w er d en fi e ld

2006-01-23T11:36:00.000-08:00

President vows to ‘Change Evil Ways’
MANHATTAN, Kan.(AP) 1/23/06 11:12AM

At his morning press briefing, President Bush wowed and stunned the press corps with a powerful and soaring rendition of his promise to change his “evil ways”.

Recognizing his lack of popular support at home and abroad, Bush made an impassioned and densely polyrhythmic plea for the American public to take him back, despite his public "foolin' around", declaring he understood the public's desire to "find somebody who wont' always act like a clown".

After an uncharacteristically visibly excited Scott McClellan announced President Bush’s unscripted appearance on the Air Force One morning press conference, the press secretary retreated to the back of the stage, where he set up a quiet, unhurried, funky mouth-bassline over which the President intoned with a coiling, streetwise baritone:

I've got to change my evil ways, baby, before you stop lovin' me.

I've got to change, baby, and every word that I say is true.

Both McClellan and the President swung into a bouncy syncopated vibe for the bridge and chorus, declaring:

I got troops runnin' and hidin' all over town,

I got snoops sneakin' and a-peepin' and runnin' you down.
This can't go on, Lord knows I got to change, baby.

Returning to the opening rhythm, Bush continued over the flawless mouth bass and commanding air hand drumline being laid out by McClellan:

When I come home, baby, the White House is dark and my polls are cold.

I'm hangin' round, baby, with Dick and Don and-a who knows who.

You're gettin' tired of waitin' and my foolin' around,

You'll find somebody who won't always act like a clown.

This can't go on, Lord knows I got to change, baby.

With a quick series of “Yeah yeah yeahs” President Bush, nodding at McClellan, launched into a dazzling, completely silent and pyrotechnic air guitar solo, as the press secretary moved his fingers frantically up and down an imaginary keyboard. The speech ended with the President on his knees and an ecstatic McClellan throwing his hands into the air in triumph, brandishing unseen drumsticks.

While later quietly admitting that the music was “a little heavier” than the President's favorite fair, McClellen, wiping sweat from his brow, claimed President Bush had been inspired when he came across the song on his Ipod while dirtbiking at his ranch over the holidays:"The President was immediately struck by its relevance to his own plight as the increasingly embattled ‘leader of the free world’" McClellan added, throwing his arms around the shoulders of two adoring, giggling female reporters and heading off-stage.

did anyone watch these two?

2006-01-12T11:03:00.000-08:00

After watching 360 minutes of these boys lives, what to say? If you missed the show, its available online (but right now Frontline's site is down, and this show is clearly (gotta be) why), and here's a blurb:

Filmed over three years (1999-2002), "Country Boys" tracks the dramatic stories of Chris and Cody from ages 15 to 18. With the same intimate cinematic technique and sound design that distinguished "The Farmer's Wife," David Sutherland's new film bears witness to the two boys' struggles to overcome the poverty and family dysfunction of their childhoods in a quest for a brighter future. This film also offers unexpected insights into a forgotten corner of rural America {Floyd County in eastern Kentucky] that is at once isolated and connected, a landscape dotted with roughshod trailer homes and wired with DSL.

I am mostly interested if you have watched it, or part. I have a lot of thoughts around it, and not simply testifying to its power, but also the more problematic side of Sutherland's "portraiture" and the social impact and cost of such a stance. It was a very complex project, and yet I feel that the documentary, as-aired, entirely erased that complexity in favor of an eventually wearying/naive insistence on letting its subjects speak/be seen as if there was no camera. And I was enamored of these two, deeply, I just became troubled after awhile by the fly-on-the-wall angle, and wondered, as I often do with, say, war photography, how we, as artists and audiences, repsond to and consider the alleged "neutrality" (i.e. naturalization, invisibility) and "observer status" of the artist.

Like, simply, did Sutherland talk to these kids? Get at all involved? AND did he think-through the effect his presence would have on them, their lives, the footage he culled? I am sure he did, but none of that was shown. There were fascinating moments when I could discern the bit players conscious of themselves as actors for a far larger stage, and of course, the voice-overs, and I wonder about this shift... the very creepiness of voyeurism...

Plus, this film is a fascinating and utterly ripe expose of its other subjects: small-town America, Appalachia, boyhood, the role of parents: esp. the role of (absent or inadequent) fathers, the welfare system, popular Christian culture, NASCAR America, what the hell high school education means, class consciousness, conservative ideology of the free will/liberal focus on social conditions - played out up close and personal.

start the day by answering email

2006-01-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

crissy, i must have known this email was coming, as i looked up the hill this morning and thought of going over for lunch. i certainly will. best lunch around, no?

i am still here, and there are stretches where that is okay and others where it is not. it takes the same focus and dedication and courage you talk about to do a job search - i have been holding back. but this is still the wrong fit job, and there is a ceiling on what i can learn and do here. urgh... must marshall forces...

glad to hear whats up with you - did i give you my "real" email? - sarahandkyle@earthlink.net, lets move this conversation over there. and follow your passions! follow your passions!, right? its my wish too, although the wish to "play it safe, stay low, take it easy" mostly dominates. we can do that too, it just doesnt make for a tasty life - a sort of suburbia of the mind. and curse that dumb eagles song.

i am in one of those "lots of ideas, little actual work" phases right now. but i am very happy to report that i have no pronounced seasonal/post-holiday depression hole. which makes for a lovely change, thanks to all the work i've been doing, and to the universe.

we went snowshoeing last wknd, but i cant say i envy your winter (whenever it gets there)- snow looks best in hills and mtns (though snowing looks wonderful anywhere). and maybe snow looks best when you drive away at the end too (although in Boulder, i loved how it would dump - and then melt completely the next day). in SF, the cherries have started to bloom (!). so freaking soon? i give you that with the complete overhaul of the ecology/flora out here, the seasons can make perilously little sense within city limits.

tasos just emailed me to inspect and possibly file some drawings, making that my sole work task for the day. and yet i wanted to complain! oh, little child, we may be getting a tad spoiled.

i think in the right setting, any of the plants you talk of would be powerful experiences for you. but i have no personal experience with any of them. ayahuasca can be life-altering, from those around me who have taken it - but the homeopathic route, thats intriguing, a slow, gentle course instead of a 1 day cram-for-finals cosmic blitz. i could see that as a good fit for you.

san pedro is generally described as a close but milder relative of mescaline. its rumored to taste horrible. you eat the flesh. which makes it easy to control dose, once you know how strong your plant is. lets say you do "see someone's illness" - vividly, say - what do you do with the knowledge? these are warrior plants.

i wonder about someone in new england taking tropic plants though - there are many indigineous mushrooms in NE that could be hunted, picked fresh and wild, and brewed as tea which might have more to say to someone of your clime (and more holistic of an adventure too). i fit in this city as rosemary is cultivated all over the place, perfect for me and my headaches.
(how could ayahuasca be made into a homeopath pill though - the drug is a brew, from many sources, not just one plant?)

anyway, i support you in whatever path involving plants you step out on. if you do take the one-day intensive route, a little structure (like a question and a friend/guide) will help ground it.
the leaf i had smoked/drank as tea is called Calea Zacatechichi, "the dream herb" (practically a registered head-shop trademark). do a search for it online and a thousand sites selling it will pop up.

its basically an i ching type event, where you spend some time beforehand formulating and considering some question/active edge in your life, drink and smoke the herb (which, unlike the plants you mentioned, is very mild, somewhere between sleepytime tea and a wee puff of weed) and then go to bed, question in mind. then (perchance) the dream.

the herb smokes well, but the tea is exceptionally bitter, like drinking aspirin. but i never felt sick. i just looked online at "experiences" people posted about it, and its sad, they're almost all from druggies who stumble through it as spectators, passive, without intention, ritual, thought, questions - just brew it up and kick back and wait for the psychic tv. no wonder most of them are disappointed. the dream you mention was one of the best dreams of my life. a teaching that still applies.

okay, love to you, so good to hear from you, i have had fun writing back, more soon, no? i miss our lunches. its grown quiet here, somewhat cobwebby. perhaps i'll go inspect those drawings, and then read from the book of poems (Charles Olson, an MA native - wrote obessively of Gloucester, born but in Worcester) and start a review I promised to a friend/editor. I just added these last lines because it was too horrible to end with the tombstone of "go inspect those drawings". i am not going to peacably inabit these death-realms.

love,

k

the sonic liberations of plunderophonics

2006-01-09T14:59:00.000-08:00

"If creativity is a field, copyright is the fence" – John Oswald (or, for the brave, John Oswald).

And the wonderful word plexure.

plexure: n. 1 The act or process of weaving
together -[Webster's 3rd]

I first read plexure as a diabolical portmanteau of pleasure + flex. And if anyone can help me understand why I read vinyl into flex (not cuz its bendy), beside maybe the old Dischord comp Flex Your Head, I’m thankful.

If you don’t know John Oswald’s early plunderphonic work (c1989), trek here. A full CD’s worth of assault and tweakery is downloadable in 2 large files (in gray, near the top). Bear in mind that this is his music 16 years ago, when the digital revolution was still years away from the type of sound-shaping and shifting advances that let a laptop become a complete soundstudio. The work appears to have been done through the painstaking manipulation of magnetic tape on a mixer. And probably requires a couple listenings to sink in (to destroy also being a creative act).

sound as property
sound as brand
sound as (re)source
sound as material
sound as food
“pop will eat itself”
cut its avant head off and get: the Gray Album.

Creativity as a matter of channel-surfing. Respecting that there is a wave (the surfer rides out waves – chooses among them for the One (finding many). Our culture provides a mindscape, through which we move. The question is to how?

Samples from Plexure (1993).
A synopsis of that project: an "megaplundermorphonemiclonic" “encyclopaedic popologue” covering 10 years (83-93) in pop music history that “plunders over a thousand pop stars” “It starts with rapmillisylables and progresses through the material according to tempo.” Thus becoming also a study of the relation of tempo to genre (there’s a moment when the metal is briefly cut by bluegrass – two very distinct mythologies of speed).

When I heard this as a teenager, it blew that same mid out the bedroom window. If it sounds more familiar, if I now have a sense as to the how of this work, and a better understanding of the where it works in and from, it does in one way become less of a visceral mindfuck. But knowing what goes into it, and what this type of work entails (incl. reams of Michael Jackson lawyers ordering you to “destroy all copies” and your family and neighbors shaking their heads year after year) it becomes more radical, more courageous, more plain old eccentric cum visionary. It tears the fence off the field – free-range as any organic label or cowboy legend can be.

Welcome to our new year. So lets hear it for electromegamadmonics. And what does it look like in words?

graine, redux, woolf, this prose

2005-12-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

DISCLAMING: My tendency is to take work like this and file it away in a drawer. I pretend I do this out of compassion for possible readers. But come now, I do it because I do not want to be seen in this light. I want to choose my appearances carefully. And I am not an especially privileged or insightful judge of my work’s use to you. So here it is (actually yesterday’s too), I trust you can skim and skip as good as I can. But here’s what I am noting as I review this: that it becomes repressive, that it smothers, and that its brilliance lends itself not to enlivening, but to… what? I can’t label it, and I don’t want to pooh-pooh it further. The essay is a form whose impersonality can be demonic or daemonic, and lordy lord, if this one doesn’t slip – for me – between the two, although it opens up vital territory in its own particular way (why so loathe to admit it? – because its hurt repeatedly?). How that part which desires to make sense can itself easily, ever so easily, seductively become monster. One of the worst. To make sense of surroundings - not to experience the always-already existent sense. A hard day's work? - not working, not inventing cycles of work/rest.

What was it like to write it? Slightly uncomfortable, a hungry focus pushing on, circling back. The motions, in the end, tiring, dissociative. Its abstraction gutting my, and this, frame – it stalks it subject, and sails away from it, but enacts the very process it critiques : its distance a bridge to compassion or JUST MAYBE anything I write in this space (at work) is rabidly, violently insane, i.e. a work generated of unresolved tensions and conflicts. How to hold and articulate those then? This morning’s attempt… take it as further madness, like most madness, a raving will to live, a trapping to be free...

(Now those words felt sane)

graine, woolf

and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to want variety in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy loved anybody else, furious! For he was jealous, uncontrollably jealous by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where was his knife; his watch; his seals, his notecase, and Clarissa’s letter which he would not read again but liked to think of, and Daisy’s photograph? And now for dinner.
- Mrs.Dalloway

There are moments in the day that I have come to think of as abandonments. I owe this term to Teresa Sparks, who related it to the writer’s habit of working on a piece, building it up with an intensity which spoke of passion and commitment, only to suddenly and irrevocably sever that intensity mid-plateau, and park the frustrated fucker in the “drawer” cum hard drive.

The problem is that there is no cumming hard here – it’s a frustrating coitus interruptus, or really, coitus abandicus (Mword wonders if I meant to spell "bandicoots" here). Just when it starts to heat up, when the territory is exciting and powerful, when we start to get a little disheveled, in the moment, a little strange to ourselves (itself a familiar, slant feeling) then, the break, the back off, the smother. Its no coincidence that these moments are exactly when our life-limiting habits are simultaneously coursing strongly and in a relatively unguarded, openly visible state. What is it that shuts this door as quickly as it opens – that turns, in a sentence of consciousness, from fury and torture, to seals, a letter not to be read “but liked”, and off to dinner? And where, in what shape, does the echo of this frustration – this interruption, driven (consciously) underground – persist, dwell, in our bodies?

Its this habit, this move to close what is clearly a powerful subterranean well, a psychic geyser of repressed energy (if, like Woolf’s Peter Walsh, we find the strength of our own emotions unsettling, foreign, awkward, something to avoid and to later try to clean-up/explain) which renders our own emotions Other, and relegates them to shadow, to subjugation and censure and avoidance. It’s a move, a quick snap of the switch of mental attention, denying audience to some powerful upsurge, but why?

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires
- Guy Debord

Walsh turns to toys, knick-knacks, sentiment, and the routine regularity of set mealtimes. This seems so familiar, this turning, this abandonment of his own greatest energies – at the very moment they present themselves. Familiar from daily encounters, from my own stream-of-consciousness, and from myriad cultural representations once the emotional intensity becomes coded as abnormal, malfunction, breakdown. Politically, the “eruption” of scandal – whether name-brand (DeLay, Abu Ghraib, Lewinsky, the latest celebrity divorce) or generic anonymous is handled in the same way: a defense team assembles about the “accused” and struggles mightily to stomp-out the accusations of rage, greed, lust, etc. An admission of guilt is seen as both humiliating and likely end to a career – the notable exceptions appearing almost as “miraculous” comeback kids.

This defense team is the very mechanism of psychic repression – if we took it back to Lacan, we would be talking about the Symbolic realm, the order of the Father. It is this defensive, goal-minded, career-egoistic behavior that the emotions threaten; they threaten its static stability, its fixed identities, its narratives of progress.

While we talk about a nervous breakdown, its not the nerves or emotions which “breakdown” (rather, they spring to dizzying life), but rather the subject’s transparency and fluidity in the discursive realms and roles demanded of adulthood – job function, citizen function, consumer function. And, heart-breakingly, these functions have become so demanding, so central and normative to symbolic narratives of identity, that when a friend, family member, or lover is in such a place, we often experience this what? - frustration, impatience, stagnation/confounding which often results in our repeated attempts to catalyze (i.e. fix, either directly or via distraction) “the problem” – as it becomes – or to abandon it (and therefore, abandon our intimate (and our own intimacy too) and return to the familiar, predictable workings of the Symbolic.

To go to Dinner, or return to work. These are – from the Symbolic opinion – reassuring, normal, orderly events to be relished when compared to the odd strength and dark uncertainty of intrusive, demanding emotions which know no timetable, have no clear guide or intent, can’t even be properly traced back in time to some specific cause. If we – immersed in the net of the Symbolic - do dally with them, much of the dalliance is generated from friction, a Symbolic resistance – to allow in, to listen to and accommodate the different, but undeniably powerful and real logic of the emotions. Hence much advice, the offering of strategies to get over/get on with it, offered medicinally – as curatives – in the same fashion as a doctor’s prescription for an upset stomach, or splint for a broken bone. The sense is there is something wrong, and it needs to be righted. And that it’s the doctor – or his pills – which will do the righting. The wrong dwells, inarticulate, helpless, in the body, asking for deliverance. Which arrives from outside – from the Symbolic. But is a broken heart equivalent to a broken shin, and can rage respond well to tablets of Tums?

Too abstract? I am not trying to state that we are all bad people who abandon their friends and repress their own emotional vitality and spontaneity, but I would be surprised if most of us did not experience some difficulty, often profound, when confronting a friend, lover, parent, child – and esp. ourself – in distress. Even laughing too loud, having too much fun, joyful wildness, is disruptive. How many movies bear one of these scenes where one guest’s incivility (manners being the Symbolic policing of affect) disrupts the dinner table?

The link between Modernism, Marxism and Psychoanalytic thought (and for many, from Benjamin on, various Mysticisms) has opened a wide vein of study of this tendency in the arts and literature. Surrealism comes to mind, and at an even rawer, ruder level, much Dada. Perhaps it’s the book I’m reading, but women seem often to be adepts at this work – or is it just I recognize it more clearly when it is Other? Not just Woolf, but Maya Deren, Djuna Barnes, and today, writers such as Renee Gladman,Bhanu Kapil, Summer Rodman and Teresa Sparks explore this rich, unsettling vein with remarkable veracity and fluidity, if not with untroubled ease. Rather, if this trouble, as always, is liquid, then they have learned to swim, passing the barrier of frustration/repression and diving down to this unconsciousness, to the realm of desires and aversions. Although not always surfacing again – Deren may have grown lost in Voudon, and Woolf fell prey to her despair, literally enacting the “drowning” sensation of one buried and oppressed by the heaviness of feeling.

Duncan comes to mind too – and even straight white post-avants can dip their toe in – the logic of Sean MacInnes work is a definite probing of emotional terrain, digging through sentimental encrustrations to contact less predictable moments of resonant lucidity. But the closer one stands to the Symbolic power nodes, the better one is at that game, and the harder, the less accessible such “radical” explorations, such “threatening” openings, seem. A mansion is a far greater investment than a one-bedroom apartment, or a cell. Its defenses are accordingly far more involved and elaborate.

I’m very excited about this thought-string. And I am equally saddened by its abstraction, its distancing, its predilection towards utilizing Symbolic means to critique the Symbolic. Whats the old situationist slogan - “One cannot end alienation with alienated means”? Then there’s:

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth
– Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution Of Everyday Life"

And not just because I want to wind it back now, to the subject of migraines, to the brainstem, to explore – and offer testimony – of how it might dwell in the body once denied conscious audience, how, like a scorned child, unable to speak to the parents and share its needs and experience, it sulks and tantrums and rots instead up and down the neck, in the back of the head, along the shoulder, in the pit of the eye. Except I am not – instead this piece tracks my motion away from this initial desire, is its betrayal, its abandonment. The circle closes not to bring revelation, but an annulling completion, a FINIS in which further participation is … I want to say an impossibility, but I don’t know – I’ve grown tired of writing this, the logic is unsustainable, falters, gives no further life, only questions about just how much its progress so far has enabled, and to what extent its been a further distraction, a new repress.

all graine-y

2005-12-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

today i am feeling very well.

yesterday's post was written about an hour into a migraine. its fairly typical of the terrain an hour in. typing it two or three hours in, as it nears full-strength, is unthinkable.

while its not a subject i talk about at length much - socially i avoid broaching it if possible - migraines have been a fact of life for me since I was 15 or so. for over 15 years, i've experienced at least monthly, generally weekly, and even daily episodes, ranging from 6 to 12 (occasionally longer) hours in duration.

a migraine is a cluster of symptoms. they include (for me):

sensitivity to light, noise, movement, and conversation. exertion, even intellectual, quickly results in intensified pain.
nausea. but, for moi, never vomiting.
constant aching and throbbing pain, accompanied by feelings of heat and pressure, along one side of the head, from the eye socket, over the top of the head, down the back of the neck, and along the shoulder, with some lesser pain and tightness in the shoulderblade as well.
wide perceptual and emotional shifts accompanying "dealing" with and accomodating the pain, and its accompanying demands (go slow, do nothing, turn off lights, avoid distractions, stay with your body, don't speak, do not wander into thought, avoid activity and bend with the knees only, head and neck held straight up)

these classic symptoms, for me at least, are accompanied by (when i notice):

-tightness/contraction of the gut. this creates a center of further pain, and perhaps predates the flaring in the upper body.
-if i raise my arms, i become conscious, as trad. Chinese medicine predicts, that the pain travels down the length of the afflicted side's arm.
largley involuntary shivers and twitches along the neck-shoulder-arm route.

Migraines alternate hemispherally. If today, your left side aches, when you get your next one, it will target the right. Western science is unsure as to the causes of a migraine, it is a hotly contested arena of research and pill-patenting. An inflammation of blood vessels in the brain was generally agreed upon as precursor, but now the focus is more neural, and the role of the brain-stem is being investigated. Migraines also come with or without auras. For more on this (science!) side, check here. A lovely sample quote:

The trigger of the migraine may be overactivity of nerve cells in certain areas of the brain (for example, the raphe nucleus). Dilation of the blood vessels is now known to be caused from chemicals released from nerve terminals and inflammatory cells. Occasionaly a migraine can be triggered by large amounts of emotional tension and stress.

Wading further in the same articles brings the word prodrome: an early symptom indicating the development of a disease, or indicating that a disease attack is imminent. "

In Trad. Chinese Medicine (TCM), a migraine is an intense form of Liver meridian imbalance. It is the body's response to shut down the system through disabling pain, in a way like one turns off the water to re-callibrate the flow. The bitter element harmonizes the liver (most herbal liver medicines are concentrations of bitter herbs - thujone in wormwood/absynthe catalyzes the alcohol high in a markedly diff., more lucid direction) and the bland/sweet/salty diet of Americans comes along with a high rate of alcoholism and blood diseases (the liver births and grooms the blood).

"Migraine sufferers usually develop their own coping mechanisms for intractable pain."

The list of what I have tried is long, and varies depending on the vintage. Aside from OTC painkillers, I've tried over the years: traditional yoga, alochol, green tea, rosemary, meditation, feverfew, walking, hot showers, naps, akido, weed, tibetan yoga, immersing myself in water, iceubes, facemasks, acupuncture, massage, eating, drinking water, lying down on the floor in the dark and groaning, etc.

Believe it or no, I have never sought a western doctor's advise or treatment on migraines. When I told - as a teen - my eye doctor about them (without using the classic "migraine" label) - he was uninterested, having ascertained that that didn't sound like a symptom produced by the prescription. And I am not a fan of expensive experimental drugs, although, for once, I have insurance.

"Sumatriptan and related selective serotonin receptor agonists are now the therapy of choice for severe migraine attacks that cannot be controlled by other means. They are highly effective, reducing the symptoms or aborting the attack within 30 to 90 minutes in 70-80% of patients. Some patients have a recurrent migraine later in the day, and only one such recurrence in a day can be treated with a second dose of a triptan. They have few side effects if used in correct dosage and frequency. Some members of this family of drugs are:
Sumatriptan (Imitrex®, Imigran®)
Zolmitriptan (Zomig®)
Naratriptan (Amerge®, Naramig®)
Rizatriptan (Maxalt®)
Eletriptan (Relpax®)
Frovatriptan (Frova®)
Almotriptan (Almogran®) "

In TCM, its noted that simply eradicating a symptom, and not attending to the root factors that lead to that symptom arising, will drive the disorder deeper. In neuropsychology, the brain stem, whose "malfunction" or "over-sensitivity" may result in an episode, is the seat of the ddepest, most primal emotions, including fear and aggression. In TCM, a symptom is a node in a web - it is not causally identical to another subject's instance of a similair system. Differing systems may yet inflame the same node. So tracking the web, its relations, in my life becomes the work. Not sure how well I have done at it though, I am more Inspector Clouseau than Sherlock Holmes.

While they respond to care, and to my surrender to their seemingly inhuman, obliterating agenda, they do not respond very predictably. But letting the pain hold center court, abandoning any agenda I might have besides suffering and caring for my pain-wracked body, is rewarded, and the pain changes, subsides, sometimes even ceases. Sometimes, in its wake, there's a palpable, if subdued hush of ecstacy. But even the slightest weariness or premature excitation over its departure, and a migraine will steadfastly return. I'm thinking of how dominant males mark their territory, and patrol it, squashing challenges - its a lot like that, that sense of resistance is futile. And the shit is intense - life is very vivid in these procedurally restricted passages.

"Annual employer cost of lost productivity due to migraines was estimated at $3,309 per sufferer. Total medical costs associated with migraines in the United States amounted to one billion dollars in 1994, in addition to lost productivity estimated at thirteen to seventeen billion dollars per year."

The workplace is an exquisite and total torture when suffering from a migraine. I invariably struggle, and then abdicate. Some of the strength of that feeling of work=s extreme & immediate suffering has long since hopped the phenomenal fence and broken free of its strict association with migraines per se. I eventually just thought of work itself as a sort of low-grade migraine, a background irritation in which the foreground pain inevitably and periodically arises. Like the roaring laugh track in a sit-com.

For a long-time I knew, holisticlly, that this pain was necessary, even benevolent - that is, a teaching. Not an easy one, but it was my body's instinctive response to its situation. Western science focuses either pornographically on the neuro-materialist aspects of what physically, isolatably happens to the body during a migraine, or has dismissed the whole thing as a mental malady. Either way, its seen as a disease, the body as weak or malfunctioning, the patient its victim. I have long known there is much more to what is happening here, and that I - how I am living my life, is a responsible party (and the only on I have hope of effecting) - but charting the rhythms and happenstances around my migraines has been a long-term project, and one that collapses every time i fall into resisting its logic, or lamenting my fate. While science does acknowledge tension and stress as factors in "some" migraines, they stand mute on emotional habits, on what we might call the psycho-energetics of migraines. And maybe we want our science to stand mute on this... its a seemingly obscure terrain, it offers no quick fix. You might miss a day of work, not get to go shopping.

My focus now is shifting to the prodrome arena, to becoming conscious of the early symptoms that might alert me to an attack, so I can respond to these incipient signals, instead of ignoring them, and be forced to respond to the willful demands of a full-blown migraine.

There appears, here, to be a definite emotional and energetic link between these spasms of pain, and a re-occuring repression of unconscious desires.

The cleaning staff is here, my stomach's growling, that's far enough, time to go. i leave it to me to probe the emotional subterrain, and for you, if you care to, to wonder how this might relate to the Kyle you know, whether aesthetically, intimately, blogger-ly, whatev. And if you don't know me, you know someone else who suffers these fuckers : 8% of men, 16% of women, for a start.

2005-12-14T15:07:00.000-08:00

today i am not feeling so well. Blogging and nausea - non, merci.

I have managed to forget both of the great ideas I've had so far today.

Not so sure these points are as unrelated as they first seem.

-

Readers, does it bother you when a blog - such as this one - has occasional typos and grammatical hoo-haws? blogger's spellcheck is so, so slow. there are other options, though. perhaps my carefree-ness here is interpreted variously - in this theoretically public space.

-

books i could be reading today:

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf.
Selected Poems, Charles Olson.
Office of Soft Architecture, Lisa Robertson.
Ovid: currently sidelined for an inexcusible prosaic-ness.

Yesterday, at the SFMoma, I read some fascinating selections of a 1937 Hitler speech on "degenerate art". Reminded me, in its arguments and inflammation, of certain US politicians.

My not-feeling well-ness means that i don't care to risk commentary on those other titles.

Yet part of me is filled with rage at this blog post.

Lection is out

2005-12-13T10:53:00.000-08:00

Lection, the latest Subday Press offering, is out. Author Scott Inguito read from it @ the semi-annual SPD Open House on Saturday, and last night John Sullivan, our long-suffering web-designer, launched the Lection page. Check it here. Lection is a tasty, thought-provoking and pocket-size morsel, and its available on the cheap - I hope you'll check it out. Teresa Sparks will be reviewing it in the upcoming American Book Review (Feb/Mar, methinks). But don't wait.

