Workshop/Small World

My private workshop began last night and had wonderful energy.  Each person brought in a short piece to share, as a sort of ice breaker.  My job as group leader was to cut short one lively discussion after another.  I experienced that wonderful sensation of writing contagion—reading people's work made me crave to write, like I wanted to run out of the room and start pounding away at the keyboard.  The group is unusual, in the best sense, for a prose workshop.  Of the 11 (including Kevin) participants, 5 are visual artists.  Of the writers, almost everybody is a poet.  So, inventive approaches to prose writing is inevitable.  I'm in heaven.

I'm reminded of the Irresponsible Essay class I taught at CCA a couple of years ago, which was comprised of a mixture of writers, artists, and vis crit students.  That range of backgrounds generated sparks and surprises rare for a writing class in the academy, it's like I have this compulsion to repeat, I want to teach that class with those students, over and over.  On Saturday, in West Hollywood, I ran into one of the students from the essay class, Brigid Mason.  I'd just come from a book signing for John Baldessari at Gemini G.E.L., and was rushing to my rental car to meet up with Kevin and Christine Wertheim back at our hotel to prepare for our evening adventures.  (Kevin and I are writing up our Saturday art day in Los Angeles, and will probably post it on the SFMOMA blog.)  I saw a man and a woman walking across the street, the woman was wearing these incredible high heels, they were very high, inches high, and they had stripes along the length of them, red and black maybe, all shiny, I was mesmerized and somewhere above them a voice cried out, "Dodie??!!!"  And it was Brigid.  Her male companion is a "master printer" at Gemini G.E.L., and they were headed there.  Brigid now lives in LA.

Speaking of small world, last night, in my workshop, when we did intros I asked people to say what they were reading, and Anne Walsh said she was reading On Cats by Doris Lessing, and I couldn't fucking believe it.  What is it about that book that keeps coming back to haunt me.

Here's Christine at Gemini G.E.L.:

 Here's John Baldessari busy inscribing a book:

Faculty Night Out

Kevin sent me to LA with a digital camera and told me to take pictures, but I haven't.  But tonight at the Antioch Los Angeles MFA faculty dinner, people were taking pictures, which reminded me.  I didn't have the camera with me, so I used my iphone.  The dinner consisted of Thai take out in a classroom with martinis mixed on site.

Here's Doug Kearney and Leonard Chang having fun:

I met Doug at CalArts, when I taught there spring 2004.  I'm delighted to have him teaching at Antioch and getting to spend more time with him.  I missed a recent reading he gave in the Bay Area, but I heard raves about it.  My sources were right—he gave an amazing reading here the other night—political, performative, and sharp language-centered twists and frissons.  Few can please both the demands of the Bay Area experimental poetry world and a more populist audience.

I also knew Leonard (sort of) before working with him at Antioch—through Geoff Dyer.  We both worked on Geoff's thesis.  Leonard was his official thesis reader at Mills, and I had my leg in a cast and needed help, so I read Geoff's thesis in exchange for him driving me to my class at SF State (he also took the class for some kind of credit).  I didn't meet Leonard during the thesis reading, but I heard a lot about him.  Once you go through Geoff together, you have a special bond.  Geoff once set his car on fire trying to eat a hamburger and smoke a cigarette at the same time.

Here's Alistair McCartney, another person I knew before he started teaching at Antioch.

Kevin's been a long time fan of Alistair's writing, so when in town we'd have brunch with him alone or with his boyfriend, Tim Miller.  Alistair and I went out for Mexican food and margaritas earlier in the week, where we were delightfully vulgar and childish.

Here's Amy Sage Webb at a sushi restaurant after the faculty dinner, reenacting her attempt to pour sake without removing the cap from the bottle:

I met Amy here, and over the past 5 years our relationship has progressed from polite friendliness to this evening's riotous girl date.  I have such a deep craving for riotous girl dates, so this was heaven.

