Real Jobs

One of my current students found my myspace page last weekend, and friended me. Most of my students on myspace eventually do find me, so it wasn't unusual. However, after class today he asked, "so, your real job is as a writer?" I told him it was, and he didn't respond with the disbelief or obvious discomfort that other people sometimes have. This little exchange stands out because he concluded that my real job is as a writer, where as teaching is something I do "on the side." That isn't quite true, but it's the exact opposite of the conclusion that people usually come to, so I thought it was interesting.

List of my current jobs:

• Teaching English as a foreign language
• Teaching developmental English
• Tutoring people about writing
• Designing t-shirts
• Doing research for a marketing company
• Creating marketing materials & public relations materials for a local yoga studio
• Managing the web site of that same studio

List of my current writing, art, and editorial projects

• Diligently shopping my first book manuscript around to all the places people said I should, even though I'm pretty sure I already know how it will eventually be published.
• Editing my second manuscript. Getting ready to, yes, diligently send it around.
• Kind of putting together a third. I don't think the third is really a manuscript--the pieces are too disparate to make a coherent book.
• Writing my fourth manuscript.
• Still working on "Memory Lessons," a series of visual pieces.
• Thinking already about my contribution to the 2008 Dusie project, now that the 2007 one is complete and live.
• Little bits of an essay thinking about the concept of "The Gurlesque." I need to plan ahead so that I have something to say by the time the anthology edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg comes out from Saturnalia in 2009. I've been a slllooowwww critical writer recently.
• Little bits of a review on Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No, even though it's been reviewed. Maybe the review and the essay will be the same thing. Maybe I'll send them/it to Absent.
  

List of current yoga projects:

• Dropping back into urdhvadhanuasana from standing. Standing up from urdhvadhanuasana.
• Jumping up into handstand from two feet but with straight legs.
• More flexible hips, hamstrings, psoas, and quadriceps. So, that means a lot of hanumanasana and krounchasana.
• Learning and memorizing all the asanas named after birds. Krounchasana is the "heron pose--a very appropriate homage and counter balance to my bike rides around the lagoons.
  
  

Dumb Rebellion

I hated everything about yoga. I hated the stupid new age music with its pseudo Hindi ethereal vocals. I hated all the vinyasas. I hated the "centering" at the beginning of class, the pranayama at the end of class, and I hated the chanting. I thought, I don't want to feel centered. Being centered and balanced is for suckers.

The teacher who taught is one of my favorites, but I was in an unusually agitated mood--unusual even for me. I'm not sure I've ever been more agitated during yoga. One reason why I do yoga is to turn my brain off, but even during some of the inversions and crazy arm balances I couldn't turn my brain off today. I was hostile and perverse. I thought things like, Fuck you, Shiva, I hate this asana. I cursed sages by name! To hell with Koundinya and Marichi!

Several people I know through the yoga studio are pregnant, and I thought mean, nasty things about pregnancy and children. During one asana, someone joked that the class was becoming "like a prenatal class" and I said, rather too loudly, no thank you.

I stayed an extra three breaths in headstand two or three or whatever it was out of spite. I wasn't enjoying being there, I just didn't want to come down at the same time as everyone else.

I was at the beach today.

Well. I walked near the beach. Along it. As a kind of very mellow exercise.

Before that, I did three and a half hours of grading.

I stared reading Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold. I don't know what I think of it it. I like it enough to keep reading.

I maybe have a possible shot at possibly teaching classes at Palomar. Maybe.

I have never wanted a job, though I've needed, applied for, and had many. Maybe the exception is when I applied to be a counselor in training at Nichols Day Camp in Sedgwick, Maine.

Deep Change

I own a pair of white, patent-leather, high-healed sandals. I noticed them in my closet just now, realized I'd forgotten about them (bought them on sale at the end of last summer), and immediately started planning an outfit around them.

But white, patent-leather, high-healed sandals? I like them, but I'm skeptical. I look at them and think "Orange County." I also think of a potentially sexy but usually just depressing youthful look that gives off an "I am hot and dressed up and 17 but I don't really know I'm hot and I don't really know what I'm doing and I'm about to get married to a real douche bag" kind of vibe.

I'm not 17. I know what I'm doing, and I'm not about to get married to a real douche bag. Still. What does it mean that I am now ready to plan an outfit around a pair of white, patent-leather, high-healed sandals?

I just looked at them again. They're slingbacks. That helps me feel more confident.

I'm not exactly a rich Italian heiress on a yacht, either, so I can't pretend I'm working a nautical look.

O. Friday.

I have no personal weirdness

It's spring! There are wildflowers all along the bluffs above the ocean.

