Workshopping is Weird

I've decided to think of workshopping as like a reading where one doesn't always read but people tell you what they think in detail anyway.

Currently reading, for class Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Woot!

It's raining.

Filmed today. Editing tomorrow. Using a camera isn't as awkward as I thought it would be.

I had two vaccinations yesterday, and my arms are sore. Ouch. Ouch.

Aliens! Desert! California!

I want to visit the Integratron! And it's all because of someone in my documentary class, whose name I can't now remember, who brought it up. How can I not have heard of the Integratron!

According to its website, the Integraton is " an acoustically perfect tabernacle and energy machine sited on a powerful geomagnetic vortex in the magical Mojave Desert." Van  I've never even been, but I already want to write about it--like the Salton Sea, it's one of those places that, well, if I could kind of understand it and write about it, then I feel I might understand something essential about Southern California. The history, briefly:

George Van Tassel was an aeronautical engineer and test pilot who worked for Lockheed, Douglas Aircraft and alongside Howard Hughes at Hughes Aviation. After retiring from his aviation career, Van Tassel and is family moved to a place called Giant Rock--a 7-story high, freestanding boulder--in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California, where they opened an airport and restaurant.

Van Tassel initially learned about the rock from a prospector and desert dweller named Frank Critzer, who had created a cave-like dwelling under the boulder. Because Critzer was a prospector, he always had a lot of dynamite, and one day he died in an explosion. Van Tassel eventually acquired the land surrounding the boulder from the Bureau of Land Management, and went on running the airport and the cafe.

Until....he began hosting/conducting meditation sessions in 1953 in the rooms underneath Giant Rock, which "led to UFO contacts and finally to an actual encounter with extra-terrestrials when, in August of that year, a saucer landed from the plant Venus, woke Van Tassel up and invited him onto the ship. There the aliens gave him the technique for rejuvenating living cell tissues."

Aliens! Desert! California! Prospectors! Meditation meetings! Men in the aeronautics industry! Huge boulders! UFO conventions that were eventually held at Giant Rock! The word on the street that Giant Rock was a sacred site for the Native American people(s) who originally lived in the area! The weird utopian, anti-government, anti-tax subtext of so much UFO literature!

My happiness is largely dependent on my ability to express negativity and to feel crappy

I don't trust people who don't express negative emotions. Of course, there are a variety of ways of expressing negative emotions that don't always involve heated arguments or punching and being punched.

I have similar feelings about sarcasm and irony--both tend to make me feel comfortable because they're a form of sharing social negativity and combining it with humor. Humor itself has to do with social and aesthetic values. The world is full of incongruities between our understanding/expectation and what actually happens or exists. When I'm sarcastic and someone else gets it, we're having a moment of a shared understanding of some particular incongruity or another. What could be more comforting?

But I've been thinking about all of this a lot recently, especially in light of my feelings about my residency here in the San Diego region. There are numerous things I deeply dislike about my life here, but this weekend has been a good weekend, because it was a combination of almost everything I love: talking with friends about stuff that is irritating and stuff that isn't, time outside, movement, art and food. The only thing missing was a poetry reading--a big gap, certainly, but also offset but the fact that the art show was good.

It was also a three-day weekend.

Happy hour on Thursday! I won't sing the praises of D Street Bar and Grill in Encinitas. It's big, it was in a good location for most of us, they serve a variety of different drinks, have solid food, and a reasonable happy hour. So, it's fine with me. Happy hour is a perfect environment during which to express negativity in an energetic, friendly way. Dinner again with friends on Friday--more talking, more friendly negativity. Stayed up too late.

All that socializing and friendly negativity put me in a good mood for Saturday: Mark and I went to Batiquitos lagoon for a leisurely walk and some birdwatching: unusually peaceful crows, a juvenile northern harrier, a very large flock of semipalmated plovers, whimbrels, several terns (maybe Caspian? I couldn't tell), lots of little bushtits, a golden-crowned kinglet, several brown pelicans who were fishing, and an anna's hummingbird. We also saw some other kind of hummingbird--I couldn't identify him, but I know he was a male because he was doing display dives. He'd fly up really really high and then dive down really fast, making an ark at the bottom and a kind of whistling sound.