Speaking of ABR, I just sent them my first review, of Sara Larsen's doubly circ. Ganglia crossed.

As for me, I'm listening to funk on the college radio station and I'm a little too stinky for comfort, so its a pre-shower blog moment, friends.

Final note of hot gossip: Sean MacInnes has made a brilliant and intimate batch of short videos while down in FL for his Kerouac House residency. These films are worth seeing - they are lyric, nightmarish, gauzy, silent, celebratory and a little wobbly. The ghost of ol Stan Brakhage floats thru. They are deeply felt and oddly touching too, and they speak of the goddamn wonder of sight (check out Derek Jarman's Blue if you forgot about that). He can send them out on VHS tapes, I am not sure if he can do DVDs. We can work on it. Email him here if you are curious - and with a little luck and a few dollars donation, you too will learn about benches, branches, cockroaches, and sprinkler jets.

And if he doesn't, let me know and I'll make you a pirate copy.

k

2005-12-07T16:19:00.000-08:00

Books I am reading today:

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

"Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock."

The list of particulars dates back at least as far as the heroic epics - the Illiad and the Odyssey, for one start. It shows up today in the work of Ray DiPalma in the current Chicago Review. My edition notes that Woolf saw the novel, c. 1920, as at an impasse, and was reading Euripides, Bacchae excitedly. How alive this prose is - sparkling with details, written thru the senses and memory- gaining focus thru its characters narrative wanderings. Want to read Nightwood after this. These are the first non-standard genre novels I've read since Dhalgren last year. Breaking out of my reading rut feels great. I chose this book because I remember there was something alluring and satisfying in Woolf's prose as an undergrad English major. Some type of ecriture feminine, is it? I am conscious of not wanting to read any male-written novels right now, at least none I can think of. A few minutes pass, and this dissolves. Woolf and Barnes first though.

Tales From Ovid, Ted Hughes
A Christmas present last year, and here I am pouring over it. Having just finished Ronald Johnson's seminal radi os, a page-by-page "reduction" of the first four chapters of Paradise Lost into a bewildering and intensely alluring alchemic word-drone, in which whisps and suggestions of underlying stratas and a dozen or two startling lines rose out of 70 or 80 sparse and beautiful pages, Ovid's metamorhic tales make mighty sense. And yet I have no sense of Hughes' mode of translation, so I can take these only as work bearing some intimate relation to Ovid's 1900 years earlier, but from what I can guesstimate, this is a logonymic translation privleging "sense" as in semantic content.

I dont recall liking more than a few of the lines in Hughes "own" poetry, but "Creation; Four Ages; Lycaon; Flood" made for a great afternoon, and it turns more and more brutal with each page, a sort of restrained but pitiless death metal poem. We move from "Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/ Into different bodies" (go ahead Ted, tell me) thru the prehistory of the world, up to the flood, where we part 18 pages later, with: "Drowned mankind, imploring limbs outspread,/Floats like a plague of dead frogs." I certianly don't expect such work from Poet Laureates. It must be the magic of the classics - that his craft shines brightest in looking back at the work he first read as a schoolboy struggling with Latin.

I enjoy this and it also irks me that I do. Which is part of the point - my sense of lineage and my ideological leanings have cornered me to the point where reading is no longer fun, and is cut off from many of my desires. I don't yet know what to say of Ted's lines, how he works with them, they are themselves a sort of "rough" free verse where the line ends act as the main key to distinguish this work from prose, staggering the lines in tiers, slowing the reader down. The prose translations of Ovid I glanced at looked pale and dull - despite the stylistic diff. btwn us, I read Hughes lines in this poem with great warmth, and they slip easily, energetically down the throat like a tastier red bull. But they slip fast - there are only a few lines I re-read to savor or work out an image or turn of speech. It is - I keep feeling - such a different use of the poetic from what I have grown used to these last few years. It feels good to be in contact with it again, from this new vantage.

Like the Dalai Lama has said - any one faith would be a poor fit for all the various peoples of the world. Any one corporation, any one state, any one style... I agree.

werdenfield love for each and every last - squish! - one

2005-12-01T13:05:00.000-08:00

this arrived in the mail today, confirming my sense that john ashberry has become deeply weird with fame, psychoanalysis, and age. Move over, late, rhyming Creeley poems, its:

Wild Geese - John Ashberry

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

okay, so i lied to you, its - surprise - mary oliver. but i figured if i put mary oliver up there, you'd read it like i did, with a sense of fatality, like watching a body fall out a window til "PLONK!" we hit the, umm, hard concrete? of "the family of things".

sent by a borderline-buddhist friend who doesn't read much poetry yet called me up to tell me how much he liked my reading last month (future post or visit to therapist here). i tensed while reading it, and tried to pull away, esp. the parts where we are flying over the placeholder nouns of named landscape like in "god bless america" or "this land is your land" but without any of the cheese or charm of those two. goddawful descriptive distance.

i figure some people like the lullaby-like quality of this, but without the metrics of song. its like your boring mother is saying boring but familiar things to you as you go to bed. its like checking the thermometer: "yup its hot". "yup its still hot". slight sweetness + bland =s comforting, right? poem as sleep-aid or suppository. hell, "life's rough" & some are "in need" of an ameliorative.

so, what to say about the daily weather forecast? that its predicatable? it seems silly to rage against it, "over the prairies and the deep trees". it is obviously medicinal to some, but its barely readable to me. poetry is vast and inexhaustible. its sentiments are blameless. etc etc.

[ i am trying, pirooz, not to rush to condemn, but there's nothing else here for me thats FUN, that wants only to tear up and rip out the pastic intestines of this beast and REVEL in it - VIOLENT, yes, but no more than my LUNCH. the only way i want to masticate this is not as droll NPR sermon on beatitude and some kinda whitebread come-on to intimacy but as WORDS to MASTICATE on BURP thank you very much then - and there is liberation in me destroying in a fit of gleeful rage what someone else is rushing to stickily embrace and us not needing to EXPLAIN or FIGHT over this difference - since I'm not tearing up THEIR book or ITS AUTHOR - I am tearing up THIS SPACE, THIS TEXT, THIS READING, what it elicits...]

so i mull before lunch, i ,
"whomeveh i am, no matter how wonewy
the mawy owiveh offehs itsewf to my imaginashun
cawws to me wike duh wiwd geese, hahsh and ecksiting--"

okay, now i am squarely back to how terrible it is, what a horrendous ball of hooey, spiritual hallmart e-card texts.

i am never going to even try to get to the bottom of this, except to say that when i find myself acting in a "mary oliver-esque" way to another adult, i am overcome with shame and scorn. and thats in person - an that emotional response keys me thati have "lost" my connection with them in the moment, it attunes me to cut the soliquoy, hold-space, and reoreint. If i fail to do this, I go on, but with a sens eof shame at the betrayal of our relation, and then scorn at this too, a rage at what shit is pouring from my mouth. i read such sneakily and unacknowledged (and obviously unavoidable in the act of writing) falseness and duplicity here. maybe i have issues. its not all i read here, but it overwhelms the rest. but i do not stand against intimacy, or even advice, or certainly not "sharing" (but the poet's promise to share their woes is not followed up, its an empty gimmick - and not just here, but in most (all?) of oliver's work - there is a frigid patina of distance which she uses to convey intimacy that i find troubling when the resulting work is taken as natural, organic produce and not some deeply mediated gene-splicing: in many ways i find her work supremely un-wild, massively tame - and taming: which I resist here). i dont stand against, even the type of genial - yet lingusitically very decisive and powerful - type of wise-old-aunt authority ol mary's asserting here, but, left to its own devices, it - what? - represents a human tendency that i think of as opiate, a nice sleep-aid before bed for troubled sleepers, yes, but a very weird crown to be riding on the head of the intersection of the worlds literary and spiritual, where i often find it.

i respect deeply many of the people who ornament their sermons, letters and essays with verse of this kind (like today's sender), yet it seems so purely decorative - maybe thats part of it, i dont want a purely - even mainly - decorative poetry, and my insistence that one's artwork can be a much more funamental and powerful wrangling with life and death and self and other and sex and state often feel a little lonely.

a basic lesson of autonomy i that if someone tries to shovel the wrong medicine in your mouth, don't swallow. regardless of their own intentions. if you do, you get deeply troubled, and have to write mad posts about it broadcast to the teemingly near-empty depths of the blogosphere. how did i know it was the wrong medicine, friends, its right up there in the brand-name, one poetica-pharmaceutical giant who does not have my consumer allegiance. hence this class-action suit to which you are welcome to file briefs.

thanks for stopping by and please deposit leftover portions of this rant in the comments box on your way out of the page.

2005-11-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

Last night saw the second installment of Salon. I still gaffe at the name, esp. when I think about the online mag. I am converted now to this media of group discussion, this enacting of poetry-as-social-thinking, a thinking both critical and practical, and attuned towards expanding and redefining awareness.

This morning I've been doing some research off one thread of last night's topic, and that's around Stephanie Young and Juliana Spahr's collaborative panel presentation @ the recent LA Noulipo conference. Even though Stephanie was at Salon last night, we didn't ask her to talk about the performance, or its fall-out, so an opportunity missed there. But one of the greatets things about Salon, and about any on-going engagement with a writing community is how the mind and heart expand/contract/ re-orient upon entering an arena of common concerns (and some others left out - silenced? or uncommon? - as well).

How do we enter the commons? Its often traumatic for me at first, i.e. i enter with anxiety, with a lot of emotion, indeed more than the apparent "coolness" of the discourse can handle. Maybe it was just my rough weekend. But if I stick it out - i adjust - and can bring some of that raw energy to bear on what - surprise surprise - can drifty towards the abstract and heady, a discourse more interested in demonstarting mastery than in encouraging emancipation and intimacy. But this is a writing community where an analysis of that tendency towards headiness (and the body it leaves behind) is very much welcome, if one can articulate it.

Which Juliana and Stephanie can. Together, they presented "Foulipo", a talk processed with traditional Oulipian methods (ommited "r"s, and n+7), and with an overt nod to the 70s feminist body-art performance work (i.e.: they twice undressed during the talk). The talk itself was about the problematic intersection - or lack thereof - between these two practices, their practioners, and their politics. But thats just an obvious teaser for a piece I am at a loss to do quick justice to. Check it out:

You can find general info about the Noulipo conference here.
A review of that day's panel can be found here.
And, the main course, Stephanie has posted in full, with notes, their text here.

Its been fascinating to read their paper, and the work around it, from a personal vantage point - to read it in consideration of the emotions and states i bring to the writing commons - and to compare its analysis with my own experience of writing panels, workshops, texts. It also doesn't hurt that I just saw the Kiki Smith retrospective @ the SFMOMA.

If I was less hungry I could express this differently, but I am getting a little strung out now so ciao. But thanks to both Stephanie and Juliana for once again writing something that helped redefine (re-mind?) what art is all about for me at a time when, once again, I felt I was losing just that grounded sense of what is desired, what is problematic, and what is possible. It went down with a big gulp of "oh yes" that is simultaneously "oh shit": a perfect prescription.

2005-11-20T21:11:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

What else is a blog but a sort of rarefied gossip column? Plenty, but not today. It’s 7:15, and I’m going to get into what’s been exciting in my corner of the ark poetica of late. Its going to entail some sinfully laudatory descriptive language.

Friday nite saw Brandon Brown and Brent Cunningham read @ SPT. SPT is the outgrowth of a 30 plus year old literary-advocacy project, and pretty much the most reliable and wide-ranging series of contemporary readings round here. Have I already said much the same? It’s a reliable place to run into poetry pals and peers, nestled in the Timkin Lecture Hall at the back of CCA’s hanger-esque artspace.

Brandon read from/performed sections of his The Persians by Aeschylus, the latest of his active re-imaginings of Classical texts. Constantly shifting, formally conscious and inventive, dense with word-play (downright Zukofsyian at times), and tensely resonant with an echo-chamber of postcolonial concerns with representation of the Other (the Greeks “fend off” the Persians, the US “pre-empts” Iraq), and wise enough to allow the chorus to get down to business to “Rock the Casbah”, Brandon’s work was invigorating - a real stunner. The type of piece where, after its over, I found it difficult to speak, and certainly difficult to speak about. Which is a measure of its impact and strength, work that can literally fuck you up. I don’t know how well Brandon’s rep extends outside the Bay Area – his bio is disturbingly full of unpublished works (someone will have to do something about that) – but he was warmly received and “welcomed” Friday night by his hometown crowd.

It’s a warmth they returned. Brandon and Brent opened the evening with a performance of a comic dialogue which underlined both performer’s real interest in – and critical consciousness of the limits of – creating a warm, intimate space of “welcome” with their work, of having the audience listen as comfortably as they would in their own home. Timkin - and SPT - both are and aren't that space they were invoking. Their appeals to the heart - worded, performed - both did and didn't evoke such intimacy and warmth: and the constant return to this basic welcoming became increasingly absurd - the record's (or neurotic's) stuck groove. The slide here between pathos and bathos was wonderful, and had at least two of us independently thinking of Beckett’s tramps. Language is such a tricky medium, never stationary, never flat, always beyond our control, even in moments when it seems most transparent and responsive to our intent. Both Brandon and Brent, in their own ways, proceed from a position in which irony and honesty, personal vulnerability and the impermeable mask of the orator, are inseparably coiled. Good f-ing luck picking them apart.

Brent read a smattering from his Bird and Forest (Ugly Duckling), for which this reading served as a belated release party. Brent read a sampling of the title poem, a series which, as he explains it, inverts the traditional mode in which multiple images point towards the same “unnamed” center, which the images serve to enliven. So the single image of the bird, and its forest, iterate outwards off each page, in each instance in a different direction, gesturing towards dozens of possible focii. This approach has a rich conceptual resonance, and is realized in sumptuous, contemplative language full of subtle turns. It’s a fucked thing that work that seems to emanate from a place of quiet, dedicated study – from in short, a study, that sense of the workman’s table, a comfortable armchair, next to it a table on which rest a few well-chosen books, seems such a rare find these days. Brent's work seems at home with itself where much other work seems itchy, bothered, uncomfortable, agitated. There’s a sense of unhurried mastery here I associate more with the past dead than the present living. Rarer still that the work is lively, attentive, that it has heart and grit to it, and a humble/sharp sense of humor. This alertness, not sprung from any sense of danger, but somehow innate to the posture of the work itself, makes for compelling reading, makes the generative intimacy of the study seem a resonant chamber for me.

Brent continued on to read from a new manuscript which got me thinking to such a degree I can’t really say anything on it. Sometimes you leave a reading just wanting to see the damn work on the page. What impressed me most was Brent’s declaration that the process of this new work included a vow to strike out any line which struck him as conventionally poetic. Given Brent’s skill with this “conventionally poetic” that strikes me as a particularly brave thing.

As soon as the applause died down, Sara and I ducked out to pick up Sarah and hit The Goblet of Fire, which temporarily erased the reading with the first blast of Dolby sound. In the second row of the multiplex, feet up on the seat before me, Whizzy Fizz popping on my tongue, I switched from viewing the work of a sole author to a movie made by more than a thousand.

Saturday saw Sara and I sit down for the first of two el pobre submission selection meetings (at Beanbag, a café two sunny blocks from our usual choice). November is the tail-end of the warm season here, and this weekend delivered, with a trio of glorious days. I keep thinking “it’s November” as if that means something on its own – but months only take on specificity in a given place – and no, this isn’t anything like November in New England or Colorado. The selections are making more sense this time round: the third el pobre advances and refines our aesthetic, challenges several of our early limits, and is moving into a more varied, rougher, uneven – and invigorating – read. Its exciting work, and a pleasure to be publishing. The flow is a little wilder, less predictable, the range of work is greater, and the aesthetic preoccupations and concerns come forth more sharply here. The 1998 Robert Creeley interview Brent's brought us is a particularly rare and wicked find.

Today – Sunday – Scott Inguito and I finished the layout and proofing for Lection, Subday’s latest. Lection will initiate Subday’s “mini book” series of small book-art conscious chaps. Each time we meet the design comes a full step or two forward, and each time it’s a surprise. This time, once more, the book came forward in unexpected directions, and carries a liveliness and fully-realized polysemous quality that was only a dream a month back.

On top of being productive, the meeting was delightful – Scott and I have been ideal collaborators, and working on Lection has fulfilled the social criteria of publishing – that the editor and the writer come together in the process, that it generates an intimacy and exchange of ideas, perspectives, poetics. I also see the mini book series as a collaborative venture, a chance for me to step forward with layouts, designs and editing strategies which push the process of book-making to the fore, that catalyze the writers manuscript into a new shape, new form. Bookmaking is always a process of translation, and with the mini books, I hope to showcase the possibilities and test the limits of this trans-ing of the word.doc text into papered three-dimensionality. Lection will be available by December $10th, for $5, and Scott will be releasing it at SPD’s Holiday Open House reading and book sale. These are two facing pages, unfortunately scrambled here. They line up so that "use aries" can be read across the pages.

Now I’m sitting at home, finishing an Oatmeal cookie milkshake, and Sarah’s at my side watching Bono on 60 Minutes. I’ve put my headphones back on to finish track 6 of Sigur Ros’s latest CD. Their must is emotive in a way that turned me off a few years back, but, now, the alternating surges and slides and languid rolls of their music makes sense to me, how to say it – there’s a tidal quality here, and a vulnerability that rises up in crescendos of noise, vivid waves of it that then crash – or evaporate, leaving a droning wake of amplifier hum and piano keys. The same way, 20 seconds after a big six foot breaker, a 1/8” thin sheet of water pours back into the surf with its fine cross-braidings of sand.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wanted to end the weekend at the New Yipes, a half-hour away in Oakland, where Norma Cole is reading tonight, but I was too late. So I’ve decided to share and celebrate that too-late-ness, this buoyant comma at the bottom of the heavy week. Next line starts with Monday’s alarm brrrrrng and my first shave in five days.

Now Sarah’s watching about animals left behind by Katrina, and I’m gonna join her.

Today's amazing Wikipedia link

2005-11-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

Brazilian modernist poet Mario de Andrade: "he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) in 1922. He has had an enormous influence on Brazilian literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, and as a scholar and essayist—he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil."

before heading home

2005-11-14T17:32:00.000-08:00

I assembled 25 boxes this afternoon. Some long and thin – for architectural drawings. Some fat oblong cubes for administrative files. Into these boxes went information pertaining to the construction and modification of a variety of courts, hospitals, universities, and secure treatment facilities (department of corrections) throughout California.

Prior to this, I composed a long associative poem, the type often thought of as “a meditation”. This usage is the western version of what might be better termed “a contemplation”. I want to distinguish the mystical sense of meditation – which involves no action beyond letting go, and is an active process of being passive – i.e. of practicing non-attachment – from the object-focused work, often taking a literary form, known as a meditation. From some perspectives, particularly for those not concerned with meditation-as-practice, this distinction might seem unnecessary. Another, softer way to make the distinction is to describe zazen as “meditation” while other forms, whether worded, imagistic, or purely conceptual, could be termed “meditations on”, hence bringing their object into the named fold. St. Augustine’s meditations are surely “meditations on”, in which objects emerge and fade, and each path leads to God, and to His realization in a particular life remembered discursively. Zazen, and other forms of meditation-sans-object, have a different approach. Writing is not possible from this place, just as writing is not possible from a coma, or a dream, or death. Trance-states form a boundary region here, and I am down enough with Herzog’s Herz aus Glas to consider that intriguing. Yet, lit-wise, its wicked old fashion, its Surrealist digs, and folks these days prefer other types of the minor. Fashion is relentless, but Henry Darger and Hannah Wieners show a continued interest in this territory. Once these get too trendy, I am sure the head of the moving column will be found elsewhere.

The poem was concerned with space, with inhabiting space, and the difference between experiencing and fixing that experience. It strayed from and returned to these concerns, to avoid being fixed by them. I’m interested in work that charts desires, work whose liveliness has a slightly uneven, unpredictable quality of attending. I doubt this is news to anyone who has read much of my work (all 12 of you) but its coming clear to me, and, today, its spilling into other areas of my life. Cracks of light on a beautiful fall day turned evening.
Now Sarah is here, and I am a gonna go.

Lacan goes to the Salon.

2005-11-10T13:27:00.000-08:00

I've been reading some work on Lacan, AND, we've revivied the salon idea. The second salon is to be around Lacan. And i've fallen in love with how lacan defines jouissance not as bliss, but more generally as (it would appear) any intensity "which is too much to bear" - i am guessing its the Symbolic-Moi complex which must bear it. So if a flow or rupture too great for the (imaged/worded) I to bear comes across a subject, it arouses a state of great excitation which normally we want to rid ourselves of immediately, right? Feeling hot? Bothered? Un-normed? Go back to being cool, rational, under control ASAP. Irony aside, experiences from anxiety atacks to being horny to not understanding a speaker or text appear to fall under this heading. For me too. But I've noticed it doesn't help.

In modern Western societies, it is considered masculine for men to have hair on their faces, arms, chests and legs, but the hair growing from the top of the head is generally kept short, relatively speaking; equally, it is considered feminine for women to have no hair on their bodies, with the exception of knuckle hair, but to have a lot of it on the tops of their heads. This is a fairly recent development. Before the First World War men generally had long hair and beards. The trench warfare between 1914 and 1918 exposed men to lice and flea infestation which caused the order to be given for the routine cutting of hair to a severely short length. The shorter style became the new normality and has never entirely gone away since.

With activities like extreme sports, we also SEEK these states (in a form the I can just so barely control or perhaps pushing into a limnal state where control is a dangling question.) I just flashed on Genet's The Balcony here, a similiar fetishized state at the edge of control as theater, and also as (barely) mediated eruption of the repressed unconscious desires.

Hair is the filamentous outgrowth of the epidermis found in mammals.

Now thinking of this and reading - a text which disrupts too radically the symbolic logic causes jouissance. but this jouissance too will largely /most likely be construed as painful, irritating, annoyance. Won't it be the work of the ego to say that this outbreak is "petty" or "painful" and therefore dismissable/to be avoided, so we can return to biz as normal?

In humans neoteny is manifest in the paedomorphic characteristics exhibited by fertile women. See Sexual attraction

It appears as a threat, and the threat, one way or another, must be extinguished.

See also
cuteness
heterochrony

This seems to me to make enormous sense in interpreteting the response to the various modernisms and po-modernisms of the last 100yrs. A writer fucks with the code, and the general response is one of... defense, of reentrenchment, dismissal, pot-shot, boredom, the same response a client on the couch is likely to have as the analyst pushes the work into the unconscious 'wound' (or i guess Lacan would say the neurotic knot). An artist may do the same so long as the ghetto (i.e. container) of the Object is not compromised - then their disruption is recouped through capital and object fetishism, again as a form of theater. The book is such a marginal site for this theater (not as restricted of entrance as a whorehouse or limited edition object) that only the critic can recoup it for capital/audience in a larger symbolic order. But with nothing to buy, the critic loses the ear of the elite (as well as the privleged site of the gallery space) . And not owning any of it, the privleged classes show far more indifference to its larger cultural promotion, freed as they are from any shareholder's stake in the enterprise. UNLESS the book is a limited edition affair, a "book arts" project, esp. one bridging the art and literary world, providing them an accessible entrance into this new theater. With attendant high cost/restricted access.

Some studies suggest that one source of physical attraction of a human male to a human female is dependent upon a proportion between the width of the hips and the width of the waist (see Golden ratio). (disputed — see talk page)

Writers who engage in this process of focusing on jouissance, on documenting and heightening it - are threatening to unravel just what the normative society is absolutely forbidden itself to unravel. Not that this work is necessarily heroic or particuarly intelligent - just that the general direction of the avant-garde (insofar as it shares this direction to trouble the smooth surface of language-logic) is towards increasing jouissance in texts, contra the broader tendency to extinguish or severely deplete or ghetto-ize it.

One idea of physical beauty regarding the breasts of women is that the best shape approaches the shape of a three dimensional parabola (which is called a Paraboloid of revolution) as opposed to a hyperbola, or a sphere. Conversely, the shape of the buttocks of an attractive person (male or female) tends to resemble the shape of a cardioid, which is the inverse transform of a parabola.

(i actually dont know if you are interested in Lacan. hi there)

Sexual attraction to a man by a woman is determined largely by the height of the man. For the woman, the man should be at least a few percent taller than her in order to be perceived as handsome. In European populations the average height of males is about 175 cm whereas the average height of females is about 165 cm - a 6% difference. It would be preferable if the man is at least a little above the average in height in the given population of males. This implies that women look for signs of social dominance and power as factors that determine male beauty.

It's also worth noting that Lacan saw the process of jouissance as a destructive one - its uncontainable energies provide unbearable suffering unto its conscious subject, who is unable to maintain the symbolic order of meaning under tis "attack" - yet, at the same time, the unconscious drives and energies of the same subject experience jouissance as a satisfaction - its eruption provides the body an aspect of release, a discharging of clogged/trapped energy. Even psychotic episodes ("breaks") are moments where flow is restored. The unconscious mammalian body thus regulates its flows of jouissance on its own, even when the conscious and Symbiolic egos act as its intractable foes. In the end, the "real" body may be dominated, exploited, suppressed, but it can never be extinguished, and its unmediated, non-symbolic power, like any force of nature, will be felt both in the continually escalating degree of control nec. to "maintain order" (response to the current riots in France, and the continual bark of the right wing to unleash the army) and in the pent-up destructive energies which turn, inevitably explode (the riots themselves) when measures of containment and repression themselves threaten a greater disruption than jouissance itself. There is a comedy here, or play of forces, as the Symbolic order and the Real energies of the unconscious do their dance. Its worth noting that neither force has a monopoly on violence.

At various times in history and throughout various cultures and sub-cultures the growth, maintenance and display of facial or body hair produced as a by-product of testosterone activity within male bodies has been considered a primary characteristic of sexual attractiveness, and of a display of masculinity in general. Cultural development seems to oscillate through multi-generational cycles from one pole to another: extreme hair growth, especially of facial hair accompanied by elaborate grooming rituals is often followed within a couple of generations by a widespread antipathy to body hair and the widespread adoption of depilatory practices.
The causal mechanism for this oscillation has not been established but differences in the simultaneous characterisation of body hair attractiveness within a culture between different social classes may indicate that the dynamic force driving the diffusion of differing male body hair social practices is in fact mate selection by females.

The text is a body with as many operative levels of Symbolic order (and hence social demands, with their ever distance from instinctive drives) as the political body of a nation. Language - for Lacan - is the seat of Symbolic power, the source of its energy, the means of its effect. The text operates Symbolically through plot, through diction, through the heirarchies of clause, sentence, paragraph, chapter, through "proper spelling", through dialect and the associated rhetorical tropes. Jouissance, for most writers, is what falls outside (Symbolic) intention, it is seen as inattentive writing, as error - it is swept away. The repressive/winnowing master-author alone decides what goes into his text. Any other autonomy within the book is discarded. What is left of jouissance is the titilation of the romance, the suspense of the who-dunnit, etc., a disruptive tension playd like a string inthe maestro's hands, to its ultimate, and never-in-doubt conclusion. And these are in textual forms geared towards emotive release - legal documents, instruction manuals, newspaper articles, medical and mathematical treatises: what role does jouissance play in these? Aren't the Symbolic reigns even more tightly bound into the unconscious flesh?

The appearance of health also plays a part in physical attraction. Often, women with long hair are thought to appear more beautiful, as the ability to grow long, healthy looking hair is an indication of continuous health of an individual

But the next place i go to is Lacan's sense that the analyst's task is then to regulate jousissance. As flow/current. Which brings me to chinese energetics, to meridians. To hazard some fairly obvious translations: jouissance is a dark, mature yin energetics, the Symbolic a classic yang ordering principle. A rupture comes about when the dark yin unseats the ruler - yang - sowing chaos which is also fruitful release, dependingon perspective. As in the flooding of the Yangtze, or civil unrest, or a wife leaving her husband (classical Chinese thought seeing a direct gendered extension betwene man and woman in the paly of these energies, one the West has also inherited, with all its associated problematics - its in Lacan as well, and has likewise been a fruitful troubling in his inheritance among the French feminists). Neuroses and psychoses are unharmonious (excessively disruptive or short-term emergency measure) pairings of these energies - they create grievious distances and (social/psychic) ruptures even as they allow the subject to carry on against a threatening backdrop of chaos.

