I subscribe to Yoga Journal, Self, Lucky, Cooking Light, Food & Wine, and Cooks Illustrated.

I also subscribe to a bunch of poetry and literary magazines, but those are too many to list.

I recently an article in Self called "Keeping Up with the Yogis." Yes, I read and subscribe to Self. Anyway, the article was about snarkiness and snobbery in yoga communities. The article made me think about the anger or sadness many of us feel when we have an especially aggravating experience with other poets an artists. The world of art is supposed to, somehow, be better than the rest of the world. It isn't of course. I mean it is, but not because the people are nicer or more reasonable or funnier or even more intelligent.

It's the same with yoga communities. Yogis can be competitive and unkind, even though they're not supposed to be. I remember when I worked at the desk of the yoga studio, there was a man who would always tell me what time he'd gotten up to meditate. I didn't care, wasn't impressed (was he flirting with me? I don't know). I found it annoying when he said things like, "You know, it takes a lot of spiritual discipline to get up at 3:00." No doubt, but shut up about it, please.

There's also a kind of competition to see who can be the most calm and happy. My external hard drive crashed right after mercury went into retrograde (in the studio where I practice, we do talk about things like mercury in retrograde). A few days after my hard drive crashed, I went to my usual Wednesday night class. The teacher was talking about how to remain calm when everything around is not. I was able to proudly announce that my hard drive had crashed! Yes, my hard drive had crashed, but how calm I appeared while saying it! I could have said it while doing an open-floor handstand! How wonderful that the Universe was testing me in this way and giving me the chance to grow! Even if I believe that--and I'm not saying I don't or do--I despise the snarky language of yoga pop religion. You know, this kind of stuff:


I've been really fortunate, I think, with my teachers and studios. My first yoga teacher was Jeanne Gaudette, a neuro-muscular therapist and yoga teacher who had a small studio in Blue Hill, Maine (I think she now is a teacher at the Downeast School of Massage). I have no idea what kind of yoga Jeanne taught but I remember basic standing sequences that are still familiar to me, and a lot of restorative poses. I also remember that she did bodywork for both me and my mother at a very discounted rate. She was kind, funny, and unpretentious.

After college, I started practicing with Margaret Townsend. Again, I think I was amazingly lucky. Margaret is a dancer who teaches Ashtanga yoga, but her background is in Integral, Iyengar, Anusara, and Ashtanga--so I got the benefit of learning about how to connect breath and movement, learned the logic behind sequencing, and also learned a lot about alignment and anatomy. She's a kind but demanding teacher with a sense of humor. And unpretentious. I would never have started practicing yoga seriously if I hadn't been lucky enough to randomly go to one of her classes.

I did go to one studio in Washington, DC that was really weird. The owner of the studio wouldn't tell me the names of the teachers, and had no information about their certifications. He also grabbed my butt during an adjustment--the first and only time that anything like that has ever happened to me in a yoga class. I never went back. Good lord, what a creep!

The studio here in Carlsbad where I practice is, frankly, pretty great. Like all communities, it has it's moments (see above). People are, in general, friendly and unpretentious. They admit when they feel tired. The teachers are all diverse and well-qualified. Their bios are posted on the website. They answer questions, they don't make adjustments unless you want them, they're attentive and responsive. I hate having a hamstring injury (it's better, but still not completely), but I've really been grateful towards my studio these past few months. I'm benefiting from my teachers' knowledge of anatomy, kinesiology, and yoga. My hamstring is getting better, and I'm learning how to make sure that doesn't happen again. A doctor would have just told me to stop practicing.

And now I'm all energetic and optimistic. Sorry...

So much of my life is taken up with boring, tedious details. Explaining to the State of California why I don't owe them 2005 taxes. Noting student attendance and giving them daily grades for participation, attendance, and fluency; paying bills; making sure that I hang my keys up on the hook so that I can find them again; laundry and folding clothes and putting them away (I hate putting them away); filling out my time sheet, and other stuff that is so much more boring than what I remember now. I think about this often, how I really don't remember half of the things I do, probably more than half.

I know I could write poems about these things, perhaps, if I could remember them. When I worked at the Henry L. Stimson Center, I wrote poems with language from staff meetings and panel discussions, and started a rather long poem based on acronyms officially in use by the Department of Defense. Now, I don't feel like I have the strength or interest to poetically engage my everyday details. Instead, I want to get away from them.

Maybe it's time to start working on another one of my big long procedural Chinese translations. Or to make more doodles. There was a book at the Dupont Circle location of Secondstory Books in Washington, DC that I regret buying. It was a Chinese language reader based on the speeches of Mao. That would have been fun to work with. I'm a sucker for old language text books.

Risotto

I made my first risotto of the fall yesterday. Strangely, I made it with spring vegetables. Asparagus, for example, which is still really good at the farmer's market. No fava or lima beans, alas.

Ha ha, I laugh at you, O State of California Filing Enforcement Section MS F180 of the Franchise Tax Board!

I have located and printed a copy of my 2005 DC taxes, which I will send to the State of California Filing Enforcement Section MS F180 of the Franchise Tax Board. I payed DC $2025 in 2005. I will not pay California $988 plus a $225 penalty for late filing plus $230 in interest.

In other exciting news, there was a fire in Camp Pendleton again today. I could smell the smoke all afternoon and used my inhaler for the first time this year. The last time I used it was, well, last October, during the fires. The smoke clouds that form after fires are oddly beautiful the morning after. They look like a thick marine layer that's come from the desert instead of the ocean.

Stall Dos

I am, in fact, applying to MFA programs this year. I once vowed I would never, ever, under any circumstances get an MFA. But vows are generally stupid, as I now know. Besides, I made that vow in a time and place where/when no one around really cared about MFAs. In DC, an MFA didn't prevent me from teaching at the Corcoran, because DC is a city, and cities have art communities that, while they include universities, are not defined and created by them. However, most of the USofA is suburban, not urban. With a new, interesting MFA program at UCSD, I might as well apply. Hey, if you don't have an MFA yet, why don't you apply, too...

I frequently say, "I want an MFA so I can get crappy adjunct work." However, as Mark has pointed out, I already get crappy adjunct work. But I want better crappy adjunct work. I have no delusions about getting a tenure-track creative writing job, but a local MFA might make me more attractive to area community colleges. Maybe I'm guilty of wanting change for change sake. A dangerous want, but oh well.

Tangent: I found my female Robin Hood-type doll. She has a Robin Hood hat and everything. I played Robin Hood in 6th grade. The play was in French, which seems ironic given the history of the Normans and Saxtons.

Stall

I have not made the hair appointment yet.

I want to make aged Gouda biscotti with walnuts. I have no aged Gouda, though. Next week.

If I only had to eat aperitivi for the rest of my life, that would be ok.

Writing continues. Attempts at writing something on Tina Darragh's Opposable Dumbs.

I put on a different kind of eye liner than I usually wear

It is green. Now my eyes are watering. I should stick to Clinique charcoal gray, or whatever color it is that I normally use.

I got a flu shot this morning, and then took my external hard drive to be fixed. Although neither was a pleasant task, they went well enough.

My trial-size perfume samples arrived. Six of them. I will find a good, long-lasting, citrus-based scent.

I have no content right now. My content is beach town. My students saw a dead seal on the beach that, according to them, looked like it had been the victim of a shark attack. It's windy, clear, and cool today, windy enough for white caps--my favorite kind of North County weather.

I think I've decided on a place to get my hair cut: Detour Salon in Encinitas. It will probably be a bit overly-trendy, but that's ok. I'm going to try and get an appointment with either Jessica or Jillian, because I like their hair.

They Hate Me

But I hate them so much more than they hate me. They cannot fathom the depth of my hate.

Also: California, fuck you. I do not owe you taxes for 2005. The reason I did not pay 2005 California state taxes is because I did not live or work in California in 2005.

We got our ballots in the mail today.

I want to get my hair cut shorter into some kind of bob. But I don't want to look like Paris Hilton or Posh Spice, and I don't want to look like I work for CNN. I need something a little asymmetrical, a little inverted with the right amount of layers and razored ends, and maybe longish side bangs.

But it can't require blow drying to look good.

And where to get it cut? I haven't gotten an actual, styled haircut since I lived in DC. Nope, it's been Supercuts all the way. Big decisions.

My Love Roderick Usher Part Trois

Thank you, Slate, for pointing out that my beloved Vincent Price has a cookbook. Just listen to him describe how to make Viennese Stuffed Eggs!

Yo quiero a garden

Heirloom beans!