That afternoon, I went to Swami's Beach for a hoop class and jam. I had a gorgeous time and learned a variety of new ways to break--but now I have weird bruises on the insides of my upper arms, very similar to the kind I used to get on my hands when I started doing more off-body work. Next weekend I'm going to a workshop with Julia Hartsell at the Circus Fund in Del Mar. If I had my way, I'd be taking just about every class they offer there!

On Sunday I saw the splash from a whale breaching (I missed the actual breach), but a few minutes later s/he did a fantastic tale slap.

Today, we somehow avoided the rain (well, almost) and took the train down to see the Tara Donovan exhibit at MCASD Downtown. I'd seen the piece made with pins before, and I still love it, but my favorite was Haze, made entirely out of clear plastic straws, and completely beautiful:

After the show, we walked around, and I eventually ate a hamburger. On the way home from the train station, it rained and rained. We actually got soaked.

Now, I use it with some regularity--when appropriate.

1. Before moving to California, I never used the word "motherfucker."

2. A new quarter at UCSD has begun. I am taking 1) a multi-genre workshop that all MFAs must take with Anna Joy Springer 2) The second class in the movement for theater sequence, still with Charlie Oates, 3) a seminar in the Visual Art Department on subcultures with Ruben Ortiz-Torres.

3. Beyond that, I'm TAing for an intro poetry class with Michael Davidson and still RAing for the New Writing Series. And I'm teaching online, and doing bits of contract work here and there.

4. I have blisters from playing Zen Chaos in movement for theater. Someday I will describe Zen Chaos in detail, and write down all the rules. It's a bit like ultimate frisbee with two hacky sacks instead of one frisbee, and cartwheels are a regular part of the game.

5. In the multigenre workshop, I said that my goal was to make my work somehow a combination of the Bee Gees and Sun Ra. I got very excited.

6. No doubt you have all seen the video of "Stayin' Alive." But just in case you haven't:

Eying or Eyeing

1. This is the first holiday season since we moved to California that Mark and I have spent together. It's been a nice combination of laying low (cooking, movies, walks) and socializing--we spent a nice Christmas Eve with the California branch of Mark's family, and this evening we're going over to the Rothenbergs'. In a few more days, we're headed to Ensenada. I've long fantasized about blowing off the entire winter holiday season and instead getting out of the country, so this is a step in the right direction.

2. All the climate change involved in the travel from here to Florida and back again has irritated my skin. I've got a patchy red rash that almost resembles hives. It's uncomfortable, and it makes it difficult to wear makeup.

3.Back from a hoop class with Michelle. After a year of thinking that working with more than one hoop would be completely impossible, it's so much fun to be playing with two and have it start to make some kinetic sense.

4. My attempt to keep my hair short is finished. Having short hair requires getting regular hair cuts by stylists who actually know what they're doing, and stylists who know what they're doing cost money. My hair is neither super curly nor super thick, so nearly any fool can cut it when it starts to get long. Therefore, I am growing my hair out again.

5. For Christmas, Mark got me: 1) Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds, by Bernd Heinrich 2) Feelings Are Facts: A Life, by Yvonne Rainer and 3) The Silk Road Gourmet: Volume One: Western and Southern Asia, by Laura Kelle. They're all super cool books that I've been eying a long time.

Merry Christmas

Lester, with traces of the roasted red pepper soup he had for lunch still on his beak.

Still in Florida. Last we had a rainy thunderstorm of the sort that never happens in southern California. All the heat and the green here is kind of amazing. The shore birds are nearly the same, although I saw a lot of  Solitary Sandpipers, which I haven't seen around Carlsbad. They must be migrating.

Headed to Florida on Thursday morning.

1. Backbend (wheel) with feet at the wall into a backbend with feet on the wall into handstand into a walkover. It feels good to have a super challenging Sunday yoga class.

