No Flowers or Candlelight?

Thursday night I sat at my computer until 3:00 in the morning, watching Tulku, a film by Gesar Mukpo, a son of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of Shambhala (and for the poets out there, Naropa University).  It's a film the buddhist saw this summer and was moved and rather disturbed by.  Like that Little Buddha movie staring Keanu Reeves, Tulku is about Western children who are "recognized" as reincarnations of Buddhist masters—except Tulku is not a work of fantasy; it is a documentary.  Gesar Mukpo himself is a tulku, and he interviews a handful of other young guys born in the West, who have been hailed reincarnations of great Buddhist teachers, but who aren't living out that destiny—one of them, the coolest one, reminded me of writer Dennis Cooper when I first met him in the early 80s.  Here's the trailer for it:




The movie is interesting but not fabulously so, and it's flawed by the wimpiness of Gesar Mukpo's position.  Throughout, the film seems like it's being critical of the tulku system, but then at the end Mukpo backs off from that and says how proud he is to be part of such a great thing.  Mukpo interviews and eats dinner with one of his teachers, Bhutanese lama (and tulku) Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, whose spunkiness and no-bullshit attitude I was taken by, so I looked him up.  I found out that he's very popular, a sort of a rock star Buddhist, and he worked as a consultant on Little Buddha.  Last night, Friday, I printed out "Distortion," an article I found on his website, and took it to bed with me.  Sitting up, sucking on my sublingual melatonin, when I got to the following passage about women and sex, my eyes practically popped out of their sockets:

The notion of sexual equality is quite new in the West, and because of this there is a certain rigid and fanatic adherence to the specific way it should be practiced. In vajrayana Buddhism, on the other hand, there is a tremendous appreciation of the female, as well as a strong emphasis on the equality of all beings. This might not, however, be apparent to someone who cannot see beyond a contemporary Western framework. As a result, when Western women have sexual relationships with Tibetan lamas, some might be frustrated when their culturally conditioned expectations are not met.

If anyone thinks they could have a pleasing and equal lover in a Rinpoche, they couldn't be more incorrect. Certain Rinpoches, those known as great teachers, would by definition be the ultimate bad partner, from ego's point of view. If one approaches such great masters with the intention of being gratified and wishing for a relationship of sharing, mutual enjoyment etc., then not only from ego's point of view, but even from a mundane point of view, such people would be a bad choice. They probably will not bring you flowers or invite you out for candlelit dinners.

I think if a woman's going to fuck away her notions of gender equality, she should at least enjoy the sex!  I spent a lot of time this summer researching sexual, substance abuse, and financial scandals of spiritual teachers—not just Buddhists; I had Christian cult leaders and some so out there I wouldn't know what to call them.  I wrote a piece about all the scandals I found, focusing on the language that followers use to rationalize the "bad" behavior of their teachers.  (The buddhist criticized this piece for not appreciating the "beauty" of belief.)  I read many excuses for spiritual teachers having sex with students (it makes the student get enlightened faster, did you know that?)—and I read many horribly abusive practices, rapes, druggings, humiliations, knowingly passing on HIV, etc.—and reading this material I felt depressed and creeped out, but nothing I read pissed me off the way Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche's promotion here of psychological abuse does.

A consensual SM relationship is one thing, there's an integrity in that—but the glorification of a sexual relationship between student and teacher—a power inequality minefield in the best of circumstances—that dismisses the student's desire for something as basic as "mutual enjoyment"—this is really fucked.  Accusing her of being attached to "ego" when a woman owns her desires or stands up for herself—yes, I'm starting to get plugged into my rage with the buddhist, his patronizing attitude, which he totally denied, his attempts to call all the shots, and when I stood my ground, his hurling Buddhist terminology at me and withholding affection.  But I'm out of that situation now—let's reduce this to a cliché—no use crying over spilt milk (an idiom I don't quite understand for it is easy to imagine scenarios in which spilt milk would, indeed, be something to cry over).  About so called sexual equality, Rinpoche writes, "To expect a yogin or yogini, who is aspiring to go beyond the chauvinism of the confused mind, to worry about sexual rights issues seems absurd in the context of such a vast view."  A guy in authority declaring an issue so vast it takes priority over women's rights—sound familiar?  I have a copy of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche's What Makes You Not a Buddhist (which the buddhist told me about, of course).  Would any of you gals out there like to come over for a book burning?