And also, on the bus today was a kid wearing a black trench coat and bowler hat. And he was reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He is the third person I've seen reading on the bus, ever. The other two are regular AM bus riders: an elderly woman who volunteers at the library and reads a lot of children's literature and a guy who reads a German-English dictionary every morning. I stared at the young man rather directly until he looked at me and gave me the finger. I smiled at him and said "right on." I don't know what possessed me to say "right on." I've already integrated "peace out," "rad," and "bogus" into my vocabulary, but today's "right on" was a first. I don't know how I feel about it.

More drafts of poems up at See it Everywhere.

Sunday

My hamstring is not completely healed, and it is frustrating. I hate it. I hate being injured. I hate the stock market. I hate cars. I hate wall to wall carpet and press board. I hate how yogis say "please be mindful of..." instead of "please don't..." I hate the fact that my hard drive is broken and shouldn't be and how nothing is made to last. I hate the dust that sticks to the screens. I hate my sensitive skin. I hate professionalism and I hate a lack of professionalism. I hate it when Lester bites me. I hate poems about dead pigs that use overly familiar feminized language to describe the dead pigs. I hate asthma. I hate Bank of America. I hate the bus schedule in North County. I hate how my nails break. I hate grading. I hate how some people think that having a specific kind of degree makes you a poet. I hate the average failure rate of students in online classes. I hate working for schools that treat students like customers. I hate how my fingers swell up after I run. I hate how I have a sore right ankle which is somehow connected to my f-ed up left hamstring. I hate how having a sophisticated critique and understanding of power and hierarchies doesn't mean that one has an emotionally sophisticated understanding of how power and hierarchies affect one personally and directly. I hate how people talk about how mellow the lifestyle is here without specifically mentioning anything other than the beach, even if they don't live anywhere near the beach and instead live in Valley Center or Burnt Mountain. I hate how women I don't even know say things to me about my apparently inevitable future family. I hate how the sun causes cancer and salt water causes rashes. I hate the plastic on the beach. I hate the dead seals after red tide, I hate all the crap on the roads: glass, rocks, hoses, rakes, pieces of furniture, blown tires, dead animals, shoes. I hate it when people abuse the carpool lane. I hate the reverse elitism of community college employment practices. I hate it how people throw all sorts of crap into the lagoons like bottles, cans, and plastic bags. I hate dog shit on the side walk and I hate people who are overly paranoid about dog shit. I hate home security systems and also thieves. I hate the fact that my employers never tell us if they're going to serve food at staff meetings but then surprise us with mediocre pizza that we all eat even though we've already eaten lunch. I hate how scratched up my glasses are. I hate putting things away. I hate Sunday afternoons.

Friday Lester

Lester has some very particular likes and dislikes. Dislikes include the sound of crinkling plastic or paper, the rapid opening and closing of doors, and loud sneezes or coughs. Likes include the sound of running water, dried chili peppers of any sort, lime juice, and chewing on dental floss.


Lester's been in a good mood recently. Mark and I have settled into our respective normal Fall schedules, so it's easy for Lester to predict our comings and goings. All three of us typically eat dinner together most evenings; he eats more or less whatever we eat. For the past few evenings, Lester has sung while eating dinner and throwing his food all over the cage--surely a sign of a good mood.

The other evening, I went to yoga, and Mark and Lester hung out at home. Mark put on Peter Brotzmann's Machine Gun album--a rapid, frenetic, and dissonant European avant garde jazz recording from, oh, I think the late 60s. We saw Peter Brotzmann in DC three or four years ago, I think it was at the Black Cat. Anyway, Machine Gun is an awesome album, but not lyrical or relaxing in any traditional sense of those words.

Lester sat all fat and relaxed on his favorite perch for the entire album. He didn't shriek or express any displeasure until Mark got up to go into the kitchen and prepare lunch for the next day. Lester despises lunch preparations, because they involve opening and closing cabinets and the crinkling of plastic.

No one presses their audience appreciation button

during the second verse. They push it during the chorus. Or the guitar solo.

My point is that those CNN graphs are addictive, but not necessarily telling. Everyone goes for generalized, soaring rhetoric about American families sitting around the kitchen table, etc.

My lesson about the grammar of wish statements didn't go very well.

It's not like I chose that topic.

I finished Kora, now I'm reading Spring and All, both of which are good bus reading. My students haven't wanted to talk politics this week, so I'm getting a bit of respite. Not that teaching and talking about US politics during an election year is punishment, quite, but...

Today is laundry day.

I am looking forward to the first "cold" day so that I can wear my sweatshirt that says "expatriate" on it.

Next week, perhaps, we will return to posts with more "serious" "content." I'm working on something for LA Lit and looking forward to the Cal Arts conference at Redcat at the end of the month.

My external hard drive is broken.

My right pinky nail is broken.

My music stand is broken.

WCW--c'est bon for me right now. The preface to Kora is always great, especially the letter from Stevens.

My morning commute to work is especially pleasant now. I ride past the lagoon at about sunrise.

Money is so abstract. All this value.

Magical 777

I am listening to Joan Jett while my next door neighbors are having a party. My go-to "I'm alone" music is usually the Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division, Jefferson Airplane, or Tori Amos. So, today I'm branching out because I need something that rocks and is less moody.

No men appear to be at the party. Large groups of women out on the town (such as it is) or at parties is a common sight here in north county.

On my mind:

I'm exhausted with hating and obsessing about the US government and economy. I often feel like it's got to be some kind of accident that I'm a US citizen. I barely grew up here, and half of my family still lives overseas. I often feel like I'm in the middle of an alien, embarrassing homeland. Reading Leaves of Grass and Spring and All helps. But.

New ESL session starts tomorrow, new class. I'm teaching 8-11:30 instead of 8-1. I'll miss the money, but 5 hours of that kind of teaching every day is too much for me. Preparing vocabulary and conversation questions/topics that will help the class discuss all the recent news.

Starting a new online class, one I've taught before. I'm ambivalent about online classes, but it's better than nothing for students who can't otherwise attend an on the ground class, and I'm getting better at teaching them.

I have no retirement funds since I'm still in the process of paying off dept. Oh, I take it back, I had about $1000, but obviously less than that now. However, other people I know do have substantial retirement accounts, and I hope that today wasn't too catastrophic for them.

It rained today. Hard. With thunder and lightning. This is quite unusual for around here, but perhaps it bodes well for the fire season.

My little sister Allison has been writing a "long, rambling manuscript" that she won't show to anyone. This makes me happy.

I hope the places where I work remain solvent.

There are many grapes that make good wine.

Wilted, slightly revived

This last cycle of teaching was difficult. It's not always fun to be a representative of my country and translator of its politics and culture to my ESL students. I get tired and start imagining that I'm an old Australian man living in the Marquesas, or maybe the captain of a freight ship. I know. Being the captain of a freight ship would probably suck, but never mind, I like port cities.

If I were moderately independently wealthy, today's fantasy involves Croatia. If I were just plain independently wealthy, today's fantasy would be about Barcelona.

And, dear friends, please don't feel the need to caution me with well meaning, paternal advice about recklessly buying international real estate. To be reckless with real estate, I'd have to have the funds to do it. Rest assured, I don't. Maybe I'll buy a fancy perfume sample in my continued quest to find the perfect citrus scent, or a whole watermelon instead of half a watermelon.

Maybe I will reread all of Laura Riding's Progress of Stories, or something from the pile of new books on my desk--I think the one on the top is from Tarpaulin Sky Press. It better be good.
Lookout.

The Lives of Dead Bugs

They thrive on the hoods of cars, for example.

Today's alter ego is split between Jam Master and Achy Le Fevre. Other alter egos include: Little Lord Summerfield, Cakes, and Prudence.

Here is a picture of one of my forefathers, Sir James Graham (1612-1650):

My Sisters are Fortunate

They live in Australia, go to an international school, and have dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States.

Needs

Less working for money more working on writing

More vacation

Fewer injuries

New running shoes

More energy

More time

More watermelon

More focused students

A raise

Fewer flat bicycle tires (less glass on the road)

Fewer hallucinatory dreams

An alternative to wall-to-wall carpet

New ESL texts

Last Day of Summer

At my cousin's wedding in Maine, several of the men wore Nantucket Reds, and the women wore pearls (I brought some pearls with me but didn't end up wearing them). It had been a while since I'd been in a polite, yacht club environment, but I was able to draw on all of my sailing and preppy vocabulary to make conversation. I remember in high school that I vaguely wanted to get some boat shoes, but they were rather expensive, especially for someone who didn't sail very often. But even the people in Maine who don't sail can sail--the coastline and waterscape demand it. So, I took lessons at the Blue Hill Yacht Club for a while in high school, raced a little, and went on sailing trips, etc. But I never became comfortable with sailing with a spinnaker, and I wouldn't feel comfortable now navigating on a long trip, or even a short one now. I've forgotten a lot.