Green Screen

On Gmail video chat, Kevin was showing me the shoes he bought on sale at Paul Smith, but even better, here he is showing me the inside of the Paul Smith box:

The box up to his forehead reminds me of Joseph Smith rather than Paul Smith, when Joseph put the stone in the hat then put his face in the hat and "received" the Book of Mormon.  What inspired images Kevin's receiving from the green box, I can only imagine.

Family Portrait

Kevin and I were using Gmail video chat this evening, and he lifted up Sylvia for me to see.  Here's a photo of the three of us:

It seems like I should make some comment about it, but some images just steal your tongue.

Pink Moholy-Nagy

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in the Santa Monica mountains, where I looked out onto paradise.  Didn't take a single picture.  But this morning I was looking out my hotel window in Culver City and the parking lot reminded me of Moholy-Nagy's photo of a parking lot in Chicago, which I posted earlier.  Here it is again:

 Here's a photo of my parking lot:

My photo lacks the dynamic movement of Moholy-Nagy's, plus there's a screen in the window, so I was limited in camera angle.  Mine's pretty much evenly spaced slabs, but I was above it all, looking down.  It was interesting looking through the camera searching for geometric shapes rather than things.

As I drove here along the Pacific Coast Highway, ocean churning to my right, on the radio they were playing a cut from Dark Side of the Moon.  Every time I'm down here they play cuts from Dark Side of the Moon on the radio, something I've never heard in any other city.  Yesterday they were playing my favorite song, the one with the high-pitched woman on it, her moans or sighs or whatever you call nonverbal vocalizations.  A few years ago, on a particularly beautiful night as I drove around the West Side, they played the entire album.  My rental car had a good sound system, and it was glorious.  It's not something I was into when it came out, so this was the first time I really listened.

Not long after that, back in San Francisco, Kevin and I went over to Ryan Thayer and Sarrita Hunn's for dinner.  Their roommate Matt Boyko was also there.  Kevin knew Ryan and Sarrita before I did—but just as they were moving to Berlin, things gelled and it was like couples love, and I was so sad they were leaving.  After dinner, as the five of us were sprawled around their living room, Pink Floyd came up, and Matt dug out his copy of Dark Side of the Moon—on vinyl of course, you have to listen to Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl I was told.  I told them I loved the cut where "the woman was screaming," and it was agreed that was a good cut, but nobody could remember which one it was.  So Matt proceeded to plop the needle down over and over, trying to find where she screams, but we couldn't find it—more needle plopping, which was wonderfully retro in our CD age—it got more and more important to find this elusive screaming, but it seemed to have disappeared from the album, and everybody got giddier and giddier.  It was such a sweet moment, pretense shattered in our group giggles.  We have a photo by Ryan in the bedroom, and a painting by Sarrita in the living room, daily objects in our lives which waver on the edge of presence (art) and absence (friends).

Online I could find the name of the song with Clare Torry's amazing vocalizations in a couple of minutes: "The Great Gig in the Sky":

By the Seat of My Pants

Went to my favorite laundromat in the Castro today.  It's solar powered, with paintings on the wall, plants, books to read, jazz playing on good speakers:

They have a table and chairs, so I took my laptop, determined to begin some work I've been avoiding.  The table at the laundromat, however, was too tall for the chairs, but lying on the table was a 3-inch thick book on alternative healing, so I put the book on the chair and sat on it, not very comfortable, but functional:

And of course, I got more work done sitting there a half an hour as my hand-washables whirled around on a delicate cycle than if I'd worked at home all afternoon.  I remembered back to when I was in college and I read that if you needed to learn something from a book, to put the book under your pillow at night, and as you slept some part of you would absorb the information.  My friends and I believed this, and when we had a test, we would put our textbooks under our pillows.  I was wondering if it worked through your ass as well, if perched on Disease Prevention and Treatment I had in fact absorbed valuable information about disease prevention.

