ways, depending on who is doing the transliteration and who is doing the pronouncing and where and when all of this happens.

I like Mutrah (or Mutra, or Mattra), but I would, I'm a tourist, and Mutrah is an old port with narrow twisty streets and old forts and old cemeteries and mangy dogs and scrawny cats and nasty smelly overflowing garbage cans and old buildings--some restored, some not--that Mary says remind her of Baghdad (especially the wooden balconies) and fishing boats and commercial ships and a souk with a mosque so close your brain will vibrate with every call to prayer and coffee shops and old hajis with long beards sitting on stools. There are no goats.

Mary and I did a short but fairly steep hike up over the mountains from Mutrah to Muscat and back along the ocean. We passed a small abandoned village. The cistern still had water in it, but the aflaj had broken down. The houses (or ruins) were made of stone, unlike those on the coast. The trail followed a wadi for about half of its course, and the wadi had some water in it, and the water had tadpoles in it.

Responsibility sneaks back

Sarah admires her sand angel somewhere on the northern edge of the Wahiba Sands:


Things to do, some pleasant, others not:

1. Send work to Area Sneaks (this one is long overdue, but finally I have something I think is right for it)
2. Finish several reviews with February deadlines
3. Finish editing the 16 short articles I took with me to edit
4. Lable all my Oman pictures on flickr before I get on the plane
5. Buy a few remaining gifts and such at the souk
6. Make macrame and shell necklaces with Allison
7. Hike the old road between Muscat and Mutra (tomorrow afternoon)
8. Copy Mary's recipes for dal and naan
9. Finish a typesetting project
10. Write bids for a few upcoming projects & send my resume to two organizations
11. Complete applications for tenure-track jobs at a MiraCosta Community College.
12. Exercise, eat well, walk across the floor on my hands, buy real estate in Paris & Istambul, etc.

Five things

There's plenty to say about the camping trip, but I've been tagged by both Cathy & Ian and responding will take less time than detailing the camping trip correctly. I've uploaded some pictures already and will continue labeling them tomorrow.

My list feels arbitrary, since there are a lot of things that we all don't know about each other--thank G-d. But here are five of the things you might not know about me:

• I have been stalked.
• This poem is true.
• My father's mother was Comanche and my father's father was named Julius Ceasar, although he changed it to Julius Cecil.
• I have had bells palsy twice. Bell's palsy is a form of temporary facial paralysis. The actual paralysis is caused by damage or trauma to facial nerves, but what actually causes it is unknown. Scientists think it might be a virus.
• When I was 6 I had a crush on Tom Selleck and used to watch Magnum PI with devotion and also High Road to China over and over again.

I will tag more someones later.

Off camping

down the coast towards Sur for a few days.

Ali, Sarah and I at the Grand Mosque in Muscat--we visited this morning. Technically, Ail and Sarah don't have to cover their heads, but they wanted to because Mary and I were. The sun was rather bright, that's why they're squinting! I may go back tomorrow because the visiting hours for non-Muslims were almost over by the time we arrived.

We also attempted to drive to the Lansab Lagoons, a well-known birdwatching location close to Muscat. It's supposed to be especially good for seeing raptors of all sorts. However, our information was totally inaccurate (thanks a lot, Lonely Planet!), and we ended up in a military construction zone. It was beautiful but we turned around immediately when we saw the Ministry of Defense sign. I wish they'd posted something sooner.

I looked at the Azaiba area on Google Earth--something I should have done in the first place--and it looks like the lagoons aren't anywhere near where Lonely Planet says they are. So we're going to try to go back and find them tomorrow. I'd like to see some eagles.

A sober moment on an otherwise festive New Year's eve

Happy New Year

I'm headed to the bash at the Shangri-La this evening--the neighbours have an extra ticket, so off I go. I'll still miss Mark and you all in DC : ( but at least I can miss you all in a lavish environment! I'll be ringing in the new year ahead of you, at 3pm this afternoon EST. Time to get dressed.