There were several graduates of my high school at the wedding, all friends of my cousin. I knew some of them because I'd taught them swimming lessons at Nichols Day Camp. One confessed to having had a crush on me during camp and said that I should come "party with them" after the reception was over. It seemed good natured enough (his girlfriend was there and thought it was funny), but I was tired, and didn't have the stamina for more alcohol. I admit that, ridiculously, I was feeling old, and felt weird about partying with a bunch of guys wearing Nantucket Reds reminiscing about their days on the sailing team at Dartmouth. And the fireplace in the cabin where Mom and I were staying was quite nice. And it was pouring rain.

Lorraine's International Real Estate Report

All I need is 50,000 USD.

I was supposed to be meditating and focusing on my breath, but when I did that, all that happened was I saw the word "breath" in various fonts

I'm grumpy.

Today during savasana I tried to list all the ways that my life has been/is/was materially affected by the Bush Administration. I can think of numerous ways that other people's lives have been drastically changed. But truly, I can't think of very many ways my life has been affected.

• My job outlook is poor, but it's always been poor. I do well enough somehow anyway.
  
• Now that it's even more difficult for students to get visas to study in the US, more students go to Canada, and so enrollment is lower at the places I teach. However, it hasn't really been lower than usual. I have fewer students from Africa, and more wealthy students from Europe, especially Milan.
  
• Real estate is messed up, but I never owned real estate, and even with prices "low" now, they're still way too expensive.
• The price of gas is still high. I don't really drive much, and have structured my entire work life around not driving whenever possible. Mark and I share a car, which he drives 15 miles to and from work three or four days a week.
  
• I suppose we've taken less road trips than we might have otherwise taken.
• The rising cost of living in DC coupled with increasingly unstable and unpleasant work possibilities would have caused Mark and I to leave DC, even if he hadn't gotten the job at CSUSM. Mark's job at CSUSM and the general growth of this area has a lot to do with suburban development based on 1) the military and 2) real estate. These two things are at least partly responsible for our move to San Diego county.
• 9/11 and post 9/11 Bush policies really enlivened the careers of anyone working in international security, as I was when 9/11 happened. Several people I worked with wrote white papers and press releases and were promoted. A few went to work for the DOD or defense contractors, one went to work for the Millenium Challenge Corporation (which, despite its name, is in fact a government agency). I promptly left my job and got an MA at Georgetown. I didn't do an MFA because Georgetown gave me better funding and Carolyn Forche was more or less gone from George Mason. Aggravatingly, it would have been a better professional choice for me to do an MFA. But who cared about MFAs then?
• The dollar is down. Going to Europe is harder.
• Health Insurance is worse. However, in California, it is still possible to get free birth control, even in a county where Planned Parenthood is always surrounded by anti-abortion protesters.
  

I'm thinking about this list for several reasons. I feel all overwrought about the elections, as I always do. I care about U.S. politics and think it matters who wins, but this feeling isn't personal--it's very abstract and vague, which is part of why it's so aggravating.

I get annoyed with friends who talk about not voting because they can't bear to compromise their moral values, or voting Green (as I used to do when I was a DC resident, since voting in DC is nearly like not voting at all). I rehearse my argument that a Democratic president means Democratic bureaucrats and Democratic interns doing the fact-checking for all the documents and all the research that informs policies, and that this slight difference in perspective is important, regardless of whether or not the actual President is effective.

I think not voting in any election year would be idiotic, and also a sign of just how materially irrelevant a change in administrations actually is for many of us. Maybe if the cost of gas were $9 then voting would seem less about abstract values and feelings and more about basic things like eating and living.

Not that that would be especially good, either.

I don't worry about love or sports, so the only things left at times are politics and students (i.e. work).

Sick of worrying about the elections. Sick of worrying about work, or, rather: bored. Que mas? I'm taking my bike to the shop tomorrow for its 6-month tune up. Y al mismo tiempo I need to think about cleaning my study, as usual. Sorry. No especially exciting thoughts. A student gave me a nice bar of German chocolate, and Mark bought some Oktoberfest beers. Also, I made a green curry--more Indian than Thai (cilantro, mint, jalepenos, baharat seasoning, coconut milk). Editing and getting final responses from people on a forum I'm moderating for Area Sneaks on visual poetry. Working on the cover for Terminal Humming.

Left hamstring is slowly recovering. I still can't do a forward bend like I used to, but I don't need compression when I practice asana now, so that's something.

Without Nuance

Probably many of us who vote aren't significantly affected by the government to have enough of a perspective on the very real differences between a Democratic and a Republican administration. I don't mean that we aren't affected. I mean that we feel like we aren't.

I don't worry so much about the President (though I worry about that plenty) as I do all the low and mid-level bureaucrats who will loose or get jobs based on the next election. I don't want Republicans as heads of the various foreign policy desks at the State Department, for example, and I don't want someone fresh out of an internship with the Heritage foundation to be doing their fact checking, either. Oh for the days when people with PhDs in German literature were on staff at the NSA.

CNN just advertised the next "Larry King Live" with the tagline "Sarah Palin, Up Close."

There's an interview with me online at The Scrambler, as well as a few of my visual pieces, including the one above.

I'm home

And feeling like a zombie.

The oldest daughter of my oldest cousin on my mother's side is getting married

I not really a wedding person, but I'm not not a wedding person. Either way, I'm going to Maine tonight on a redeye. Think of me at 6:30 am on the east coast, when most of you will be asleep. I'll be in Newark trying to get some breakfast and waiting for my flight to Portland. It's been ages since I've been in the Newark airport. Ah, nostalgia.

San Diego to Maine is about the longest trip one can take in the continental US--but Maine can be beautiful this time of year, and I'll see family that I haven't seen in a long time. Maybe 10 years for some of them. I'll post pictures.

And I'm still, yes, still, writing up notes from Vancouver, which will appear here eventually.

xo

Having people over makes me happy

and makes me love our apartment in spite of the wall to wall carpet. Here's what I've made for our 3rd annual Labor Day party:

• Baba Ghanouj
• Skordalia (Greek potato and almond dip/sauce, one of my favorite things ever)
• Hummus with Paprika and Whole Chickpeas (the most fancy hummus I've ever made)
• Egyptian Spiced Carrot Puree (I also love this, mostly for the spice topping part, which is made of toasted ground hazelnuts, coconuts, coriander seeds, and cumin seeds, and other stuff)
• Roasted Red Pepper Involtini (little rolls made out of roasted red peppers filled with a ricotta mixture. These taste good but fall apart)
• Roasted tomatoes with honey and thyme (they are so good! Good on bread, especially with some ricotta)
• Rice Salad with Merguez and Preserved Lemon Dressing (I couldn't actually find any Merguez, so I used some spicy chicken sausage, but it tastes good)
• Three Pea Salad (hurray for peas!)
• Beet Salad with Candied Marcona Almonds (Marconas are addictive even when they're not candied. And I love roasted beets)
• Cheese, fruit, etc

This is a fairly long list, but it really only took me a few hours on Saturday morning (which left plenty of time for hooping and the beach), with some final preparations today before I head off to yoga. I roasted anything that needed to be roasted outside on the grill, so I didn't even have to heat up the house.

Bringing Lester Home

Last Monday, the day after we got back from Vancouver, I took the train down to San Diego to pick up Lester from the vet where he boards. The vet is less than a mile away from San Diego old town as the crow flies, and (as it turns out), a very direct bike route as well.

Waiting at the Carlsbad Village Coaster Station:


Until the train came:


I wasn't the only one reading and writing on the train ride:


At San Diego Old Town Station, where I got off, you can catch the trolley to San Ysidro, and from there walk through the turnstiles and over the border to Tijuana.


It was a short ride from the station to Lester's vet. I picked him up, packed up all his toys, and put him in the travel cage, which fits quite nicely in my bike bag. This was the first time he'd ridden in with me on the bike, but he seemed to like it. He sang most of the time. He did make a nervous contact call once or twice when a large car passed us, but I answered him, and he went back to singing.


