I didn't talk about porters

I love porters, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I speak three languages and can do handstands

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

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

There are several answers to this question.

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

Skull Panda & Yo Gabba Gabba

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



or Teen Girl Squad:

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

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

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

Friday Koala

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

It's that time of year

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

Happy Birthday Bryan!

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

I've been having very lucid dreams recently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AGITPROP READING SERIES

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

Friday Lester

And final bonus snow bunting:



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

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

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

I'm okay with death, but aging is not okay

Today I miss Washington, DC. This does not mean that I am unhappy or dislike San Diego. But today I miss the biannual reading series organizing meetings at Brickskeller and elsewhere, and the relative ease of organizing events there in general--a relative ease created through plenty of work and years of relaxed socializing and friendships, but still. Here in San Diego, we work harder for less art.

I miss major rain storms, even though we are in the middle of as major a rainstorm as ever happens here. And yes, I miss thunder. I miss humidity and green. I miss cherry blossoms and the tidal basin and the monuments at night. I miss the public transportation that took me to all those places.

I miss Bridge Street Books, teaching at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, and Moby Dick's House of Kabob (the original Georgetown location). And I miss being able to go for beers after a reading and sit next to Carolyne Forche and talk to her confidently without having any clue who she was. I miss living within walking distance to the Black Cat. I miss writing while having donuts and coffee at Sparky's cafe on 14th street (which I think has closed) until being driven out by all the chain smoking or the random appearance of my MA thesis advisor. I miss the prostitutes.

I've never been to Perth

Well, my blog fast is kind of over, and I'm feeling some combination of sluggish and wall-punching. This has been a week of highs and lows, ups and downs, rights and lefts.

I tried to send my little sisters postcards today, but I realize that I don't know where they live. Are they still in Adelaide, or have they moved to Perth?

Reading in Tuscon / Blog Fast

I'm taking a weeklong break (or so) from reading blogs and blogging. Blogland, I love you, but I have several projects that I need to work on this week: a website for someone else, my own website, more grading than usual, a lot of cleaning, and preparing to go to Tuscon this weekend to give a reading at the Drawing Studio. Details below:

Mark Wallace, K. Lorraine Graham, Lisa Cooper, January 31, 2009. 7:00 P.M., The Drawing Studio, 33 S. 6th Ave., Tucson, AZ

Mark Wallace is the author of a number of books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. He is the author of a multi-genre work, Haze, and a novel, Dead Carnival. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press), a collection of 26 essays by different writers. Most recently he has published a collection of tales, Walking Dreams, and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion. He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

BARTER

New indecision’s breakdown backdrop
won’t let me go to the store beside
a terminal discrepancy, I love you
and you love power and I become power
but really specifically, like a dollar bill
or a lost loaf of bread. Total hand
carries itself, bricks say to walls.
Sugar’s a good combustible head end.
Do you like poets or being one
earned refuge, check out those shacks.
Should we do Survival Island
and stake an emblem? Flustered.
Call a shift to not be home
under a renegade special effect.
It’s exactly not to be barking about
all the mud in the honey. Some silence
just ain’t worth its hogwash.

- Mark Wallace

K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming, forthcoming from Edge Books in 2009. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take Home Project. Her poetry, critical writing, and visual art have appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Area Sneaks, Foursquare and elsewhere. A limited-edition CD of her work called Moving Walkways is available from Narrowhouse Recordings. She lives in southern California with her partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet.

from SEE IT EVERYWHERE

"Oh, Hi!" he said, happy and startled. Then, he stared into ceiling space without speaking.

I introduced myself to the woman next to me. "Hello," I said enthusiastically. "I am likely to never see you again."

The wealthy community by the sea is far enough off the highway to be difficult to get to but still defined by the highway.

I ask if they have any mastic. Mastic, she says, is an Arabic thing. I say yes, I know, I want to use it in pudding, and you have a sign that says "Yes! We have MASTIC!"

Mention the rain. Your carnations are probably from here. A cousin of your friend was shot in the head by her boyfriend.

~

The male finch notes us and calls to the hatchlings. You're a car and I'm a goat. He pauses. A child is a strange thing to want. That's a nice person, we don't say that. I told my students the joke about the chicken and the road, and they stared at me. "I see," said one. "The question is strange but the answer is serious. It is funny."