Long Catch Up Post 1 of 2

I never did go camping, but I've been on several interesting day trips. On the 29th I'd more or less recovered, but Mary, Dad and my sisters were still quite sick. So I headed to the coast with Mary's friend and her husband and their son . We went to a cove just past the Omani Dive center that seem to cater more to locals and non-European tourists.

Mary's friend studied hotel management and has been living/working in this part of the world for some time, so her Arabic is quite good and we were able to bargain for a boat. I understand most of the very basic elements of conversation here--greetings and goodbyes, as well as transactions involving numbers--but I'm not speaking with confidence. At any rate, two fellows took us out on a very basic motorboat. The older man in the dishdashi was clearly in charge, and the younger Inidan (but still Arabic-speaking) man in cut off pants and a t-shirt was his protege, and did the leg work.

They took us snorkling, and then left us on a deserted beach for a few hours before taking us home. The coral here isn't as spectacular as it is elsewhere, but the other marine life is fabulous. The coastine is very dramatic, all mountains and cliffs, with strangely shaped rock formations and islands, and small, secluded little beaches.

I saw loads of fish, including a scorpion fish, and swam through schools of flat, yellow fish with purple stripes. I also saw a decent sized turtle--not as big as they can get, but she (the younger man insisted it was a she and not a he) was quite large.

Once on the beach, I saw several herons of various sorts up close, as well as other shorebirds. The fish were jumping--every so often thirty or fourty fish would jump out of the water and skip across it on their tails--and the birds were having a great time catching them both in and out of the water. There were also loads of baby rays--not sting rays, but some other kind of ray--as well as these strange, flat silver fish that kept riding the waves, beaching themsevles in the sand, flipping around, and then going out with the next wave. Four of five sharks were swimming about 4 meters offshore, feeding on the fish and the rays. You'd see their fins pop up and then suddenly increase speed when they went in for an attack. They were fairly small sharks, just over a meter long, and not the sort that eat people. Nicole's husband waded into the water to watch them. Still, I watched them from a distance.

The beach is quite close to Yiti Beach, but separated from it by a lagoon which cannot be crossed safely in even in a 4 X 4. The government is building a road, and there are plans for development, so it's not likely to stay quiet for long. There were thousands of button shells all over the beach, and I spent an hour picking through them. I found several cowry shells, which made me nostalgic in the very best way for beach combing in PNG.

That evening I went to a party at a house out near the British Consul, again with the same friends of Mary. I talked with several expats, mostly English, a few British merchant marines, as well as other folks who work for the same tour company as Mary's friend. Want to learn Maldivian?--join the British merchant marine. Things I learned:

1. Motorcycling is quite popular among the expats of Muscat
2. The customs at the border between Oman and the UAE is lax--immigration and customs are miles and miles apart on the road. There are also roads between here and UAE that bipass immigration and customs completely.
3. There are villages up in the mountains that do not use clocks (not suprising but interesting)
4. The hours of the British School are shorter than the hours of the American International School, and they do not offer after school activities or encourage parental involvment.
5. The American Women's Club here is considered boring by some.
6. Several expat women here make jewlery.
7. The people who really like it here do not like cities, in general.
8. Most of the large houses that expats live in are paid for or owned by their client--again, not surprising.

After about 12:30, a some of the Scottish folks pulled out some insturments--guitar, bohdrum, bouzouki, and yes, bagpipes. They had a tin whistle that I tried to play, but it was bent. At 2:30 we hauled ourselves away from singing and went home. I had fun, but I don't need to go to another expat party for a while. Except for this evening, perhaps.

Yiti Beach

This is the view from Nizwa Fort.

There's a US Navy boat in port. A destroyer or something.

Woke up from my drug-induced sleep to the very early Adhan (أَذَان). I don't hear it during the day because of the traffic from the highway, but at around 4:30 am it was clear through the open windows. The sunsets over the fig trees are lovely, even though the highway is ugly.

The camping trip was postponed a night, but that's just as well, since I'm still not 100%. Another night of sleep like last night and I'll be well enough to go. I would have gone this evening, but it probably would have been a bad idea.

