Recent etc.

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

Attacking the limes, serenading the limes

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

Lester attacks the limes:

And then serenades them:

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

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

I am a zombie after the last three weeks.

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

It's cold enough for chili

So I am having chili.

It's hot enough for a pastis

So I am drinking a pastis.

Hark, hark, the dogs do bark

But the caravan moves on.

Or else, the week just does.

Or else, time. Etc.

I suck at data entry

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

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

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

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


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

List

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

I Don't Like Mulholland Drive (the Film)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday Lester

Lester contemplates the forpusfield with Wonder Woman

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

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

What we saw:

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

What we ate:

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

What we heard at the Poetic Research Bureau:

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

NaPoWriMo

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

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

http://spooksbyme.org/terminalhumming/

and everything else will go here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanna be a male model

Everyone has their own form of smelly disgustingness.

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

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

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

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

Seriously. Sunday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Sunday, Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today I have some announcements and some related technical questions.

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

http://www.spooksbyme.org

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

body {
background-color: #339999;

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

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

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

Any thoughts?