Felonies of Illusion

138 pgs.
Cover by K. Lorraine Graham
$15

I won't go on about how much I like the poems in this book, but I'll go on at least a little: the lines are twisty, the rhythms complicated and unexpected. The poems have a trippy tension between how they feel/sound and what they are and are not saying.

Plus, I'm proud of the cover.

You can order Felonies of Illusion directly from Edge Books for $11!

Here's what other people say about the book:

A master at making genre question itself, Mark Wallace gets the square peg in the round hole again. A stark and aphoristic long poem about living and working during the war—direct, wise, and brave enough to skip the decorative—bumps up against the witty, clanging, angry, top-speed, palimpsestuous title series—lyrics that swallow their own tails. Wallace is cynical, clear-eyed, and resolutely jokey on commerce, war, love (the "therapeutic use of commitment") and exhausted longing ("This day could be about today, leisurely and bright/if the days weren't stacked like nights inside it.") Nobody gets away with anything in Felonies of Illusion: we're all skewered till we grimace and grin.

Catherine Wagner


Mark Wallace invents only what's real. If democracies could talk, we would in fact be able to understand them, but we would need the help of poems like these. As its title suggests, the language of Felonies of llusion is premised on a sense of justice and reciprocity. The need is real, and thus the need for invention is constant. The writing betrays no qualms about showing this. There's serious play going on here.

Bob Perelman


Elegaic without strings, passionate without bravado, up the tragic creek without a cathartic paddle, Mark Wallace’s Felonies of Illusion is an intensely personal collection of valedictions, an extended suite of lyric leavetakings written in the infinite series of penultimate milliseconds before an always-imminent obliteration—a “now” that “is not that long from now.” These already painful goodbyes, however, are suspended in a nervewracking holding pattern as “the total system / shouts back that there’s no way to leave.” Wallace rehearses the purgatorial illogic of perpetual orange alert with unsparing gravity, but also with empathy and wit. His poems confront us with the human truth of the narratives we spin daily in the name of individual survival at the same time that they caution us not to “get / too attached to the story told / imploding.”

K. Silem Mohammad

We did not discuss "May gray"--I didn't want to upset them too much.

Today the weather is more like what people imagine when they imagine San Diego weather. "Gloomy" was a vocabulary word today, so I taught my students about "June gloom."

Still reading Hannah Weiner and loving Code Poems.

My sister Sarah sent me a card from Adelaide with a lovely picture of a rainbow lorikeet on the front--and also one on the inside that she'd drawn. She inquired about Lester and asked if I ever "try to draw the birds I see." She signed the card "All the dearest colors of the rainbow, love, Sarah."

Lester is practicing a new song

--a version of "who's my good baby b?"--one of the many silly things I say to him all the time. He's now learned it and is experimenting with incorporating it into his repertoire. If I go into the living room to look at him or even talk to him, he'll stop--when he's practicing, he likes to be alone. On Mondays, Mark works late, and I work here in the afternoon and eat a very early meal so I have time to digest before my 6:30 yoga practice. Lester and I eat together; after I go back to working in the study, and Lester practices his songs.

Lester will spend weeks perfecting a new phrase or song. He often will get the tone or rhythm of the vocalization first before he begins to enunciate it. Moreover, Lester likes to develop several different versions of the same song. For example, he has several different laugh sounds that he uses in different situations. When Mark or I talk vigorously on the phone or with each other, he'll make a loud, guffawing sound. He also has two different higher, more twittery laughs that he uses.

I've blogged before about how Lester says "peep," which is a version of him imitating Mark and I imitating him. However, Lester's favorite song is "salt peanuts," followed by a three-note salt peanuts whistle. He does at least three different versions of "salt peanuts," one that is like me, one like Mark, and one like our friend Dan, who met Lester as a baby bird and spent a lot of time talking with him. Lester also does the three-note whistle in multiple keys, depending on what he's just sung before it and what he plans to sing after it.

I think he might also be learning "I love you," but it's hard to hear clearly from here.

After Lester has incorporated a new song or phrase into his repertoire, he likes to riff on it--he'll combine one part of a song or phrase with another part, or sing everything in a different order.

My understanding of domestic happiness and order has been deeply influenced by Lester's afternoon practice sessions--and by birdsong in general. A vocalizing bird is a healthy, happy bird. Mark's parakeets would sing vigorously at sunrise and sunset, whenever there was music on, and whenever anyone sung or talked with them. They liked to join in the party.