We had about 45 minutes to kill before our train came, so we looked around San Diego Old Town. Lester sang to the cheesy Mexican music. Together we attacked a lot of attention. Several people asked me if I'd just bought him (yikes, NO). A schizophrenicaly dressed Australian woman waiting to get on a tour bus with very precise circles of pink rouge on her cheeks asked me if he was "a peach face" and I said no. Parrotlets are kind of like lovebirds, but they are smaller and from south America, not Africa.


Lester admired the adobe construction.


Finally, we got on the train. While waiting for the train a guy named Paul told me about his mother's lovebird, and how the bird is vicious and likes to bite him. An elderly woman with a little poodle told me about how her mother used to befriend coyotes, and how her sister's cockatoo loves her and not her sister, and that this has created a rift between her and her sister, but that she was moving down to Rosarito soon, and would take her sister's cockatoo with her.

Lester sang for most of the train ride. The two guys next to me were on their way to the race track. They asked me if I'd been to the track here and I said no. But I told them about how I used to go to the races in Mexico City with my Dad and a guy from San Diego I called "Uncle Geno." Our bookie's name was Rambo, and I remember that he had bad posture. I am nostalgic about the races in Mexico City, but I don't support horse racing now.


Lester's been very mellow and happy since we all returned home, though I doubt he'll appreciate my absence next week when I go to Maine for my cousin's wedding.

And now I've gotten all abstract.

As a respite from the Democratic convention, which I am of course watching, but watching in a nervous, not-hopeful-about-the-future-but-having-no-alternative way, I'm going to post some thoughts from my notes related to one of the panels on the second day of the Positions Colloquium.

There was a lot I wanted to talk about after the panel on "Alpha Bets: Language Gambles on Land," but didn't. This panel was moderated by Rita Wong. Presenters were Juliana Spahr, Pat O'Riley, Reg Johanson, and Peter Cole. I'm either one quarter or one eighth Comanche on my father's side. My father looks native American, but I don't, really. And getting accurate information about it is impossible--my father doesn't even know the name of his grandfather (my aunt claims it was "Julius Caesar Graham" and that he had over 30 children), and whatever native American heritage I do or don't have came from my father's mother, anyway. My father's distinctly not-white appearance was helpful when he was a hostage at in Baghdad during the Gulf War. He wore an Iraqi soccer team t-shirt (which my brother had, for a while. I wonder where it is?) and wandered around Baghdad without incident, buying food and noting the positions of anti-aircraft weaponry.

I suppose that discussions of race and class always interest me and make me uncomfortable. Really, I am as white and WASPY as can be. Except that I'm not. I'm not-white enough to have official tribal affiliation (which my brother successfully applied for, was going to accept, and then didn't), and I've never been baptized. My mom comes from a family descended from Jamaican, slave-owning creoles (my great-grandmother called the African Americans who worked in the nursing home where she lived "darkies") and my dad is a cracker Comanche who lived and worked on reservations in his 20s. I grew up in South America, the Asia-Pacific, and Maine. I tell people I'm from Washington, DC, but that isn't true. Unless you're a diplomat, many ex-pat communities are usually made of ambitious working-class people who want to get the hell out of their town and country, and who enjoy a standard of living totally impossible for them if they still lived at home. Class is weird among ex-pat communities. It's an old story though. Certain Europeans left Europe for the colonies in order to make their fortunes, or at least to be more economically and social mobile then they could ever be in their home countries.

So, what's my point (which is related to the actual panel discussion, but which has now wandered far from it)? Maybe that I approach conversations about race, class, and language in an overly hopeful way. However, the problem is that everyone needs to spend a lot of time explaining why they have a specific, unique identity (as I just did), and why that specific, unique identity is relevant, has been ignored, or can't really be talked about. Then the conversation moves to one of two places, usually: 1) we want to be more recognized and integrated into mainstream societies or 2) Mainstream societies suck and we don't want to be integrated into them and we should resist integration. Eventually the conversation might end in this way: some integration is inevitable or even desirable. However, we must be wary of it, even when it benefits us(especially then) and resist it simultaneously.

I won't admit to feeling optimistic, but I will officially state that I experienced feelings of joy and a distinct reduction in overall alienation.

I've just returned from Vancouver, more or less, and by the last day of the Positions Colloquium I'd used words like "moving," "inspiring" and "happy."

Vancouver is in the midst of some serious post-factory, rust belt gentrification and, more recently, gentrification brought on in part by all the money pouring into the city for the upcoming 2010 winter Olympics. The thing is, it's still a really fabulous city: the public transportation works. There are sidewalks. Not everyone is white. Not every news anchor has hair dyed blond for marketing purposes. It's a city in which a collective poetic and political organization has been able to exist for more than a decade.

My notes from the panels are some combination of doodles and language. I'll post them as soon as I can get to a scanner. For now, here's most of the language, with some descriptions of doodles.

Wednesday

AM: "On Line: Poetics and the Distribution of Meaning" (Darren Wershler-Henry, Brian Kim Stefans, Judy Radul, and Sianne Ngai). Information always comes from somewhere else, someone else. The desire to impose magic on things that aren't inherently magic. How avant-garde techniques are used in commercials. Facebook status updates as auto surveillance. The meat always comes shambling along after you ( I drew a zombie army, which was easy for me since most of my stick figures already look like the undead). Rapture as sublimity (I think I meant as "sublime." As in computer fantasies of transcending the body). Reinventing the page for myself/ourselves. Font de psychology (in response to Brian Kim Stefans' flash font doodling program and exploding poems). Form as distribution (remember mail art?) Sitting at a computer does have a physicality. How to render this? What's embarrassing about each form of technology is interesting(Judy Radu said that).

PM: "The Clifford Irving Show" (Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy with Guests--I remember that Colin Smith & Lisa Robertson were among them). Feminist barf wears bad shoes. I said I was fake but didn't mean it. Ibiza. No one wants to be the mother but a lot of us need mothering and lesbian tensions in mother-daughter relationships that no one talks about. Chickens RCA Cows RCA Pigs RCA but but but. Customs House. Tariq Alvi.

Lunch/Dinner: chicken and mushroom congee at the Congee House on Broadway. Yum. It was raining. I hadn't eaten congee in years, and this was an incredibly satisfying meal. Lisa Robertson recommended Mosses From an Old Manse.

Evening Readings: (Darren Wershler-Henry, Colin Smith, Brian Kim Stefans, Clint Burnham, Robert Fitterman). People are rent. I drew a picture of a baby in a crib saying "kill the fucker" and wrote a note to myself: "the fuwuyuan on the train from Harbin to Shanghai with the angry, haphazard coral red lipstick and Jamie describing it." I'm not sure what part of the reading made me think of that. I also wrote "suburban ennui" and "surprisingly, I have never watched a full episode of Lost. I also drew a picture of two people leaping on a tightly coiled, dangerous looking mattress.

To be more specific, Darren read from Status Update, a new project he did with Bill Kennedy that's rather meticulous and hilarious.

Colin Smith read from 8x8x7, recently out from Krupskaya Books. I'd heard his name before but didn't know his work--I really liked it. It has an energy, intensity, and torque that reminded me a bit of Kevin Killian, but it also seemed brutal and even a bit personal. I'll certainly be writing about his work more after I get a hold of the book (really, I should have brought more money with me to the conference)!

BKS read some recent (I think) poems with some projections of exploding flash poems behind him--WCW, if I remember correctly. I met BKS once back in New York when I'd just started going to readings. I think it was at double happiness, and maybe Abigail Child was reading. I also remember that I was being a bit shy, and also that I drank my first Boddingtons beer. Anyway, it was good to hear him read, and a reminder to look at his work as I continue to noodle around with coding and some of the visual stuff I've been doing. Plus, he's moving to LA soon.

Clint Burnham read a series of procedural homophonic translations of. What? Walter Benjamin? Somehow that detail isn't in my notes. I love sound-based translation--so often we rely on image or denotation for meaning, but sound is important, too, and a homophonic translation highlights this. Obviously, sounds have texture and mouth feel, as well as connotative and denotative meanings, and these meanings etc are also at least in part cultural. Poems that focus on sound, for me at least, always open up meanings and connections that I wouldn't think of otherwise. Plus, they're fun to listen to and write.

Rob Fitterman read a procedural piece called "Free" made of lines from classifieds. It was funny and rather horrifying--people give away strange things, and other people give other people's things away when people die. What does bacon stretcher look like? Rob also showed a power point presentation in which every slide was a smiling picture of himself. Rob's work continues to examine subjectivity and appropriation in interesting ways.

I still like Vancouver, even though it's raining now

For several reasons, including Asian food and KSW.