I don't know what my body is reacting to. If it were my normal allergies, Id be havine asthmatic symptoms, but I'm not, at least not more than usual. My aunt is allergic to nearly everything. This worries me.

Muscat is busy preparing for Eid. Mary and I went grocery shopping at by far the largest supermarket I have ever been in, and it was filled with Muslim couples loading up on food and gifts. I also bought some mangosteens (I've blogged about mangosteens before) and some spices--a mix of something, and dried hibiscus flowers. I love how spices are sold in bulk, and touching, smelling, and tasting is encouraged.

The traffic here isn't as bad as it is in SoCal, but it will be in 10 years, if not before. Muscat hasn't exactly embraced public transporation. There is even less of it here than in north county--I am suprised by this.

9:30=time for bed

It looked like it was going to rain today--dark clouds over the mountains and haze right here at the coast--but it didn't. I'm glad. Muscat floods easily.

I'm feeling better, although my face still looks like I've been attacked by red ants (ok, probably not that bad, but that's how I feel like it looks). Both Dad and Mary are quite sick.

We all slept in this morning, and I went up to the roof to birdwatch. I did see several different kinds, but will have to write up my notes tomorrow.

Muhammad the plumber was here off and on for most of the day. I've now seen him a few times, and so he greated me this morning in the kitchen while I was having coffee and eating Weetabix.

"Good morning, Madam," he said.

"Good morning, Mr. Muhammad." In Arabic, the titles are used with first names.

"Insha'Allah (إن شاء الله) I will fix the water completely today" he said.

"Maybe there's a djinn in the house," I suggested. He looked disturbed and so I waved my hands dismissively and said, "No, no. Insha'Allah (إن شاء الله) you will fix the problem."

The water worked, then it didn't, then they took the heater away completely to replace it (Michelle's idea all along). Then the water pressure went all weird and we had no water because the house next door has about 10 people in it right now, four of which were showering at the same time. And now we have it again. We considered just checking into a hotel, but all the rooms are booked up--lots of people vacationing here from the UAE, etc, and also Europe.

At around 3 my sisters and I went iceskating with a few of their friends from school. Apart from us (and the parents), there were two Omani young men on the ice--both in jeans and t shirts, a young Indian boy who skated at high speed, and a middle-aged man in a dishdashi. One of the parents had brought a tape of Christmas songs to play. "O Holy Night" was interrupted by the Adhan (أَذَان) being broadcast into the rink. I love the way the call to prayer sounds, but this was the first time I'd heard it in an ice-skating rink.

Sarah and I hung out together for a few hours before dinner while Michelle & Allison went to a movie with their friend. Sarah and I had hot chocolate and cookies from the huge Marks & Spencer tin sitting on top of the fridge. After that, we played with paper dolls, built a "temple" out of Jenga blocks. She showed me her sticker collection & box collection, then her ballet routine and all the things she learned in gymnastics. She is working on a pretty good hand stand, so I showed her my current version of pincha mayurasana.

If I continue to feel well tomorrow, I may go for an overnight camping trip in the desert with some of Mary's friends.

Merry Christmas & Christmas Update

Well, the hot water heater exploded for the third time this week, so there's no water again and the kitchen is flooded. We were having dinner at the neighbours, and Mary was actually telling the story of how it blew up the first time and she fell and hit her head, when Sarah came into the dining room and said "it happened again." Dad turned off the water, electricity and gas while Mary and I tried to get as much stuff out of the dark, steamy kitchen as possible. So, no hot water, etc. We've turned the electricity back on, but no water again.

The houses in this little enclave are ostentatious on the outside, but put together rather slapdash. Who the hell runs hot water through unlined PVC pipes?

I continue to have hives all over my face. I feeling telling everyone I meet "Actually, my face isn't usually red, blotchy and swolen." Allison remains the only non-sick person in the family, although Michelle seems more or less recovered and Sarah may also be on the mend. Dad, Mary and I are at various stages of a bug that starts with a congested head and then m oves into a sore throat and finally a congested cough. I haven't been sick in ages--so I suppose this is just my once every 3 years moment of being really sick. It's bad timing. But, Mary is a nurse, and I can get to a doctor easily and get prescription drugs for a lot less than I can back in California. So maybe it's not bad timing after all.