I remember taking a nap one afternoon in our old apartment at 1401 N Street NW in Washington, DC. Lester thought I was asleep, so he felt free to practice. At that time, I knew he was vocalizing, but I hadn't clearly picked out any of his specific sounds. In a sort of half-awake daze, I listened to him practicing some of the first vocalizations he picked up living with Mark and I--"salt peanuts," "Lester's a pretty bird" and their corresponding whistles. Of course, when I got up from the couch, he stopped practicing.

Lester does vocalize when people are around, especially when people are talking energetically or there's music on--but he doesn't practice then; he practices in privacy, on calm afternoons or early evenings, preferably after we've both eaten a meal.

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

It's definitely blowing the top of my head off

"There is a difference between fashion copy and our 'poems' which are imitations of fashion copy. There is a difference between a real fashion show and our imitation of a fashion show. We are interested in these differences in spite of the fact that we have tried to eliminate them.

"We want to show the difference between presentation and representation by bringing presentation and representation as close together as possible."

--Hannah Weiner, from "The Fashion Show Poetry Event Essay"

So, yes, I've been reading Hannah Weiner's Open House. I bought it at Bridge Street last October, and I'd been waiting and waiting to read it until I could actually read it with attention.

Recently I dreamed that Mark and I were in the last house I lived in in Sedgwick, Maine. Fish started floating out of the sky, and eventually jellyfish. A large apartment building space ship came down, and a military man said we had to come with him. I was skeptical, but also nervous about the fish in the sky. So I ran back into the house and grabbed an already-packed suitcase, and also Hannah Weiner's Open House. We got into the apartment building space ship, and things got weirder from there. The last part of the dream included Mormons and ballroom dancing.

It's still February, after all

Read a student essay today that suggested being a hippie was, for the student, about making better style choices and having more interesting conversations. That particular student is a good conversationalist, and does a great sense of style.

Another student said that you could rent a one-bedroom apartment in Milan for about $400 a month. I don't really believe it, but still.

Today a student asked me the difference between "reality" and "real estate." In San Diego county, there isn't a whole lot of difference.

Also, I want this; this would also be nice.

Going to yoga this evening to pry my shoulders out of my ears.

Altered States

One of my coworkers at one of my many jobs asked me for advice about sensory deprivation tanks--did I know of any? Apparently the only one this person had found is in at Full Circle Yoga Institute in San Diego. My coworker knows I practice yoga, and that's why this person asked me--if one yoga center has a sensory deprivation tank, why not another? I had trouble focusing on the question, because the moment this person said "sensory deprivation," I thought of a scene in "Altered States" where the main character Edward Jessup has regressed so far back into collective consciousness that he's become a kind of Neanderthal who goes on a killing rampage at the zoo. Later he says something like this to his wife: "Last night I hunted, killed, and ate a goat. It was one of the most sublime experiences of my life."

I have trouble remembering facts if I don't understand them.

No rain today.

I ate a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. It was good.

I am tired.

It is Monday.

My students said several interesting things today about their ideal neighborhoods. Many of them would like to live on an island in the Caribbean. One student wants to move to Anchorage. Another student wants to live in a city in southern Europe. My basketball playing Turkish student is being recruited by a school in Edmonton, Alberta. Their utopias were all basically mixed-use, economically diverse urban communities near a beach (except for the student who wants to move to Anchorage).

How is it possible that tomorrow is Monday? I had a three day teaching week last week, so now I feel like every week should be a three-day week.

A yogurt went bad. We had to throw it out. Quel dommage.

Mark and I watched an episode called "The Lost Child" from the 4th season of Prime Suspect on Friday night. It was tense. I remember my mom liking the Prime Suspect series. The episode felt very 90s pop Feminist. Detective Inspector Jane Tennison is woman in power, but the rest of the bureaucracy is all men, and she's often at odds with her superiors. The episode begins with the suggestion that she's had an abortion, and the plot revolves around the problems of motherhood and having a career. The murder victim is a toddler and the murderer turns out to be the mother (who was crazy, tired, studying for law exams, and frustrated with bourgeois pressures). Interestingly, there's a character who's a (former) pedophile--he's the main suspect, but completely innocent. In some ways he's a rather sympathetic character, even though he's also disgusting.

Anyway, the episode made me think about 90s Feminism, and Hilary Clinton, and the Democratic debate in Austin on Thursday. I drank almost too much and stayed up past midnight--both of which are pretty hard to do in San Diego north county. I want the primaries to be over.

We went to the zoo today.

Last night I dreamed that the house was a huge maze jungle gym for Lester.