Churning Waves

Today I did something I never do—I went down to the Marina and walked along the water—the patches where you can walk, as much of it is padlocked to keep non-boat-owners out.  It was gorgeous, a cool breeze disguising the sweltering Saturday that it was in San Francisco.  Here's a touristy iPhone snapshot of the churning waves, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background:

When I got to the end of the water walkway, I headed towards Bay Street to continue on towards the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was unpleasant along Bay Street, concrete and glaring sun, but this stretch was packed with joggers.  I felt a bit giddy after a while, walking among so many joggers, as both from the front and from the back, jogging starts to look silly and alien—those odd little steps and stilted back and forth movements of arms bent like rabbit paws, jiggling spandexed flesh.  Few people doing it seem to be having much fun—except for the girl couples, laughing pairs of pony-tailed straight girls that live in the neighborhood, any of whom could have been featured in a sequel to Bride Wars.  Even though I unkindly judged them as vapid, they seemed so best-friendy I felt a tinge, as I always do when witnessing intimacy.

I turned around and headed back towards the water, with the cool breeze and the benches and the beautiful views, and it was deserted by contrast.  The people down by the water were different than the highway of joggers on Bay Street.  I saw old people; middle aged people; a woman with her shirt tied around her head as a turban; people of color; people who looked ordinary, like college students; a homeless guy lounging on a bench, shopping cart beside him; people in wheel chairs; a woman talking on a cellphone with an onyx mala wrapped around her wrist; a woman wearing a white mask across her mouth; overweight people; people who looked like immigrants; a depressed looking woman hunched over on a bench, smoking; people wearing sloppy clothes; people who smiled at me.  Down by the water, many people smiled at me.

The last time I walked along the Marina, it was years ago.  It was with someone I loved, a poet, and we read the names of the boats to one another and laughed.  Many of the boats' names came from Shakespeare.  I thought sadly, how I stopped loving him, but then I thought, that's not true, he stopped loving me.  The ones who aren't around, you can continue loving them forever.  It's the ones you continue to see around year after year, see who they become, that you stop loving.  And that's infuriating, I want to yell, why are you such a dick, why did you make me stop loving you, I wanted to nurse my heartbreak forever, but I don't feel heartbreak because you're such a dick.

I moved past my vengeful outbreak, and was again overtaken with the beauty of my surroundings, like it almost felt too beautiful, as I floated past the boats towards Fort Mason—due in part to not wearing sunscreen or hat and having been up for 3 hours but not eating anything.  Got a taco at Fort Mason from an outside stand—homemade organic corn tortillas they made from scratch right on the spot.

Then I drove downtown, parked my car, and went to H&M to get some summer pants for my trip to LA.  H&M has the best summer clothes, if one doesn't think about child slave labor or whatever it takes to sell them so cheaply.  There was a dress there that was very similar to the dress that Bhanu wore on her last trip, and even though it wasn't the type of thing I'd wear, it was very much a Bhanu dress, I was compelled to put it on.  It fit me similarly to the way it fit Bhanu, snug across the chest.  I thought about how much love Bhanu gives and receives, and it was like the dress was sympathetic magic, by wearing it I would take on some of that love myself.  Bhanu has taught me not to move away from ritual.  I didn't buy the dress, I'm not that much of a stalker, it was just a moment.

As I was walking along the Marina, after having read from On Cats, when I looked at the birds they were intense, the larger seagulls frightening predators.  I noticed how groups of birds, large or small, would ride an air current, like Lessing described. I realized that reading Doris Lessing, just for a few minutes at the vet, had changed how I was seeing.  I tried to find the book locally, but failed, so I ordered a copy to be delivered to me in Culver City.  The two reviews of the book on Amazon were scathing because, apparently, there's lots of shooting of cats in the book.  "This killing of cats is mentioned so many times in the book it makes me wonder if the author is some sort of creep."  "My prior experience with Doris Lessing was Descent Into Hell, so I wasn't expecting a fluff piece on the cuteness of cats when I picked up this book, but that said I do agree with another reviewer that the number of kitten killings was a bit over the top."  I can't imagine killing a cat myself, but I'm admiring Lessing's embrace of the feral.   She'd be down by the water for sure, scoffing at the joggers.