Structurally, hair consists of an inner cortex, comprising spindle-shaped cells, and an outer sheath, called the cuticle. Within each cortical cell are many fibrils, running parallel to the fibre axis, and between the fibrils is a softer material called the matrix. It grows from a hair follicle.

But, also, in writing, doesn't this become the work? To explore the edges of the unbearable and find that we can bear them, and to enter intensities without so much habitual baggage? i think this is what i have found of value in my writing and reading practice. I can't pinpoint Lacan in this, but in my practice, the fear of this chaos, of the rupture or break, becomes so unbearably prohibitive, that writing against it - into chaos and trouble - is a welcome release, not the thing to be feared as endangering my sanity. It is also a fear which prohibits bliss - it is the clamp down which tends towards obssesive death-in-life, which I equate with the zombie.

Cross-section shape of human hair is typically round in people of Asian descent, round to oval in European descent, and nearly flat in African peoples; it is that flatness which allows African hair to attain its frizzly form. In contrast, hair that has a round cross-section will be straight. A strand of straight round cross-section hair that has been flattened, for example, with an edge of a coin, will curl up into a micro-afro.

Terror and bliss, as horror movies point out, are intimates. Daring writing does much to explore and document the same links. Likewise all states we habitually avoid - especially ones which cause no obvious physical harm, such as listening to a long, difficult lecture, or watching an unfathomable movie or (so goddamn often) dancing or speaking up - bind us, tie us down, and we attach to ever more narrow zones of comfort and control in which we move, and which, as the American Right has reaped so much capital from claiming, consitutes our "freedom", which, sliver that it is, we are paranoiacally disposed to staunchly defend.

Hair is strong. A single strand can hold 100g (3.5oz) of weight. A head of hair could support 12 tonnes. It is equivalent in strength to aluminium or Kevlar. Wet hair, however, is very fragile.

How can our writing proceed into this territory? It is work against the grain, but there are so many... there is a lifetime of work here, work that is libratory in that its aim is to bring into harmonious relations the Symbolic and the all-too-often repressed Real. So that jouissance's eruption is allowed, engaged in, appreciated, even enjoyed - not because its wild difficulty is wholly contained and regulated, but precisely in experiencing this not being so, in the very real felt tension of a work springing form both camps, a work which proceeds as a Lacanian "sinthome" a modulated creative activity in the place of a eactive situation of violence and repression of violence (itself violent). By attending to it, giving it a place within the city limits (likethe theater, at its edge) we can become more intimate and expert at noting its flows, at discerning real from imaginery dangers, at learnign to relax and repress a little less, widening the current of human possibilities : on the stage, in bed, at work, etc. It is a work of engineering wild flows, with all the attendant contradictions. Humans have been at it since before the Neolithic, no time to stop now, just because Mussolini, Giuliani, New Formalism, your inner version of the same, et al are on the momentary epochal ascension. After all Schwartzenegar lost all his ballot initatives.

People starting out with very pale blond hair usually develop white hair instead of grey hair when aging.

questions for ya

2005-11-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

In lieu of the planned post on hair, which is unfinished, we have this, an email from a colleague here at KMD:

Hello everyone.
A buddy of mine has a few extra tickets that he would
like to sell for tomorrow night’s SOLD OUT U2 concert at the Oakland Arena. The
tickets are $190 each and are in section 216.
Concert time is 7:00pm.
Let me know if you or anyone you know may be interested.
Thanks.

In this short email message we have almost everything that is wrong with rock music today. Spun off this, extending its logic, we have even more. How many can you click off? If you can't get at least 3, you aren't even trying.

The fact that it is a more thought-provoking piece of writing than a fair # of the poetry I see out there today means which:

A) I'm in the wrong field.
B) There are a lot of heads up some collective asses.
C) How horrible most poetry is is itself deeply and terribly thought-provoking. (like most other traumas, it leaves interesting marks on the body)

Dear reader, tis a joy to be here again, grumpy and yelping, and thinking about - if not writing on - hair.

Your Man On the Scene

2005-11-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

Its on the streets: or near them.

Sara Larsen’s Doubly Circulatory, published by Melissa Benham’s new Artifact Press, with a fine (perfect, really) Stacy Dacheux watercolor cover, was picked up by Meliss & yours truly from a quiet, beat up and clean Daly City copy shop (cheap copies – ask Meliss for directions- I think I will be doing chaps there too) Friday night, about an hour before the three of us launched our month of readings with November’s Poetry+Pizza. (thanks, Glenn, Clyde).

Tip for readers: never let anyone put the amp directly behind you and the mic. Feedback and sonic disorientation anyone? Add high ceilings and an L shaped room, and all is damn near lost.

The reading was wonderful. Doubly Ciruclatory is wonderful. We celebrated it last night at Sara’s, throwing a wonderful (all is full of love this drizzled morn - until I read the latest on the Paris riots) evening-long soiree of song, drink and stage. For Doubly Circulatory, in addition to a short serial (“The Library”) and the longer eponymous work, contains “The Morning War” a short poet’s play that is performable, we proved that. Your werdenfield correspondant was in the thick of it, as “A,” marking my first return to the acting stage (well, the part of her hardowood floor by the bathroom door) in 9 years, unless I am forgetting some Naropan madness.

[The intrusion of art(ifice) into a social situation (an intimate party) is an absolute gift; spillage makes for messiness, and that damn water (wine? – actually, gin & tonic) got all over my pants – praise be for the undam-ed, “wild and scenic” creativity. And this designation outside of all federal, state, or local regulatory agencies. D.I.Y. You’re only young once: yin it up.]

The beautifully written and smartly made Doubly Circulatory is throwing down the gauntlet. It rawks, it rolls, sweet jesus, it swings low. And sails. When Ms. Larsen sezs she loves Shelley and studies with Diane di Prima, grrl ain’t kidding. This is poetry to trouble any remaining new school/old school definitions you might be hiding dry-cleaned and ready-to-wear in your deep dark closet:

what is this quintessence? sleep and sleep and sleep my
body is pyrotechnic – flies, wings of war, this machine makes
our presence a killer, man delights not me – no,
nor words from dreams, though through these poems i seem to say
so.

Sara’s work springs froma ground of ancient, yet interior landscape of dream and vision, samples resonances of specific earlier Englishes (Shelley, Shakespeare, Yeats), and fluently fuses both into the unsettling wi-fi word-worlds of 2005’s cyborg realities. Making a beast of uncanny alien beauty, an unlikely and utterly compelling creature whose aluminum feathers stir restless, wide awake, a soulful and nervy marvel.

[Sara and Meliss – I’m not writing these words just because I love yous – I am writing this post because I love yous though. Yeah?]

Doubly Circulatory is available for $6 plus postage from artifact109@yahoo.com, or by snail at 2921 Folsom St. Apt. B, SF CA 94110. With any luck, we’ll get Melissa on here to spell out that shipping for ya, so we can cut to the chase.

swing low, sweat chair, it...

2005-11-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

Would anyone care to buy me 1 of the 1000 copies of Jackson MacLowe's new book of performance pieces, a coffee-table 200 plus page magnum opus covering 50 years of work? Thats about $1/yr of work, not a bad rate of conversion, but I am feeling a lil poor at the moment, as rumors of lawsuits and bankruptcy run through this air.

Just a memo to say that I envision restarting this site next week, after its autumnal slumber. November 7th, a modest return to form. Modest as contra exhaustive over-reach. Hunger is a mean

a) bastard
b) bitch

of a master. What kind of gender-neutral curses could we add for

c)?

fucker works. is motherfucker a little more problematic? it certainly sounded silly coming out of perry farrell's lil LA mouth.

kisses n pisses,

jettison
autochthonic kernel
caustic yaws
klutz lavish
smarten endeavor!
o
nicitate Kultur
a
maximal uninviting
asperity. forlorn
conferee mimetic
loafer an
orison noble
wacky
engulf

fall-ing

2005-10-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

For the time being, werdenfield will be very much on the d-l, an undercover agent with good dope but lacking any reliable connection or standard hours of operation. Your sporadic remembrance of the possibility of our future manifestings is much appreciated. We'll see you out there, margin-walking...

In a way the blog feels a somewhat disposable medium, i.e. its engagement with history is rather thin - the voluminous "archives" spelling a kiss of death for all but the most intrepid who care to dig around "back there". werdenfield has its share of "there", and its not all miscellanious errata about how my cat is refusing to eat his dinner that's out of date three posts down the line when he - in a big way - does. Its your place too: dig around.

-

And on the wassup tip:

-Melissa Benham and Stephanie Young will be reading at SPT on Friday. I will be introducing Melissa. For those beyond the reach of that name, Small Press Traffic (SPT) is a venerable and tasty reading series at Calif. College of the Arts, hosted out of their Timkin Lecture Hall. Its a reliable venue to see top-notch experimental and innovative writers read.

-the innaugral Bay Area Writers Salon thingie is this Sunday @ 7PM, thats @ Sara Larsen's, 899 Oak #7 (top floor). I'll be giving a salon-kickoff presentation. Please bring work to read at the end, and wine or beer to drink throughout.

-On Saturday the 5th, Sara Larsen's new chapbook Doubly Circulatory will be being released on Artifact Press. This'll be Artifact's first book. There'll be a dance-dance-dance-party @ Sara's to celebrate, Nov. 5th. This is smackdab in the middle of our double rdng wknd too:

- On Friday the 4th at Poetry + Pizza (7:30 at Escape from New York Pizza, 333 Bush at Montgomery/ $5 at the door and all you can eat free pizza - a benefit for the Zen Hospice).

-On Monday the 7th, at All Poets Welcome (7:00pm to 8:30pm at the Gallery Cafe -- 1200 Mason at Washington in SF).

Rock Paper Sizz be all hoppety-hops.

mi pobre stare down

2005-10-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

one last & final reminder. if you - fiendish scribbler - haven’t already sent el pobre Mouse work, please do. if you have, thank you. if you’ve never been an editor, you don't realize how tired of typing this stuff we get. are they sick of us? have they forgotten? did they simply decide to pass? we stick our lil mousey heads out into the gap, into the yawning, and try to sniff the breeze with our dastardly whiskers. we live in your garbage, we hide in your floorboards, we’re wise to that cheese shit, and the glue – we know who’s behind the glue. send your work here.

we love you all, even when we’re tearing holes in your precious cracker boxes,

kyle and sara (well, kyle)

full poem hands

2005-10-11T19:13:00.000-07:00

Thanks for coming by, care for a chair?

Oh, you already have one.

This week I am back to work, and am also in full poetry swing. There are vents (and events) a planety (plenty) in the SF Bay this week, its chock full o readings, like some twisted litry pinata. Also, DJ Spooky will be playing/lecturing @ CCA on the 19th @ 7:30, and as a body interested in the intersection of art, theory, and rhythm i am there.

The other side of the full swing is the full rush of finishing my oral edit of bioautography. Whole thing read-thru, outloud, making my last revisions before i seek a few readers and start submiting this fucker for excerpt. 95 pages, at last count, 50 more to read thru. So attending to the oral element here in such a clearly written work is making for a rich intersection, one i can really wander around in and explore. The joy of a project I have become fully intimate with, its precious to me. The terror comes when I share it with others. As if I am doing it for them? As if I'm not. But if you've come to this site, you know that old ego trick... and we grow wiser.

So terror it will be. I will be performing slices of bioautography twice this November:

On Friday the 4th at Poetry + Pizza (7:30 at Escape from New York Pizza, 333 Bush at Montgomery/ $5 at the door and all you can eat free pizza - a benefit for the Zen Hospice).

On Monday the 7th, at All Poets Welcome (7:00pm to 8:30pm at the Gallery Cafe -- 1200 Mason at Washington in SF).

At both lineups I will represent with Naropa holmes Melissa Benham and Sara Larsen. The dream of a wider readership is in the inclusion of those last names, folks. But full respect to both... and even to that dream, which takes hard work to realize.

Also this week I will be drawing up mock layouts of two new subday books, Matt Langley's A Very Mild Eternity and Scott Inguito's lection. lection will kick-off the new subday mini-book series, dedicated to producing great work that is very, very small.

Blogger out-

taking the brim with the smooch

2005-10-09T22:47:00.000-07:00

as if you need a lil more kyle in yr eye, i have been invited to join takingthebrim, an online writing community. Artaud and Deleuze and Guattari are prominently invoked, so it looks very much not a new formalist ting.

to celebrate, i posted a section of my long poem, b i o a u t o g r a p h y. which continues to surprise me and is moving towards an almost operatic delivery, if you will believe that. specifically the opera of klaus nomi, robert ashley and blue gene tyranny by way of leslie scalapino and philip whalen. it offers me a way to crack that foremost demon - the poet voice.

but check it out - its a piece from the middle third of that work, and there's a little intro to b i o a u t o g r a p h y there too. this project is rocking me - you know that feeling when your work starts kicking your butt? usually the same moment you've suceeded in taking the "me" out of it.

as subtle and misleading as that may be.

love to ya,

k

el pobre Mouse # 3

2005-10-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that work for el pobre Mouse #3 is due on October 15th. That's Saturday. Come on over and check out the newly redesigned site.

el pobre offers its pages as a site to showcase and build a diverse and vibrant community of engaged, literate and aware readers/writers. All genres and forms are welcome - with each issue we work to build a web, a commons in which each text is involved with all the others, and whose paths thru are numberless : please help us out - join in the exchange, send in yr work.

For more info, and for a more detailed aesthetics - check out our site.

naughtiness rhymes

2005-10-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

When Robert Creeley came to Naropa in 2001, he proceeded to read to the hushed room a series of short little rhymey things that pissed me - earnest first sem grad student - off. Iwas like - rhyme, really? And not just any rhyme, but Seussian. (actually that part didn't so much rankle as confound and short-circuit) I wanted - expected - greatness. What an asshole I was.

Today's Sunday. In the Jew deal, God gives us the Sabbath off to play. Evidently he didnt nail down which day the seventh was too well, but whatev - its A Sabbath, at least, and if you go back far enough (to the 50s) both my parents went to goodie two shoes whitey-white churches of some northern european stripe.

Today's Sunday. Yesterday was Saturday. Saturday was Artifact. Here's mine:

it’s the glass that troubles her hand

clumsily, for tanya brolaski

fairies? fairies bright crossed night
glimpsed half-moon dulcimer light?
first put sense then shape with sound?
regular beats to make it round?

transparency, not as its seemed
a monstrous if for then to bring
closed in circles and spilling out
garnets, garters, hefeweisen, stout.

fairies sharp in tooth and claw
gnawing, spitting pun the maw
nasty short and pointy brutes
flitting, knitting charmed hirsute

most delicious, most depraved
fairie girls at café and rave
colored socks, magentas, blues,
cinder cones scenester girlies
wandering jews

lousy losers viewed in love
which sticky fairies doth loft above
like some gelding stallions proclaimed
a trinkets treasure cereal box game

demands avoiding superfluous gilding
supine and splayed such amorous trilling
so troubles sexperts in waning view
waxing so exactly the words fuck you

Points are beside the line : a review, flagrantly : Lyn and Paolo

2005-10-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes

Words are fundamentally inexhaustible in a way that human bodies are not. They may be returned to infinitely, so long as the word remains in print. In circulation. Human bodies are fundamentally inexhaustible in a way words are not. They live and pour off the page, across the mind and street, with a sensuality and a communicative power unheralded throughout the entire dictionary. The entire lexicon. A human body is a totipotent, incandescent, utterly obscure word. Its shelf life is limited. The word too will bend, melt, recycle, spawn, meet the abandon of the grave.

Relations – comparison – the in between. Here bodies, dictionaries, objects and states humble and unbowed, enter utter infinity not knowing what it isn’t and is. Between reader and writer, make no mistake, there is neither beginning nor end. And to point out that there is, THERE IS!, is to hold an incomplete and fragmentary view of reality, which is not the same as “to be wrong”. If done with a smile, this objection is a spring of joy, a box of tools, a bridge to Oakland. And I am pleasantly full of brilliantine shit.

For years I heard this song as a lovers cautionary tale. Then, this morning, still shocked by how Dylan sings “comes” as “cummmmzzzz” at the 66 Manchester live date, I enter the song differently. It’s about master/slave relations, it’s a song of a defeated, i.e. confirmed and then (to his horror) freed slave. So this freed slave’s tale is bitter, the master, of course, is both venerated and deplored. Despised. Does despising always come with an inverted erotic sheen?

Master/slave relations, then, and how they invade love, how they are a game we play with each other, those rotating empty slots we fill variously – until the game displaces reality, the actor becomes their role, and love has solidified, and broken into two. Listen to a love poem, a good one that arouses and sustains arousal, and the fluid yearning of love is exposed – the heart overflows, but doesn’t empty, refuses expectations of tiring – its vulnerability opens it, allows it to endlessly renew even as its appreciation and desire flow out. Love is this motionless flow. Almost a running-in-place on the treadmill or exercycle. Well, love has great stamina, we can salute that. I can. And of course punk rock starts with the deconstruction of this, with Richard Hell sneering that Love comes in spurts / Ohh it hurts and that’s sexy too (and sexy is to the side of love). Especially the sneer. Especially the spurts. Especially the hurts. And a negation of the love song, that’s a crucial part of the love song as tradition, as mode. It was fucking overlooked. Meaning it was there to be discovered. And it was a great discovery, because everyone had a ewww, why’d you pick that up? condescension and bafflement to this new shit. This is why we so love or loved punk rock. Its like, have you been there yet? Dumpster diving? Find a meal there, a torn skirt, but not a place to stay. Stay where? Where is?

The hint is that the writer and lover are homeless too, hence home-makers, our little beloved and discarded bound objects both. The hint is here. There are so many hints, and love is a hinting zone – take it, get it, got it, gone? Bend, break, bust, boom? Doesn’t the hint bend with supple flex? Doesn’t causality derail up close – turn mirage? A one way street so marked by its sign? A circus, an arousal, curiosity comes into play, acrobatic, but not of death, acrobatics of life, and so the clown shits, that's part of the play, someone steps on it, we laugh, been there, doing that. We get to madly careen, feel our own gravity, call into question our eyes, tricks are played on us - that wasn't shit, it was a little girl! - now she's taking photos, now I'm someone else, now - Hello there - we're gone. The mind cannot wrap around the show by trying, the tent is too big, there are several, we collide. Will the party pour out onto the streets?

The good game of slave and master, active and passive, stone and the ass that sits on it, when this displaces the infinite possibilities of the real – revealed in particular form as our cloud current desires (shift no matter how much the pattern is loved – loving the pattern itself a shift) – then love is reduced to the same hierarchical rigidity that determines so many work dynamics. my boss rides me. I do not ride my boss. Of course I do, I am a naughty boy. And its not the same, the distinction hinges on me recognizing, on her recognizing, its not the same. Me on top is driving the wrong way down the one-way. And one-way is only a fucking sign. So the game is a Foucault and Butler one – are there any cops around? But the cops go undercover, and if a car comes… its just like playing with metaphors – eventually someone gets hurt.

For years I’ve wondered when democracy, which I have been repeatedly told I live in – will invade the workplace. Fuck invade, I am ready for democracy to so much as knock on the door and be ignored by the receptionist.

This excessively set and untroubled sedimentation is why I don’t read most novels, don’t watch most films – the ossification of the narrative flow by the exclusionary and binding logic of plot, its incessant demand for investment, its vortex of winnowing, its fixation on hurrying the fuck up and “cum” – it can be interesting, but its tiring. It comes in spurts. Does our masturbatory, voyeur culture urge us to jack off culturally as much as possible, and pay for the tissue? How high is this throne, how easily can I – sipping chamomile tea at 11:11AM in the fucking morning, step off it?

Opinions too are noun states that pass. Judgments their own cloud current, until I seed the clouds. And seed the cows. And the serfs. Until I am so invested in snow I buy a snow-maker, and dancy dance my little god of enterprise dance on my own private Disneyland.

So, for me to add that plot is also richly revealing, that plot can slow down and ride you sweet between the nasty, can even up and leave but come running back before you feel too jilted and get cold, that plot is an endlessly inventive and impossible to ignore lover, that even identifying with plot, with its trap, with enjoying being trapped, and being free to spring the trap at any time during that enjoyment, is not only possible, but probably necessary strategy, that this pure outside itself is polarizing and reductive, is also besides the point, unless done with a smile, dropping the need to be right, dropping the need for others to be wrong, the fear and loathing and desire opinions birth, words birth – the whole sandcastle of…

Of what? It slipped away. Thief in the night. Proof in the pudding. Cuz there is no speaking of G_d? The whole’s habit of eliding its “w”?

a specific sonic signature of death

2005-10-07T00:13:00.000-07:00

The United States Navy's Blue Angels, or Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, was formed at the end of World War II, by order of Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Chief of Naval Operations, to keep the public interested in naval aviation.

-

Lookin' at the devil
Grinnin' at his gun
Fingers start shakin'
I begin to run
Bullets start chasin'
I begin to stop
We begin to wrestle
I was on the top

-

Today, as the Navy's Blue Angels stunt pilots roared above the city, I felt a vestigial alarm. Even once I remembered the Fleet Week, even after I verified it online, the roars and zoom and deafening boom of the planes sudden announcement criss-crossed my mind. And this safe in the arms of the superpower. Terror even there.

-

2001: War on Terrorism: The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began at 16:30 UTC with an aerial bombing campaign targeting Taliban and Al-Qaida forces.

-

On TV, Afghanistan reminds me of the most barren stretch of the US West - I have little else to compare it to. Outside Fallon NAFB, where Top Gun was filmed, the basin and range land of Nevada stretches its vast sagebrush fingers. There, on empty hillside trails, the only man or even mammal I'd seen in hours, I would encounter again this rush and crash as the void is shattered by such definite, screeching presence. "Metal hawks"? Certainly birds of prey, perhaps a demonic flying-too-close-to-the-sun. Hard to even see, the gap between the seen and the heard coming clear only later, in a contrail or sun-turning glint. One morning, near a hot spring, they woke Sarah and I up, and I exited my tent to witness three crossing the poet's rosy fingered dawn, shooting out of the snow capped Ruby Mountains on a crisp May morn. In formation.

-

Such presence even when marked as "friend". Imagine the impact when "foe". And that gray area between, eating all. Could I talk to those pilots? What would we hear?

-

The Blue Angels perform more than 70 shows at 34 different locations throughout the USA each year. Since 1946, they have flown for more than 260 million spectators.

-

Peace to the Iraqi and Afghani children, parents, the old, murdered and unborn of this fucked-over world. And to those spreading Hell in name of Heaven, an active, strong, vigiliant peace mixed with sorrow and rage, no matter how desperate it turns, no matter how little our swords and arrows seem to dent the titanium. That my tax money goes to such obscene ends while my own fellow citizens are bankrupted by an unforseen illness, or a minor surgery.

We all know this prayer, and this plea. Its more a question of what we are going to do, how often we repeat it, how much of our life we give to realizing another way. What to add? I'm in. Call me on it when I am not, thats what friends and critics are for. I'm in.

-

sonic boom. a bomb. to tear asunder. a 'deafening' scream. where i would like to hear. and death too is acrobatic, incendiary, leaves a trail... sneaks up, unexpected, and overpowers.

-

Sly Stone wrestling with that devil, and getting on top of him.

while we are near the subject of bicycles

2005-10-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

Another bike setback:

"In another technique, sensors are placed on the rider's penis to measure oxygen flowing through arteries beneath the skin. Blood flow is detected by other sensors that send a "swoosh" sound to a Doppler machine."

Intrigued? Without giving it away, let me just say you know that numb, sore feeling from riding on a hard bike seat? How well do you know it? Uh-huh, and how's your sex life? Read on...

werdenfield loves you and your perineum.

New links, long posts

2005-10-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Sean MacInnes on the blogroll, and to Effing Press in the stage and page section. Bout time, yo. If you don't know Sean Mac, go trowling, and likewise for Effing, run by Scott Pierce down in Austin, TX, who has damn near brought down the term "ineffable" onto his head in countless reviews. I like the other sense added on ' fucking ineffable' - now that's descriptive prose.

And bout that triple decker beneath us... In blog fashion, its one essay, presented in reverse order. Essays are the new poems. Dig.

Essays are hard to write, prose can kick the reader out as effectively as any "what-i-did-yesterday" or "fuck bush, keine blud fur oil" poem out there. Essays push me in unexpected ways, and they ride me down. Like marathons. Can you see where I started to tire? And get the umpteenth wind? Tamales time, friends. Tomorrow, its back to work.

And those ridiculous SSSCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRs above my head must mean its effing Fleet Week. "Join now. "Daredevil prose, y'all. Free membership, too.

Tapping the Source

2005-10-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

When I’m home from work, time is malleable, open, a bounty. I can become longwinded. What I meant to do here was offer a little context for Pema’s laying out of the teaching of the Three Lords of Materialism ( Lalos, in Tibetan Buddhism): “the three ways that we shield ourselves from the fluid, un-pin-downable world, three strategies we use to provide ourselves with the illusion of security. This teaching encourages us to become very familiar with these strategies of ego, to see clearly how we continue to seek comfort and ease in ways that only strengthen our fears”

The First Lord – the Lord of Form

“It represents how we look to externals to give us solid ground.” Faced with unease, its that familiar list – sex, drugs, drink, shopping, sports, travel, dancing, parties, nature, TV, internet, work and career, books, having written books. Not the activities themselves, but how we cling to them, how we use them as shields, how we addict ourselves to them to escape a reoccurring pain. Pema notes: “when we become addicted to the lord of form, we are creating the causes and conditions for suffering to escalate. We can’t get any lasting satisfaction no matter how hard we try. Instead the very feelings we’re trying to escape grow stronger.” Suggesting the Stones – they tried mighty fucking hard, but in all their later photos, they look a little sad, a little worn and pathetic (or maybe a lot?), a kind of still-here tired – made simulacrum small by their own (aging) legends. Survivors, sure, connoisseurs of women and rehab, yet financing this by endlessly threshing out diminishing versions of the old hits. Disney (or maybe Miramax) caricatures of their own myth. I Know I’ve felt the same, although been paid far less for it.

Pema adds “No matter how we get trapped, our usual reaction is not to become curious about what’s happening. We do not naturally investigate the strategies of ego.” She suggests that in bodhichitta (awakened heart) practice, the radical act is simply : “to pay attention to what we do.” From this acknowledgment without judging, “we might [eventually] decide to stop hurting ourselves in the same old ways.” I would be interested to know that the Stones were doing a tour with all new material, with none of the old hits, or re-treads of same. Actually, I would be a little more interested if it was Stereolab, but whatev…

The Second Lord – the Lord of Speech

“This lord represents how we use beliefs of all kinds to give us the illusion of certainty about the nature of reality. Any of the “isms” – political, ecological, philosophical, or spiritual [or certainly aesthetic, no?] – can be misused in this way.” And “The problem isn’t with the beliefs themselves but with how we use them to get ground under our feet, how we use them to feel right and to make someone else wrong, how we use them to avoid the feeling of uneasiness of not knowing what is going on.” Yet underneath that uneasiness, beside it, is our natural curiosity, our instinctive energy and attention which we can apply to the trouble at hand. Our discernment and practice can guide us, we can find ground without faking it through beliefs. This was the fierce, uncompromising, warrior quality that shown through in Derrida. An insistence on avoiding the easy, the obvious, the cheap offered way out – on rather investigating these outs, subjecting them to analytic scrutiny, in the name of seeing what the fuck is going on with all these ruses of power. Like Jacques says, its not so much that we emphasize that “I deconstruct x” as it is that “I note x’s deconstruction”.