~

Hugs which avoid direct breast contact, how my favorite people encourage a kind of social weirdness in me. Strong feelings of being a turnip.

When you leave your bearable job and intelligent, creative, attractive lover, remember that there really isn't anything better than this. This is all that there is, always.

It's important to not believe in a lamp burning for you or anyone in a window somewhere. I know that no one will call me home.

- K. Lorraine Graham

A near-native resident of Tucson, Lisa Cooper is a poet, editor and a massage therapist. A collection of poetry entitled & Calling It Home was published by Chax Press in 1998. In addition she has two chapbooks—The Ballad in Memory and Tilt Rail. Her poems have been published in numerous journals, including Sonora Review, Spork, Hambone, Blue Mesa Review, Logodaedalus and 6ix. Recent poems appear in EOAGH (#4) and on the Invisible City website, a multi-genre improvisatory collaboration in Tucson examining art-making in public spaces. She has received an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship and the Sonora Review Poetry Prize.

THE MERIT

we walked out on the sidewalk, a kingdom of ants
a sprig of rosemary & every plant a favorite member of the family
my foot, my book & my subterranean mist
how did we get so tired?
my shoulder is a common piece of the surrounding terrain, wedged into a dress
tuck— tucker— is it time to cross yet?
at 5 a.m. music can seem especially loud—
this has merit!
otherwise I can pay someone: 5 pennies now, 5 later & 5 to get to heaven
tick-tock!— got loose!— gone fishin’…
your legend got too big, distinguished as a courtyard office—
I’m telling you at these speeds it seems to handle rather well—
& after dinner I’ll say it again:
now we’ll play this little game of chase
in which your word is tiger paw, mine is sugar
& none is never be redeemed

- Lisa Cooper

Brielf Moment of Celebration and Optimism

One of my manuscripts is a finalist for something I didn't think it would ever be a finalist for. (In addition to the manuscript in question, I have three more finished manuscripts on my desk in addition to Terminal Humming, forthcoming from Edge Books in March or so). Regardless of who actually gets a book published in this particular situation, here's to people who don't really know each other liking each other's work.

How I Celebrated the Innaguration

I'm behind the guy dressed as Obama--I've got a green hoola hoop and I'm wearing a purple boa on my head. You can read the article in the North County Times. The comments at the bottom of the article are especially worth a look.


(Nathan Morland wears a President Obama mask as he leads a colorful parade of some 50 participants north on Highway 101 towards downtown Encinitas to Stonesteps Beach in Leucadia on Tuesday. (Photo by Bill Wechter - Staff Photographer)

Not enough Marxism, too much Marxism, or: how avant-garde artists and writers describe their work

Last Thursday, Mark and I headed down to La Jolla to see Sophie Calle speak at the Museum of Contemporary art. I adore her work, and she was fabulous in person--wore heavy floral perfume that still somehow smelled good, was clear and precise when describing her work but still very charming and personable.

Some of her early work made me think about the kinds of demands that writing has to always explain itself and be virtuous. In "The Bronx," she asked strangers in the Bronx to take her somewhere meaningful to them. She then photographed them and wrote down their stories. I immediately thought of Brenda Coultus' A Handmade Museum that a kind of historic documentary/tour in poetry of the Bowery. It's a work that is very consciously investigating how we inhabit space, notions of public/private, and the very real effects of corporate capitalism and neoliberalism etc in a post 9/11 New York and beyond. Calle' s "The Bronx" is also a kind of documentary tour of a New York neighbourhood, albeit a different neighbourhood in a very different time. Unlike Coltus' A Handmade Museum, it doesn't attempt to justify itself as, well, some kind of art that's going to either liberate its participants or combat Capitalism, or even describe the effects of Capitalism.