2. Still playing around with some off-body moves with two hoops. Coordination with on-body moves comes a lot easier.

3. Nearly finished with my paper on Nightwood. I didn't really have time to do anything especially ambitious. I wonder if I could do a critical independent study in the winter or spring quarter? It's interesting how an image search for "Nightwood" doesn't immediately give me any results that have anything to do with Djuna Barnes' novel.

4. In the last movement for theater class of the quarter, I sprained my toe, but I also stood on someone's shoulders and tossed a ball back and forth between my hands. It was kind of amazing when I finally relaxed and settled into the posture--my bones were perfectly lined up above the person basing me.

5. Dear professors: please tell your TAs about your plans for grading at the end of the quarter early so that they can schedule their travel plans accordingly. Dear TAs, ask the professor you are working with about this at the beginning of the quarter so that you don't accidentally make plans that mess with the professor's plans.

You can stop reading whenever you want

Whenever I let one poem take up a whole page--or, rather, when I really let white space take up the whole page, I think something like: "This is lame. And precious. And I know that 'precious' has very gendered connotations." And then I change it back so that the page has text all over it. I don't want there to be very many rests in my work. I don't want to encourage my readers to rest in my poems. I want them to be, at best, carried away, overwhelmed, energized, breathless. Turned on.

Yesterday, Lester demanded a shower

Pauvre Pierrot

It's been a while since I've blogged. Blame work, school, and a bike accident that wasn't but could have been very nasty. I have some fabulous bruises, but that's all.

This morning I've been reading Rachel Zolf's blog The Tolerance Project, a collaborative writing project with eighty writers, artists, and thinkers from across Canada and the United States. Rachel is the author of Human Resources, and winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. So, why is she in an MFA program? Rachel Zolf is Canadian, and when her female partner got a tenure-track job at a university in the USA, she was not able to legally move with her to New York because their relationship is not legally recognized by US immigration authorities. Becoming a student was really her only other option for obtaining a visa. In her Statement to MFA Workshop October 13, she writes:

...what is most important for my project is that it is a collaborative take on the MFA as an institution within larger state apparatuses. That is the key concept behind my project, a deconstruction of how “authors” and “voices” are created through the process of the MFA, linked with how difference is “tolerated” (or not) in general in the US. I wanted to provoke a look at how the MFA works as a process, by deliberately blowing up the authorial creation and feedback process beyond this room. There is a long tradition in the art world of looking at the workings of art institutions such as art museums and art collecting practices and the creation of the artist as a commodity.

If Carolyn Forche had been more present at George Mason and they'd had more funding for me, I might have gone there instead of doing an MA at Georgetown. In fact, I think my critique of MFA programs only became fully developed when I left the east coast and found that not even community colleges wanted to hire me to teach. On the east coast, no one cared that I didn't have an MFA. Most of the major east coast cities have active poetry and arts communities that aren't centered on MFA programs. In other words, I don't think I was fully aware of the degree to which MFA programs were becoming the norm and the ways in which creative writing is professionalized in the US.

I suspect that the farther you get from the city in the US, the more likely MFA programs and educational institutions will be central to art communities. That's an undeveloped argument, I know. But where are the poets going to hang out if you have to drive to the bar? You hang out at school, I guess. Some one give me counter examples.

I'm taking a brief break from typing up my comments to the other people in my poetry workshop--I'm still irritated by the way submitting individual poems to workshop really discourages things like abrupt tonal shifts and strange juxtapositions. I fall into descriptions: this poem is doing this here and that there, that poem is doing that there and this here. I look for strangeness and moments of disorientation. I ask about other poems and refer to previous poems and try to extend the context of the poem as far beyond the workshop as I can. I don't like how workshopping encourages writing for workshopping.

I do like having an immediate group of readers. That's nice. Everyone in my class is intelligent, thoughtful and creative. But more feedback doesn't equal better feedback. Just like after every reading I give there's almost always a woman who is slightly older that me whom I've never met who wants to give me a lot of specific suggestions about the pace of my reading, my clothing, and how I need to learn to breathe differently. I know that my feedback on other people's work has as much to do with me as it does to do with their poems. Obviously.