Here the sense of always already, a certain timeless karma-in-motion, a sense that we make up in medias res, that there’s nowhere else but this big middle, and that even our best intentioned explanatory stories are just that, and somewhere, somewhere, a narrator is telling them, and that narrator has their reasons… often this very unease with not-knowing is among them. “Beliefs and ideals have become just another way to put up walls.” Who hasn’t been involved in some political crisis (whether domestic or academic or activist hardly matters) and experienced this reactive tendency, no matter how progressive our aim? What else to do again but note, but read, this tendency – chart it exhaustively, compassionately, learn from it? “if we find ourselves becoming righteously indignant, that’s a sure sign that we’ve gone too far and that our ability to effect change will be hindered.” Even in our opponents, even in the pro-life arena, in the Bush White House and their Corporate backers, even in the varying terror camps, their sense of struggle, however perverted, springs, at some obscured level, from a deeply and passionately felt conviction. Even if its only in their self, and its infallibility.

The Third Lord – the Lord of Mind

“the most subtle and seductive strategy of all.” “The lord of mind comes into play when we attempt to avoid uneasiness by seeking special states of mind… These special states are addictive. It feels so good to break free from our mundane experience. We want more.” Pema’s list of examples: LSD, sports – being “in the zone”, falling in love, spiritual practices… I’d add writing and performing. Wonderfully, I have dabbled in all of these zones addictively, or at least habitually. I have a real knack for this one. Faced with the relentless ordinary, doesn’t the extraordinary start to look sublimely good? “Even though peak experiences might show us the truth and inform us about why we are training, they are essentially no big deal. If we can’t integrate them into the ups and downs of our lives, if we cling to them, they will hinder us. We can trust our experiences as valid, but then we have to move on and learn to get along with our neighbors.” Once the applause at the big release reading ends, its back to the empty studio, to the blank screen. Once the insight is attained, it passes away, and you are hungry again, and the baby is too. “Since it is inevitable that what goes up must come down, when we take refuge in the lord of the mind we are doomed to disappointment.” So that’s what’s been going on. Literally every book, every movie, every reading, every charged conversation or long walk home in shifting light, and I am full of ideas, inspired, jazzed. And about ten minutes later it’s a puff of smoke, and what was that idea, that scene, that secret twist? I am left with questions, with the longing, which I recognize, I identify – as me. My plight. Fucked up again.

Pema, and I, move on. With one look back:

“Each of us has a variety of habitual tactics for avoiding life as it is. In a nutshell [and I actually trust this nutshell, and its meat too], that’s the message of the three lords of materialism. The simple teaching is, it seems, everyone’s autobiography.”

I could end my life on that quote.

I like my nutshells at the end of the meal, after we’ve been lost, we digress, and they come out with the cheese. Plant it in the ground, or in yr belly, watch it seed.

The text is not the book (C’est ne pas un blog)

2005-10-06T15:08:00.002-07:00

This morning, reading Pema Chodron, I make no grand claims about her. We have never met, and I have no insights into her life or practice. She’s just the type on the page, and the photo on the back, a warm, wrinkly smile, with either inner glow or studio light reflection on her cheeks. What I can say is that she writes motherfucking incredibly well, and that it is a true pleasure to meet her texts. If reading is a performance, then this was an intimate, quiet, deliberately slow one, a neural unwinding neither hushed nor precious. I read slowly cuz her lines slip in and in and in.

This is my new mojo, to understand that the very real pleasures and profundities of a read text relate more to me, to my reading, than to any distant, other author. I don’t contest that she wrote this book – no doubt with help from others – but that its simply less relevant – is actually fundamentally suspect – for my reading to focus on an absent author that I must construe and conjecture on than on the present reading subject, and this undeniable, and immediate, and pressing, experience of reading. There is a real opportunity here, and a responsibility too, not just for/to the self, but also the world with which we share whatever it is we find in our readings. And we are always reading.

This also admits complexity, it allows for one to write deeply engaged and intimate and brilliant poems, and then behave like a monosyllabic ass at the next party. The contradiction is only juvenile, apparent, born of sloppy thinking. Still, my vestigial faith tells me that writing this gentle and incisive rather pushes the hog-wild party-wrecker archetype off the menu for Pema. No one’s mentioned that side of Gampo Abbey to me. Yet.

So a vital sense of complexity, and uncertainty. A tentativeness and humility in staking claims, even in my own mind. An ability to listen, to accept, to weigh. That’s what I was reading, and reading for, this morning. A way to proceed in a life marked by awkwardness, discomfort, confusion, forgetting, difficulty. In/Of’s Malcolm X quote was a small revelation – that one can embrace awkwardness, even see its necessity. And in the arts, how the writer can allow, see the wisdom of certain awkwardnesses of language and rhetoric, how beauty is diminished by aiming always for some transcendental luminosity and exactness, as if that precision and heat of soul is the only thing worth aiming for (well then, goodbye to farming, for one). And aiming at all, it is so easy to disappear into our aims, projects, goals. To what end? And with what (unsaid?) motivation?

And with practice, I as a reader-writer can become conscious of my effects, my textual traces, and conscious of how I feel around each, about what they are connected to – habits of abandonment, of verbiage, of examples, and rapidity, of repeating words, themes, forms, of avoidances and misgivings – watching it all like a movie on an endless –yet iterative – loop, until it all becomes familiar, even in each new crop of mutations. Knowing the terrain, can’t I chose how I move through it? – and its no dumb choice. Intimacy with my surroundings allows for great insight, for fluid and masterful motions. Or, at the least, to be at peace in the war of the heart – bravely in it, not fearfully apart from it. Selfless in the middle of chaos – on Monday, for me, the ER (well, working on that “selfless” part).

And if there is anything at stake in our work, then there is danger, and in danger, one must not only be a warrior, but a capable, a fearless one. If there’s nothing at stake, then hey, go do what you want. But isn’t this “nothing at stake” just another tourist excuse? A product of some invisible luxury which oppresses us, grinds us down to nothing and no one? It seems to me too big a negation – even in play, there are stakes, as in childhood: the stakes are as high and vast as we care to see them. Regardless, as I keep doing it, and keep asserting (largely in the face of my own opposition), writing matters. It is a matter of mine. I triumph it, share it, I trust in its revelations and obstructions. In its path. The bitch is a practice, and a damn good and uncompromising one.

Heartfelt i.e. trying

2005-10-06T15:08:00.000-07:00

When I first started reading poetry and novels and essays in HS, I assumed, in a fairly uncomplicated fashion, that if you were an articulate and powerful writer, you led an articulate and powerful life. Since I was interested in liberation, in revolution, in all the good kicks a young punk rocker hungers for, I naively imagined my heroes, both on page and stage, to be champions – and models – of a better life. And I figured I knew just what that better meant.

Now I wouldn’t say that things were –as many nostalgic nee conservative accounts of childhood have it – less complicated, but that I was deliberately simplifying in order to make sense of it all, to have a fixed order, and a fixed position in that fixed order. At a moralistic and fiery 17, it is fairly easy to be a zealous deductive scientist, and write off any “bad data” that doesn’t confirm the initial hypothesis ( jocks are monsters, war is evil, the right doc martens are a sign of nobility, capitalism and money are the devil, Salvador Dali is awesome… etc.). These theses informed every aspect of my life, from what I thought of my parents to what records I listened to, which subjects I avoided in school as well as where I hung out, the girls I liked… ad nauseum. Yet I imagined myself a fiery rebel and apostle of freedom.

A few years later, having discovered how Nietzsche went insane and kissed a horse, how Hemmingway shot his brains out, how the issue of anarchy and the dream of the collective was a little different than the Ex and Crass records made out, how most of my Kerouac-kissing dreamer friends were well on the way to post-adolescent self-destruction, how Ian MacKaye was seen drinking a beer (! – I remember this one clearly, after a Fugazi show – and that it was a shock) how cynicism and careerist posturing were slipping in to the scene, how professors could spout great opinions and still lead dreary, uninspiring lives, how each high birthed a new, and greater, low, and, first but listed here last, how miserable I still was after all these adventures, I had the sense that there was nothing left, that nothing held true, I could rely on nothing, I was alone.

And with this first taste of basic freedom, I flipped out, and wanted none of it. But there was nowhere to go (thankfully). I didn’t want to get a job, just some job, and when I tried (my parents pushed) I failed. So I went into a monastery.

And there, in the Buddhist world, again I met teachers and read texts that felt purely enlightened, pristine and clear. Wisdom and insight untainted, boundless compassion, all that horseshit all over again. So after a few years my practice – or my dream of practice – ebbed. It was such hard work, it was such miserable hard work. I was still a completely unenlightened dweeb with grand delusions of enlightenment. My new crew of hero saviors was looking more like real people – wise, helpful, but limited, and even fallible, or should I say complicated? Where to go now?

probably not the post JWG is checking for (sorry JWG)

2005-10-05T21:58:00.000-07:00

thanks all. i am healing away. or healing towards. i am a little like an old person - can't do so much, little things become adventures - the shower, putting on a shirt, feeding the cats. my body urges me to go slow, and i am trying to oblige, but the MTV generation has a tuff time with that, and i'm of it. i'm learning.

being confined to sickbed is a great time to catch up on old movies (to much head ache for reading) but the ones I picked out naively are in German, French and Danish, and the subtitles hurt. Still Herz Aus Glas is fucking incredible - the whole cast was filmed - save the lead - under hypnosis, and not only does my favorite Blondie song come out of it, but there are some drop dead gorgeous, and haunting, and disturbing, scenes in this lt. 70s Herzog flick. And Derrida is for me the perfect - and highly accessible, esp. to one dedicated to reading/writing in this culture - reintroduction to the man and his work. Derrida is a thinker that I wander away from but never want to escape, eclipse, or forget - his work is just too vital a surgery of the Western body. If I can get away with putting it that way. Derrida and I meet in our mutual concern with turning over the givens of our culture, examining them in the name of a greater freedom, a greater clarity of vision (and one which allows, can even appreciate, the peripheral and occasional blur and myopic blind). Plus, it was a film that made me reconsider the lady in the ER who was shouting repeatedly that "Its all a conspiracy" - there is definitely a place where the alliance of police, HMOs, social workers and doctors and staff does seem both unholy and definitely conspiratorial. I suppose I would really have wet my pants if it had been a film on Foucault.

Anyway, my poncey eyes are tired and I will wait to tomorrow to watch the Five Obstructions. Honestly, with Sarah off travelling and me all alone and weak/recovering, I'd be up for a good erotic film - the kind that gets the blood flowing. Not quite the genre exercise of porn, I really don't know what film it would be - but luscious, passionate, embodied, sensual, connected. Bodies not removed from hearts and minds. Cheesy? When I was in the ER, there was nothing better to have a nurse touch my shoulder and look into my eyes and hear - truly listening and allowing my words to enter - my heartfelt and roughly worded thanks. That was sensual, that was intimacy, that was connection. And is. As a sidenote, those fuckers were a little guarded, a little resistant to, at first, hearing this thanks - but as I told Ms. Sparks last night, if one holds eye contact while speaking - something I am gunshy of - you can see their pupils adjust, relax - is it dilate? - into the channel of communication between us. And their faces softened - men and women - and for a moment they stopped rushing around as caregivers, and let me reciprocate, and felt the joy of their work, making, as they do, such moments of healing, of life, possible. And after all the shitstorm of those last few hours at the hospital - as a patient, and as a body to be performed upon (and thank god, cuz i could barely talk at first let alone walk and i needed that performance) - it felt so GOOD to be able to give something back - a sense of gratitude, of play, of exchange, of communion even.

Am I preaching? Let's hope its an innocuous (innoculate) sermon. And now, again, writing this, I discover my own poverty of the sensual, of intimacy, always reducing connection, penetration, commingling, to cock-groans and cunt-moans and copping a nice hiney. Having written this, I could care less about consuming something erotic now... with Eros, one can make their own. And freely SHARE it. At least until Blogger flags me (Et tu, google?). So, again to Ms. Sparks, lets hold off on that "I'd be willing to spring for a hooker for ya" offer for awhile. It was tantalizing.

I didnt link those movies above. its gotten to the point where, in this format, that feels like a very shoddy performance of "blogging". While I'm at it, there's fascinating controversary around the so-called 10th planet and other TNO's (trans-Neptunian objects), and at the center of it again are words, their definitions, and the privleges of names and naming. Such contentions! And no, the 10th planet is not going to be called Xena, if its going to even be called anything. Still, if you want to strike a blow to the system, go ahead and write about Planet Xena, we'll know what you mean, geekette or nerd. Every once in awhile, its good to return to the realms where Kuiper, Oort, 51 Pegasi (where, 10 years ago Thurs., the first extrasolar planet was discovered) and other such phantoms (such as: Orcus, Ixion, 2002 UX25, Varuna, 2003 EL61... and that's just a sampling near Pluto...) of my far mind dwell. Reminds me so strongly of being 5 and imagining infinity until I raced off the edge of my mind into, namely, terror, realizing there was no edge, no limit, no end. I nearly wet the bed.

Planet, from the Greek πλανήτης, planētēs, for wanderer. The ancients didnt include Mama Earth as a planet, so ostenibly it was Galileo and Copernicus's crew who showed that we too weren't fixed, weren't flat, weren't immune - our home too a transient nomad good-for-naught floozy in some cheap sandwich between pagan Venus and Mars. How very SF.

-

sara - know that your "its okay kyle, you're doing great kyle , it'll all be okay.. i think i am going to faint..." was a highlight of the ER experience, you and that stubborn artery that WOULD NOT stop bleeding (A truly Taurus vein runs through me).

JWG - some photos were taken, but I haven't seen anything. I am saving the bandages though. Don't ask. The hole was plum sized, and it filled with blood, and when the artery was struck, I heard (I wasnt looking then) that it spurted like a fountain. I could clearly see how this hole had been made by a car door corner, it looked like someone had chiseled a pyramid out of my chest - it was deep, or so it looked to me. The ER folk weren't impressed, as it didnt puncture my lung. But then one of their next patients had a sizable hole of his own - in the side of his head. I must've been stuck with needles over 2 dozen times. The IVs and one (unannounced) invasion in my lower gut were particularly memorable. That sense of invasion though, like, AAIIIEEEE! in come the aliens, with their own inhuman agenda.

Dylan - No I didnt. How did she know it was her?

-

well, i'm sleeping a lot and not being too ambitious. thanks and love and prayers to all. i miss you and i am glad we are all here.

love
k

bike versus car

2005-10-04T15:24:00.000-07:00

and bike lost.

five hours, and maybe 12 (can't count the internal ones) stitches later, hiya. nice big hole sealed up above my heart. hospital stories, ruminations, there is plenty to write bout this, but i am totally exhausted right now. no major organs fucked - sore muscles, torn skin ( my chest went INTO the corner of a car door), a better sense of what contemporary emergency care is... that kind of thing. i hope the woman who was shouting "its a conspiracy" is feeling better now. and i met kuan yin. but its san francisco, so he's this young guy who looked a little like talib kweli.

it will take a while to process having seen my very own (and very dear) "marbled fat". its actually kind of fun to write about this, but, LAT-R.

until then, know i am healing, my neck is super stiff, and the IVs they stick in your arms are plastic! who knew...

and share your sympathy. tanya brolaski, in berkeley, nearly got her finger cut off. its a rough week for bay area poets. shit be going down.

"Traffic accidents kill an average of 728 cyclists each year, injuring 45,000 more. Cyclist's account for 13 percent of all non-motorist traffic, 2 percent of all traffic fatalities, and 1 percent of all traffic injuries. Roughly 40 percent of all bicycle fatalities occur in the states of California, Florida, New York and Texas." - RIP, dead cycle homies. KMalone, know I was thinking of you. Sorry I always stuck my tongue out at you in the end. What to say? Hope you made it past the confusion...

complications

2005-09-30T22:55:00.000-07:00

Remember Quinne? (If not, try the 9.08.05 post). Here's Quinne a few days ago. She has apparently been robbed, fired, had charges pressed against her, been beaten up (am I reading this right?) by her boyfriend, and gotten in a car accident, all while going broke and living in Tennessee, which she appears to hate. (sorry Sean).

However, and here's for spunk, her response is "all i need is to be pregnant and walking around barefoot and ill fit right in in tennessee"

Here's how I came by Quinne this time - Wired posted a story about rumors swirling around Suicide Girls. Rumors that it is run by a wealthy, right-wing businessman (named, yes, Sean). And they apparently pay a mere $300 for a photoset. Evidently 30 of the girls have left in the last week or two. I wondered how Fence's covermodel was weathering the storm...

Bearing in mind my rather utopic, naive (or just hopeful) thoughts on Suicide Girls last month, here's the reality check. Dig the dirt, and Quinne, heal up girl. Ten minutes ago, I thought I had a bad week...

nice day outside

2005-09-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

And tomorrow it'll be 15 cooler. i live in San Francisco. I have waded thru 3 months of cool fog to get here: what would you do?

So, in lieu of the post on
-Bob Dylan
-DIY
-xenophobia
-ancient Greek customs of gift-giving
-energetic theories of negation
-the intersection of health and writing
-chinese strawberry candy
-long Fall evenings
-the magnetics of vulnerability
-burritos

and whatever else is on this crumpled piece of paper I've been carting everywhere for a week and the additional tangents I have been "writing" in my head incessantly...

I'm outta here. Kiss the sun for me. And if you live somewhere where the trees turn colors, you'll be cold and dead someday, so enjoy it.

Love,

the new dealie

2005-09-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

werdenfield is shifting to a once a week deal. thats the next evolutionary leap, we'll see how it goes. werdenfield encourages ergonomic blogging. holistic blogging. proactive blogging.

those words are weighing me down. maybe i meant "jogging" instead of blogging.

so next week will unveil whatever this new form will be. i am thinking i might have more time to edit beforehand. maybe i will talk more about writing. maybe i will make it all of maybes, raid the perhap tree for fruit. vague, blurry bundles of it.

dear crystal ball,

-

and a werdenfield note to the office-bound: i've found in the last few months that a recipe for happiness and lightness in the drudge-heap here is modest food intake (small meals, intentioanlly skipping lunch on some days as a mini-fast) and not using your down and break time to surf the internet FIRST. FIRST take a walk, talk to coworkers, breathe and stretch, write a page or two. or just a line. Once you got ground, you got play, surf with abandon. It has been working here.

w e r d e n f i e l d cares about you, so take care.

peep peep.

hunter-gatherers of language

2005-09-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

Is it Ezra Pound who writes of the "word-hoard"? I remember Ol' Andy Schelling using that phrase. If he was a meaner cowboy, he'd shoot any man called 'im Andy.

Is the pistolero concealed in

a) a hollowed-out copy of the Cantos?
b) the red checkered scarf! the scarf! although if he were a meaner cowboy, he'd shoot me and say "bandana."

Last night, Sara Larsen and I were comparingnotes on field composition. We were exploring that word f i e l d -

a plane we cross, but which presents no particular path to cross except its own contours, and how they intersect with our body and its desires (two feet and i can get tired so i will follow the low road, and i can get hungry for a view, so i'll mount the high).

field composition may have eco-zones of transition (where forest meets plain, say), but it lacks clear beginning and end in the sense of a laid-out "start-here" path. It is not labyrinthian, or maze-like. It avoids that duality? Or is it more of a n-th degree labryinth?

There's a labryinth at one of the main SF cathedrals, its an Episcopal affair, so my English wife feels at home there (actually she is as shy as me in churches). They have an outdoor and indoor labyrinth, both set on top of Nob Hill. we chose the indoor one.

A sign asks you to take your shoes off. Some mad atonalist is doing slow buzz-saws on the organ. Its a massive pipe organ, the music is kaleidoscopic but quiet(ish) and the colors aren't so sharp as just shifting. It sounded more avant then big bourgeois cathedral music had any right to. Bouncing around that huge space, and then abruptly turning from mmmnnlll mmmmnn lllmmmm to whlrwhlrwhlrwhrlwhrlwhrl to scrrrrttttttt scrtttttttttscrtt sctrtttrtttt scrttttttt. Was i the only one who noticed? Sun Ra on downers? I took off my shoes.

The labryinth itself is a large circle in which is laid a winding path - not a spiral, but a more complicated journey back and forth through each quadrant of the circle, nearer and nearer the center, til you are one step away, and then the path winds (if it was a hike these would be switchbacks) out to the very edge, then across to the next quadrant, and repeat. We are not alone - some walk slowly, some fast, some together, most singly. I walk slowly, eyes on the floor. One couple is giggling and holding hands - they walk increasingly fast, distracted. A few race madly through the "contemplative space". Gi-gi-gi-gi-gi stabs of organ. I can't help butnotice how many of the 15 or so people here don't seem to be volitonally on the path. Yet all abide by the rules of that path - no one cuts corners. It reminds me of Seattle, where no one jaywalks - except people didnt seem as anxious of the lights to turn there. A wispy girl slides past. I slow down. Two midle-aged ladies make no effort to accomodate you as you pass each other on the narrow path. Once you have covered all 4 quadrants - literally walking everywhere, unwinding and exhausting the space - a journey of 10 or more minutes (surprisingly long), I arrive in the center. Sarah has just left, with her faster, if even, stride. The sign encourages you to use the center in whatever fashion appropriate - it is shaped as a rose is from above, a center with each petal offering a little half-circle node along the perimeter. Its maybe 6, 7 feet across. I pick an empty node and sit down. I have never practiced in a Christian space before, only visited. As the organ sails off into glissandos, I relax on the ground and breathe. Then I think about Sarah - there she is, walking past, how far along? - thinking about time, and I rise and turn and slowly walk back.

Yet in a Duncan, Olson, or Creeley poem, unless you are keeping track of the page count, it is not so easy to note where this center is, where the turning point is. The lay of the field is unpredictable, its not such a simple pattern - one is moving through, one is immersed - the lines are a series of turns, a series of nooks, alcoves, and jumps. The temporality of moving across a series of signs, inlines, on pages, is moe complex, more folded, than that of a clearly diagramed path in an open chruch-space. The reader is free to skip lines, double back, pause where they like. Of course, this also makes it more intimidating. It also makes it more rewarding - or differently rewarding. And yet both are planned spaces, both encourage this tight focus of attention towards the units - breath, morpheme, line, stanza, page, section, work,book - the multileveled units through which we readers move.

And, if its really necessary, go ahead and put on some Philip Glass organ music and read Maximus for the full "Episcopal" effect. But props to that - Grace - Cathedral (its name). They have a beautiful and somber alcove dedicated to the victims of AIDS, and a gorgeous, incandescent series of long, rainbow-hued translucent ribbons hung in slow, waving arcs from the (flying buttresedly high ceiling. Their shape suggests whalebones, or the ark, perhaps, although it suggests it now - writing - not then.

Field, through which movement, through which hunting and gathering. Sightings of rabbit, a clutch of rosehips. Ancient pasttimes of our ancestors, now printed on paper, now pressed to the page. Duncans misspellings - pay attention. The Native scouts who could tell that a cougar or fox had passed this way a week ago, and if it was hungry or not... the infinite and sensual suggestibility of language, its arc between the abstract and concrete, its play of noun and verb. The ironic tangles of Olson's orations, his addressing. Creeley's modest, lean lines, the white space... motions like rolling and kneeling dough.

Sara photocopied me a chapter from a book by the witch Starhawk. In it she recounts the (purported) lack of nouns in Native American languages. All places were worded as verb-adjective relations. I see her critique (and Melissa Benham's) of the place of the noun, its fixed, clunky, delusional bulk (and the disasters it encourages when it finally breaks open (levee)) yet I am comofrtable with the play of particulars, with the movement between rest and motion, solid and liquid. If some writers triumph yin over yang, or the obtuse over the sincere, so deska (Jap.: oh, , okay, i see/ is that so? I say so deska to remind me of the old couple in Ozu's Tokyo Monogatari). I don't blindly trust them - I don't know if their beliefs and practices work towards liberation or suffering - but I can let it be que sera.... Whether ones actions bring ruination or joy, it is beyond me - I watch, add what I can, fight when I feel I must, but I move through this with not knowing. But the wise upaya (skillful means) is to right the imbalance, to adjust for maximum flow, to note and dissolve the blocks. And, in our present culture, tilting towards the play of verb state in the dictionary, stessing it in the use of written signs, even in spoken ones, makes sense. As BobDoto's post on reading the dictionary points out, there are many strategies that allow this flux into the fixed museum of categories.

And yet for some individuals - better, in some particular situations - now is NOT the time for cultivating flux. Its possible to be fluxed-out, overwhelmed in the chaos of signification, sensation, mind-awareness. This can lead to a state of trauma which buries and worms its way through the entire body and psyche. Such people need the care, rest and regularity noun-states can provide - routine, support, discernment, discipline - the ability to stand up again and pilot through the world. Critiquing them for their slant this way is not-looking, is the blindness of prejudice and belief. I've been guilty of prescriptive mono-ideology, of assuming that one shoe fits all feet, at all times. Some fuckers have had their legs clean blasted off. Difference. Appreciating, respecting, intuiting difference - its a long fucking haul for a white kid from the suburbs.

So shephards, fruit-eaters, seed-pickers, tractor-slayers. So.

Lady Nijo takes Melville as lover

2005-09-22T17:18:00.000-07:00

Dramameme. Dromedary. Apothecary.
Legal permit for suspended designation
(a signage stoppage)
Dramamine? Respitory difficulties,
a repository of tribulations. Stop smoking
them camels. Calling a halt
to Ahab. That is, chasing the whale,
of which the desert offers none.
Yes, office. Moeover, more to come
the mean meme of Richard Dawkins,
the roll of the critic (that six-sided die?)
and the following haiku,

stolen back from a nasty, if legit thief:

Waning moon over the ocean
How damp my sleave come dawn
I didn't realize we were dating.

from my fief. Trans
gerund. The rest, geriatric,
waits for its sine. And I -
always eating - am
IN TO LUNCH

actually, its closing time.

Context? Not unless you click the comment box.

welcome to fall

2005-09-20T23:52:00.000-07:00

International Day of Peace

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The International Day of Peace was established, on 30 November 1981, by the General Assembly of the United Nations, in resolution 36/67. The Assembly declared that the Day be observed, on the third Tuesday of September every year, as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, an invitation to all nations and people to honour a cessation of hostilities during the Day. It invited all Member States, organizations of the United Nations system, regional and non-governmental organizations and individuals to commemorate the Day in an appropriate manner, including through education and public awareness, and to cooperate with the United Nations in establishing a global ceasefire.
After a campaign by Jeremy Gilley and the Peace One Day organisation, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 55/282 on September 7, 2001, which decided that the International Day of Peace would be celebrated on September 21 each year, starting in 2002.

I am asking for the world where we celebrate this day with our observance. And not because the global daddy UN tells us so. Here again we are presented with their largely decorative function when they depart from the agenda of the always already world leaders. Did anyone know this was up? Please join me in promoting peace today (where in our dailyness, in this moment, do we enter the practice of peace, and where leave it?),

and then back to war tomorrow? I'm tired of that war, of feeling compelled to lighten things with a joke, of the self-consciousness when I feel unfashionably sincere. So today I will let that mirror-gazing go. (Maybe to the mall?)

In the name of true lightness of spirit,

its such an unnoticed luxury to even be reading this

2005-09-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

and how many more times over so to be writing it?

yet by no means guarranteed in Egypt.

I understand the germ of the last judgement, that sense that God'll get us in the end. But why this faith in ends? Not to mention "In the beginnings...". What about right now? Repression and the irrepressible.

Wake up, motherfuckers, do.

And

the californians are here.

2005-09-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

on the blogroll, werdenfield just got several degress more californian. 1 north, 1 south, a SF, and several East Bay. we grow... if you put these people together on a tropical island, you'd have a hell of a Survivor.

The invitation (of which I offer so many): poke around.

The challenge: are you as dedicated (talking temporality here, also, a sense of labor) as Brandon Brown to blogging? Who can limbo like that? Not to let admiration take the heat off...

The question: who is doing all this blogging anyway? to call the author Kyle (and to know what that means) seems a little duplicitous, which seems necessary no - in this thoroughly imaginary world. Maybe that's not the question. Its one of them, though. No edges, no center. No wit, and no bleeding heart either.