Raccoon Eye

This morning when I looked in the bathroom mirror, I was surprised to find a black circle around my left eye.  Apparently I forgot to take off my makeup last night—but why was there a circle around my left eye only, what happened to the makeup on the right eye?  Another unsolved mystery.  Since I looked like a raccoon, I googled "raccoon spirit guide," more in the mode of a parlor game than a quest for meaning.  (These days I'm questioning meaning, its very existence.)  Here's what I found:

Our ancestors employed mask in ceremony, ritual, healing and in other desired goals. Raccoon’s message gives us the power of the mask to create change, healing and transformation. The mask becomes the doorway to knowledge that is hidden from the conscious mind. Use your curious nature to explore this area. If you have raccoon for a power animal use your energy wisely. Take a class in acting, creative writing, or mask making. 

I wonder if teaching creative writing fulfills the raccoon suggestion to take a class in it.  Last night in my Developing the Novel class a group of students did a presentation on the narrative structure of Animal Farm, that included our watching the ending of the 1954 cartoon version of Animal Farm.  The cartoon's ending is different than the book's ending.  The students said this was because the cartoon was funded by the CIA as an anti-Communist propaganda vehicle.  From The New York Times:

Many people remember reading George Orwell's ''Animal Farm'' in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it ''impossible to say which was which.''

That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film's secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.

The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell's pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to ''Animal Farm'' from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.

In the cartoon, as in the book, Benjamin the donkey peeks through a window at the pigs.  In the book he sees the ruler pigs with the humans and he can't tell the difference.  In the cartoon he hallucinates the pigs turning into humans and then back to pigs.  And then all the animals join together and march towards the pigs in a big rebellion.  Rousing and dramatic.

Where am I going with this?  I awaken and look like an animal, and I think of Orwell's animals, and I fixate on the CIA's desire to rewrite the book to get it right, and I'm thrown back to mourning, like isn't that the heart of mourning, you keep rewriting a situation over and over in your head, trying to make it turn out right?  I had an intense, intimate dream about the buddhist last night—the second such dream this week.  When I woke up this morning, I said to my subconscious, give me a fucking break.  And then I looked in the mirror and I had become Raccoon Woman.

The raccoon's association with masks makes me think of personas—always a difficult subject for me, I remember when I was in my 30s a therapist saying to me, what you need to do is to develop a public persona—as opposed to the whimpering mass of social phobia that I was at the time.  Our stance on personas was one of the many ways the buddhist and I were polar opposites.  He said that almost every human interaction was a performance for him—and a big part of that performance was maintaining a mystique.  In person, I was struck by how groomed he was, how every detail and movement was about projecting an easy entitlement and power.  Whereas I was not groomed for anything except to be a grill cook—until I got involved with the New Narrative crowd, where I was told that writing was a middle class occupation and if I wanted to be a writer I'd have to be more middle class.  And they won, I have become more middle class, or at least more adept as passing.

But I've always been conflicted about that.  My working class family had no ambitions to better themselves.  (I've written about this before, but here we go again.)  My mother scorned friends and neighbors who tried to claw upwards into the middle class.  The way we were was fine, we didn't need to be prissy and pretentious.  I've come to respect and love this about her, even though there was much conflict between her and me over my attempts to better myself.  She was willing to pay for my college—even though she had to scrimp to do so—but she didn't want it to change me.  I hid most of my shenanigans from her, but sometimes I'd come home with something decadent like a coffee grinder and she'd look at it in horror.  What's wrong with Folger's?  Are you too good for Folgers?  The last few years of her life, when we grew close, she came to appreciate the beauty of having a middle class daughter—I was no longer a fuming heathen, I was well behaved and quiet and considerate and compliant—and her friends liked me too, for the same reasons.  But I still have this internalized, naive scorn of phoniness, that comes from my mother and a more generalized earnest midwesterness.