I'm getting ready to head off to Vancouver

for the Positions Colloquium hosted by the Kootenay School of Writing. I learned about KSW shortly after I started going to readings: Kevin Davies and Jeff Derksen were among the people that read during my first year in that particular poetry world, and my first reading in Washington, DC was with Nancy Shaw.

Kevin Davies' line, "hand me the Bulgarian umbrella, comrade," from Comp, has always been a favorite of mine.

This was going to be a long post, but it will be a shorter post. I'm so happy to be going to Vancouver and to see so many friends. And to eat a lot of Asian food. And I'm going to draw a lot of doodles and reading responses.

On the Bus

In San Diego county people I don't know frequently tell me details about their personal lives within a minute or two of meeting me. This tends to happen in coffee shops, at bus stops and train stations, and on buses and trains. Probably if I hung out in bars alone it would happen to me there.

It's always been true that marginal people talk to me, especially if I'm traveling alone. In high school and college, there would always be a vaguely lecherous and lonely middle-aged man who would offer to buy me a soda while waiting for the bus/train and want to sit next to me. Now it's usually disenfranchised middle-aged men who want to tell me their problems. Occasionally some twenty or thirty-some guy will come on to me, but the moment I tell them I'm a teacher, they usually become intimidated. It's true I'm pretty and blonde and generally seem younger than I am. But this is California, and the world is full of pretty young women, many with blond hair. It has to be more than my physical appearance that causes these men to talk to me about their personal lives. I know that I don't appear threatening to anyone.

And it isn't just men, it's women, too. Usually, these women are also middle-aged, but they are more likely to be homeless or transient. The young men I meet are not yet homeless, and the middle-aged men usually have some kind of job (often a post-rehab transitional job). Both the men and the women are often on some kind of psychiatric medication (or at least claim to be). But I was talking about the women: the women are usually fighting with their husbands, boyfriends, sons, or all of the above. Often their husbands, boyfriends, and sons are the same young men or older post-rehab men that talk to me.

(Aside: the marginal women who talked to me in DC tended to be a lot more aggressive and hostile. I don't have an analysis of that difference yet, really.)

Both the men and the women frequently look like they've been beat up. Even the ones that look healthy look fragile. In fact, anyone on the sidewalk in North County looks fragile--pedestrians here always look like they're about to fall off the sidewalk and into the street.

For the past two days there's been a guy at the bus stop and on the bus named Bob (or Robert or Bobby) who has been telling me all about his DUI case and how he lost his license and his quest to find a lawyer. Bob grew up in San Clemente in the 70s and moved to Carlsbad about four or five months ago. He says he has family who work in law and lives in down town Carlsbad. That may be true, but if it's true, it doesn't make sense that he's taking the bus to see a lawyer or hanging out at the court house to talk to a public defender. Maybe he's lying. Or maybe his family give him some money to live off of and are happy that he's not homeless. He's got the clean cut 70s look of a man just out of rehab even though I don't think he's just out of rehab: new jordache jeans, new sneakers, and a new aloha-print short sleeve button-down shirt. He carries a rather beat-up legal pad and no pen.

This morning on the bus he asked if he could borrow my pen. The only one I had was my favorite purple one, but I lent it to him but said, "I'll need that back before I get off the bus." After I pulled the cord for my stop, he asked if he could borrow it for the day and I said no, but very nicely. The woman sitting next to him and across from me gave him her pen. She'd been trying to catch my eye the whole bus ride, so this was her opportunity to enter the conversation. She said that it was a good pen, but that the ink was permanent and would mark up a car or a shirt forever. "I broke up with my boyfriend over that pen," she said, and then went on to tell a story about accidentally marking up the leather seats of her boyfriend's car, and how he got angry, and how she didn't want to be with someone who got angry over little things, so she'd broken up with him, that morning, and that the pen was good luck.

Robert was looking for some good luck, so this seemed to make him happy.

I dreamed that I was apprentice to a typesetter.

Together we lived in a huge crumbling mansion across the street from the well-kept mansion of a bishop, or some kind of bishop-like religious figure. He would appear in the early mornings dressed in a red robe and nightcap to collect the papers on his front door.

The typesetter I worked with was potentially a murderer, and the whole building was full of creepy Victorian scientific equipment as well as printing machinery. There was one machine that was like a huge typewriter, but for shapes and flourishes instead of letters. Sometimes a larger version of Lester lived in the house with us, and he looked very very green against the dark gray colors of the print shop.

At one point, the typesetter and I were giving a tour of the shop to someone--perhaps someone who knew that the typesetter was a murderer and was trying to secretly find some evidence. I remember thinking that I would have helped him find the evidence if I knew what it was. At the far corner of the print shop, which was in the huge attic of the mansion, was a door. The typesetter led us through the door and said, "And this is my master suite bedroom." The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with loose type, and there was loose type rolling about on the floors, unfixed. At the back corner were a series of metallic frames that looked like old bed frames, but were also pieces of type, somehow.

Then my alarm went off, and I got up and ate some high fiber high protein cereal with blueberries.

What I'd read before I started going to readings

I went to school in Washington, DC because I wanted to study politics, get out of New England, and because my brief visit to Barnard for accepted freshman freaked me out—I identified most with the butch dykes, but I’m neither butch nor gay, and the girly girls seemed so rich and refined. Undoubtedly it would have been better for my academic future to go to Barnard, but oh well. So, once I eliminated Barnard, GW was the place that gave me the most funding, so that’s where I went.

My BA is in East Asian Studies and Chinese, which means that I spent 6-10 hours a week studying Chinese language and linguistics, and the rest of the 16-21 hours each week studying East Asian history and politics. I also took several semesters of Chinese and Japanese literature, and a graduate seminar on Central Asian history because I was obsessed with Xinjiang. I wrote a historical senior thesis on Yakub Beg. I went to Asia almost every year during college—either to Beijing for the summer to work or to Harbin for a semester to study. I spent one summer in Singapore and Malaysia kind of travelling and building a website for a Singaporean publishing company with offices in an old, barely-renovated building in Chinatown.

I didn’t start going to poetry readings or writing poetry seriously until my last year of college. I was well-read, but not in any standard sense, and I had really no clue about the typical cannons of British and US literature. I’d read Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Rosario Castellanos (my Spanish teacher in Mexico City loved her), all the canonical Chinese and Japanese classical literature, a lot of classical Greek and Roman literature and philosophy, some classical Persian literature, the Koran, Farid ud-Din Attar, Hafiz, Rumi, Sadi, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and Letters to a Young Poet, and I loved Naguib Mahfouz—my favorite was Adrift on the Nile. In high school I was also a big Nikos Kazantzakis and Khalil Gibran fan. My international hippie background is a bit too obvious. I also read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but that was only because all my guy friends in my Islamic literature class were reading Beyond Good and Evil for some other philosophy class.

Because I went through an obsession with all things having to do with King Arthur and Celtic mythology, I’d read anything I could find having to do with that, including several translations of the Mabinogion and the Táin Bó Cúailnge, Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. Other than that, I knew nothing about British literature and history. I was in Mexico City and Guangzhou during my sophomore year of high-school—the year that I would have studied all of that.

By the time I got to GW, my knowledge of U.S. literature was pretty random. I took AP American English, so I’d read many of the classic high school texts. Predictably, maybe, I loved Hemmingway and Poe. I also read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. Beyond that, I read T.S. Eliot’s Selected and Four Quatrains on my own, and a lot of e.e. cummings. I knew the obvious Frost poems. When I entered college, my favorite piece of U.S. literature was Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.

I suppose my point is that I really knew nothing about contemporary US literature when I started going to poetry readings in Washington, DC. I had a strong background in international literatures, comparative religion, and philosophy. After a reading at the Ruthless Grip in Dupont Circle in the fall of 1999, my friend Mike Zito convinced me to come hang out with everyone at the Childe Harold with the soapy tasting pints of Rolling Rock. I didn’t get the literary reference of the name, and I had no idea that I was sitting next to and talking with Carolyn Forché for much of the evening.

And then this morning I woke up thinking,

"they're going to get me. Oh, wait. No they're not."

Then, I toasted some frozen waffles.

I was thinking, very distinctly, "I hate people, real hair, and signage."

Last night I slept feverishly and this morning woke up really angry from a dream I don't remember. I have several thoughts about several things, but most of them are mean.

In my ideal world, we would all have well-read psychotherapists

I'm back from the fun and festivities of LA, sitting here with Lester who is doing some post-shower preening. I thought I'd write my thoughts on the comments to my post below on Ariana Reines' Coeur de Lion here instead of in the comments box.