(I had to tell a drunk queen at a party this week that i prefered not to be called a "nice liberal" unless he wanted to start something. Since the something he wanted to start was a not-so "nice" dance, i have once again defended my honor against the impieties and horrendous advances of the cross-dressing legions. With that gunslinger brought down, now I can concentrate on smaller fry, like my family and bosses.)

Yes to edit, perchance to delete.

Oh yes, and to be dreadfully casual and cursory.

tintin would put it down in disgust

2005-09-19T23:09:00.000-07:00

so much anger in that last post. what to do? fuck pigs dick shit? go beat someone up? eyes closed, how tight and uncomfortable the stomach feels. as if braced against the wind, or crying. some tremor or tremble to guard against. to rage. tie me to the fucking post.

what a way to squander good will. i came close to deleting the whole post, but, old school ethics, and stubborn investment, out it came. comes. taurus sun, taurus moon. now the remorse and sourness (bittersweet actually) before bed. to carry poisons, to daub them on the arrows, to knowingly load the darts and ppth! fire.

a practice i learned in tintin, c.1986. goodnight, herge, you possible collaborator and brilliant illustrator. for me, you made color live, and narrative was always there to outwit plot. i bounced around as i bounce now. to bed.

tupac versus biggie or 50cent versus mos def or mos def versus tupac versus me?

2005-09-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

the following started out as a comment to Sean on Can o Corn, but I didnt think it was quite a comment there. So here:

I know we all want to win the popularity contest and change the world, but what if we don't want to win the popularity contest and don't want to change the world? What if we don't even know what we are doing and are working on figuring that out, and working hard, and not trying to be esoteric but using the tools at hand and one of the main problems with accessibility is accessible how? And if something is easy, if it springs out of where you are, well, you're already there, so how does that change anything? And if somethign is difficult, if it is foreign, and we dont recognize it, is that bad? Is it a matter of fault? Has some writerly duty not been upheld? I like some TV, I like relaxation and entertainment, and I also like work, sweat, and facing the difficult, even the terror of unknowing. Why does one need to triumph over the other? Why this sense of war and critique in so many different blogs I've come across? Why the guarded camps? I sense at times an almost bunker mentality. And now I feel I'm exaggerating, or that I'm the bunker.

Some kind of tension between access and difficulty, sure, sure. Sure. I want to encourage everyone who wants to connect with a larger audience to go connect with a larger audience. Read: a different audience. Read: communities, not community. The "mainstream", as in a river, is an aggregate, determined from afar, provisionally, to aid in navigation. But not to mince words: if you want an audience which is dedicated to challenging work, to work which offfers a radically divergent view of the world from the one on the Nightly News and in the big circulation magazines, its just not possible. Having written that, and realizing I probably believe it on some level, i am not so sure.

All I can say with full faith is that the commercial establishment, including that of the publishing industry, is built on inequity, and is an instrument of corruption first, and of anything else (say liberation) a distant, compromised second. Now if you are the Dalai Lama, a writer but not primarily so, you may have a fine relationship with these people, and not succumb to them. You have other media to exploit. A writer has only his books, and his book tours. It is far more difficult. The academic world has similiar problems, ones intensified at non-alternative schools. From Melville on, the tortures and difficulties of the American writer's relationship with audience, with publishing, is a long, long saga. But we, by and large, are marginally published writers, and the big break seems elusive, something to go for, something worth having.

But the funny thing with so many posts I am reading these days is this sense that there is this need to revolt against a literary establishment disinterested in, fundamentally, making bridges and meeting new readers. Am i reading that right? That seems a broad generalization, and a theme aired out all over the place - the sample at the start of one of the Roots' albums, for one (there its a question in jazz). I have to say I tend to read this as an individualist rebuke of intellectualism per se, or at least a distrust in its logic. And what might be completely understandable as a simple "i'm not finding this work interesting" tends to spill over into "this type of work is old and in the way". In whose way? And how? And who put it there in the first place? I am suggesting that this speech could use refinement. Its one thing to choose not to be an intellectual, to choose, say to foreground a writing of the heart and the sentiments. When this slides into a more general critique of intellectualism, I tend to wonder whats being repressed here, whats not being said. Like: someone really wants to take the nerds community away? Force them to go be popular, off to accessible writing labor camps?

It also doesnt seem to matter very much. There are many overlapping art establishments, or scenes. We have the chance to make our own. But I am not sure bigger is any better, or that there is any direct connection between making art and its finding an audience. Or that it is something one should aim for. "should". As if the magic of the work is a transferance of value from me the maker to some other consumer of it, in need of a fix of inspiration. I think that misses the first basic point: it is the maker who is changed, who comes alive, through the work. To much focus on audience can put the maker to sleep, changes them only in so far as it further reifies them as a branded producer of consumables. And hence consumer of them. My work with Danielle Steel brought me up close and personal with this, as has my own sad attempts to write a bio whose dominant unpsoken trope was not : love me, please. I think entertainers are fine. So are scholars and sages. I think these roles blend, but that that's an exception - they are largely distinct, which is why they have their own words. But then again, hybridity is all the rage.

My sense is many young writers feel an often overwhelming, if vague pressure, hydra-headed, to write other than they want to. As a "real, daring, drop-dead-funny, no-holds-barred cutting-edge comedian" or "disciplined and serious intellectual critic" or somesuch? I know I feel both. One voice urges to push further into some unknown, another hedges: will anyone follow? Maybe I should cut some slack, make a joke, warm them with humor. Sound familair? If so, look round kids, thats nothing to do with poor old poetry or art or one particular school thereof, thats the larger Modernism, a la Modern Capital, wheel of constant reinvention, why buy just one? Pull back further its doubt, uncertainty, on one hand a boon of honesty, openness, choice and consideration, on the other the devil tempting whoever it is the devil tempts in that one book that Bush has actually read. Its the voices in our heads and culture always criticizing, always pointing out shortcomings, failures, botched attempts and pathetic and telling marks of our own desperate forgeries. Is this the enemy we are firing our guns at?

Pooey on that. I think this is a rhetoric of unecessary division, of international borders with all the rituals and restrictions of their crossings. I know that at our best we are both amorphous and bounded as communities, yet without the need for passports and uniforms. I know that while it is useful to stir up the manifestos, they ultimately become dead weight on us. And as powerful as setting up the straw dogs for burn night on the playa may be, when someone else recognizes themselves or some loved one or tribe member in the effigy, shit be going down.

Which works in (mainstream) hip hop. Lil Kim's goin to jail, I hear they got Martha Stewarts cell ready for her. I would check Talib Kweli (Move Something) on this, though.

We can each choose to follow our desires, which wend divergences, yes, thats kind of the point, to get off the freaking freeway and bump around a bit (or an eternity), and then be free to get back on, eat at Burger King, and get to the next destination. Not an either/or. Not the old camps, the old divide. And then share notes. If we are willing and able to listen.

Last thought tonight: what kind of math are we using to calculate the efficiacy or positive contribution of our work? do we have such faith in a determinable (final sum) cause and effect? how do we know that Saving Private Ryan has been more influential than My Emily Dickenson? how do we determine if the net effect is a + or a - for humanity? Ready your slide rules and show me the math money. I say each shared piece is the old haiku formula: put it ina bottle, and let it go down the river, maybe into the mainstream, maybe to sink forever in an eddy to the side. But sometimes the side eddies are where the readers are, and the mainstream heads straight out to sea, and the whale's belly. Aint no telling. So the poet gives a humble bow to what is beyond comprehension and control, as Emily Dickenson's bound and hidden work was and is beyond her control just as much as the very publically decalimed Whitman's.

Polemics following me out into the night with all their bullshit. This empties me out, this turns sour, this is me stepping into the same GOTCHA! trap.

Posing for the cameras. So i quit my stargazing and write something.

fairness in search-engine reporting

2005-09-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

got this from John Sullivan's blog:

Go to Google, type in the word "failure", hit return.
Maybe this is why people say that Google is good.

late for lunch

2005-09-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

after rdng other blogs i am suffering the blog anxiety. some people know how to write readably. communities seen from afar look luscious. a taste i've never touched (tongue)? ola, voyeurs. do leave comments.

to those whose mailboxes i flooded

2005-09-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

after spending a solid two hours blogging last night, i posted here, i posted there. my sense is most of us keep it current, but i was digging in archives, making up for lost time, and shooting my fingers off. typing. no guns involved.

it occurs to me that this too has an element of abandonment. if, like me, you get yr comments delivered into yr mailbox, these comments are invitations into conversation. but, if, like me, you are never sure exactly what post they refer to (my email never informs me of this) then this work is rather arbitrary, uhh, even irrelevent. responses to strings so old that they are really new starts. or faux pas'. so keeping it current when commenting makes cents.

but i was away for a long time and missed you folks. (and i have more blogs to check too).

this is a long route towards asking any of you responding to maybe do it here, or pop in and say you responded or where, i have no idea when i will have the chance to check for responses. cuz the techno-logy is a little rough here and doesnt make THESE links all that ergonomic.

then again, perhaps all it amounts to is me saying hi.

now for a couple mintues of alli warren's HOUNDS.

blog trail

2005-09-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

like a slime mold. not here, but can of corn, shikow, thinkfeel, barak. it continues.

this ongoing quality. more so than a book, even a zine. ongoing conversation, its brought to the fore. esp. with those who are far away, esp. for what its hard to say. being a poet means taking responsibility for that rhyme, and sending it on an underground railroad away from the proper peotic authorities.

that my friends are amazing, are troublesome, impulsive, brilliant, and stubborn. that we repeat ourselves. and that we explore. and that occasionally we have no exact idea of what to say, but the heart is open, it is receiving.

and even the antsy mind listens.

now i ride my bike home thinking about what t sparks once wrote to me about the logic of abandonment. which i, don juan of the notebook, know too well. this wreckless and romantic quest for the new, perfect, virgin writing, and this constant disregard of the already written.

JWG bugs me once a month or so to publish, but that would mean breaking this cycle of infidelity. which is a big one for me. but i am getting sick of it though. but where to start in this montrous harem (full of east coast WASPS, trannies, cocksure fighters, a few old farmers, lovelorn students, junkies, and aspiring artists, a ravishing beauty or two to be sure)- which to lead out towards social light? great big "ummm" and haw...

just to say this exists. that and a pimple on the inside of my nose - 2nd in a month! they hurt.

this is the type of post that does/doesn't get you jobs?

speaking of grumpiness.

2005-09-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

visit a grumpy and hate-filled lady of poetry (if link won't work: http://www.bostoncomment.com/index.html ) and see what the vitroil does for ya. i double-dare ya. and would you ever guess it from the photo? grumpiness revealed in full in the Essays, also in the questions phrased to our (somewhat) underwhleming panel of textperts in the post-avant section. i just get trouble when i ask for more carnival, but please, i'm dying out here, more carnival.

go read the theory if you have to. from Boston to Bakhtin. can i get an amen?

link courtesy Sean MacInnes, newfound Orlando, Floridian.

Sean sez:

I've been reading the avant, post avant, and beyond
section of essays. Beside her seemingly constant
negative view on current poetry and rare
gerneralization, I find it all very intriguing, a
sound voice of reason.

remeber to floss.

Bracing words! And confounding. I taint remebering nutin, but i tis goin ta bed.

goodbye new frontier chapter 418.2

2005-09-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

link via JWG:

For the moment, much of the news falls into the ``cautionary tale'' category. In August, a California automobile club fired 27 workers for posting messages on the Web that offended co-workers. Not long before, a Boston University instructor was fired for blogging about a distractingly attractive student; a blogging nanny was fired for telling too much about herself and her employers, and a New York beauty editor lost a new job because of blogs about the fashion industry.
Andy Fox, a senior investigator who conducts background checks for Investigative Group International, said Internet searches on prospective employees were now commonplace. For high-profile jobs, he said, ``I'll run everything down on Google if it goes to 27 o's.'' Each o in a Google search is worth 10 entries.
Curt Hopkins, a 41-year-old freelance writer in Oregon, began keeping an online list of people whose blogs got them fired, disciplined, or rejected for new jobs after his own blog sidelined his quest for work at Minnesota Public Radio last year.
``It just seemed so antithetical to the notion of free speech,'' Hopkins said.
Michael Skoler, MPR's managing director of news, acknowledged that Hopkins' blog was an important factor in the decision not to hire him. He said he was concerned about Hopkins' use of profanity and name-calling. ``It didn't seem to represent good journalistic judgment,'' Skoler said.
Hopkins and others are now calling on companies to write blogging policies. ``My feeling is, whether you're an employer or an employee, you need to broach the topic,'' said Hopkins, who currently is figuring out how to protect bloggers in repressive countries.
International Business Machines Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have instituted blogging policies. Both focus on helping employees write entertaining blogs without revealing company secrets or offending suppliers and customers. IBM discourages anonymous blogging or covert marketing. Sun urges employees to expose their personalities but warns that ``a blog is a public place and you should avoid embarrassing your readers or the company.''

A blog is a public place and you should avoid upsetting Daddy. He will be very mad at you. Am I crazy? I work at a company where it seems you'd have to off two or three employees publically, naked, while swearing and shitting, before they even considered firing you. This is the type of article that makes people grumpy and nostalgic old conservatives.

long over dude

2005-09-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

At the end of last month, and without my noticing it, the first stage of this project came to a close. The daily entries, 4-6 a week, and the tendency towards the long investigation, rant, musing, and the conflation (possibly conflageration) of the personal and public were all part of my original aim to explore this new form and practice my prose. All at the office, to boot ("Writer Paid To Write, At Last, Although Boss Doesn't Know")

For the first month it was a new love. Every new comment was a victory and the daily blogs felt daring, necessary. Then, after a spell, it became another daily practice, up and down, sometimes inspired, sometimes bored, but, like zazen, i sat and faced the screen for at least 5 minutes : more often 20, 25, 42. The typing grew so loud it rattled one of my coworkers. Focus came and went. Some of the readers stayed. That was a deeply heartening experience.

But after awhile, finding the time to blog became an issue. And then the questions of focus, in this unrelaxed atmosphere of a corporate T.A.Z., became pressing. I became more deeply uncomfortable with what I was typing, and let go. And I forgot to note that, though there's a small, aging post-it from around the 1st of Sept. in my head reminding me to do so.

I can feel the shift, but I'm not sure what the next form is. But it will press up against that other limit in my work - a sense of direction, or lack therof. Its nice to get lost, and to drift, and its also nice to have a sense of where to, and how, and that its happening. So time to work this later aspect. I could continue to do what I'm doing now til the end of time, but my heart would not be in it.

If you haven't been over to One Less in a while, tardy and surprising poets of the blogosphere, check in: deadline's coming up tomorrow.

the web is made from milk

2005-09-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 02 2005 5:24 PM
i have tan lines for the first time in 4 years. i think i reallllly miss my friend chloe, to the max. i spent a week with the family it was pleasent as we were at the ocean. on the 10 hour ride home i saw a convoy of "military police" with things like "lootbusters", "free trip to louisianna", "deserst storm - new storm" and all that lovely american killing machine horror written on the sides of them. and these people were proud. for a moment i thought "oh look finally they are going to get some food and water and help to those poor people . . ." then i realized that those trucks didnt have food in them , only guns.

-Quinne, one of the Suicide Girls. She's 21. Her MOST HUMBLING MOMENT: this is an everyday event people. Her CURRENT CRUSH: not doing the laundry, and given her FAVORITE BOOKS: harry fucking potter, into the great wide open, lolita, politics of extacy, geek love, the davini code, the perks of being a wallflower, she's not likely to come by this site any time soon (sigh). Check out her page, though - her journal is undoubtedly a rare find in the world of erotica... a living, breathing, fragile thingie. Not only the above, but august 24th, rocks. I am goign to wade into the comments and see whats up there. Obviously if I had boobs, this site would get way more traffic.

There are certain blogs and journals and letters and zines which - despite it all - read so "artless" (yet obviously Quinne knows a thing or twelve about the arts of seduction) that the writer in me immediatedly seizes wistfully upon them. Not even as material, just out of that lost innocence (again, lets look at Quinne's eyes up there) that writers, with experience, lose. I dont know how many times I have commented to friends who think they cant write and largely dont, "I love this, you should write a book", which of course, if they did, would murder exactly what I love in their writing, that unpractised occasionality.

But back to Quinne. What's she doing on the cover of the new issue of FENCE, announcing the likes of Carla Harryman to the world?

Rebecca Wolff, Fence's editor:

"Tits and giggles, really, when it comes right down to it, and perhaps more tits than giggles. Metaphorically speaking, it's tits that make us want to buy something, whether it be a journal or a car or a handbag or a sweater for a baby. If tits can be made to stand in for the quotient of glamour, or the promise of effulgence, or the metronomic catapult of image saturation: one eye on the tit back at the tit back at your eye. Tits equals extra. Tits equals vibration. Tits equals fiction! Tits equals valley and leverage, glen and demonstration. Tits equals hot food for the rest of your life. Quinne's tits, god love her, are exceptionally big and pretty, like her eyes; perhaps someday she will feed a baby with their milk, if she has not already.
What is a tit, really? As a woman entering her eighth heavenly month of breastfeeding, happy as all get-out to be plumping up my Margot, an eighteen-pounder built of nothing, so far, but the milk from my own considerably smaller, considerably older tits, I am currently feeling even more especially fond of tits than usual. Margot has an entirely unconflicted relationship to my tits: When she's hungry she wants them; she cries out; they are delivered to her. So why not, I thought, give the people what they can also be understood to want. It is a more than slightly ironic comment on my own initial promise to make Fence "visually appealing and desirable as a consumer product" (see my 2000 interview on bookmouth.com).
For all of these reasons I am happy to sport these nice, round, probably warm tits on the cover of this special double-fat summer-fiction issue of Fence. Thanks, Quinne!"

A year ago, I heard about the Suicide Girls, and checked out the site. I initially thought it was simply a new demographic being tapped. I promptly forgot about it. This afternoon, more than a lil bored, I visited dqpb and linked over to FENCE which is linked to (for the obvios reasons) Suicide Girls. Its a fascinating site to explore.

The women themselves, how they are presented, how they present themselves, the actual infrastructure/navigation of the site, what it promises, its apparent delivery of some of those promises (for instance, both male and female paying members post blogs and use it apparently like friendster, but they pay for the privlege of doing so on the suicidegirls domain). What is so fascinating is it so clearly both is/isn't about sex. For once, there is a website where sexuality is folded back into the culture at large, rather than being completely segmented off and desiccated. Not to mention idolize. Is this a "minor erotica" a la Deleuze?

Like me, maybe you're skeptical. And maybe curious too. Not to mention it makes me nostalgic for my days of peroxide, fishnets, and jumping up and down to shitty-ass thunderous loud punk rock. Again, I'm looking at the 2nd word of the phrase "literary community" and thinking - really? But yes, really. Old friends of mine still active in the punk community have changed roles - like it or not, they are the professors and police and publicists and politicians of that scene now, they love it, but that it changes relentlessly, it recedes - like one of my favorite characters in Dazed and Confused says - "I keep getting older, but they always stay the same age." Once you get over the typical male "perpetual youth" fantasy, there's a melancholy, there, an estrangement - a progressive tweaking of perspective - impossible to hide from. Think of the long, diminishing hallways in Expressionist German cinema. And, among writers, who hasnt felt the gulf of the very lack of shared adolescence, the gulf of having grown up apart from this whole
art scene, and hence a somewhat awkward, no very awkward, often, weighting of the scene towards the adult, or the very childish, the acting out to prove we're not adult stuff that, come to think of it, started seeping in exactly when? College? HS? But we are, we are, what to do about it, adults. Lets all get mature together and raise some kids, start a company, build offices, carports, homes.

I really would get more comments if I had a rippling six pack and/or "nice, round, probably warm" tits. Quinne averages 30-40 per post. PLUS email. but she's still all alone (sigh).

How fucking familair.

of lists or loss

2005-09-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

Three heartbreaking songs:

“Names”, Catpower, Free
“Straight to Hell”, Clash, Combat Rock
“Upward Over the Mountain”, Iron & Wine, The Creek Drank the Cradle

If I haven't been to visit your blog in a while (and I haven't), I have barely been to my own.

-

With thousands of British and French soldiers surrounded by victorious & advancing Nazi legions in Dunkirk in 1940, a broke and near-collapsing English government and nation was able to quickly mobilize damn near every boat on the South coast of England - yachts, tugs, destoyers, fishing boats - and evacuate the entire contingent: "In total 338,226 troops were evacuated (220,000 British, 120,000 French, some Belgian and Dutch, and even some German prisoners of war) aboard around more than 900 vessels." This operation, from scratch, over 8 days, with the German Army bearing down and the Luftwafte raining bombs and machine gun fire.

But we live in a different empire. All prayers to the people of the Gulf Coast. If you have money to spare - the American Red Cross is springing into action.

if you walk here, the seagulls may attack you

2005-08-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

I've been looking out plane windows since I was 5. This time I made it 1/2 way across Nevada before getting lost (what comes after Table Mountain again?).

On the way back, I passed a nuclear reactor twin-funnel power plant in Illinois. Woke up over Pueblo, and followed us through over Crestone to Sevier Lake. Came back in time for Great Basin National Park, the Lunar Craters of central Nevada, Tonopah (more interesting from the sky, really), and, eventually, the White Mountains, the Sierras, Yosemite, straight over Half Dome (impressive even from 30000 feet or so), and the Diablos. Long evening shadows on the oak foothills.

On the way out, 5 days earlier, long morning shadows, facing the other way. Such a sensuous planet to hoist offices, cubicles, prisons and report cards upon.

The birds will attack - or threaten to - if you go to the spots pictured above during nesting season. You've ben warned - a couple hundred angry seagulls a few feet from your head - maybe something you'd rather avoid.

our lonely planet

2005-08-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

three thoughts before editing a long poem

2005-08-29T23:38:00.000-07:00

If the mouth opens, and I – alone, usually in the small, portable container of the car – give myself over to voicing a text, speaking into some tension, speaking not to tie it up but to explore and penetrate it, the work itself – if followed closely, as a prayer, as the extinguishing of flames upon the skin – enters realms – with ease – dependant on close attention and cutting honesty – that the typed and printed page can rarely access. I call this practice soliloquy, in full deference and wonder at the genius Shakespeare turns it to. And I should add that these texts – spoken deliberately into the void, with no intent to record, even mentally their contents – are likewise full of such surprising turns, alternating between wide and narrow fields, focus switchbacking thru the underbrush. As always the vista is elusive, is so desired, is full of promise, is its revelatory letdown. No end. And yet, this saying is a something said, magnetic, urgent, enlivening. I follow it down to its dregs, where it might burst into giggles, howls, or groans.

Who is the brilliant writer I am reading? Emmanuel Hocquard. Emily Dickenson.

A friend was telling me today of her response to the oncoming end times. End times? She tells me its not just the Mayans, but Incans, cultures around the world. 2012? 2012. I tell her I know jack-diddley about the end times, but that, on the plane yesterday, I thought: how many more times will I be on one of these? Not taken for granted. Oil production is past peak, and 70% of Alaskan residents want to drill the Artic NWR. Put off the inevitable collapse. My friend, a shaman-in-training, noted how her philosophic friend dwelt in the inevitable horrors of suffering such cataclysms contain. For her part, she’s ready to bring it on – death and all. What choice? Continue the unsustainable present course? Which calls for correction? For her, it was his imagination which turns morbid at this thought. For her, it is a shedding – her knowledge is that we all die. Why does it matter how? Or so I heard her. Yet I also heard her say – less conscious people will die – yes, but less conscious of what? The Tibetans waved their magic charms at the British troops and Gurkhas, who shot bullets clean thru their skulls.

What did I see on the road last night? Upon its side, no trace of blood, a perfect red fox.

Given that we make this world with our actions, and our actions follow from our desires, and our consciousness discerns – or can – the course and source of our desires, I am going to begin writing these up in Word, and spellchecking. Bring in the editing. Already here, the dancing horses. And not leaving.

Hocquard Rides the Mechanical Bull:

Y finds X riding the bull sexy – X is riding the masculine brawn, and wonderfully.
X finds Y riding the bull sexy – Y is riding the feminine buck, and masterfully.

The mechanical bull is wild. The Joker (Hocquard). X and Y are relative positions. Masculine and feminine entwine. Arbitrary? Already entered, found, pre-existent, social. What holds as term? Sexy. Entwining: always a relation with a desired other. Between and among. A filling in of field – as it enters into charge.

A college scholarship basketball jock has moved in upstairs w/ his girlfriend. Imagine. Now we practice their noise. If the fucker – if they are fucker – just peed in the courtyard, they better be braced for trouble. 11:12PM – goodnight.

Caught the fucker mid-pee. I hope he wet his pants with his hasty exit zip up.

blog disease fucks corruption

2005-08-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

this is off one of the many junk blog posts to monday's entry:

ADVISORY:: How Would You Like To Completely Dominate Any Market, Any Keyword, Any Industry at all? And How Would You Like To Do It As Many Times As You Want, For Any Product That You Sell?
"New Blog Submission Software Takes TOTAL DOMINATION To A Whole New Level, And Allows Complete Control Over Any Market and Any Product You Sell. -- Renders All Other Marketing Methods Totally Useless by Comparison"
"Introducing Blog Submitter Pro 7.0... There's Nothing Like It - Anywhere. This Software Is Unlike ANYTHING You've Ever Seen... With The Click Of A Button You Can INSTANTLY Capture 3 Of The Toughest And Most Profitable Marketing Methods In Existence!"

guess what they're talking about? as far as i can tell, this is some ridiculously roundabout way not to get our attention so much as redirect search engines to their sites. i think we are ancillary benefit.

i guess the option is a higher level of post control - figurative "gateposts" thru which blog spammers can't pass. can you say - members only? which is exactly what i was excited that this place wasnt going to be. yet the predictability of this movement is fascinating, inexorable. at least in this economy, where no holds are barred, unless your lawyer/lobbyist/PR rep gets them barred for you.

i know, blogging on vacation. but i'm at my parent's house. for 3 days. imagine.

Vacancy

2005-08-22T16:22:00.000-07:00

No, I'm neither dead nor in a funk. I'll be traveling thru New England for the next week. And blogging not-one-whit.

Whit, iota. What words we have wrought, what words. We speak thru the tongues of (drunken) giants.

saturday @ artifact

2005-08-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

This Saturday saw the August Artifact. The series, hosted by Melissa Benham and Chana ("Connie") Morgenstern, is nearing its first anniversary mark. And, already, its been noted as part of the growing (thank gawd) movement of alternative venues for readings. Each Artifact is a house party-cum-reading, where the flow of wine and conversation and music complements - indeed makes possible - the reception of read work. Experimental poetry and prose often proves a difficult experience for even seasoned vets to tango with, so the intimacy and warmth of a house reading - the chance to observe the place of literary work in a real, functioning social scene outside of an institutional setting, at the very edge even of any distinction between peers and some more distant sense of "audience" - is one merrily appreciated by the 30 or so folk who pack each reading.

And, for the organizers, doing the work of booking, prepping, and hosting a reading is an invaluable instance of helping ease the text off the page, into a packed room ("of occurence" Leslie Scalapino might add). It brings the creativity of the writing scene to a whole other level - making social - even permeable - what is often otherwise remote or unapproachable or just plain different/difficult work. The final of Brandon's E PODES, on the page, might be daunting - how does one read this? Yet, in person, twirling a fake villain's mustache, offering a hint of context beforehand, and launching into the vibrant, dense, even brutal word beds, well, fuck, after 4 or 5 minutes it works, its wonderful, I'm in.

The connectivity of these events is lively and refreshing, and, for me at least, an affirmation of real living substance in our varied projects. When these events really begin to mix it up - when the audience is multi-generational, when graphic designers and philsophers attend alongside the poets and novelists, an even more powerful friction rises, conversation gets so deliriously varied and unpredictable, even the mojitos taste better. And the fruit punch, with bruised mint, and there - there's Brent Cunningham in a shirt that earned him some grief, slicing a mango.

So yes, we're alive. And this is our work. In our space. On our terms. And you are very much invited.