I plan to spend most of tomorrow reading my history of the Arab world & drinking tea with calamine lotion all over my face and neck. If I'm feeling really good I'll check out one of the parks in Muscat which is supposed to be a good place to birdwatch. The goal is for all of us to get better as quickly as possible so that we can go back to having fun, and so I can go adventuring. Dad gave me a guide to the birds of Oman, so I may simply sit on the balcony (again, drinking tea with calamine lotion all over my face and neck) and try to identify every bird that comes into the yard.

~


This is Dad and Winston on Azabia beach, Christmas Eve. Azabia beach is just down the road from where they live. Very big, flat, and empty.

All of us are sick, but we've had a good Christmas so far, and in a few hours we'll go over to the neighbours to eat. They put the turkeys (which were "slaughtered by hand with a knife as per Islamic rites") on the BBQ. I've never had turkey this way, but it should be good.

Allison says: "Even though it is Christmas in Oman, it is very hot! (Singing & dancing) I wish you a merry Christmas, I wish you a merry Christmas, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year."

It's been a low key day. We're all getting ready for Christmas tomorrow, and recovering from the past few days of activity.

In Oman, expatriates and some non-Muslims can get a kind of passport that allows you to buy alchohol. The stores are very nondiscript buildings with no windows and secured doors. The one we went to was called "Asian and African Import Export Store." The words "Alter Ego" were written on the counter by the cash register. The fellow behind the desk recognized Dad's car (which he could see drive up because of a hidden camera) and already had a case of Tiger beer waiting for him. We also bought wine and champagne, etc for Christmas dinner.

Yesterday Afternoon / Evening

I arrived. The trip was long but fairly easy. I made my connection in London, but my luggage didn't--hopefully it will be on the British Airways flight this evening. Amazingly, someone spilled something with me on every leg of the trip. Water, coffee, tea, red wine, in that order.

Muscat, what I've seen of it, is spread out--it actually reminds me of southern California to a certain extent. The new housing developments are basically suburbs, a golf course is planed, etc. The coast line is lovely and goes on for miles. Starfish. Colored rocks. Boys playing soccer. It's greener than I expected--they must be doing some serious irrigation and landscaping. Dry craggy mountains just beyond the city.

The hot water heater exploded shortly before I arrived, and Mary has a concussion from slipping and falling to get away from the falling heater and the exploding, scalding hot water. I was sorry to not be able to shower, but also kind of nostalgic--I've lived in many places overseas with exploding hot water heaters, no water, or both.

I also have hives all over my face! Hives aren't unusual for me, but I haven't had them in ages, and I haven't had them on my face in ages. I met the neighbours with a layer of white anti-itch cream smeared all over my face to help prevent me from tearing off several layers of skin. It sounds even better than it feels.

There are other, more interesting things to say. But I've really only been awake for 10 hours since I arrived. Taking notes. There's a coffee shop behind the house, between the gas station and the highway. I can't really go, but I can watch the patrons sit outside from one of the windows in the house. They drink coffee and watch either soccer or bellydancing projected onto an outside wall. Tomorrow I'm headed down the coast for the day. I have not spell checked this.

Wow, what is better than airline customer service? Almost everything.

Today we took Lester to the vet to be boarded. I spent a half hour arranging is cage with familiar toys and perches so he'd be comfortable. He's in a nice, sunny room with other smaller parrots, so he'll have plenty of company.

I will get up at 4:30 tomorrow, take a train at 5:27 down to San Diego, and get on an 8:30 flight. By late Wednesday morning on the east coast I'll be in Muscat.

I called the bank to let them know I'll be traveling so they don't put a block on my check card. I told the woman, "I'm going to be in London, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates," and she said "oh, so you're going basically everywhere in Europe." Way to go, Bank of America!

Time for a run.