I am enjoying all the reading and discussion that I'm doing for both the workshop and the other seminar on Modernist aesthetics and art movements. I'm remembering things that I like, reading things I've read, reading a lot of things I haven't read. In some cases, I'm evaluating my relationship to things that I respected but thought I wasn't that interested in.

Example: it turns out that I might actually be more excited by Fanny Howe's work than I previously thought.

Example: now that I've had to read some more Donald Revell, I can be much more articulate about why I really dislike it.

Example: I've never written about Modernist theater or performance. In fact, out of all the major a-g Modernist, I've probably read Artaud and Beckett the least. It's exciting, then, to read them and others and think about a genre that I haven't thought much about.

When I was doing my MA at Georgetown, I felt pressured to make every seminar paper full of amazingly brilliant critical insight that would somehow be relevant to the field. Now I don't mind if I use my term paper as an excuse to think about and learn about things that I want to think about and learn about. I don't care so much about the field. If I have any academic career ahead of me at all, which is doubtful, it's certainly not going to be based on my ability to write normative academic articles. So, in the meantime, I get to read Artaud and Beckett. I get to think about Jacques Copeau and the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, especially the years it was in New York, and also Charles Dullin. How Artaud's name comes up constantly in the work of the artists and actors who were busy reviving/changing/rejecting pantomime and thinking about a more physical theater centered on actors and gesture.

Chessie the Manatee

Way back on October 3, 2005, during the last autumn I lived in DC, I wrote a brief blog post about Chessie, a manatee who swam up the James River all they way to Richmond, Virginia--although now I can't find any verification that this was an official Chessie sighting.

Chessie, originally from Florida, was radio tagged and tracked by the US Geological Survey's Sirenia Project--although he apparently got rid of his tracking device in 2001. In 1995, Chessie swam all the way to Rhode Island. According to the Chessie Watch page (which hasn't been updated since 2004), there hasn't been an official Chessie sighting since August, 2001, although a younger manatee has been sighted in and around Virginia Beach. You can read more about Chessie's in his bio.

Anyway, I bring to your attention a comment left this afternoon by Mr. Case of Virginia Beach, VA on that very old blog post of mine. He says:

"I saw a manatee today at noon at Rocketts Landing; it was swimming slowly downriver."

Well, Chessie, if that was you, we wish you well. In fact, whoever you were, we wish you well, and recommend that you start heading south before the water gets too cold. Go, manatee, go!

Specific Information

My adventures in MFAland continue to be interesting--I've posted the last two sequences of things that I workshopped in Rae Armatrout's class to my poetry drafts blog, See it Everywhere. I've been doing some visual stuff, but I'll need to noodle with that a bit longer before I post it anywhere.

In Rae's class we're reading Claudia Rankine's, Don’t let me be lonely and John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, Donald Revell, & Lyn Hejinian from the Hybrid anthology. And then also Hejinian's Against Closure essay. Predictably, I deeply dislike the Revell. I've heard Claudia Rankine read from Don't let me be lonely at least once. The doodle above is from when she read at UCSD on January 25, 2006--that must have been one of the first readings I went to after moving here. That book is, among other things, a devastating examination of American loneliness, and so a good introduction to living in the San Diego suburbs.

This week is Futurism and Dada week in the Modern Art Movements and Aesthetics with Michael Davidson. We're reading some of Peter Bürger's Theory of the avant-garde; The argument of this book is incredibly familiar to me at this point, but it's good, I suppose, to be actually reading it. We're also looking at Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, Loy's Feminist Manifesto, and several pieces by Schwitters, Huelsenbeck, Tzara, Khlebnikof, Ball, etc.