Plus you get to see what shoes everyone has chosen to wear. Platforms, vans, or beatle boots? Lime green mod dress or all-purpose urban black? BYOB.

-

The readers - Brandon Brown, Lauren Shufran, and Alli Warren, devised a novel mode of performing: each read for 10 or 12 minutes, and then handed the mic off to the next. Then, after the third reader, Artifact has its intermission, which quickly turns into a mini-party of its own. After 15, we return to the reading, and, in different order, each of the three readers read once more, in different order. A sort of ABC-BCA affair, which both voided the normal heirarchy of who read's when, and, even more importantly, gave us two further practical advantages

-the first reader isn't thrown to the dogs as a warm-up act while the rest of us adjust our ears to the subtle modulation of an unmic-ed voice (an element of drone - and its unique harmonics - lies in all but the most ennunciative and rhythmically forceful deliveries).
-rather than getting completely lost in a 20 minute reading, which the audience considers as a unit, there are two distinct shorter performances for each reader. For me, those two readings allowed a wealth of freshness and diversity of response. Both Alli (hearts for the free chap) and Brandon read from disticnt material in each of their turns, and this was striking. Its as affecting for me to see the range of a writer's ouvre as it is to be exposed to one projects depths. And this format seemed designed for such ends. Yet even Lauren, who read twice from a longer manuscript, and whose work pushed more towards prose in its sense of line, benefitted - to my ear - from the interval between. Much like one puts a book down when filled with it only to return later and be hungry again. I am always a sucker for delay, silence, and interruption in a performance - for the relief of spaciousness, the polysemy of vergent perspectives, and for the jolt of adrenalin when we return, move on. With more breaks, the mix is thicker - the shit happens. It might just be my chronic ADD, but there is some real meat in this format.

Today i have tried on a more formal style - how do I look in it? It raises the question of how i intend this blog. How I write it translates into who will read it, and how. I say enough with predictability. I'm aiming low, and watching the winds.

peep peep (announcing)

2005-08-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

Bob Doto's Tracking Bunnies.
Teresa Sparks concerns herself with Dancing Ideas.

Did you know these were out there? Subday authors be raising the flag!

oh, and one final... subday press is online. visit and see, and come back in a couple weeks. we are going from the rough to the smooch, indeed.

for a subday is just a 1/2" from a sunday. link us up, friends, link us up. mega poetry props to john sullivan, our secret agent behind the scenes.

if i was an advertising genius i'd say - 30% off all subday book orders between now and Sept. 1st! to celebrate the site being up. and i will say it. and its so. just add that you "saw it here in werdenfield".

yes, we're crazee. do stop by.

love

k

if i can't dance on google...

2005-08-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

Assemblyman Leno Honors Theresa Sparks As California Woman Of The Year

Human Rights Commissioner Will Be The First Transgender Woman Of The Year Honored By The State California will make history on Monday, March 24th as Assemblyman Mark Leno names Human Rights Commissioner Theresa Sparks the Woman of the Year from the 13th Assembly District.

The California State Assembly hosts the Woman of the Year ceremony annually as a way of recognizing outstanding women who have made significant contributions to communities across California. Sparks will be the first transgender woman to receive the honor.

Ms. Sparks was appointed to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission after years of advocacy on behalf of the local community. She served as a founding member of the city’s Transgender Civil Rights Implementation Task Force and helped secure an agreement by the San Francisco Police Commission to adopt standards of treatment of transgender people previously recommended by the department’s Office of Citizens Complaints. Ms. Sparks additionally became the first transgender woman elected as Chair of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club.

“Commissioner Sparks is a stellar individual who has been a true trailblazer for our community and I am proud to name her Woman of the Year,” Assemblyman Leno said.

Press Availability: 10-10:30AM, State Capitol Room 3146, Office of Assemblyman Leno Ceremony: 11:00 Assembly Chamber with additional viewing in Room 4202

sara larsen - "humming blood poems"

2005-08-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

Sara Larsen recently gave me a CD of her poetry - a short 13 pieces, none more than 2 minutes long. They are work, home-recorded onto her iMac, with her voice hovering right above the mic. It is beautiful, intimate work, daring to be soulful as well as discriminating, sensuous, rooted in specificity of wordchoice and flirting wildly with traditional rhetoric, even with high diction and tone (she even inverts a few noun-verb orders), but never monomaniacally - never without moving on and through the off-beat, the casual, jargot and jargon. Inclusive, seasoned, a traveller of many worlds: this is work intelligent enough not to try to impress the listener with its own intelligence. It is, in a word, poetry. It really fucking is. Sometimes, when that word poetry seems horribly overworked, i wonder if its umbrella has gotten too thin, too wide. Maybe some of the more experimental work, the more hybrid, including some of my own, arrives at such a distance to what has traditionally been poetry that we ought to stress its difference, acknowledge it as its own form, perhaps one particular to its age.

I think we can do this AND acknowledge that poetry is a category as wide as music, and while most of the work under its aegis is easy enough to recognize, there's always trouble tending the edge. Which is cool, I like making a little trouble there too - helps me discover a more worhtwhile definition of the art than any I learned in college as an English major.

So to define my terms, Larsen's work - which I highly recommend - is lyric poetry. humming blood poems is almost sapphic, and reminds me of some of the short, dense word-nets Anne Waldman occasionally put out in the 70s - works I know through CDs such as the Naropa Archive collections of her readings [not sure how many of these are commercially available]. Larsen's CD has the yearning restlessness I associate with the postmodern condition - and Sara has worked found language into her texts - weaving a sort of masterfully conscious visible seam into her own more seamless drift. Its a practice which blows open and unexpectedly allows each poem a spaciousness and breadth of reference they might otherwise lack. Its also a marvel that the insertions here become at much at home as her own language, and are, at some level, distinguishable mainly in accent and in subtle semantic shift. "Yet" the humming blood poems also spring from an embodied rootedness springing straight from the old days, last seen in a living form where? For her, in Shelley, Yeats, Duncan, di Prima. And to this lineage, this work, I say rock on.

There is a real abandon here, a real surfer's sense of surrender - the humility before a really righteous wave. In each poem, up comes this great, massive, powerful, relentless, wild-to-the-core word-universe of thoughts, feelings, fragments and sensations - and there she is, riding it, every bit its partner and equal. Seperate how? To/for whom? Its a wondrous thing to behold, such trust and care and mastery - and it forms the spiritual core of this work, an intimacy with tone and line and language which allows for delicacy and shading to which the ear or eye will keep returning. And for which lesser poets sigh and preen. For it is completely alive, a-quiver with trust, in fearless surrender, true spirit and Jersey grit.

If you would like to hear this work, contact Sara here. She could probably use a buck or two for postage, CD, labor of love.

el pobre Mouse comes online

2005-08-18T16:16:00.000-07:00

Its a simple start folks, but we're here. We're a small zine with modest needs and we are already kicking all y'all asses, so, in the proud tradition of bending-the-blog, as in One Less, Artifact, and all those countless Next Blogs which are really advertisements if not downright illegal pyramid schemes or granny-baiting... we're heerrreee... and we have a delicious template to boot.

Photos of the collage parties to follow suit.

Link us up! And, with nepotistic glee - all blog hail!

Happy Birthday

2005-08-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

Freedom isn’t free.
(heard)There’s an f to fucking feed.
(subtitles read) There’s a hefty fucking fee.

What follows is a deeply personal blog entry, and those looking for intellectual thoughts, notes on poetics, editing, and even wit, should seriously consider looking elsewhere. If you’re up for a personal journey, and the underworld, and confronting demons, then, as much as these words hold, you have found the right place.

I add this because I am aware werdenfield is straddling – perhaps awkwardly – two worlds, a personal one of process and growth associated with holistic therapy, mythology and Buddhism. The second is a blog chronicling an involvement with a specific community of writers, a specific body of writing and the arts. What these both share – for me – is an abiding interest in consciousness – its representations, narratives, and cultivation. The ultimate end of both is libratory – a shattering of illusions, a clear an powerful engagement with this world. Yet, from my limited and occasional writings here, and due to a certain distaste for pursuing a grand synergy here, I have largely left each to its own. But I think this unfocusing tension, this slight blur or wobble, is productive. And I’m afraid if I veer one way or the other, that something I am intrigued in will be lost – and that this will not be an ecstatic rupture, but a return to an old repression, to maintaining a wall between two gardens, for which there is no reason to maintain. You visitors can take care of yourselves, no? At a basic level, what both of these interests share is that they are worded, that I engage them through the medium of written language, and at that level, they are distinguishable only in particulars.

-

PS - Sorry to be formal - its that kind of morning. And, even in America, form has its place, no? Why do I always have to pretend casual isn't its own form? The next, scarier question - is intimacy a form? Yikes. Thanks again for bearing with all these warm-ups. This blog often is my push-ups, stratches and squats. No pretense that that makes for great reading.

-

It’s M_____’s birthday. M_____ L___ K________. How much weight can one word – a name – bear? In the dictionary, 28 definitions, 3 main entries, 2 or 3 columns. In the private mind, a stream of connotations and connections for every moment of interaction. Interaction with the person, with their imprint on you, with your memory of them (perhaps a subset of the imprint), interactions with others whom you associate or group with them. It is a work to dwarf Proust, and in constant motion, ongoing, even when left fallow.

Can I write it? Perhaps. What do I want to say here? I am going to call up M_____ and wish her a happy birthday, and part of me will be raging that this is the terms of our relationship, reduced to cinder ash. That voice will ally with a critical and masochistic voices so cruel that they will speak of how this is entirely my fault, that it proves my lack of worth, my inability to stand up, to be a warrior, a man, worthy of respect, anybody. Proves I am shit. I already feel the stings of those blows about my face, my muscles tensing in defense, uncomfortably tight, bearing the weight of the bad news. Enacting the very shrinking from responsibility, the very death and disease the voices reprimand and warn of.

So this – which has little directly to do with M_____ – how to confront it. I neither want to or can ignore/hide it nor lay out all my dirty laundry before the whole world, demanding their involvement. It is not a “how to stay out of trouble” situ, because I am already IN trouble. I can feel it, it rises up in me, demands expression, demands acknowledgment, demands release – something. A metamorphosis, or else a poison. So how to deal with this poisoning – to find its source. This allying of destructive voices, this failure to distinguish between tirade and rational observation, and the loss of perspectives and inner boundaries/ground that follows. A surrender to ghosts. The actual pain between my M_____ and I – is that second? IS that what remains? It is a starting place – but this upsurge of shame and worthlessness – and the anger that follows (directed at whom?) – this is the first barrier. Yes – I’ve made it. I am responsible, but it goes further, wider, deeper than just me. It’s accrued around me – I have come into consciousness as and through this – is this the Christian fallen, or sin – to find oneself in the claws of (and enacting) suffering from the get go – reincarnation of karma throughout the ages – but why call it wickedness then? Start here. Oedipus tearing out his eyes, abandoning the throne. Necessary gestures for renewal, for sobriety, for going on.

Drunkeness? My very ignorance and denial of the dark side of my mental drunkenness is what has brought me here. I am not talking of the delirious lightness, the warmth. I am talking about the dogged attempt to stay in that light, to cling to that central heating. An addiction in which I stand to lose the entire world. Overly-dramatic? Let’s see if I can continue to walk this straight line, arms out at either side. Let’s see if I can experience pain as pain, loss as loss, joy as joy, a joke as just that – a moment of finding humor.

Now to call that fucker.

-

2ndPS- And what is left, when I listen and talk to M____ without recriminations, without anger, without drowning in inner dialogue? I hear M____, I hear the distance, betwene us, yes, but also the distances we each carry, and the touch-and-go of intimacy between these gaps. That often gape. Hearing the sadness, really listening, the sadness, the doggedness, the love, of an old relationship, and of two lives. This listening is heartbreaking - its hard to be with - evne by phone - hard to share space with someone who doesn't acknowledge their own suffering, doesn't question their own patterns, is out of touch with their own mortality. Not categorically - never totally, but the smallness of what we talk about, the return to themes of how unfair and difficult, and trying... the sense of burden, of being small and vulnerable before a mosnter threat of a world - and soldiering on, yes, but soldiering on with shoulders hunched, eyes down, rifle in hands. Hearing that - knowing we're still in touch because I carry that attitude to, but am outgrowing it, that I want to let it go - and seeing my own desire to help, the power of M___'s logic beeing - that to help, I must leave the convincing trap of M___'s terms - I must offer love on my own terms, trusting myself and M____, knowing that these dilemmas I am hearing are of M____'s own making. She is choosig to seal herself in stones. That there is very little I can do about them.

In the great Korean film Why Has Bodhi-dharma Left for the East? there's a scene where a monk returns to his mother's house without her knowing. She's blind, and hearing a noise, searches for her slippers to investigate. He watches her in pain for her difficulty in completing what is for him such a simple task. Unwilling to reveal himelf, he can only nudge the slippers towards her questioning hands. This has always been a cutting, heart-rending scene for me on the veyr humility and human smallness of a bodhisattva's acts. And it means engagign, recognizing, acting out of - but differently - that same pain.

Off to lunch, so sorry if the last line is cramped.

Editor's Notes

2005-08-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

Hi. My name is Kyle, I do a zine and a press. I write too. And sometimes read.

el pobre Mouse

The zine I co-edit with Sara Larsen, el pobre Mouse, is gearing up for our third issue, and we're open for submissions. Our backbone is poetry and poetics and the more daring and/or subtle shades of prose (sorry plotsters) - and our aesthetic leanings are well-documented on this blog (at least mine are). Defining aesthetics is a tricky if necessary part of publishing. Even if that definition is "work I like." el pobre Mouse is interested in work which takes poetry seriously, skeptically, and with a definite charge. Work with libratory aims, work that acknowledges and celebrates human desires, including those of the mind. Contemporary work conscious of form, tradition, and the possibilities of play and experiment. One particular (personal) interest: work which moves into the visual: in all the variants spelled out on g huff's blog please apply.

In addition - interviews, correspondance, essays, book reviews. el pobre appreciates a textured, varied text. a document of our lives as writers - more a fluxus box than a PBS documentary-by-numbers.

Every time I write this, it changes. We have an e-flyer which will be posted here shortly and making the email rounds, and we'll be launching our own blog too as a virtual HQ/sand castle.

Our deadline is October 15th.

-

subday press

I co-edit subday with Summer Rodman. We publish contemporary poetry and hybrid works.

Over the last few days I have been reviewing a Matt Langley manuscript, which we are editing for a forthcoming book on subday. I have a few thoughts on editing from this:

At his or her best, an editor offers a thorough exam of the text-child - but the parent/writer is still in the room, or right outside the door. And the editor is less a doctor in the Western sense of "fix the flaw" as a holistic one - checking flows and currents throughout the text - noting blocks and limits. The editor listens first - to this other body, to their relationship, and trusts his response to this listening. Learns to trust it. An editor offers up these insights, and, together with the writer, sorts out which illumine and further the work at hand. While the writer, at any time, can say "get your hands off my child", likewise, at any junction, the editor can say "i no longer feel comfortable treating this patient."

While this clarity of roles may be nothing special - editing has been a swamp for me - I love it, but I get all muddy, and lost. And sometimes end up trespassing, or getting kicked off my own land for no good reason. A map and compass comes in handy. And there is always the question of how to handle one's own desires for (another's) text - if one cultivates the blending of author and editor as shared makers of the book - which is always distinct, if only be degree, from the manuscript. My feeling is, I owe my the project my full attention, and all my skills. That means reading, commenting on, suggesting, and defending/advancing my reading of this work, a process of sorting, sifting and returnign to the page, until both of us can let go of it, and it -wobble, wobble - walks free.

A few years ago I thought, as writers, the main work was in making a manuscript. Now I see there's a second process of making that manu a book. It varies, just like a doctor's reading - different bodies call for different attentions. But I am less afraid to wield the editors sword, and more able to acknowledge when I slip up and cut the book or author, than I was in my terrified, wide-eyed twenties. Learning the ancient way - through repeated doing. And, in an age where the apprenticeship has broken down, learning DIY, stealing what we can, tweaking and just plain making up the rest. May the logic (and the binding) hold.

-

Subday's website will, hopefully, be up any day now. Stay tuned - to be sure - for links and e-champagne. Many thanks to John Sullivan for his pioneering and impeccable and dedicated work on this project. If we are lucky, Summer and I, together, could operate a slide projector.

communal blog challenge?

2005-08-15T00:12:00.000-07:00

So the experiment in communal blogging at Urban Abhaya was without its designer's intention - a delicious instance of the machinery running right past the creator's intentions, a la Blade Runner, well, a la a lot of cyberfiction.

But i thought it was a great idea - and i want to know who else thinks a communal blog might work.

Lets face it, a blog tends towards certain, identifiable forms: journal, reporter's log, scrapbook, notebook, or diary. There are exceptions, but one encounters them as exceptions. To keep any of these forms up - exceptions included - as the sole propriety, with any sense of continuity ( i.e. reliably updated posting) is quite the practice. And the form itself limits the interactivity with the whole post/comment hierarchy, pushing the audience to the tributary edge - on this blog, to another pop-up screen.

I'm not saying i want to throw in the werdenfield towel for some utopic collectivity, but the idea, which Chris briefly - and accidentally - championed, of a gathering in cyberspace, with some evolving thematic strand, and with numerous members commenting and posting freely: that felt like a real, live, untested practice, it felt like mixing it up.

I particularly like how different members can bring in a refreshing mix of difference - and I liked my imagined occasional participation/visitation. A room somewhere where the party/salon is always going on. How's the Cheers theme go: "Where everyone knows your blogger tag."

Its 12:21. My enthusiasm outruns my lucidity. And outruns my bedtime. Drop a line if interested, we could easily launch one of these...

Això és or, Pirooz!

2005-08-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

Horchata or orxata is the name for several kinds of vegetable beverages, made of ground almonds, rice, barley or tigernuts (chufas).
The name comes from Valencian orxata, probably from ordiata, made from ordi (barley) (from Latin Hordeum). The French 'orgeat', English 'orgeat', and Italian 'orzata' have the same origin, though the beverages themselves have diverged. [1]
According to a folk etymology, James I of Aragon was offered a glass of the beverage by an Arab girl after his conquest of Valencia, and exclaimed, Això és or, xata! (This is gold, girl!)
In Spain, it usually refers to orxata de xufes (horchata de chufas), made from tigernuts, water and sugar. Originally from Valencia, Spain, it is served ice cold as a refreshment. It has a regulating council to ensure the quality of the product and the villages where it can come from, with the Denomination of Origin. The village of Alboraia is well known for the quality of their "horchatas".
The idea of making Horchata from tiger nuts comes from the period of Muslim presence in Valencia (from the 8th to 13th century).
In Mexico, it is a rice based beverage in Mexican cuisine. While the drink is usually white and "milky" it can be made dairy-free through the use of blanched almonds, though some recipes call for milk. Other ingredients often include sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla or lime.
In Suriname the drink is called orgeade and made as a syrup, of sugar and almonds.

If you're in the western states, try it at a local taqueiria. If you're in Spain, try it from a market. If you're in Latin America, you're not asking this question.

Quipo

2005-08-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

language links for the day: 1 and 2. what is writing? it has this persistent connection with kings.

this object, at a distance, a seen engrossing. even mathematical tables, errata.

up close: if we can read, do we even recognize there's something there?

the tight knots of authority.

new blog in town.

2005-08-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

today my post is here. today's date, its the 2;37PM post. this new blog, "Urban Abhaya" has popped up as a collective affair, organized by Chris Mazura. It is always a pleasure to read Chris's work, or hear him perform it, and its one pleasure I have had precious little of in the past few years. So its an honor and I delight to be invited aboard.

i do suffer from blog overload sometimes. i've pushed myself here - and after JWG's post the other day (guy who ran out of things to blog) - i'm taking a gander at what it is i desire here? i know its this, its us, its you. the immediacy, the fact i dont even spellcheck this. the fact i jump off the cliff each time.

and survive. even thrive. but facing the overwhelm of the world, i wonder: how am i steering this? bringing it home, questioning my direction. claiming it, wondering, where next? is this work heartspeak, is it service, is it writing practice, the practice i choose (instead of some other(poetry?)). usually i critique borders, boundaries, definitions. today i wonder if i need to work on rasing, and holding them, some more. building the dream body at the same time i let go of the dream.

this must be the navel gazing so decried by Ogg. horchatas for all - and to Urban Abhaya, welcome aboard turkeyfingers.

blogger ate my blog

2005-08-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

wrote a fun blog and now its gone. that was yesterday. site maintenance can eat you alive.

esp. when it sneaks up on you. jim is getting dissed by devils, pirooz is duking it out with silliman, and this morning i wrote a poem before i surrendered to a grueling day of warehouse work:

“here” “I am” “immediately”
“immediately” “the work” “begins”
“a mark” “serves” “that newness”

“continued” “gaps” “and drop caps”
“so named” “so invited” “or held”
“the prisoner” “is desired” “fills”

“with flowers” “dimissed” “remiss”
“a” “dis” “particulate”
“each embrace” “an orbit” “oort cloud”

“defining” “an edge” “felt”
“naming felt” “its fur” “slight charge”
“in air” “above” “the relative”

“yes” “embraced” “a new yes”
“the sense of” “next” “the sex of”
“sense” “of now” “particular”

“embrace” “so” “this”
“so” “a rock is buried” “we”
“dip” “this spoon” “in form”

“minute” “silk” “continues”
“spit” “spun” “defining”
“this” “work” “of hands”

becuz even five minutes of word-casting before the workday can keep you alive. re-reading it to post, i am smiling at the sort of half-sleepy stumble of wordplay - the trace of boredom? how could i not be bored 10 minutes into this workday? and so, out of that/this thin corporate air, to write something. "a work of hands" to bury this rock. out of which springs flowers.

alchemy. lets post on alchemy.

MINI series contest

2005-08-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

who goes there?

who wants to win?

who wants to win a free book of poetry?

the MINI series is a set of 9 collaborative texts composed among sara larsen, sean macinnes and myself. it is the first compelted project of the Rock Paper Scissors writers collective. the books were written, designed and assembled in the space of a weekend. they are each handmade, from very tasty, texturiffic paper, and have individual collage covers. all materials are salvaged/found/recycled. each is 2 x 3, and the texts range from 8 to 20 pages. we are talking little here, the way lychee, grape, slug, forget-me-nots and naps are little - delightful occurrences in the broader day.

the series is limited edition, 36 were planned, 43 made. 9 remain.

if you would like one, please include your address AND one line of found poetry. please take the time to open a book, or your manuscript, or your memory, and write down 1 line of poetry from the 43rd page of its book. just type up the line & the book, add your address, and VOILA PRESTO SUPERMOTHERFUCKEREXTRAORDINAIRE you'll have a little micropress original in the mail.

if you can't count that high then you are fucked.

2005-08-08T16:15:00.000-07:00

no more anony

no more anonymous posts after last week's series of junk comment ads. was someone really paid for writing that program? just when you thought you had psyched the invasive, colonializing, brute force of capital...

appreciating intensities and imposing agendas

if anyone remembers last weeks discussion of trash/serious work, and the comment flurry around that, it proved useful for me in exploring and disodging this dualistic sense i have that there are 2 types of cultural products - trash ones, and high ones. now i don't go round embracing this duality, but it does alight upon me from time to time, and i carry it. those are two, not neccessarily opposed, axes of cultural products. nor is serious the same as high - we can have high camp, and we can have serious work that eschews its connection to any "high", ie annotied, canonical tradition. nor does either high or serious overlay perfectly on the academy, that sense of writing as institutionalized in the MA/MFA/PhD programs. The whole debate opened me up to a sense that, a) there is a lot of energy around this topic and b) my mental map of this territory is foggy, vague, and liable to error. the kind of map where California is an island, and there is still a NW route to China.

for me though, one connection is that work that begins to seem difficult ( a word i overlay, in a poststructury sense, with - to me - the less used/less relevent serious, and with a sort of new pomo high) exposes me to a certain risk of becoming - and being seen - as overly intellectual, all mind, or inaccessible, purposefully obscure, even insane. yet to me its the work with the highest level of return visits, work i can return to, develop, challenge, and see thru. i.e not abandon. i.e. there's something alive in it, a working-thru or -out which i am still a party too. the lighter, more casual, ironic, trashy, lyrical (fivemore words which are not exact synonyms in any way, yet which i associate) stuff tends to feel more throwaway, a kind of delightful, occasional metonymic sibling, or near relative (and subtextual visitor/leavening) of the meatier, darker, more experimental stuff.

somewhere inbetween is visual work, and formal experimentation. so not exact synoyms, yet overlapping terms, related closely, from a certain perspective - a subjective orienting - mine. mine, for now, at the moment. less dualities than adjoining, perhaps contested neighboring regions on a map. there ARE polarities, but which terms become polar depends on the culture, the writer, the text.

but what gets me is my projective tendency to take a simple map and totalize it for all of my work, and for all of us - for a comic, comedy is obviously not some sideline. i might hav areally fun poem, but if i dont think i do that stuff, it will never see light of day. if the heart of our writing practice is always some edge, or edges we are pushing, a question or knot we seek to penetrate/dissolve/unravel/embrace, then where that edge is, where the greatest risk and difficulty and adventure lies (the meat) is not easily predicted, nor fixed.

the lineup of creative powers, desires and blocks varies for each writer, and IN each writer - but i have a tough time - in the moment - accepting and appreciating that difference, the spectrums, the very real diversity we exhibit, even in this little corner of blogerdom. i tend to want to totalize, to group and categorize and rank/sort. its a fascist and useful organziational tendency, but it rarely helps me appreciate work. especially in its reductive, fascist (totalized) form. and given unfettered rein, its pure solipsism and a recipe for disaster.

appreciation of the work must always precede sorting it, linking it up to a lineage, grading it, etc. intimacy before distance, practice before critique. you might be surprised how much trouble i have maintaining those priorities, that ordering. this becomes the underlying dialectic for me, a continual awakening in this tension between the ordering, conclusion-oriented mindmind, and the appreciative, curious, explorative mindheart. and that tension cuts deep, can use some love, and is wholly necesary. and asks to be fully owned, made conscious, ridden.

written. the lovely thing, for an artist - its ALL a place to begin.

everywhere?

2005-08-04T17:53:00.000-07:00

Sound is everywhere. It is anything. And whatever we think is interesting, sound, we begin to collage it together.... "But dont take so seriously what we`re doing. - Yamamoto

http://www.epitonic.com/songstreamer?coid=41690&bbadd=yes

If you're in, you're in for the whole track. Trust me, and turn the volume up.

Pirooz - I really recommend this track and the album it comes from for you, I could imagine you hardcore getting down with this and properly scaring the hell out of/shining massive doses of sunlight on LA with this crew of Japanese monster-genuises-savant.

You can have sounds echo with your brain, and it feels good. So rather than listening to music, it`s like having these sounds ringing inside your head, and yourself creating the music. Sound that`s like you don`t know whether it`s there or not. By having this sound you can create various musics by yourself, even very different ones, inside your head. - Eye

2005-08-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

I wrote JWG today. Several pages exploring his recent work. On JWG's initiative, I tried my hand at a couple versions. Here's one, a re-working of his "After Meng Chiao":

Incense. Meng Chiao.

Those I love were
always shadows lost
days trail
out scars leaves
and leaving at
edge of sight
"vanishing"
moon sits some
fool dazed a
cross the snow my
hands
fleeing exiles
this gorge

JWG is getting published left, right and center. Here's a shout out to all that work. Isn't he your Best New Poet?

this is so retarded

2005-08-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

i meant for that photo to be my profile photo. did you think ol k had something gainst the profile photo? was hiding? no, is just frustrated, is just not able to figure out the protocol. oh powerful machine code, let me pass, let my small pixellated image accompany my blogger comments so i may be seen as well as read (err... heard).