The buddhist was interested in details of how I packaged myself.  When I gave him my jacket to hang up, he looked at the label and mentioned the designer.  He said his sort of wife worked for the designer, and got a discount on the clothing.  "Expensive," he said in an enigmatic tone.  Then later that same evening he asked, out of the blue, "How much did you pay for your glasses?"  And I said, somewhere between $600 and $700, and he said, that's what he figured.  Then he added, as afterthought, that's what his glasses cost.  I was disconcerted, like why did he care about such things?  He also grabbed my silk scarf and was fingering it and looking it over closely—and I pointed out that the scarf only cost $12, as if to redeem myself.  I have no idea what his opinion was of the price of my trappings.  It was like being under a microscope—does the microbe know what's in the mind of the scientist?  I think not.

I wish I could erase the buddhist from my consciousness, I'm sick of thinking about him, but my writing brought him into my life, and it seems he's going to stay there in spirit, if not in flesh, until the writing's through with him.  When he contacted me, I was in the midst of working on my manuscript about New Age spirituality and cults.  Suddenly a person from the world of my book was offering himself up to me, and I couldn't resist.  This summer, when I was working hot and heavy on the manuscript, he spent 11 weeks in meditation retreats—most of which he was teaching at, and from which he was emailing me daily, often several times a day.  The energy of his writing to me got fused with the energy of the book, and I would share the writing process with him in ways I never do, and it got all confused.  I wasn't writing about him in the book, but the energy of him, the eros of our contact, influenced the manuscript, and the writing kept getting kinkier and kinkier—more interesting, more animalistic than I'd planned—a frenetic New Age fuck-fest.  So now that I'm again trying to finish the book, the writing wants his energy and is clinging to it.  The connection between writing and life can be so magical, and once that process takes over, the writing always wins.

Red Brick Road

This evening I went out for dinner and then tea with writer Lindsey Boldt.  Here she is at the Sunflower, a Vietnamese restaurant on Valencia Street.  Lindsey's 27—the age I was when I moved to San Francisco, so I experienced this uncanny doubling as I talked with her, my younger self superimposed over her, even though I don't think I was all that much like her when I was younger.  We had a satisfyingly intimate conversation about relationships, writing, therapy, insecurities, and other writers—not so much gossip as the complexities of living within such a tight circle as an experimental poetry scene—and how it feels to be focusing on prose within such a scene.  Lindsey told me that younger women are afraid of me because I'm intimidating, and I told her that I've been trying to act more friendly.  Lindsey's publishing a chapbook of my writing, and we'll be having a bookparty at her place on Sunday, November 14, so if you're in the Bay Area, hold the date.  I'm excited about the chapbook—other writers in the series are Lindsey herself and Dana Ward, and forthcoming, CA Conrad, Bruce Boone, and Ron Palmer—I can't imagine being in better company.

Earlier in the day I walked downtown and back—now that the virulent gentrification of San Francisco has reached 6th Street, it's not too intense to make the 20 minute walk down Market from my home to Union Square.  There's still poor people, and drugged people, and crazy people, and confused tourists, but it all seems to work, meaning I don't feel the need for hypervigilance like I did in the old days.  I've seen blood on the sidewalk, but not on pedestrians.  Today when I was near the corner of Market and 6th, these two guys came together in front of me, a tall guy and a short guy.  The tall guy said, "What."  And the short guy said, "How about a computer," and pulled up his black T-shirt to reveal a large Dell laptop, silver colored.  "$110," he added, definitively.  This unexpected witnessing of a transaction so far outside of my normal life skewed my perceptions and suddenly I felt like I was in a movie, a crime film, obviously.  It was an overcast day, around 5:00, growing subtly darker, with a total lack of shadows, which made colors really pop.  The evenness of lighting, the saturated colors, and then as I neared home, the sidewalk switched from concrete to red brick—it felt like I was moving through a sound stage like the outdoor scenes in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, the woman beside me wearing the turquoise scarf and pushing an over-stuffed cart was an extra—and that Dell laptop a few blocks back was a prop—just a shell, no guts.  My therapist said it's likely that the buddhist no longer thinks about me, that he's shut me out of his consciousness, my therapist said that this is not uncommon for a certain type of man (and my therapist thinks he's a classic narcissist)—he says this is a highly effective defense mechanism, it's over, wall that part of your past off and move on.  This is so far outside my nature, I can't imagine how anybody would do this, but then I was thinking about movies, how you love watching a movie, but when the movie's over, you may ponder it for a bit, but you move on to other movies, and that's the only way I can understand this, that the buddhist saw me as a movie, not as a person who continues with all these guts and confusion.