In Movement for Theater we continue to focus on honing "neutral" movement. We've also started working on some basic tumbling and acrobatics--somersaults, standing on each others' shoulders, and some basic flying techniques that resemble what I've practiced in acro yoga. And handstands, which I'm always glad to do. All of this is incredibly fun and stimulating, but I'm not yet seeing a path towards how I'm going to use it in my own work. Thus far, my attempts at movement in performance feel muddy and confusing.

Research into my family history has yielded interesting information: 1) Comanche great grandmother 2) Dutch ancestors, in addition to the Scottish ones that I already knew about--they all came through New York 3) A lot of my ancestors on both sides of the family lived in and around Tippah, Mississippi. The ones that didn't stay in New York went south, typically. 4) References to marriages in Jamaica--but no specific information.

I think that the "neutral" walk is much harder than standing on someone's shoulders.

1. I'm a bit embarrassed by how much my weeks at UCSD leave me completely exhausted.

On Thursday, I got up early as usual to go to my theater/movement class. We stood on each other's shoulders and practiced "neutral" walking, which isn't really neutral at all--more like walking without character, or walking with the character of a white man from Europe or North America with excellent posture and an unusual level of evenness.

That afternoon, I was completely useless, much like a squashed bug or a pile of warm laundry. I know those aren't especially unique comparisons, but that is what I was like. A friend from high school once described me as being like "an elf after the holiday season." So, I was like a squashed bug, a pile of warm laundry, or an elf after the holiday season.

2. Wednesday was the first event in the New Writing Series at UCSD.

Part of my funding for my MFA comes from a research assistantship connected with this series. Nikolai, my fellow RA, and I have been running around all over campus for the past three weeks trying to get everything organized. Like so many administrative and organizational jobs, the tasks themselves aren't difficult--what's difficult is getting everyone and everything to coordinate in at least a semi-functional way. Example: getting a key to the performance space where there readings are held required signatures from three different people, one of whom doesn't really have an office and rides around campus on a small green utility cart, as well as a tutorial on the sound system for the space.

About an hour before the reading, Nikolai and I went to set up the space. However, the numeric code to the door, which had worked on Tuesday, did not work on Wednesday. Inexplicably, the art department had given me a code that would work for only one day instead of the entire quarter. Because I'd left my cell phone at home that morning, I had to borrow a phone to call facilities, and finally the police, to let us into the building. The police and facilities kept asking me for "the number of the building." The performance space in the visual arts facility, of course, does have a number, but it's not located anywhere on the building. Randomly, I had a map of the department in my bag, which had the numbers of the buildings. The Visual Arts Facility at UCSD is confusing enough to need its own map.

The policeman tried thirteen keys before he found the one that would open the space. All of this happened about 10 minutes before the reading was supposed to start. Fortunately most of the faculty as well as the readers, Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, were a little late arriving.

3. I am emotionally available for irony

Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire! Baudelaire!

I am quite sure that I use irony as a way of identifying with others as well as distancing myself from them.

My work also sounds so mean and ironic. It is mean and ironic, but it isn't all mean and ironic.

Today was our first day actually workshopping in the poetry workshop I'm taking. It wasn't so bad. Everyone's comments were, in general, insightful and mostly helpful. There were a few that were very helpful.

All that said, I don't think my work is well suited to a workshop format. I write in long, messy sequences. I don't really write discrete poems--so I have to submit these weirdly excerpted chunks. Things that seem strange shifts in tone, diction & form, etc, usually are, but they also typically have resonances with what's happening later. I write very very loose rough drafts that get revised a lot--a lot--and I also do a substantial amount of reorganization.

I suppose what I have is a fairly boring kind of nervousness. I'm really not used to showing people rough drafts of my poems. I'm used to showing them third or fourth drafts--given the way I write, I'm not sure how useful a first draft is to really look at.

In and around our exhaustion with work, Mark and I have been talking about emotional availability in poetry. We haven't particularly defined what this is, and it's not "authenticity" or the opposite of irony or sarcasm, but whatever it is I feel like my recent work lacks it a bit. I want the sense that anything can come into the poem--I'm good at letting in things like roadkill, or the extreme exhaustion of the person sitting next to me on the bus this evening who kept falling asleep on my shoulder all the way from La Jolla to Carlsbad. However, I'm not so good at letting in the sunset over the beach out the window, or the pelicans and cormorants.