Food Situation

Sitting here eating a kind of shitty supper because I kept not dealing with the Food Situation, and then I was getting hungrier and hungrier, and still not addressing the Food Situation until I'd eat anything.  I do this a lot.  "Anything" tonight is a Sunshine burger cooked in the toaster oven, on a rice cake, and a big salad.  Everything's organic, and most of the produce is from the Wednesday night farmer's market in the Castro, exquisite produce, so I suppose it's not that shitty, or maybe it's spoiled urban shitty.  I love that market, because it's from 4 to 8 in the evening, a reasonable time for someone like myself who is so not a morning person.

Since I'm leaving town for 12 days on Tuesday, I'm horribly task-oriented.  This afternoon I took my cat Ted to the vet for an acupuncture treatment—I know, how bourgeois can you get—and in the waiting room they had Doris Lessing's On Cats.  So I picked it up and started reading from the beginning, wondering if I'd still like Doris Lessing.  I was a great fan of Doris Lessing—when I lived in Chicago I read the entire Golden Notebook on the bus to and from work, an advantage of commutes on public transportation, the ability to let go and zone out in another world.  I used to love reading on buses, all that swaying and jolting and my mind lost elsewhere—so much so that one time I hopped on the 22 Fillmore and rode it all the way to the Marina and back, while I read that first, shorter edition of Sylvia Plath's journals.  Plath I have never tired of, but Doris Lessing, I wonder.  There was a time I was determined to read all her books, then she started putting out the sci fi ones, which some people adore.  But, for me, the sci fi ones made her seem a bit "daft," as some non-American might say.  And then there's that loony video of her, of when she she learned she'd won the Nobel Prize.



Okay, her blase reaction is actually pretty great.  Love her son's artichoke, attached to his sling. I went to see Lessing give a talk in Marin, many years ago, and instead of talking she said she'd take questions from the audience, which made me want to throw tomatoes at her, as that seemed so lazy, plus I hate audience questions.  Eileen Myles loves audience questions.  Sometimes she judges the success of an event by the quality of the audience questions, which I think is so weird, like who asks audience questions—the crazy and the ego-maniacal.  When there's no audience questions, I'm like, great.

So I sat at the vet and read the beginning of On Cats, but the beginning wasn't about cats at all, it was about living on top of a mountain in Africa, and the great birds of prey, particularly hawks, that would swoop down and grab mice and kittens (that's where cats are first introduced)—but mostly chickens.  Where Doris Lessing lived, they had lots of chickens.  I sat there, petting my cat Ted with one hand, holding the book with the other, thinking I can't believe she writing about hawks!  Hawks are something I never think about, but Sunday, out at the ocean, on the path above Land's End, I found a hawk feather.  Here it is, where I put it, on top of my desk in my pen glass:

You'll notice that behind the hawk feather is the word chicken, the very hawk prey that Doris Lessing was discussing in her book.  These odd coincidences, where the world starts to feel like it's all rhyming, this is what it feels like to write, to be in that deep trance state of writing.  I'm not in that state right how, I'm just spewing off the top of my head, but everyone I've discussed this with who writes knows what I'm talking about.  Either you're open to reading the world differently, or the world gets all generous and excited about your project and just starts giving.  So far my cats have only stolen the hawk feather from my desk once.  There's no place I could put it, except in a drawer, where they wouldn't get it.  That endless seesaw of who's predator, who's prey.