Emotional nakedness in writing can be incredibly interesting. I’m also intrigued by Q’s comment about manipulation, sincerity, and vulnerability. The writing I love most takes risks—sometimes these risks veer more towards intimate emotional vulnerability and sometimes they’re more formal. The writing I like most often plays with some kind of a tension between these two things, and (again), Bellamy’s work is a good example of that—I’m thinking right now of The Letters of Mina Harker, Cunt Ups, and also her recent collection of essays, Academonia. Her subject matter is a choice, and I’d argue that she’s very much in control of it—it’s neither purely conceptual nor unregulated emotional nakedness. She chooses what to write about, what is edited out (or in), appropriates and changes texts, connects them to her own experiences, etc. I suppose I’m trying to say that her work is both emotionally and formally complex, and I see a lot of similarities between the concerns in her work and, for example, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, or even Charles Bernstein’s poem "Sentences my Father Used." There’s a lot of personal detail and information in both, and all three writers have a deep commitment to understanding personal experience, and questioning how that experience can be and is represented. Nick Piombino is a writer often associated Language poetry and also a practicing psychotherapist. He’s spent much of his life exploring emotion. His book from Green Integer, Theoretical Objects, is one of my favorites.

I’ve also heard the story about someone suggesting that Bellamy see a therapist after reading her writing. In fact, I’m drawn back to that anecdote again and again. The suggestion that she see a therapist was certainly meant as an insult, and whenever I hear people talk about it they also seem to feel like it was an insult. However, in my perfect world, everyone would see a good psychotherapist. Thinking about, understanding and questioning the structures and narratives behind feelings and emotions doesn’t make those feelings and emotions less real or intimate—instead it can create other possibilities for expressing them and connecting to others. That’s probably another characteristic of the writing I’m most interested in: I like writing that investigates structures of emotion and experience with attention to social and cultural contexts. The poems I love most question their own assumptions and make me question mine.

The ways a poem might question its own assumptions and require its audience to question theirs really depends on the context of the poem. Avant-garde writing isn’t about a specific set of aesthetic moves. It’s about a risky investigation of assumptions—and that investigation involves taking risks in both the form and content of the poem.

Here’s a section from “Avant-Garde Deodorant,” an essay that always makes me feel cheerful. You can find in Mark’s book Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose.

“When it comes to deodorant, I’ve always preferred Gillette’s Avant Garde to either Academic Speed Stick or Bureaucratic Sure. But this may just be personal preference.

“However, the question of the forum, ‘What Does It Mean To Be Avant Garde?’ confuses me. Avant Garde is the deodorant I use, but I’m not at all sure how a person can be a deodorant.

“In any case, it sees clear that one uses a deodorant in order NOT TO STINK. After you take a shower, rub it back and forth under your arm, and the world’s your oyster, that is at least if you believe the commercials.

“Of course, the problem of whether or not you stink has a lot to do with other people. After all, for the most part it will be them, not you, who will notice what you smell like. So whether you stink or not is a matter of social mores…”

A risk in a poem is only a risk in context (a social context, a cultural context, a political context, a gendered context, a linguistic context, a psychological context, a historical context…usually some combination of all of the above and more). The term “avant-garde” itself is tangled up in a variety of contexts, and I’m not interested in stabilizing it.

I'm Reading in LA

I'll be responding to comments on the post below tomorrow--thanks everyone for their thoughts. In the meantime, come say hello if you're in the LA area!

-----

Reading with Michelle Detorie, K. Lorraine Graham, Amanda Ackerman, Vanessa Place, and Carribean Fragoza

Saturday, August 2
at Betalevel
(directions to Betalevel below)
Doors open at 7pm; Reading at 7:30pm
Free

~

http://betalevel.com/2008/08/02/reading-2/

~

Ice Age art

Something beautiful …

"You can be sure, that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years."

The figure of the woolly mammoth is tiny, measuring just 3.7 cm long
and weighing a mere 7.5 grams, and displays skillfully detailed
carvings. It is unique in its slim form, pointed tail, powerful legs
and dynamically arched trunk. It is decorated with six short
incisions, and the soles of the pachyderm's feet show a crosshatch
pattern. …

~

Michelle Detorie grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. She currently
lives in Goleta, California where she edits WOMB, an online magazine
for poetries by women, and Hex Presse. She is also a contributing
editor for Little Red Leaves and Narrative Magazine. Michelle is a
2007 National Endowment for the Arts literary fellow. Her poems have
appeared or are forthcoming in How2, Chelsea, Bird Dog, Blackbird,
Verse Daily, The Notre Dame Review, Typo, Dusie, POOL, Pindeldyboz,
DIAGRAM, La Petite Zine, Cranky, Caketrain, The Tiny, The Potomac
Review, FOURSQUARE, Confrontation, The Southern Poetry Review, The
Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel(2007), Poetry East, Letters to the
World, and The Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets.
(http://mdetorie.blogspot.com/

)

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. Ron Her poetry, critical writing,
and visual art has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Jacket, Area
Sneaks, Fold, Magazine Cypress, HOW2 and elsewhere. A limited-edition
CD of her work called Moving Walkways is available Narrowhouse
Recordings. Lorraine has taught poetry and memoir at the Corcoran
College of Art + Design in Washington, DC and at California State
University in San Marcos. She lives in southern California with her
partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet.
(http://terminalhumming.blogspot.com/)

Amanda Ackerman lives in Los Angeles where she writes and teaches. She
is co-editor of the press eohippus labs. She is a member of UNFO (The
Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization) and writes as part of Sam
or Samantha Yams. She is also a member of the event space Betalevel.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in flim forum; String of
Small Machines; The Physical Poets; WOMB; and the Encyclopedia
Project, Volume F-K. With Harold Abramowitz, she is also co-author of
the book Sin is to Celebration, soon to be published by House Press in
the fall. (www.eohippuslabs.com)

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues
Press. She is the author of /Dies: A Sentence/, a 50,000-word,
one-sentence novella, the post-conceptual novel /La Medusa/ (Fiction
Collective 2), a chapbook, /Figure from The Gates of Paradise
/(Woodland Editions/Five Fingers Review) and the forthcoming
/Conceptualisms: An Ill-Conceived Guide to Kinda Conceptual,
Post-Conceptual, Extant and Taxonomical Writings, etc.,/ written with
Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her nonfiction book, /The
Guilt Project: Rape and Morality/, will be published in Fall 2009 by
Other Press. Her collaboration with artist/performer Lamya Regragui
will debut at Cent Quatre in Paris/Los Angeles in 2009, and she is
collaborating with conceptual artist Stephanie Taylor on "Olady," a
visual/sound project. She lives in Los Angeles.
(http://www.lesfiguespress.com
http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2008/07/vanessa-place-round-one_10.html)

~

1. Find yourself in front of "FULL HOUSE RESTAURANT" located at 963
N. Hill Street in Chinatown.
[Map to Full House]
2. Locate the alley on the left hand side of Full House.
3. Walk about 20 feet down the alley (away from the street).
4. Stop.
5. Notice dumpster on your right hand side.
6. Take a right and continue down the alley.
7. Exercise caution so as not trip on the wobbly cement blocks underfoot
8. The entrance to Betalevel is located 10 yards down on left side,
behind a red door, down a black staircase

Some reading notes on Ariana Reines' Coeur de Lion

I like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath's work, but they've never been especially important sources of inspiration/influence for me in terms of my own writing for several reasons. I'm not a Boston Brahman living in the 1950s, and I don't currently face the same degree, or even kinds, of gender and class-based social and aesthetic restrains that they did. I feel trite and mean when I say this, but I don't have to marry or be in love with a rich asshole and then feel abject and bad about it.

True, my family would probably, if I asked them their opinion about it, like me to marry. And like me to marry a nice, upper middle class NPR Democrat engineer or entrepreneur or political science wonk or perhaps a certain specific sort of academic who knows a little bit about music and literature and gourmet food, but it's not like there's any money for them to threaten to cut me off from if I don't, and I don't need the protection of a husband to live without the support of my family, and I can live and work and not starve and do more than not starve on my own.