Yeah, I haven't read Notes on Conceptualisms. I would, however, like a "Sobject" T-shirt.

In MFAland, gradschooland. Reading and rereading, among many things, Henry James' "Beast in the Jungle" (which I mistyped as "Beach in the Jungle") and The New Sentence.

I like how "sentence" is "oración" in Spanish, and that it's feminine. La Nueva Oración. In English, a sentence is more about the conventions of writing than speaking. The closest English word to oración is, of course, oration, though oration is rather formal, dignified and ritualized. Latin orationem--"speaking, discourse, language, prayer."

The Sufficiently Hierarchical New Sir Sequels

This is the first complete week of classes at UCSD--but I don't have to be on campus on Monday, so I'm here trying to clean and organize my desk and put away my clothes.

Thus far, the only class I've attended is a graduate movement for theater class with Charlie Oats. It was incredibly fun, and the mime/walking exercises we did were challenging. On Tuesday I have a poetry workshop with Rae, and on Wednesday a class on Modern art movements with Michael. I'm TAing for John Granger's nonfiction class and one of two RAs for the New Writing Series.

Even though I've barely started, I'm already feeling exasperated--not with classes, but with being back in the structure of a university and having to deal with the irritations of interacting and being confined by said structure. Please note, I don't wish that I were still teaching ESL, or that I were still working in business, or even in public policy. It's just been a while since I've had to deal directly with the particular passive-aggressive type of behavior that academic bureaucracies (and probably most types of bureaucracies) enable. In a university, communication tends to happen indirectly and is always filtered through a variety of complicated channels--rarely does someone tell you directly what to do. Of course, there are things that you are absolutely supposed to do, and there are hierarchies, but one can't admit them directly (at least not in the humanities). It takes a while to realize the difference between a suggestion and a command.

I won't bore you all with the details of all the running around me and the other RA have done for the New Writing Series thus far, but it's been quite amazing. I'm looking forward to the Winter quarter when in theory we'll both know what we're doing, how things work, and where things are.

I organized my manuscript files, and found a half-finished manuscript called The Death of a Toad that's a kind of mashup flarf conceptual piece. I don't know what it is. As a manuscript, it suffers from theory head and a lack of energy, but it's full of ridiculous language. One section is called "The Sufficiently Hierarchical New Sir Sequels."

I feel dramatic and melancholy, and like most of the people I love and events I want to go to are on the east coast. It's been too long since I walked home from a party.

Tengo preguntas

¿Por qué el perro está raspando y en qué está raspando?
¿Hay un perro en la piscina?
¿Cuándo alguien escribirá una review del Tarareo Terminal?
¿Come se dice "How long will it take me to master hoola hooping around one leg?" en Español?

Summer is over, but I went to the beach today.

1. SPD sold out of my book, so Rod has sent them more!
2. I am impatient for reviews.
   
3. Or, at least, stop telling my friends and my boyfriend what you think of my book and tell me instead.
4. No autumnal clothes for me for a few more months. The best I can do is wear jeans and sometimes a light sweater, but that's pretty much true all year round here.
5. Remembering how funny Dada is: "Dada will kick you in the behind and you will like it." I like the fact that they say "behind" instead of "ass."
6. Jerry is coming all the way from Amherst to visit!
   

Now that I'm beginning something new, it might as well be over.

1. Not bored with Language Poetry. Not bored with John Cage, either.
2. I haven't even started classes at UCSD yet, and I already have to look for funding for next year from a grant database made for PhD students, not MFAs. Oh well. If I don't get funding for next year, I just won't go back.
3. Been grading all. Day. Long. That's why I couldn't meet with you at 4pm.
4. Convinced that real estate limits mobility. Unless one is rich or bought one's real estate in the 70s, 80s or before.
5. Missing good bookstores.