2005-08-02T23:53:00.000-07:00

spring in the cherry fields

From Home ( a rare visit )

2005-08-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

Setting

I write this post from home. I wonder if you can feel the difference – the “rule” of this blog is “blogging done @ work”. What that means is fluorescent lights, the small, even intimate noises of others working around me, a cubicle, the great emotional void of ‘office’, my own sense of paranoia around blogging as ‘not work’ and all the associated narratives I bind my worker self around. Friends, it means alienated labor in a tough market, fair and simple. If not straight.

At home, maybe 25 feet from my bed, 15 from the fridge, 5 from the couch, without coworkers walking by or a sense that I ought to be doing something else, or even the complicated background hum of alienated productivity (does D’Arcy want to address this irregularity of access ramp heights? is it Patrick’s desire to restructure the Intranet search engine? do i want to resume updating this off-site archives database?), I can write from a different origin. I can quickly muddy it, I can bring the office home, but these complication sit differently, they fade more readily, I am more comfortable here, I return.

Site-specific blogging. Even when the posts do their best to ignore and block out the work environment surrounding them. A good deal of my (writing) work is all about magnifying palpable incoherencies, bringing buried logics into the open anyway – with all the attendant cobwebs and obsessive repetitions and shadowy unsaids.

-

Method

bioautography, my current project, is a simultaneous, jump-cut working-through of four old notebooks of the kind I tend to ignore/suppress. Each notebook has a different cover, but is of the same size and shape. Ragged right stanzas are born of words and phrases lifted from page 1 of each notebook in turn, then page 2, etc. But the order itself becomes uneven and varying, as some notebooks are written on back and front, some front only, and, occasionally, a whole page is left blank. So what begins as a quartet fades, like the players in Yellow Submarine getting zapped by the Blue Meanies, down to trio, duet, and finally, solo. Surrounding this, the first and last “chapters” of bioautography are more generous, free movements; free as in wide-ranging, also, inviting the delight of chance, of choice. The stanzas here proceed, in turn, through fragments taken from “at random” (meaning I flipped…) each entire notebook: this introduces the thematic and specific referents, and works to open and close the space in which the main sequence unfolds.

What is this? Forcing a hidden, unloved/overlooked language into the open, offering the background hum of my own writing practice up, and, through attending to it, through angry and compassionate exam, transmuting these private thoughts, occasional observations, and predictable tangents into a strangely intense Frankenstein monster, dense with fraught rhythms, a sort of motorik stutter, marrying insistent pounding to a omnivorous, atmospheric drift. A twilight sonanta of contemporary alienation.

The Steely Dan Project, my previous darling, simultaneously demolished and reconstructed Danielle Steel’s The Ghost, using the very word ash and busted rhetorical bricks I found on a given, randomly chosen page. To mix things up a little, and extend this reworking into a different domain, these new page-poems are then infused with a selection of words drawn from Steely Dan song titles. Its deeply irreverent, yet the pull of Danielle’s and Steely Dan’s work (in that order), of the worlds they invite/invoke is referenced, inescapably, through their material – words – via the imposed limit of only this found language. So the miraculous tension of sampling, of source, of pulling apart the field to watch it come together, different, yet related, again. Lovely, lovely mutation.

-

Poetics

In both projects, the work is that of the collector-alchemist. The writing agency is a process of selecting, tweaking, and presenting already worked material. Who works that material, whether a previous me, or a previous other, is a relevant if limited – but not limiting – distinction. What’s at heart is the sort of flavor the source provides – as in cooking – what ingredients, and how fresh? If Steely Dan makes the obvious other of Danielle Steel’s text (and its attendant ideologies) strange to itself, then, with bioautography, it was my hope to return the favor, to take work that felt like a product of my (uncomfortably not ready for prime time) fixed ego – and render that other up raw, unfixed, compelling, strange and, finally, free.

My process here is an un/refixing, but not simply to delight in un/refixing itself – though that is a constant and necessary companion. I go there because there’s life in it – as a reader of these texts I am awoken to their possibilities, to their inherent instabilities and stabilities, to their myriad weird gestures and manipulations, to all their veins of word-ore. So I’m a miner, and also the metalworker, and also the mountain (whether I admit it or not). There’s magic there, juice, jizz, sweet wine, a plate full of dim sum dumplings. The heat goes up, friction is applied, the whole Universe present – good stuff.

-

Further Set

I’m mulling this after a morning of Pu-erh tea, Lisa Jarnot’s Black Dog Songs, and the poems of Jim Gore. Got to asking myself what poetry is, what I’m reading here, and, for once, instead of going ballistic on someone else’s text, decided to take a (over)look at my own process (well, do I write poetry? how is my work part of this? what IS this stuff?), which (and raise your little cyber hand if you feel this) feels horribly and absolutely mysterious to me – that is – I arrive before it at a loss for words. Which is both absurd and all right. But today, I thought I’d venture in to that cave a little bit. Whether I let my eyes adjust to the darkness or blasted it a-bright with some REI lantern,

is a rhetorical question addressed to Nobody in Particular. NiP, hope to hear from you soon. JWG, hope to have a response for you later today.

10 minutes

2005-08-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

i put a 4" wood buddha on my desk to ignore. every once in awhile i look his way - there he is, seated still in meditation. is that me? its not a feeling i carry often.

this saturday, sarah celebrated her 30th birthday with a raucous and intimate fiesta. i've known sarah for almost 14 years now, and our unlucky 13th is just what the I Ching predicted - chaotic, fiery, and therefore choice.

at the fiesta, we watched poet after poet don the pink blindfold, down a tequila shot, get swirled in both directions, and, holding on to an old stick (which Jack Bessey managed to shatter) take dead aim and swat the hell out of a festive and innocuous little sea-mine shaped pink and green pinata. for variety, non-poets were also invited and allowed to play.

i'll be damned if that little wood buddha has ever swatted the hell out of anything. fucker hasn't had to.

my life would be simpler if i'd chosen to play nortenos instead of jamaican ska during the pinata-ing. it would have made sense - maybe i wouldnt have had a headache then, with direct, graspable choices like that.

the wood buddha is determinedly not looking at me. that sculptor knew what he was about.

watching my friends swat the hell out of that bright little cardboard star was empowering. they had it in them. and the swoops of delight when it hit - SMACK gives way to a rain of sour candies, cum wipes, plastic 2" Absoluts and Jim Beams, other cheap little sparkly things.

if there is no point, there's nothing to cut yourself on, or get poked with. you can walk around without worry, or avoidance. you can take in the sights. then you can go somewhere else.

quick hits

2005-07-29T16:33:00.000-07:00

i tend to go long. here's some shortie practice. (sorry i dont have any flavorful sports analogies)

TRASH: don't pick it up / don't take my life a-wayyy. NY DOLLS, 73?

TRASH CULTURE/POP CULTURE/CONSMER CULTURE/FOLK CULTURE: this distinction is shot to hell. doesn't mean its not important, or that an instinct (john waters/steven spielberg) isn't a fine place to start. we live in the midst of this shit(dove and ipod billboard, pomegranite juice, tour de lance). how can the culture we breathe not be worth our consideration beyond quick yeas and neas (beyond consumption and its refusal).

POETRY: lately it seems like a catch-all for the work that's not genre prose. drama comes in at an angle. its a wide, wild, bottomless river. or the bottom is somewhere beyond my dangling toes. which doesn't mean don't get wet. i want to trust the current. but getting wet doesn't mean i comprehensively "know" the river. study, like play, is without ends.

MY POETRY:

yesterday i wrote:

The order before him. Through such canvases as the mind
makes it so, brambles cut back, foreskin discarded
As waste, we know better than the first factory
Our womb. Such forfeit of mirth to survey the scene
Even in its laughter spangled, retarded, a 12 stepping
Anonymous. This paper, unsigned, no signatory
a skittered glide before flight. An implied familiarity –
dimple obscure but recognized with each new
Inevitable smile. Misspelling the words might break
The spell, new colors, new fabrics from Egypt, Guatemala,
What’s left of Milan. The never-be-divided, in the headlines
Reads nothing but. And counting lines before the apocalypse
Or changing the channel, this page, between others, here,
Here is a boot cut, here is James Dean, here a hero travels
To her father’s house to confront him, on the very date
Khrushchev, or his player, left-field, adds the final loping Cyrillic v.

this is a voice i often start from when i pick up writing poetry. then the project becomes: how to move thru/past this? is it just cause i'm restless, or this is unstable ground?

today i wrote:

The great SS Coherence
Set out upon the sea
There ne’er was a grander ship
To part the salty breeze

which goes on for 12 more screechy pirate fight song/sea chantey verses. talk about trash. or delicious.

i am gleefully in trouble and back in the game. thanks to everyone who I've been in conversation with the last few days, posters too - this has all been most welcome/helpful. freeing the trapped little mind.

HORCHATA: see delicious.

Have a jolly wknd.

Sacramento Speaking...

2005-07-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

I'd say that you can trust a writer when she/he confesses a love of what the Academy disdains. or what serious readers collectively spite. in other words, readers who take their reading seriously can, or should, admit to what is glossed over as trash. that includes poets in the Academy who are not serious readers but take their reading seriously, too.

-Richard Lopez.

that should make the case for Steely Dan. one CAN be serious about their trash (its a common currency in this world). Richard's July 26th post, and Eileen's i would recommend, but she is all over the place, which this blogger appreciates, and i couldn't find the one Richard refers to.

in other news...

el pobre Mouse springs back to life this fall. We begin our work on the 1st of september. the current deadline is rolling, but if you're ate, you'll be sorry.

ok, eaten. if you're late, we'll be sorry too.

curious about what zines or journals impact you. please leave any notes you're gracious enough to provide. i am wondering if (editorially guided) context matters, or if the assemblage itself is context?

i'm leaning towards editorial context, porbably to have a more active role as editor. and to redefine how i think about editing - from culling "the bests" to surveying a particular locale, be it geographic, topic, ideologic, formal, etc.

could i get away with saying formic? how i am informed by it?

i submit blogs as trash. a kind of daily garbage hunt that can be most rewarding. epiphanies wilt so fast anyway, compared to a three legged chair with a torn slip, and pages of a burned book. both of which recently were offered on the street.

in the virtual junkyard, a guy in texas, tells us about drivers responses to his walking in a lightningstorm. in tokyo, this french bloke (at last! foreign language blogs!) is deeply infatuated with architecture and vintage depeche mode.

samples:

this is from a series called, yes "black celebration". ecstatic.

to end on a meditative note: http://bxmppfo.blogspot.com/. MUFFIN3LUCY's about me lists 15 concurrent blogs. at points, they richocet, mutate and echo each other. how "pineapple pound cake recipe" on fpudii becomes "poem by ezra pound" (hulugz) becomes "phoenix dog pound" (rwukkbot) "pennies per pound" on pmvdgtf. jackson maclow comes to mind. and leaves : these are SHARP - silly screenshots of our vast _____. pick yr nouns carefully (mrb, this means you). sharp is one link from silly. maybe one 1/4 second / 1/8th".

here's another side of our Tokyo francais correspondant:

fantastique, non?

photos courtesy antoniosugizo.

a minute later, a "Yiddish speakin', terrorist hatin', Israel-lovin', iced-coffee drinkin', pool playin' sista of Zion" holding forth on Waylon Jennings "Ladies Love Outlaws" turns her attention to the follwoing question from Bec: 1. if you had to go back in time to live during one of the following periods in history, which would you choose, and why? a) the pogroms during the 1880s, b) poland, 1940, c) the period that we were slaves in egypt.

the question is in red type, the answer in orange.

rare delight courtesy ESL

2005-07-25T16:54:00.000-07:00

"this door is wet paint"

(repeated, handwrit, on notes, on the carpet, at the foot of the doors, for each door, down the hall.

there are many doors.

in addition, today only (doors being wet paint) each door is OPEN. offices, officefolk, are REVEALED.)

a liekly email may serve as an ample psot

2005-07-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

liekly, entyr, psot? the lord giveth context and the lord can take it away. alternate defs:

liekly - a tangential manner of advancing. circumspect, surprising, wary. difficult to counter, or predict. cf. fungus, air-born diseases, the collected works of Robert Duncan, spam email, off-color jokes, guerrilla insurgencies.

entyr - a process, viewed at a distance, which appears to occur outside of / or on an edge of time. this may change when viewed at repeated, varying distances, as shadows change upon a well, or cross a wall.

psot - a bramble whose form bears both fruit and thorn, and in which the flatness of the open field is replaced with a densely curvilinear, thickly bracketted space. it is often disorienting, yet provides shelter and nourishment for many makes of small mammals.

well, as long as we aren't actually in the boats, or if we are and can swim, no big problem if they sink.

so shame, yes. and healing. and the gap - perceived - between healing work and writing life. what to say of it? the best words i know come from a zen roshi - he spoke about how dangerous zen practices of no-ego are for people who don't already have healthy egos. they are contraindicating, and end up wrecking the person rather than enriching them (or freeing them from these distinctions). so libratory for whom?

a boss just walked over to a colleague - wasn't sure if he was the (his) boss - but he projected that boss authority, that casual control one must earn here by position of authority. total ease, slow stroll in and starts to talk about "9 holes of golf this wknd" and you better believe that my co-worker immediately abandoned his work and turned hs full attention and charm to bear on THAT conversation.

now they are paracticing their swings and i am smiling like i am superior. isn't it sweet (orange, quince, port) that they are still boys, that in this shit they still enjoy things? a refuge from duty, either corporate or familial. and perhaps sweeter even in the retelling, where all negatives are erased - do not even appear - than in the moment of golfing, where the friction of the real world constantly intrudes or threatens to.

maybe. by quoting the roshi, i am casually and undogmatically equating the practice of writing with the practice of zen. are both nondual? in writing we explore the pliant pronouns, the ever-shift of i and we, stepping in and occupying their vacancy with characters, inexhaustible characters, but never ourselves. what we call ourselves is what? - our passing feelings, impulses, thoughts, perceptions and sensations. which, rendered, become other. teeth hurt, we watch a body pass, the brain and computer hard drive hum. the word "nigger", a memory of a grandmother, of a woman we once saw begging, of caked red dirt and rust on tin cans. in this, from this, with this always with us, we write.

yet, what force rises to shape or influence this current? we could call this organziaing force, this psychic corporation (to be gloriously unromantic) the ego. it rises up, yang, and embraces direction - dwarfed by the world flow, it yet plays active partner to it.

practice - zen, or writing, need both. in touch with the flow, and able to tweak it. in that order. a zen garden is beautiful in its allowing of natural forms their autonomy without surrendering the role of the pruners, the rake, a shovel scraping up dirt.

i am in to therapy and healing because my ego is in such marginal shape that it is exceedingly hard work just not to cry or otherwise explode at work. ie, to "keep up appearances". but more - to have a healthy relationship to my workplace (which is horribly repressed, making actually healthy minor explosions of tears and swear words inadvisable and threatening). i immediately doubt that. but... butt... oh the argument comes unhinged. i do try.

i trust dialectic arguments more than any other. sex is a dialectic, as is love, war, and good target spitting. the tension and juxtaposing of non-identical (if not neccessarily diametrically opposed, that old reductionist binary opposition) forces creates frictions, eddies, currents much like Earth's weather and landforms - ie places to inhabit. places i might live a rich and satisfying life.

to the extent that therapy and healing offer an entrance into this dialectic, yes.to the extent that writing and reading creative work offers an entrance into this dialectic, yes.

neither is perfect. i am at home in neither, but can move through both, i may be, for a few moments, really at home in either. they take turns. i feel stuck by this language, these terms. home invites homelessness - is that opposition relevant? i feel compelled to explore it, and i am not going to.

be compelled. to discover our autonomy, and then exercise is it wisely, with compassion, w/o attachment. that seems a worthy and noble end. that autonomy is perceived semiotically, through sign systems, which we learn to read. language is one of these. to be articulate, to lay it down, no BS, that, to me, is healing. or one element of it. to lay it down, to open to it, to follow unknowable desires and become intimate w/ them... i think this is possible in both language work and (professionally conceived) healing work.

rambling. like a good patch of briars. the trail snakes through, though you may cut your hand or snare your shirt.

i think healing practices can catch and snare the shirt, which is not healing. i think the same of language, its work. maybe it IS healing. doesn't it depend (on the greater web)?

so we navigate both. memoir invites and demands anti-memoir. i would say that is healing too - memoir is a construct, a tool in an ideology whose aim is codification, a solid understanding ( a firm grip on the situation) which beds easily with control, and with reductive thinking. it need not, it is just a tool - anti-memoir, the study of what we leave out of our tidy or messy presentations of self, is the shadow work. bringing both into play, a field is generated, sky above, earth below, fruitful green zone of living things between. a home, an ecology, a series of traceries, superhighway routes thru, nexuses and nodes where a banana or grape might grow or a love one dropped off on the bus.

think think think. not to deny the daily experience of shame - which i have. shame at imperfection. when i practice it, i start here, i say, yeah, i feel a lot of shame at being "so fucked up". i even feel shame at wanting to heal, at believing in healing, shame for being weak and then shame for wanting "strong". its bizarre. it can keep me back/keep me down. ie silent, and a traitor to my strongest desires, most basic/burning questions. but if i bring the secret out into the open - thing i most fear - it changes. it may return, but it changes. it loses its grip, becomes something else. i can write that.

this weird slippy slope "between" knowing who i am and being open to who/how i might be(come). ego and its edge. its so hard for me to be there. i dont know where it goes. i dont know how it might be a "career" so i dont go hungry/in rags. a long email. as to others who will not hear us - yes. but here is a good bernstein quote i just found, pointing to risks either way:

Mr. Bernstein, for his part, readily concedes the many difficulties of "Shadowtime," and argues that they arise not only by design but by necessity. "Clarity is valuable in many situations, but not necessarily in art," he said in a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment. "Many will no doubt be befuddled, just as a work that seeks to be clear risks boring people. These are the risks you have to take."
Yet more seems to be at stake than simply keeping an audience challenged. When pressed, Mr. Bernstein echoes Benjamin's friend and colleague Theodor Adorno, who defended difficult music as having its own social value precisely because it teaches us how to withhold understanding and therefore helps us resist the allure of false clarity in the world beyond the concert hall. Complexity, in other words, is a worthy ideal in art because reality is even more complex and dissonant than the thorniest work of modernism, even if politicians and the commercial culture reassure us that everything is simple, clear and harmonious.

how does therapy move beyond the singular individual to address the disharmonies and false harmonies or even the repression of actual harmonies (we all play the same note NOW - smile, how are you, i'm fine. have you tried pepsident?) in the social sphere, our culture life, the womb in which each of our little worm identies nestles and thrives (or no). i am thinking of the first Matrix - the process of waking up invariably involves moving into a confrontation with the demands (intrusions) of our culture over our life, our language, our desires.

ie. the need for money. fame. a nice hot body. in the latest clothes, with a highspeed wireless connection. and fabulously intelligent. clever, compassionate, sexy, wry wise - I DEMAND OF YOU TO BE.

perhaps we can start with noting how these worlds do and don't intersect. perhaps we can bring them into conversation. we could start with bodies, and how bodies emerge into signs. for a writer, words. perhaps we can acknowledge our different projects, their overlaps, and start here, from this. trusting ourselves and eachother to move deeply and fully into... into what? does it have a name? our desires? our paths? if we can weave a world, and words, of this trust, this knowledge... is that our home?

and here i feel still a little shame for hoping "yes", for wanting to conclude, as if its a hoax, as if how could i pretend that this has anywhere "to go", anything to "clear up" or "illumine". for a few moments, we stare into the gap. our eyes, somehow, adjust.

and we do the box thing? (pleese do not call eet the box thing)

i have no idea if there is any food or threat here for you to ponder. if so, send the little boats back. they're sturdier than the depression thought them.

Hello, My Name Is Almost Bird & Forest

2005-07-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

A book I am now 20 pages into, and still owe its author for (not fogotten! not - quite - forgotten!). For years I have shyed away from consciously developing a conventionally narrative prose, to explore what I tend to think of as "the outer reaches". But this affection for Sun Ra, cosmic ambience, and absolutely stunning disjunctions eventually circles back into the prose rhythms of... well "conventional narrative". I mean to imply a dialectic friction - a text may push against the limits (using Lacan) of big S signifiying with its firm grounding of place / noun / speaker / subject / object etc. but can not exactly escape it - into what? the line drawn between the big S and little s is not to be crossed in language. There is no identity of one's words, and one's desires, no more than between an anatomy book and a living body. We never break through to the other side, but we can tool about at the very edges where signification (its constant mapping) becomes so obscured, or troubled, or fragmentary, or bewildered, or overloaded and cluttered, that it loses its train and derails, and this derail hints strongly / evokes / can point towards little s states. But we still have there (as our hinting /evidence ) the derailed signification. If the hint is taken is not in the texts hands.

I have written extensively in this (demanding) vein, towards noise/bliss/silence, but, as with ecriture feminine, such work always carries something of a paradoxical question about it, something unsettled. To write against language in language, to resist the ordering of perceptions through the mediation of words in words, is this some quixotic prank?

Not today (meaning "yes") . It is a phase, a choice to explore a certain realm of possibility in language, one our culture overlooks, significantly overlooks, and it is a journey, a phase, a choice, one possibility among many. Why head off to the barrens and the wilds where the beasties lurk (for if you think they aren't hiding in your own incomprehensions, then where exactly under your bed are they) except for the classic heroic tale - so that, in doing, in going to the underworld, you can again pop your head out into the bright and perhaps sunny day, at home, and live your life with renewed vim and vigor. Its somehow neccesary work and it helps me put things right (and not put a lot of other things right - i.e. intrude/go anal/bonkers - i have (exhausting) interludes of (trying to) making a well-ordered world, instead of just writing and witnessing a well-tempered word). Instead, I have a go at exploring chaos.

If I was a more caring soul I would go back over this and edit it for you, or me, or the hell of it. As is, here's one more walk in the woods. I want to add that I don't seperate the emotional/spiritual/intellectual realms of this "underworld" or outer galactic reach. They intertwine. It is the work of examing a shadow, of the earth under my feet, the compress of the rubber of my shoes, it is work of armpits, latrines, old girlfriends and things said/seen when i couldn't even speak. Its a place that utterly compells the rereading of the most hideous and depraved old notebooks (and not in any titillating sort of way) to bear my signature scrawl.

I do hate the stickiness of writing from this place. Even writing on these old fells sweeps me into them again. Reground. Use the delete where neccessary. Bring the figure (half) out of the stone.

So there is an element of flirtation in writing around the unwritable. It also bears a touch of s/m, as the distinction betwen pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability is also troubled, dissolving into moments (perhaps of "pure being" or "the box thing" depending on which character in Huckabees you prefer). That so much confession/conversion narrative in so many traditions does not honor these ruptures is a shame, and points to how many "breakthroughs" are largelly big S affairs, concerning ideologies far more than bodied praxes. I live this shit - how many times do you tell yourself "that was a life-changing experience"? Versus how many times your life actually radically changes. Wording the experienc ein that way is a first neccessary step to murdering it, an act I - deluded to this - participate in willingly. We drag the shock and opening of an emergence of little s into the analytic lab-fridge of big S, murmuring how exciting it is, unable to conceal our murderous glee to anesthetize, roll-over and slit open the fucker.

All this relates, as a sort of pre-amble to the introductory note, to Brent Cunningham's Bird & Forest, a delightfully different tangling with language.

Hi, my name is SEMIOTICS

2005-07-21T17:29:00.000-07:00

"Lacan calls key signifiers points de capiton, or "upholstery buttons" as on a piece of furniture." These "serve to "seal" some kind of crucial meaning for participants in sign use."

Being in therapy, and being a writer, Lacan seems very apropos right now. I am wondering, in the narratives I carry, esp. in the ones I experience as needing tending (mending) what are my upholstery buttons? Which ones are poorly attached, dangling by a string as they do, or just wiggly loose, and how many were poorly placed in the first instance?

Which may be thousands of years back, the lifetime of just one tree.

Of course, when I ask that question here, of myself, it becomes, gratis, yours, if you'll take it.

In language, out of which we make our stories (and theirs), mastery is a weird thing. Given you drew up your "self" as a wee one, whose mastery exerts itself on your armchair?
What holds us as we are, even, modulates how we may be/come ?

Rhetoric. Let's throw it away. Exposing...

the void? (as if). If we REALLY throw it away. And I trust that tradition that says "dont worry,it/you comes back". But I meant lets throw THAT rheotric away. It was getting cheeky. Hands off my post, scurvy would-be adjunct theory profs!

Semiotics. I recommend it. A real easy ease-into is the INTRODUCING series, where those not-quite brilliantine quotes up top come from. All those pictures and short captions really help breach/broach.

I know some of our generation have found all things theory intrusive or limiting or just more dogma, but as I get a bit older, I find it can - at times - magnetize my perceiving. I thought about - experienced - words/consciousness differently today, thanks to old Jacques L. Punches a little hole in those narratives wrapped so tightly around the self.

To let y'all go with something that doesn't happen much around here, a haiku:

Wind.
The flattened pigeon wing
flaps.

or

Wind.
The flattend pigeon wing
flaps still.

(or "still flaps").

Or

In wind
the flattened pigeon wing
still flaps.

Does the "In"/"still" help - I imagine its assumed? It gives a little paly/tension around motion, but maybe drains somethign too? Whaddya think? Just dont tell me whether you LIKE the poem, for chrissake. It was just words that occured on a bikeride home that i will toss around until i'm good and done with it.

My most horrible secret writer self wants to call this poem "Democracy 2005". I think I am going to acquiese.

Unless I call it

"words that occured on a bikeride home that i will toss around until i'm good and done with it that i called..."

OOOOOOOOUUUUUUUTTTTTTTT
damned post! psot?

on reviewing old posts

2005-07-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

Why am i ashamed of my humor?

riding off ron

2005-07-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

How you hear a poem & how you hear a reading are two different things, unless of course the reading consists of a single long text (which may be why I’ve given so many readings that have been just that). Some of the tracks on Smith’s CD are as short as 23 seconds. They echo in the mind, but by the time one absorbs the words, the poem itself is long gone. (This may explain why such diverse poets as Robert Bly & Bob Grenier have a tendency to read a short poem multiple times during a reading.) With a longer reading, on the other hand, the reader settles in, begins to hear nuances & themes, tonal changes, as well as whatever content might be flowing past. With a longer reading, you can almost hear the moment at which the audience relaxes into the text – it always occurs somewhere after the 15-minute mark, sometimes after the 30 (and, often, you’ll hear two such moments). At 40 moments or thereabouts, I’m so tuned into a reader’s sense of time & the formal scope of the text that it is as if a vista opened up. Only from that point forward can I really hear pretty much everything the poet is doing.

And no two poets, at least no two decent ones, have anything like the same timing – it’s as particular as fingerprints. If I find that I resonate with some aspect of that timing, a reading can act like a spell – I’m totally enveloped. But if I find that I don’t resonate, sometimes the reading itself can seem very alien, as if we’re translating across not just languages but beings or species. That can be even more interesting if I can tell that the writing is very good, but operating on planes that don’t feel at all familiar or intuitive to me. Indeed, some of the readings that have had the most lasting impression on me – Alice Notely as well as the late Douglas Oliver – fall into exactly this category.

-rON sILLIMAN, tuesday's blog.

It is SO RARE to hear a poet read for the lengths Ron is writing about here. At Naropa, during the "featured reader" evenings, we would have the chance to hear writers like Pierre Joris or Creeley open up and dive in for 45 minutes to an hour or more. Even with a distracted mind, this still gives an audience the chance - the neccessity, really - to enter into a prolonged, ongoing conversation with the reader and their work. If Pierre Joris had read for only 20 minutes, I might no even remember the event today. (Although the shock value of some of Joanne Kyger's shorter readings (say 5 or 6 minutesTOPS) also resonates)

Analogically, I'm thinking about walking. If one goes for a 15 minute walk, they may feel refreshed, they may have a few moments of contat or confrontation with the environment they pass through / are in. Now, stretch that out: by 30 mintues, the walk has totally enveloped them, they are going. At an hour, the desire to stop has risen more than once - perhaps they have stopped, and are walkign again. I agree with Ron that if the participant is willing, at that hour mark, the intimacy and immersion factor in the act of listening, or walking, or fucking, or sitting (or vacuuming - not to dis the prosaic) is far higher. Of course, if I am a 21 yr old lone wolf who digs Miller and Kerouac and Rollins and I sit down and my teachers parade before me Mullen, Silliman, even Collins or Heaney, well, that intimacy is likely to be one of resistance - if I can call such "intimacy".