You're in writing mode

when you're listening to Neil Young's Live at Massey Hall (1971) version of "Down By the River," and he sings "She could drag me over the rainbow," and you start crying.  Because you just know.

The Deep Moans Round with Many Voices

Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

I came across these lines in an old journal.  I copied them down this summer when Marcus Ewert and I were lunching at the Samovar Tea Lounge at Yerba Buena.  He'd found a poetry anthology on the street on his way there, and he suggested bibliomancy.  Things were still developing with the buddhist at that point—the innocent days, before he admitted to me he was sort of married—so I asked about him—not a specific question, more of a general, what's up with this.  I plopped my finger in the book and I landed upon this passage from Tennyson's "Ulysses."  At the time I thought it was saying, go forward with him.  But maybe it was a warning, and here I am sitting, listening to Pandora in my newer world, and you my readers are the many moaning voices of the deep.

Giantism

After class tonight I drove over to a cafe and jotted down some ideas for the manuscript I'm working on.  I was a bit frustrated, having hauled my laptop around all day, to be sitting there writing in my journal with a fountain pen, so I turned on my MacBook and checked my email.  A friend wrote saying she was having the best sex of her life, but I already knew that, having read her blog.  She didn't talk about having sex on her blog, but I could tell from the sudden sensuality of her syntax that things had progressed with person X.  The way we live within one another's language.  Then I got another message from John Sakkis asking me to send him a poem about the San Francisco Giants, for a chapbook of poems about the Giants to be distributed for free during the World Series.  My first thought was that John Sakkis must be fucking nuts to ask me for such a thing.  It wasn't until this week that I finally learned that the Giants played baseball (rather than football).  But I did write John Sakkis a Giants poem, because of his hutzpah, and my boundless desire to be loved and included.  What I didn't put in the poem was that I was at Rainbow Grocery when the Giants won the pennant.  I'd come from sitting in another cafe working on my manuscript—on Saturday and Sunday I labored over a 700-word paragraph with many layers that I juggled, admirably I think, and which solves some problems I was having introducing various themes I pick up on later, and in which I incorporated some of the material I had guiltily spent much of Sunday afternoon reading about online—and therefore I could tell myself I hadn't crossed that fine line between "research" and fucking off.  At Rainbow the stoner, p.c., vegetarian checkers were hooting like crazy, and I felt swept up in waves of this populist thing.  I acted happy with them, even though I didn't know what the pennant was.  Kevin says sports are important during a depression, it's a way for us to be patriots.  So now that I've written my Giants poem, I'm a patriot too, I guess.

The Howe Connection

Friday, after I finished meeting with students at CCA, I rushed home, cleaned myself up, put on my smokey plum eyeshadow, my new knee-length black pencil skirt—and yeah, it was cold enough for knee boots, finally, my favorite outfits can begin again—and then when I was looking for the perfect lipstick, the doorbell rang, and it was Bruce Boone.  I let him in while I ran around gathering what I'd need for the evening, and then we drove downtown for a delicious, cheap, funky Indian dinner at Chaat Cafe on Third near Folsom. Bruce and I had our usual conversation—literary gossip, mourning, spirituality, writing, updates on the flaws of those we find flawed, love, and (lately) blogging.  Bruce's recent blog, in which he remembers his long-term partner, Jamie, is a must read. Bruce is amazing in tracking the nuances of love and mourning, and lately is getting into aspects of mysticism and the paranormal that he experienced towards the end of Jamie's life—stories which I found fascinating when he told them to me, but now are even more powerful translated through Bruce's literary prowess.  The work he's doing on the blog feels important, and, hopefully, the posts will eventually be collected into a book.