I wonder if reviewers and Calle's peers ever discussed it in those terms. When briefly describing "The Bronx" on Thursday, Calle said that she wanted to create a piece that 1) highlighted the danger and risk of living in the Bronx (hence putting herself in the care of a stranger) and 2) wanted something that acknowledged the "ghetto" aspect of the Bronx--and it was clear she meant ghetto in the traditional sense of the term--a place in a city where a minority lives because direct and indirect social and economic violence force them to live there and make it difficult for them to leave. I mean, the whole piece clearly does illuminate all sorts of interesting and complicated social, economic and political relationships. What I'm most struck by, I suppose is the fact that Calle clearly didn't feel like she had to describe the piece in the Leftist theoretical terms that reviewers use to describe Coltus' A Handmade Museum.

When I was up in LA for the Cal Arts conference Untitled: Speculations on the Expanded Field of Writing," I saw Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Marc Voge and Young-Hae Chang) talk on a panel and also present one of their pieces. Stephanie Taylor & Heriberto Yepez were both on the panel, the title of which was "The Concept of Conceptual Writing: What is the relation between conceptual writing and the trajectory of conceptual art?" I bring up YHCHI first because the piece they presented could have easily had direct political implications--it was a very charming comic narrative of someone who buys fake documentation to come to the US, has a series of mishaps, but eventually makes it to the US alright and has a happy ending. I'm not sure anyone on the panel actually talked about the relationship between conceptual writing and the trajectory of conceptual art. However, there was a major difference between the way Yepez presented his work and the way Taylor and YHCHI presented their work. Yepez spoke very directly about the need for overt political engagement in art, Taylor and YHCHI didn't. Marc Voge said, "We have to admit that we haven't considered these issues." Yepez is a writer, Taylor and YHCHI are not.

I'm paraphrasing, but in a conversation I had afterwards with Joseph Mosconi, he said that it was kind of retro or passe for artists to justify or describe their work in direct political terms. (Joseph, is that what you said? Do you remember? I can't remember the specific word that you used).

So, after that panel, and after hearing Sophie Calle speak last night, part of me was thining about how much I'd love to not have to explain myself, and how much more flexible and fun the visual art world sometimes seems. (Or maybe life is just better for artists in France and LA--that's also quite possible).

On the other hand, I confess that I do become frustrated with writers who, for example, can quote Bataille, Bakhtin, and maybe Baudrillard, but they probably haven't read Guy Debord and know almost nothing about the Frankfurt School. Or if they've read Debord they haven't read Society of the Spectacle. They've studied aesthetics or only the most aesthetic political theory without studying any political theory. Fredric Jameson anyone? Monsieur Louis Pierre Althusser? Horkheimer and Adorno? And really, how is it possible to get through, for example, Judith Butler, and not want to go further into both Marxist theory as well as pyschoanalytic literature. Don't get me started on how we need to read more Freud and Lacan, but people who read a lof of Freud and Lacan are often annoying.

Sticking with the feeling of being annoyed: I get annoyed with art and poetry that can only define itself in terms of a very narrow version of Marxist liberation, and I get annoyed with art and poetry that doesn't address social and economic conditions. I get annoyed with art and poety that addresses social and economic conditions but then can only talk about them in terms of Marxist theory.

So, what to do? Is anyone thinking about these things and fascinated/annoyed with them?

Some New Multiplicities

Mark has posted round one of a conversation that we've been doing with Joseph Mosconi about multiplicity and interdiciplinary art.

It has nothing to do with Ron Silliman's idea of the post-avant, but you should read it and comment.

Unrelated, but today's horoscope is helpful for once: "So it sounds odd to your dear ones that you've decided to pursue a career in medieval feng shui. So what? Are they going to pay your bills, or are you?"

This week I can feel every little vibration. If a large truck goes down the highway, I can tell. If my neighbors downstairs take a quiet little step or take a shower, I can feel it. My sensory processing is haywire and accurate. I just went outside, down the stairs, and across to another building in the apartment complex because I could hear that someone left the outdoor hose barely on and that water was dripping out of it. I wish someone would do some balanced research on PMS and sensory processing.

Sonic Booms at the Beach

Someone was making early Valentines:


It's warm here, even for San Diego. Mark and I went to the beach. This is the (gasp!) fourth January we've lived here, and the first time we've ever been to the beach in January. Other than hearing several sonic booms, all was peaceful. Was it the military? Probably. Fireworks or other random exploding things? Possibly--the San Diego Chargers are playing now.

Anyway, the tide was super low, and all that packed sand makes a great natural dance floor