I just remembered a dinner party that I went to with my brother and sister-in-law at one of their friend's houses in Belmont. I'd not yet learned to navigate parties with confidence and charm, but I'm sure I was some combination of overly energetic, friendly, and strange. I was uncomfortable being around Belmont rich people. I remember very few specific details about the evening. We brought guacamole. Someone was trying to decide between Harvard and Yale for law school. Someone had been on the Atkins diet who got really drunk ate half a pear tart. They were talking about their trips to Europe. I tried to talk about Singapore and Malaysia, but no one had been to either of those places, and I'd only been to England and Ireland and never continental Europe. I kept thinking about Plath and eventually Sexton at McLean, and how Sexton actually kind of wanted to go there and how fucked up it was that being at a mental hospital would seem a preferable alternative to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet outside of one. I remember looking around at the women in the room, most of whom were academics, becoming academics, or married to academics (I guess there were lawyers and business women and men, too) and wondering how many of them were depressed and/or taking psychiatric medications.

I'm thinking about all of this because I've just read Coeur de Lion, by Ariana Reines. And because Plath and Sexton are thus far the only non-contemporary poets to come up in any conversation about Gurlesque that I've read. I have a lot to say about Coeur de Lion. It's good. It's maybe the best book by one of my 20-some and 30-some peers that I've read in two or three years. It's got major energy. It's a super hyper-aware love poem aware of the historical and grammatical constraints and pleasures of lyric. It's perverse.

The poem isn't attempting to represent anything like Suzanne Muzard's idea of reciprocal love: "The idea of love is weak, and its representations lead to errors. To love is to be sure of oneself. I cannot accept nonreciprocal love, and therefore I reject that two lovers might be in contradiction on a topic as serious as love. I do not wish to be free, and there is no sacrifice on my part in this. Love as I conceive it has no barrier to cross, no cause to betray."

Coeur de Lion knows that "you" is always a constructed object, and that the world comes into the poem at you's expense (both in the poem and maybe even out of it). Lyric love traditionally depends on the beloved being a distant jerk and on the poet being alienated and economically disenfranchised--Coeur de Lion knows this though, and tries to push that dynamic as much as possible.

But, but. It did make me think of the dinner party in Belmont. That says more about me, maybe, than the book, but still...

(The poem made me think of a lot of other things, too, including some New Narrative, Bataille, most of French Feminist theory, Kathy Goes to Haiti, Djuna Barnes, and Freud more than Lacan or Zizek because even though Freud is often wrong his theories of subjectivity are so much more physical and bodily than Lacan or Zizek).

Long sentence: ...Something about how the poem chooses in a totally self-aware way to inhabit a traumatic series of neurotic loops that obsess about love and loving a rich, emotionally abusive jerk who is not a very good writer and the abjection and self-hatred that come from this choice, which does, yes, remind me of Sexton's desire to be McLean.

More later.

Whenever I'm teaching too much, which is most of the time, I find it really difficult to maintain the level of energy and focus required to follow comment streams, blog posts, and emails. I want participate and have some kind of conversation that isn't with my (generally great) students, but it feels too much like work, and I get overwhelmed by the details--sometimes posting a comment feels about as exciting as commenting on (for the bazillionth time) a student response to "The Yellow Wallpaper." I love "The Yellow Wallpaper," but if I had any control over the content of the courses I teach, I'd take it off the reading list so that I can enjoy it again.

There's a new issue of Galatea Resurrects out. I'm always impressed by the quantity and variety of the reviews in each issue, and it's one of the first places I look when I'm trying to find a review by a book I've not yet read or an author who is new to me. But looking at the table of contents makes me feel like I have vertigo. It's frustrating.

This tiredness also changes how I experience new work: I'm unlikely to really enjoy or be able to give full attention to anything I read, and I've never really mastered the art of being able to read without full attention.

If you're in the Bay Area

Then check out two events.

1. A screening of "C Red Blue J" in conjunction with the 12th annual Mission Creek music and arts festival Sunday, July 20th, 8 pm, $7. "C Red Blue J" is an experimental documentary feature that uses the director Christopher Sollars' family to illustrate the complications of division during the 2004 Presidential election.

I went to high school with Chris Sollars and his sister, Jen Sollars and, at the time, knew them well. Chris is an artist in San Francisco and Jen works for the Environmental Protection Agency, I believe (I haven't seen her since I ran into her, randomly, on the roof top pool of the apartment I was living in in DC several years ago now). I've not seen the flim, and I don't know Chris' recent work well, but when I knew him he was talented. He's one of two people from my college and pre-college years that was interested in art and actually became an artist (the other is Matthue Roth, who I've blogged about before). So, if you're around, go check it out.

2. The Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics (BARGE) presents BURIED TREASURE ISLAND, a multi-platform investigation of Treasure Island, currently on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. For those out-of-towners who can't visit the installation, there is a guidebook, audio tour, and other elements online (website - nonsite?). The audio podcast might not yet be fully up & running, but you can download the guidebook & see some images at: http://www.davidbuuck.com/barge/bti/index.html

Lester Attempts to Communicate with Hawks

The juvenile hawks continue to hang out in our apartment complex, calling, and crashing through the acacia trees outside our windows. Yesterday, Mark saw two of them playing with each other on the ground. Apparently that is pretty normal behavior; siblings will stay together and with their parents for up to two months until they can hunt and fend for themselves. On the ground, they practice hunting insects and inanimate objects. Yesterday I saw one of the hawks flying with what I'm pretty sure was just a stick. It was practicing, no doubt, for an actual hunt.

There have been almost no other bird sounds around here for the past week except for hummingbirds, who seem fearless. Even the jays and crows have been quiet. Thus far, the hawks haven't bothered the nest of finches next door. However, this morning I can hear finches calling to their fledglings. Or maybe calling to encourage their young to fledge--but they're not the finches next door. The call of a male house finch is one of the most nervous-sounding bird calls I know.

Lester always enjoys the extra bird activity, and he's been trying to communicate with the hawks. He doesn't know what a hawk is, or that the hawk would enjoy eating him, but he knows that there are a lot of birds calling right outside the window. The other birds Lester has known have been friendly, for the most part--all parrots and finches of various sorts, and generally very talkative. The hawks don't respond to Lester, though, they just keep calling their calls, regardless of what sound he tries.

Like many parrots, though, Lester is a focused and determined bird. Last night he made a sound that resembled the hawk call, which means he's putting a significant amount of effort into trying to communicate with them.

Notes for a review on Danielle Pafunda's My Zorba

It's very tempting to get all Lacanian.

... (I just went to put the clothes in the dryer, and now I've lost my train of thought)...

But I won't get all Lacanian. Nor will I use the word subjectivity too much, but I will use it.

I should probably say "sex" somewhere in the review.

Probably I will also say "fracture" or "fractured," but I'd like to think of a better word.

Also, I will talk about puns and sound.

I like Plath and Sexton well enough, but....

I'm feeling more or less human again. In other words I am eating.

I've been enjoying sending and receiving emails. It's not as satisfying as sending and receiving something in the mail, but still. Some human social connection is better than none.

I do wish that I could get a few thoughts in response to my post "I like the Grotesque..." about the writers important to some of the women whose work has been called Gurlesque. Who? Who other than Plath and Sexton?

Food Poisoning = Not Fun

Or maybe it was a weird allergic reaction. Either way, yuck. I feel like I've been turned inside out and beat up.

Visitors from the East

Dan and Mike are visiting from the East, so for the moment I'm not writing any substantive blog posts. However, I will note:

1) There are three juvenile hawks in the area. After listening to them for several days, Mark and I at last saw all three of them a few days ago. They hang out on the roof of the building next door. I wonder if they are the offspring of the pair of hawks who nested here in the early spring...

2) I went to a hoop class and dance jam last night and learned some more arm moves.

There are several juvenile/fledgling coopers hawks (I think, but maybe red tailed?) in the trees outside my window. I only catch glimpses of them, but I can hear them. Raptors are usually quiet--that's one reason why they're so dangerous to other birds--so it's quite strange and wonderful, really, to be listening to morning hawk song.

My butt is like, so not big, but whatever.

I've been following the discussion about gurlesque and valley girls at Johannes Göransson's blog with extra interest, because here in north county San Diego I live closer to the origin of valley girls than I ever have. I kind of enjoy being mistaken for just another blonde local. People have been asking me if I'm from California my whole life.

Ironically reclaiming / using the valley girl stereotype in poetry could be interesting, but it also could be boring--I suppose for me it depends on how the poem does that and if it has any insight into the stereotypes it's performing. I suppose I'll have to read Minnis' book now.

In the mid 90s in Washington, DC, "baby got back " was something that men would say to me on the street, usually something like "Aw, yeahhh, baby got back" when I was walking home from a club early in the morning. Obviously it was unpleasant, but since I was (and still am) a very white girl who knew pretty much nothing about hip-hop, I figured it was a comment on my butt, but beyond that I didn't get it.