But lets trust that we're all adults here, and that we are choosing wisely what to do with our time, and that we're mature enough to even engage our unexpected detours, the so-called "mistakes" that may be more like surprises, really. I like this idea of an hour long reading, it seems gritty and expansive (and quite frankly a little daunting). I gave a 20 minute reading on saturday, one of three readers, and it went

I'd like to interrupt this blog to consider how the persistence of mistypings and mispellings in blogs provides an uncanny and delirious postmodern echo of the pre-dictioanry days of printed texts and manuscripts, where regional dialect and who you learned from dictated your spellings of words far more than any central, hierarchical authority. Once again the word becomes as multiple when lettered as it can be when said (but with a quite distinct route - lack of formal education and keyboard dyslexics - into this).

well. Well standing in for I found certain rythms, tangents, routes, followed them through, and on to the next, in a satisfying matter - so that I was practicing my reading, really getting into it - okay, sad here, critical here, joyous and silly there, a mournful echo here, anger there, tight and fast here, slow and chopped there. I appreaciate orality, esp. at a reading, a writer who engages the specifically oral nature of their delivery - I understand most of the writers I know and go to see are primarily writers, not readers/performers, but an attention to, a practice of the reading of a text - it feels like good work, and it attunes my ear to what is going down it. Mastery, is a powerful thing to witness. It was said well in the first Harry Potter book, when the wizard who sells wands finds the right one for Harry, and explains how the only other wand of this class is owned by Voldemort:

"For he did great things. Terrible, yes, but great"

A little terror really sparks a reading, esp. if one is fairly certain that Taylor Brady, or Melissa Benham is not, in fact, a spawn of Satan hell-bent on world dominaion and the elimination of four-eyed muggles who ride bikes and garden like yourselves.

-

The reading went well, but 20 minutes is a fairly early exit point. In the case of Artifact, it makes sense. The audience is there usually for one or two of the three featured readers, and Artifact is a reading series cum party - its social side is consciously invoked. A 60 minute one -reader blowout makes for a very different evening. What most triggers me in considering this is how we as writers and organizers can maximize the diference and variety of our venues and performances, to make for more possibilities, for fruitful complexities where my desire for an occassional hour immersion sits easily beside the sampler mentality of another evening. If its all the latter, and none the former, aren't we just feeding our culturally emergent ADD?

So who is setting up readings where we can "go long"? Are there any such series in the Bay Area? Do they have comfortable seating? Light shows? If not, perhaps RPS will have to set that up too, right after we get our lecture series and salon off the ground.

-

Speaking of RPS (thats Rock Papier Sizz, San Francisco's #1 poetry and writing collective) welcomed honorary member Sean MacInnes to town last weekend, and dove into the MINI series project, producing 9 small 8 - 16 page collaborative texts (although 2 or 3 are uncredited solo ventures) and, within 24 hours, writing, editting, printing and assembling them, through salvaged and recycled material, into a set of 27 handmade, saddlestapled, 3x4 books. 9 more remain to be made. So, en toto, 3 books, 4 copies each. All books were given away at readings that weekend, and, by the way, literati Martha Stewarts, they make great party favors and introductory gifts.

I hope to post some covers up tonight, and if you're curious, email me and I'll send you a PDF of our text.

have you ever been and what would yours be?

2005-07-18T16:36:00.000-07:00

If you haven't, I would put aside 15 minutes for this.

It formed part of my "refusal to do a day's distraction" project. Its a subtle work, and the other folk here at distraction haven't noticed that I have chosen to work all day instead of doing that other stuff we are paid for wasting our time with.

This link arrived for me this morning, and last nite I witnessed dozens of poets come up to a live stage and confess their poetic sins (one kept a blog, another - she confided privately - is afraid of nouns) and receive a vodka and juice absolution. Some, inspired by the cleansing magic of this ritual, confessed freely, again and again. some to the point of compromising their dancing skills. But these are the lesser poets, and that thar above link is no one trick pony.

So what or where is it?

2005-07-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

New Brutalism has some severe critics, one of the most famous being Charles, Prince of Wales, whose speeches and writings on architecture have excoriated New Brutalism. The poetry column of Private Eye, "Books and Mourners", began life as "Books and Mourners of the New Barbarism", with "new barbarism" clearly intended as a reference to "new brutalism". The column is skeptical about postmodern poetry in general, but over the course of some four years has reserved its strongest wrath for New Brutalism, especially in 21 Grand projects.

It could be the work found here.
Or here.

I hear the master slaps you if you say "both", but hell, its worth a try, and its probably not a hard slap (the lawyers advise).

Its not there. That man is an imposter (see it in his well-sweatered smile?). If you are in Canada, you know what we do with imposters. Bring the creme fraiche.

On my lunch breaks, its definitely here (over there ... ). That fountain, when its on, reads some loud motherfucking poe-ette-tree, lemme say.

It is altogether the precursor, in 3-D, of Brookyln grafitti that it looks like, and has the same crew of detractors or should we say distractors.

I recommend the final reading to be held there, if only because poets are the best dancers, and no one else comes close.

ugly / bald / lively contrasts

shameless / vivid / brazen constructs

fleeced / wooly / post mods revel

accessible can be a reference to putting seats out, switching the senses up, and charging a four dollar admission. tradition can be courted -no?- at a bacchanal.

and the view out the front door is a painting waiting to happen.

to me it looked a lot like a group of people who'd made it to the point of no return, look around and took a couple digital photos, a sip from their flask, and promptly high tailed it out of there, back to the city (there was a new Johnny Depp film coming out that night). this might explain why, with suitable (ie ample) whorski nearby, poets make the best dancers, and mighty fine preachers too. for they have lived to see the other side, hallelujah.

it also might explain why i have been feeling feisty all day. New Brutalism Series - there will only be one more, chck it out and see you there. after that, we'll have to do it all ourselves.

Principals need not reply.

great swath of emptiness

2005-07-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

on the web today. short posts, posts of poems, travelling posts, posts of the undead. as if the social center is absent (quiet - where empty reads "background noise" - heartbeat heard through ears, neighbors through walls, the bus outside, glow of a computer monitor left on or hum of fridge - spider webs and no spider) and we are all gone to or over the edge for awhile to poke around quietly, don personas, shop a bit, and then head home.

bags empty or full? who's got receipts?

i will be giving a reading this saturday evening as part of July's Artifact. The event is "free to the public" (if hearing an hour plus of readings by Sean MacInnes, Melissa Benham and myself is truly "free of cost" - but dont worry, there's liquor and we take breaks and sometimes tell jokes too - not all organic whole grain post- grad school post-langopo ver.2005 ) and there is liqour and breaks and a party afterwards (and in between - it is my hope that i won't feel compelled to responsibly ask/remind/nag Melissa to start up the reading after the second reader again, when the "intermission" party always threatens to take over, and if there's no third reading and no one remembers, hey, its a party, yall. yet i am a sworn protector and guardian of art - witness my flaming hair.

Well, wavy blonde. The reading is in the great city of San Francisco and you can find all kinds of info about it on Melissa's Artifact series blog. Don't you want to be on such an attractively designed bill? I understand, really. I was waiting for it to be my turn again. Insider tip : the flyer design is influenced by two of Melissa's "favorite directors". Any guesses? Not the guy who did the John Cussack films, evidently (my hopeful guess before seieng it). Am I supposed to say "Brakhage" - ain't gonna. Don't know, don't know. LA folk?

Is the jury in on non-personal blogs? They take a diff. course, to be sure, and arise quicker than those wishing to make expensive/time consuming web sites. And those of you who are like "expensive? time-consuming? what the f**k? - shame on yrselves. Come over here right now and I have SEVERAL web sites for you to build/teach-how-to-build for/to me and my friends.

Good day to you all and please carefully consider hitting "next blog". Last time I did I was in the world of a 21 yr old cutie who wanted to move to New Zealand and marry a Kiwi. Very Being John Malkovich. I tell myself - "go ahead, it won't hurt. maybe i will make a new friend and throw peanuts at them."

Thus continues the case of the absent center. Its all vacancy signs and doors left open with only the cleaning staff around (down the hall, inside 309, you can hear them). Want to snoop? Even the pool is unattended, and its so warm outside. Good day.

miserable motherfuckers, unite!

2005-07-11T14:13:00.000-07:00

we have only our salaries and benefits* to lose!

am i the only one out here who is working in the corporate wasteland? snuggling in the cold, frenzied, clot-inducing heart of the office?

i welcome your support on performing a bypass - its high time i get out of here. so, for what its worth, i hereby announce i am (as of this moment) looking for work. it feels like sawing off a limb and winning the lottery at the same time.

(if you wanted to see The Corporation and you haven't, you are a foolish, foolish being(see post-title, please))

* and one-bedroom apartments, and dusty cars, and partners and IKEA cookware and parental approval and $ to buy books with etc.

secret blog decoder ring

2005-07-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

Currently a day of great emotional turmoil. Making it a Monday.

Here's a quick insight into how this blog works:

-if the post is intensely negative, if its highly critical, my guess is the author is suffering from a bout of melancholy. the more deeply, devoutly, intensely negative gives you a corrolative sense as to how deeply so.

-if the post is deeply critical of others, or others work, the blogger is having difficulty with his own work, most likely around the very vein he is critiquing in others

-if the post expresses anguish around writing or art, the blogger is stuck in his own process/blogging instead of working, a fine yet sustainable definition. all those of you who have blogged for an hour when you promised to "edit" etc. know what i mean.

-if the post displays consciousness more than self-consciousness, a sun is shining somewhere.

-if the blog is clever then the blogger is a dirty thieving hypocrite!

-if the blog leans too heabily on irony, there is a problem w/ spine allignment and a stooping posture.

-if the blogger shows a penchant for generalizations, this is a patent indicator of distance. (at a distance one perceives conglomerates which dissolve/re-arrange up close)

-if the blogger wears their heart on their sleeve, their heart is wounded (and most likely a decoy).

Mispellings in this post: liekly, psot, blogge ris.

-if i tire of this sort of talk, it is a blogge ris.
-if the form evaporates leaving only its trace, the entry becomes a psot.
-if a blog is inclined to admit too many tangents, it is liekly, and therefore not recommended as a seaworthy vessel.

in that section, we found "entyr"

"but that psot entyred a whole afternoon" (there is both a suggestion of the wearing down of a tire, and of the co-arrising state of feeling tired/sore (too much typing, perhaps in slightly lost/fruitless directions (inducing blogge ris))).

-a blog which dwells excessively on the surface betrays its ties to the logic of capitalism, as expressed in an advertisement: the windows of the skyscraper are always opaque, the foyer's marble is 1/8th of an inch thick.

-infomercials : i have just had a brilliant and short-lived theory on infomercials (relation to the psot without the attendant blogge ris yet still felt as liekly - if manipulatively so) . its lucky i still have functioning feet, although good lord my legs and neck are sore today. do they have places for old poets to go before they die so we can meet up and quarrel?

(quarrle, jst) lets face it - used judiciously, typos make work shine.

jst - a minute or obscure jest
quarrle - a mouse-like psot, not at all liekly, but quite blogge ris.

-so i experience this, what, moment? we should recognize that this secret decoder blog ring may penetrate many of the emotional energetics (i.e. miasmic submerged feelies) underlying this blog, but it does not dismiss the posts born out of its psots, or stand to ignore the momentary shininess of even the most slender jst, or justify writing off the whole affair as too entyring to be concerned with.

just to point out what may be there alongside the there.

can i recommend

2005-07-08T20:46:00.000-07:00

Pirooz's intvw of Rebecca Loudon ? July 4, 2005. Interviews - people meet, things happen. Its like a date without the sex. And the voyeur is invited! Note to self - intvw. someone.

Oh, and they "talk" about writing.

How I want to tell you things tonight! Ok, "let us away"

(the TV speaks roosters)

Cali Team Down by 3, up 1. 1 visiting.

2005-07-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

Not moving to Cali (Northern Division):

Dylan Hock, Rory Tubbs, Quindynn Hock-Tubbs.

Moving to Cali (Southern Division):

Pirooz Kalayeh.

Just visiting its couches:

Sean MacInnes.

Thus continues the great 100yr immigration to Southern California, a beautiful land that has absolutely no right or resources to support such a massive population. Southern Californians: we love you! but what on EARTH are you doing there?

If any of this is unclear, ask where your power and water come from. Us wholesome San Fransicans steal much of ours from Yosemite.

Mulholland Drive, anyone?

flipsiding

2005-07-08T17:03:00.000-07:00

returning to the tibet exhbit "from the roof of the world" last night, sarah and i toured the third and final gallery: "sacred works". in this room is a great concentration of thangkas and statuary of explictly devotional nature, some as old as the 13th century, and at least one a gift to a high lama from no less than Kublai Khan. i hope you all know who Kublai Khan is, although he is only idenified as a "Yuan Emperor of China" by the thingie that has all the info about what you are not seing but probably just were and then gave up or got curious so went a few eye feet to the side to read the plaque about the artwork [would be very grateful if someone knows an actual word for this thingie], but then the Asian has clear and close ties to the Chinese & Chinese American community (kind of a default in SF), and sometimes the Mongols just don't represent.

We are only 1 degree of seperation from writing about Coleridge here, folks. Or, from that, talking about the best paper I wrote in English Lit in college, which my prof didn't appreciate much (because it pulled a trick on him that he fell for all too clearly - admittedly a presumptious thing to do- but les here it for pre-presumpting profs).

So, for the paper, I was reading Coleridge's work and being a college druggie myself was wondering what it meant that Colerdige was "addicted" to opium/laudanum. My theory was that there was a predisposition I could find in his early work, before he tried opium - my hunch was that the poems would often show the trademarks of an opium high, even though he had not taken it yet, and that his old pal Wordsworth's poetry, would not. In short order I found some work by both that bore this out.

I don' know what I think of this now, but next I wrote up a standard "you can see the infl. of opium on coleridge's poetic vision..." paper using this early work. Without hinting there was any discrepency. All along the paper I remember frustrated, nagging red marks about "yes, but he hadnt tried it yet..." etc. My prof evidently knew his Coleridge drug history well. And then, in a flourish, I announce halfway through the "but..."and moved into a critique of theories of addiction (specifically the "dark power" of drugs the authorities tend to propogate, the old "demons" in new, appropriately materialist, chemical forms for the age of Christian science (not the faith). If a drug only addicts those who already desire/move in specific orbits, then its dark, seductive power is far reduced. The red marks stopped, but I think I got a very dry comment at the end about not being amused and a B+. Thus began and ended my career as a stage magician of English Lit. If he had a sense of humor, I might be the next Tom Robbins by now.

On seeing this room, with its radiant and unwordable and very impressive/powerful Kalachakra and Mahakaya thangkas, its gold statues of Tara, I had none of the same pessimism and sense of gloom I had last time. Maybe it was becuase the swooning rich women and the natty and chatty rich men weren't there, talking over and summing up and ignoring/voiding it all (curse my weakness for even letting them IN my mind!). But also, the spiritual dimension of the work, or else my familiarity w/ (rudely) Tibetan Buddhist practice/beliefs, or w/ the thangkha as a form... I dont know. I felt closer, engaged, and able to marvel at how much complexity and life each piece held. I witnessed a foreign language here, a whole other mode of wording, and I knew a few phrases, and could move around in it, begin to appreciate, orientate...

They worked. They just worked as teachings to me, even behind glass, on walls, with the full power of an institution (or twelve) behind them. While Tibetan daily life felt horribly, irretrievably diminished in the first galleries, the spiritual heart of the Tibetan teachings came shining through unblemished, and i got just a base glimmer of it.

Not to idolize Tibet. Thibet. A feudal system, with its static hierarchies, its own unquestioneds... but what the hey... some amazing teachings, some profound artwork, some bold use of color (cutting is the word- those reds and blues slice right through me.). IF you are feeling particularly high or low on yourself, I suggest staring into the eyes of a wrathful deity for 5 or 10 minutes. should sober you right up.

(and a painted or sewn depiction of such a deity will do in a pinch...)

the ashes and the urn

2005-07-07T16:47:00.000-07:00

What about the well-wrought urn? These days, when I'm in the Asian Art Museum (curr. exhibit: Tibet), I often feel sad. Some distance between me and that object that won't dissolve, a sense "this is not the place". Others exhileration at seeing this bone cup, or that lama's mantle, it just furthers a sense of... glumness. Castratation - an object pried from use ("home" - its eco-locale). Familiar to me vis a vis animals at the zoo. Picked up again when noting the clumsy/inaccurate/misleading, if well-intentioned exhibit placards, or hear the uncomfort and limited knowledge of the volunteer-guided tours. The passion and intimacy is as bounded out as the glass binds each piece in.

But when I'm at a gallery or the MoMA, I almost never think of/feel that. What tribal boundaries am I up alongside here? What crossings, and what ferries can't I board? Is it that the work there is not only from a culture/tradition I feel conversant in, but also that the objects are designed for this type of medium, this setting/relation? A painting is meant to hang on a wall and be seen. And some work- installations esp., practically demands a museum or gallery, even this one - site specific.

Sometimes travelling, sometimes at home.

One + One +

2005-07-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

One Less joins the blog scene. All hail One Less. They published me, and that's something. They published John Sullivan, Teresa Sparks, they published a whole lotta us, some them, they helped us (and them) redefine the us/them. Check 'em out.

(The cover art says Wyoming but the postal service says MA - my cognitive is dissonant round that. But then there's the move... (Maybe it was Colorado))

lets not and say we did

2005-07-07T16:39:00.000-07:00

- Diablo labels (x3)
- rounds
- xtra boxes downstairs
- enter new boxes
-labels
-SQL
-carton #s
-to basement / masterlist

-wrap dwgs?

me, a flavor

2005-07-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

Why read? I would read more writers our age if i didnt think half of them just wanted to be clever. Clever: worded demonstrations of special wit and insight and charm - or whatever other sordid motivation makes someone not only write but stand up with the whole "look at me/look at me" of publishing. A sort of ornamentation, a marked flavoring of the work, presenting it as, say off-beat, exotic, outlandish, etc., but always very very me, a flavor you should remember.

if you remember the dead milkmen lines: "You know that carnival comes into town every year? Well this year they came through with a ridecalled The Mixer. The man said, "Keep your head, and arms, insidethe Mixer at all times." But Bill Jr, he was a DAAAREDEVIL, justlike his old man. He was leaning out saying "Hey everybody,Look at me! Look at me!" Pow! He was decapitated! They found his head over by the snow cone concession." then you're right here with me.

But, unlike the commercials, it took me several minutes to actually find and pull up those lyrics. But then again, this is 64Ram dinosaur.

Cleverness. It reminds me of ad agencies. Attempts at being noticed, noticeable, pretty enough, strong enough, distinctive enough. Branding, and the desperation and sense of fear that surrounds/underlies that. The need to MAKE IT, or face oblivion and failure trying.

I'm not advocating faceless conformity here, either. Just looking at what gets in the way of work (incl., notably, mine) and ends up disfiguring it. another way to look at this is to note that cleverness itselfis occasional, effortless, a flourish of mastery. what I am talking about is work that tries to be clever, and muddies itself up with all the effort and makeup required to attempt to convey/mimic/forge cleverness. Which is rarely clever. writing to impress is the most writing most revolting to read. Revolting, or sad, or comic. Or not or. The amazing things we choose to do with our days, even the mundane ones.

Actually, I wirte this in the declining energy of mid-afternoon, after lunch, still artificially lit at work, and having erased everything else I thought to write today. The clever may plague me, but the effortless evades me (another sort of plague?). Head down, returning to data entry. (look how negative this post is. i need a new job)

five minutes

2005-07-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

How do we type emptiness? The distinct notes of an individual bird song, transcribed. Is melody a thread - is thread temporal? I want out. I want a bath, and I want a bath filled with women. What I want changes - what if sex really was the magic panacea so many let it become in their mind, the soccer goal to end all soccer goals. But as we get older, we know thats not true, and then we kick it in anyway. Imaginine dying a romantic. Sex though, there is a definite tantric practice there, even if its between a pervert and a whore - thus the transaction. Its simply weak magic, or black (i.e., printed green). I could define the shift as - the difference between a lesbian couple in - no, that wouldn't work. But San Francisco's most beautiful and captivating bar (not words I use much around bars) - maybe I should get off it and just say "pretty and relaxing"(still not bar words) - is often bartended by a - insert description. The last time someone described me, they told me I was looking"more and more like a beatnik", so perhaps description raises more thorny issues than we imagine. My cat tends to bite me after I describe him as small and cute, descriptions deserve respect - the wsidom there is to hold lightly - or - to return to typing emptiness, dont you dare tell me I never left, TOW-HEADED, SHAVEN-HEADED, long-locked, curlicue, flaxen, amber, golden, burgundy, mahogany, chocolate, licorice fcuks, who i love.

(now its your turn to write)

our way is not difficult/basement fungus

2005-06-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

Tim Hecker is a sound artist who moves at the (a) periphery of the electronica scene.His Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again CD is currently wedged in the car stereo (note to would be thieves: car stereo is an old discman stuck in the glove compartment), somewhere in the mid-city lifting fog. One of his CDs, Your Love is Rotten to the Core, is composed largely (or entirely, I can't tell and he doesn't say) of snippets of Van Halen, MTV VJ patter about Van Halen, and radio tour ads, etc. I think my affinity with this springs out of the Steely Dan project, that is, out of my own sense that collage can be worked over in surprising and ultimately unrecognizable ways, and yet it carries a felt ghost of its former environment, which exerts its own (counter) influence. On top of this, both Tim and I aim - I think - at a rough integration of the source material - not a gleaming surface smoothness, but a sense of textural consistency - if consistency is the word? The source distinctions become blurred - the identity, whether stolen or "home-brewed" is run-over, endandgered, pushed to the point where its discarded, where it doesnt matter any more, where the "stealing" doesn't even deserve such a bold word to describe it. Working out of the media-stream, acknowledging pop-cultural heroes and villains, thats just a part of the job, a possibility of the basic toolkit. Its in a way a tribute to such diverse pioneers of this technique, whether it be the dadaists, the early Ashberry and Berrigan poems, John Cage's Imaginery Landscapes series, Warhol's portraits, or the embedding of samples in pop music of the 80s and early 90s (from hip hop to industrial to Metallica), I think the cultural technology has changed radically, so that such "borrowings" seem far less ironic, far less foregrounded or daring, or intrusive, than they once did. In a sense, the scissors, the act of violence, that birthed the cut-up are replaced and the snippets are now seen as simply another source to work over. We are past the pioneer stage, and we're getting into working this place, this charted but rough territory. And in so doing, there is a chance here to explore, perhaps, a non-sentimental tenderness, a way to work through - critically, awarely - our tangled relationships, both with our crafts and sense of self and the wider cultural contexts we wade through. So Danielle Steele (dig that final "e" - refinement is always and add-on) and Eddie Van Halen become different, take on new life, tragic, comic, absurd, recognizably human, de-celebrified, by this type of working through.

What's Tim have to say?

There has really never been an overarching concept to any of my recordings, a concept if you will that has guided the entire recording process. The concept I've used for previous records has been more of a practice of writing, almost an act of fiction, just like the efforts used in designing the artwork. That's not to say that all of my recording processes have been devoid of ideas or directions - they very much do exist, but I've tended to ham up the presentation of a record, almost in reaction to much of the pretentious pseudo-conceptualization that is endemic to the electronic and experimental genres.

and...

Hence my work has been a hunting party for the wild fox that is the nexus of dissonance and melody. There are many possible ways to hunt the fox; it gives me a reason to keep on.

His new record - Mirages - is - evidently - out. For awhile now, I've missed that boat. But any of his CDs come highly recommended. Here's copy for Mirages (from the invw. again), and Hecker's elaboration:

Let me ask about the press material accompanying the new album: "Taking inspiration from Italian partigiani and the counter-attack of the anti-Vichyists, Hecker has issued a salvo against all tourists of melancholy, from trustafarian pseudo-leftists to the Ikea nihilists of the bobist rive droite. ... With its motifs of eroticism and torture, militancy, and ecstatic pain, Mirages also points backwards towards the Viking penchant for fighting and feasting." Care to elaborate?

This is basically making reference to some of the more heroic WWII anti-fascists, in particular their resolve in waging war against the inauthenticities of modern life - both "trustafarian pseudo-leftists" (those who pay to play) and the "bobo nihilists" (those who play to pay). I wanted to say that this record is an attempt at authentic experience (even if it failed), and even if it must be barbarian to do so.

Check out the whole interview here.
-

Web crew, what can I say to you? Blogging reminds me that I'm only alone when I want to be. Actually, the trashcan I passed in the tenderloin today showed every sign of sentience. It freaked me out. It was a modest Oscar the Grouch aluminum can, 2 ft tall, with a brown plastic covering tied on, which was morphing magnificiently- and threateningly - in the wind, like some tiny and deeply disturbed butoh dancer (or, more to the heart, like some horrific minitiaure demon which was going to reach out and grab for me). As i passed, it arced out towards my leg and bike, and as i continued passing, it followed me in its lunge, bending backwards, roughly inflated and billowy.That woke me right up.

Tenderloin is an SF neighborhood reliably full of street people, drunks, junkies, and recent Vietnemese immigrants. I saw them quite clearly after that trashcan. Outside my office, I watched a grandmother kiss (SMACK!) her grandchild (suspended in grandpa's baby bjorn) and then comment joyfully on him in cantonese to her bemused husband. Love. The emotional thrust, at least, was clear. I imagine Jim has become quite the conoisseur of knowing-not knowing what the folks around him are speaking, the fine and intelligible art of discerning incomprehension, and comprehending it. Drunks on words, in words, not always, but oft

en. (what a deelight/th

a bed of nails. a home (shabby-chic)
to set out from. going
in.

"both ways, now"

head bitten off, or kissed

2005-06-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

It was quite a rollercoaster reading folks responses to Monday's post.

Sarah (my wife) is locked out of our apartment today, so I don't have much time to wwrite before heading home. Today she forgot her keys and I forgot my wallet.

And yes, this is the second time I have forgotten that of late, although she has only forgotten her keys this one time.

In lieu of a meaty post, I recommend Silliman's Tuesday post, on the role of relaxation and aging in writing. Juicy and refreshing, Mr. Silliman.

That rollercoaster, though...

It was definitely a personal, or intimate musing, but it wasn't meant to be a wailing confession. I re-read it, and I still don't see too much of that. Just for the record, it wasn't a headbanging, I dont feel I was or currently am doing much self-hatred and flagellation round a) money, b) being depressed, or even (of late) c) writing and poetry, but I think its healthy to put out and name whatever you are feeling, rather than silence it and make it some unspeakable secret. I was surrpised to get advice after that post, if anything, it was quite absorbing to write it. Luckily I wasn't depressed actually, I have found depression makes it hard to receive,let alone consider, advice, and if the advice is (and you know who you are) "stop whining and get over it" the depressed person is incredibably likely to a) feel distant from that person, and b) beat themself up for that distance, all the while c) becoming more depressed and d) not being able to meaningfully address what is happening to i) themself or ii) the advisor.

In case that misses ya, I gotta say, thats the worst possible advice. Anyway, note the distance. I do think it is curious that depression is STILL so unspoken (and prevalent) in our culture, and I am astounded at the depth and variety of responses and, really, testimonies Monday's entry elicited. Rock on, bloggers! We do this work together.

PS - I have had several songs from the adolescents s/t 81 LP, the one that's turquoise w/ red piping, running through my head today. Fuck do I need a copy of that again. Please realize that if in a fit of intense and misguided (but poignant) 22 yr old spiritual ardor, you give away your record collection before entering a monastery, this will inevitably and repeatedly come back to bite you in the ass. Its just good sense.

Now to go rescue my missus.