Sympathy and Empathy

So, today, for the umpteenth time, I explained the difference between sympathy and empathy to my ESL students. (Aside: I remember the first time I heard the word "umpteenth." Dan Rather said it during coverage of the first Gulf War. I don't remember any more about the context, but I went and looked up "umpteenth" in the dictionary. I have a problematic soft spot for Dan Rather because he gave my Dad topographical maps that helped him backpack out of Baghdad to Jordan).

I think the word "sympathetic" has a bad reputation. As in:


We tend to focus on the concept of "pity" (pathos, etc) relative to sympathy, but I think sympathy can be about the capacity to imagine someone's experience while at the same time recongizing that you cannot possibly accurately imagine someone's experience--especially their suffering. It's the combination of the willingness to imagine and the recognition of the impossibility of imagining that is important. When my Dad's dad passed away nearly 10 years ago (I never new my grandfather, all I know is that he ate wheat germ and was once hit in the head with a wrecking ball--mythology) I didn't know what else to write except something along the lines of "Dad, I have no idea how you are feeling, but if you want to talk, let's talk."

When I explain sympathy to my students, I talk about it in terms of identification. Sympathy is when you can imagine or identify with someone's experience, even if you've never had a similar experience. Somehow, there is an affinity--even if it's only imagined. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (if some kind person with access to the OED wants to send me the entries for sympathy and empathy, great), sympathy is "almost a magical notion at first; e.g. in ref. to medicines that heal wounds when applied to a cloth stained with blood from the wound." Sympathy as a way to connect to someone else, even though true connection is impossible.

Empathy is a much more recent term, coined (again, I'm citing the Online Etymology Dictionary) in 1858 by Rudolf Lotze. Empathy is initially about identifying with art, not with people. (The art object as a mirror of self, bla bla). When we talk about empathy relative to another person, it's still largely an intellectual concept: empathy is a kind of intellectual vicarious experience of the feelings of someone else. At least that's how I explain it to my super smart advanced ESL students.

So, I think of empathy as being intellectual, and sympathy as being imaginative. Yes, I know, it's a false dichotomy, but still. It's truly impossible to understand someone else's experience. You can't really know what another person is experiencing any more than you can know what a parrot is experiencing. What you have is your ability to imagine someone's experience based on your shared interactions. This is how Lester and I interact: we have our own knowledge of ourselves, and our own knowledge of our shared interactions.

I was confused about many things

Alas, there are no readings this evening.

I am going to make a lentil stew thing with greens. Lentils are good with greens. Also, I have a rather large amount of lentils in my cupboard, and also a lot of greens in my fridge.

I want to brine my own corned beef for St. Patrick's day this year--all in practice for one day spending St. Patrick's day with my sisters and Dad and Mary in Westport (we'd have to climb Croagh Patrick the next day to work off the corned beef). This will likely never happen, but I want to be prepared. Mark and I will eat leftover corned beef on sandwiches and in breakfast hash.

I wish that Jean Rhys had written more. I wish Jane Bowles had written more. I have to stop myself from rereading Good Morning, Midnight and Two Serious Ladies every month. When I'm tired and frustrated with reading, those books are all I want to read. I think it's probably time for me to reread Nadja. Maybe I'll be able to appreciate it without feeling so hostile towards it and endlessly comparing it to Nightwood.

Here are some books I would like to read:

• Insel - Mina Loy
• Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin De Siecle - Elaine Showalter
• Trauma: A Genealogy - Ruth Leys
• The Open: Man and Animal - Giorgio Agamben
• The Blindfold - Siri Hustvedt
• CALAFIA'S CHILDREN, The California Heritage Poetry Curriculum - Oakland Unified School District
• Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity, 4) - Joel Robbins

And a lot of other books

Riding in the Rain

I should get rain pants. It turns out that they would actually be very useful, even here in southern California. Also, riding in the rain would be easier if I wore contacts. I've tried, but I don't like them. I should also go to a real eye doctor who can fit me with contacts that aren't irritating. I like the fact that my glasses cover up the circles under my eyes.

I have a new ESL class this week, and so I no longer have the very vexing and scary student I had last month. Apparently, he complained about having a new teacher and told the director that I was the best teacher he'd ever had. He's like a guy who beats you and then says how much he loves you afterwards.

Edwin Torres arrives tomorrow to read at Cal State San Marcos. Leslie Scalapino is also reading down in San Diego. If only there were two of me!

Off to yoga. My open-floor handstand is much stronger now. My quadriceps feel like they're shrinking, though--one downside of cycling, so I need to work more thigh stretches into my sequences.

Missing Cupcakes

I can't find the cupcakes we brought home from Auntie Em's Kitchen. I think I remember taking them off the train. Maybe they are in the car? I am sad.