From the Sick Bed

Well, actually, I'm sitting at my desk, so it's from the sick desk, I guess. I was sick yesterday, one of those purging-type sicknesses. Kevin was working at the desk, and I'd be lying in bed, or on the couch for variety, saying to myself, no you won't throw up, you won't throw up, and I'd take deep breaths, try to relax, and this would go on anywhere from one to 10 minutes, then I'd shuffle to the bathroom, which, anyone who has read my book The Letters of Mina Harker knows, is behind my desk, at least the toilet part is.  Kevin would have to scoot in his chair for me to get by, then he'd go stand in the kitchen or sit in the living room and wait for me to finish, then he'd go back to the computer and work.  Over and over again, all evening.

Finally, around 10:30 my body seemed to have calmed down a bit, and I said let's watch a movie, something "light."  The first one we turned on was The First Traveling Saleslady (1956) with Ginger Rogers.  It was god-awful.  Ginger played a feminist turn of the century corset designer down on her luck.  The movie/Ginger proposed that the wearing of corsets was a feminist activity.  Ginger wrote a song that Carol Channing sang while wearing a corset, proposing that if you tied the corset so tight you couldn't breathe, it pushed everything around so that you looked so good your "man" wouldn't cheat on you.  Ginger played the part of the feminist corset maker with a silly high-pitched voice.  I got up and threw up and when I returned I said I couldn't take any more.  So then we switched on Bride Wars (2009), with Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway.  It had the advantage of being so inane and predictable that it was a good movie to throw up to.  I'd get back from the bathroom and say, "What happened?"  And Kevin would say, "Nothing."

I decided that if I was going to revive this blog, I'd give it a new look, so this is the new look.

I've been reading Ariana Reines' new blog.  It's fascinating, reconfirming my belief that Ariana is a genius.  People are enamored of her, I feel, because she so fully embodies whatever mood she's communicating, be it ecstatic or depressed or abject or steamy.  Reading her—or being in the same room as her—there's this burst of aliveness you can't keep your eyes off of.  As far as the blog goes, I'm struck by what powerful effects, so resonate and multi-layered, she's able to achieve by using very simple, straightforward language.  This is something I've also frequently admired in Kathy Acker's writing.  In one blog entry today, Ariana tells the story of the bundles of pinewood she brought back from Haiti.  The passage ends with, "The burning of sweetsmelling wood by a woman who lives between toilets and a motorcycle mechanic is something very dignified and generous."  She builds so gently towards this, it comes as a small shock that took the top of my head off.  Is "took the top of my head off" an American idiom?  It sounds funny, like a memory I made it up.

When I read Ariana, I want to write simply; when I read others I bemoan my own simplicity.  I guess I want to absorb whatever writing I admire.  And I suppose I do.  Writing absorbs the world and spits it back out in the most surprising ways.

Here's another photo I downloaded for the SFMOMA blog but didn't post.  My file is labeled "beat generation."  The blonde woman on the far right, wearing the fabulous sunglasses, is Nemi Frost.

 

Open Space

I haven't written here in ages, but reading Bhanu Kapil's blog, I'm so envious I'm feeling the itch again, though my journal has been happily receiving all my pent up thoughts. In the meantime I've been doing a series of posts for SFMOMA's Open Space blog. I signed up to do a series of 8 posts of at least 800 words each—memoirs based on work in SFMOMA's permanent collection. I'm currently working on the final one. This week I posted a 2-part sequence on Moholy-Nagy. Part 1. Part 2. If I could write as eloquently and easily as Bhanu I'd be in hog heaven.

Here's a picture I scanned but didn't put in my Moholy-Nagy posts. It's a picture of cars M-N took in Chicago in 1938:


I've gotten so used to Word Press, which SFMOMA uses, that Blogger feels odd. Am struck by how plain my language has become. When Bhanu was visiting, when we were still sitting in my car in the parking lot near Ocean Beach, I told her I longed for radical otherness. And then this morning I got an email from Dana Ward in which Dana discusses his and E.T.'s relationship to "alterity." And I keep thinking of my use of "otherness" versus Dana's use of "alterity," and I say, Dodie, why don't you use fancy words like "alterity," you know some, and when Dana uses them they sound so lovely.