What a total idiot I was to be wandering around DC in club gear early in the morning.

Anyway, today, I realized that "baby got back" is a reference to a hip-hop song from the early 90s called, duh, "Baby Got Back." You've all heard it. The song begins with two valley girls talking, in valley-girl speak, about the size of a girl's butt and how her but makes her look black.

I like the grotesque. Going back to the moment of horror again and again is soothing.

This is a great generalization, but I'm going to say it, nonetheless: the grotesque is a consistent feature of the avant-garde. It was, maybe, less prevalent in Language Poetry, but it's certainly present in New Narrative. To use an expression I despise: the grotesque is a part of the standard avant-garde tool kit (the tool kit part is what I despise).

I have New Narrative and the Gurlesque on my mind, so it's not surprising that I'd want to connect these two discourses--although I suppose Ron already did that in his post by attempting to contextualize Minnis' work through writers like Dodie Bellamy.

Bakthin & Bataille aside, I'd be interested in hearing more about the writers and artists that inspire writers like Lara Glenum, Chelsea Minnis, Danielle Parfunda--writers whose work has been called Gurlesque. No doubt that the cultural context of the 1970s and 80s is relevant, but the specific context of each generation is inevitably important for that generation. I suppose what I'm wondering is how they might situate themselves in the historical continuum of the avant-garde. That sounds really pompous--but I feel like I can always understand more about a person's writing and certainly their descriptions of their writing by learning who/what they're writing among and against.

In the interview about the Gurlesque on Delirious Hem, Arielle Greenberg says that "in some ways, the Gurlesque poets are harkening back to Plath and Sexton in this, while rejecting—though nodding to—the work of someone like Sharon Olds[12], whose work is most in line with what I think we want to mean when we use the term “Confessional.”

So, we've got Plath and Sexton. Who else? I know what writers and artists I'd put on a list writers and artists interested in the grotesque and gender (and honestly, confessionalism doesn't immediately come to mind for me), but I'm curious who else they might include.

Still thinking about Bad Girls, and also Gurlesque

I was looking at a dialogue that Jessica Smith and I did for an forum on poetry and women's embodiment in the second issue of Traffic (2006-2007)--it occurs to me that we were talking about some issues relative to good girls and bad girls in art, and what to do with the cultural pressures we've grown up with. I'm still thinking about Silliman's post on Chelsea Minnis and also the forum on the Gurlesque up at Delirious Hem.

JS: “…[I]t’s not all bad—the fractured, fragmented, nervous sounds of sexual violence performing itself on and off the page—it can also be that culture/class specific impositions (‘a good girl must do x’) can bring interesting otherness to the table. Of course, ‘interesting otherness’ can come from all directions, but I want to celebrate rather than hide at least one of these odd, culturally enforced ‘instincts’: the pressure on women not to ‘make it new’ (faster cars! smaller computer chips! bigger bombs!) but to ‘make it pretty.’

“(A hastily sketched aside: ‘make it pretty’ as a response to—a backlash against?—the postmodern art of the last quarter century that celebrates the ugly and grotesque. A move toward the embellished, decorated, made beautiful, as you put it, ‘not clear…what is artifice and what is authentic.’)”

KLG: “…I’m usually torn between wanting to celebrate my interesting, culturally enforced otherness and wanting to reject/question it. So, while I read about Martha Graham and her versions of Greek heroines, I’m attracted to Merce Cunningham’s rigid and ‘unnatural’ movements and the cultural critiques they imply. Perhaps, like you, I want to explore what is, as you say, ‘embellished, decorated, made beautiful.’ But I admit to still being focused on the perverse and grotesque.

I'm thinking about this part of our dialogue (which was quite long, and covered a lot of ground in addition to what I've quoted) relative to some of what Ariellle Greenberg says on Delirious Hem about the Gurlesque in poetry, and how it has something to do with being "unabashedly girly, to talk about things like ponies and sequins, while also trying to be fierce, carnal, funny, political, irreverent…all these things at once."

A few things strike me: embellishment is a way of being unabashedly girly. The frames of reference that Greenberg mentions on Delirious Hem are mostly pop culture ones--popular Feminism of the 1970s and the pop culture of the 1970s. But she also mentions the carnavalesque as being a common element in a Gurlesque poem--which makes me think Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes and, before them the gender-bending and exoticism of Decadence.

I'm not sure what to say about narrative.

And camp has to be important, too.

I haven't been injured since high school

Advice

If you want to be a virgin, you need to die before somebody screws you.

Shame and so on

Mark and I were talking about shame and badgirldom (badgirlness? being a bad girl? writing bad girl poems?) last night, prompted, yes, by Silliman's post and the footnote in his post:

"Schneeman was never a “bad girl” that I can tell since she has always lacked the one thing that binds all the bad ones together – a sense of shame, some concept of all this being somehow dirty. Hers truly is a sex-positive position, with no sense of what Sianne Ngai calls Ugly Feelings. It’s interesting to contrast how Acker relies on this framework of social (and self-) condemnation whereas a later writer, such as Dodie Bellamy, is far more playful with these borders, able to evoke & examine but not be ruled by them."

Being a "bad girl" does require that there are very real social and cultural forces at work that 1) try to prevent you from asserting your subjectivity in the way that you want and 2) condemn subjectivities that they don't approve of but which are asserted anyway. You can't be a bad girl unless someone with more power than you points at you and says that you are bad.

If no one is there to tell you that you've done something wrong, then there's really no point in being a bad girl. This is one of the reasons why I like reading Acker and Mina Loy but could never get into Sex and the City--it was boring. I'm not that interested in free-spirited wildness and sex in the interest of finding The One and having a great career and looking professionally cute and stylish.

I'm not sure how to connect this all to bad girls in writing, or bad girl writing, or bad girl personas in writing.

Abjection and negativity must be a part of this, too.

Shame is one of those cultural narratives--whatever form we make it in--that we all rely on to make sense of abjection.

Abjection and negativity (which I love love love) are pretty standard avant-garde fare, no?

It's probably the "girl" part of the "bad girl" that interests me most. At least in terms of the term.

Bad Girls

Ron Silliman's recent post on Chelsea Minnis reminded me that I have a whole finished but unedited manuscript that's a vaguely procedural rendering writing through/of/with the Be a Bad Girl journal by Cameron Tuttle.

I'll have more thoughts about bad girls etc in about a week, well after blogland has grown bored with the discussion, I'm sure, if they haven't already.

Music Recommendations Please

This afternoon I successfully secured the birthday ipod to my ponytails and hooped on the beach--mostly to Natacha Atlas and the Psychadelic Furs.

So, if you were into hooping, what kinds of music would you hoop to?

Or, even if you're not into hooping, what kinds of music do you think I'd like to hoop to?

I suspect that a substantial amount of music that works for tribal belly dance music would be great. I like the sound and groove of a lot of the reggaeton I've heard, but I can't stomach a lot of the lyrics. Anyone know enough about dancehall to make suggestions?

Friday Lester

On the hoola hoop.

Grumpy and Less Grumpy

My ESL class has 17 students--half of them are 15 or 16 year old Italians from Milan, and the other half are students in their 20s and early 30s. The younger students are basically here on vacation, and the older students are here to study. The class dynamic is not pleasant. My younger students are intelligent and reasonably well behaved, but there are many reasons why I do not wish to teach high school, ever. I'm feeling very grumpy about it.

Speaking of grumpiness and teaching, I had a job experience (that is to say, not getting one) last week that made me rethink getting an MFA. I won't rant about it too much, but come on: I have an MA, teaching experience (in creative writing and literature), a solid publication record, and a forthcoming book. That's a lot more than a lot of post MFAs have.

Less grumpy news: Mark and I booked our tickets to Vancouver for the Positions Colloquium in August. I'm not reading or presenting, but Mark is, and the list of invites includes many friends as well as people I've never met whose work I admire. And Vancouver is great--it's true that I've never been in the Pacific Northwest in the real winter, but I admit I'm quite smitten with all the cities I've been to in that region, Vancouver most of all.

Monday Yay

The summer students are hyper. And younger. And richer.

The weather is warm. But cooler.

Lester is molting a bit.

I have a big bruise on my right leg. It is mysterious.

Started reading Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry, which came up several times in discussion at the Press conference.

Addicted

It's hot here, for once, and the water is warm.

Friday Lester

He's just so charismatic and photogenic!

I put my yoga pants

on backwards