After dinner we walked over to SFMOMA for the opening of the new Rebecca Quaytman show.  Here's SFMOMA's description of the exhibit:

In thought-provoking paintings, all made on small wood panels, R. H. Quaytman employs a variety of techniques and artistic vocabularies to explore the complex history of painting. The artist considers each new body of work as a new "chapter" in an ongoing investigation of the interrelationship of site, history, and object. With each chapter structured around a specific theme or concept, a narrative thread develops in the work over time. Quaytman's New Work exhibition debuts the 18th chapter, which uses SFMOMA's collection of photographs to reflect on Jack Spicer, a poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s.

An exhibit inspired by the poetry of Jack Spicer, plus Rebecca Quaytman is the daughter of poet Susan Howe—has there ever been a more poetry-centric museum show!  Quaytman's paintings are a rather cerebral and sometimes uneasy insertion into Spicer's emotional/mystical realm, reworking images of vision, camera, moon, baseball bat, and mysterious human figurations.  Bruce suggested that one 1910 photo, "Camera Reflected in a Glass," in which a thick-legged tripod prominently features, is referring back to the oracles at Delphi, where the oracle sat on a tripod and spouted her visions.

The opening was by invitation only, and the crowd consisted mostly of curators and well-dressed couples.  There was some scary facework that normally you don't get to see in Northern California.

The room is beautifully spacious and well appointed, with the crispest of white walls that catch the glitter of diamond dust and the cunningly painted edges of the paintings.  Here's the show's curator, the wonderful Apsara DiQuinzio, with LA MOCA's Bennett Simpson, and artist Rebecca Quaytman: 

Here's poet and SFMOMA's Community Producer, Suzanne Stein, looking tough and sexy in front of a doubling of moon images:

Here's tenor and curator, Lee Plested, Scott Watson (director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at UBC in Vancouver), and Bruce Boone:

After we drank a bit of wine and Apsara gave her remarks on the show, a number of us rushed over to CCA/Small Press Traffic for the revival of Kevin Killian and Wayne Smith's play, The Shakers.  A shorter version of the play was performed ten years ago at the San Francisco Art Institute.  This summer, during my private workshop, Kevin would bring in excerpts of the play in progress, which the workshop would act out, with much laughter and camaraderie.  Kevin has said more than once that his plays are really about the rehearsals, rather than the performances—and often guests are invited to his rehearsals, where invariably they get roped into taking part in the rehearsal themselves.  One of the beauties of poet's theater is that, like in the gloriously marginal poetry world, the division between performer and audience is permeable and ever shifting.  Even last night, when one of the actors couldn't make it, Darin Klein, who's in town from Los Angeles for his show "Darin Klein & Friends" at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, found himself cast as Emily Dickinson's father in The Shakers.

Here's the expectant audience before the play began.  That's Scott Watson standing in the pale blue shirt—a bit of my head can be glimpsed, wedged between him and Bruce Boone, who's on the aisle:

"Apple Betty, a strange old woman of the woods," played by Cliff Hengst (he was brilliant):

Scott Hewicker as Civil War vet, Amos, surrounded by Shaker women played by Laurie Reid, Jocelyn Saidenberg, and Karla Milosevich.  Standing between Jocelyn and Karla is David Brazil as British Shaker Uriah Lee:

Here's Lindsey Boldt as Belle Adore.  "Okay, so I’m not really interested in becoming a Shaker, but I’m a human being and a whore."
 

Here's the grand finale, where the entire cast sings, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken."  That's Rex Ray as Charles Eames, holding up the Shakers' coveted popcorn owl.

As soon as the play ended, I rushed over and snapped this picture.  It's Kevin with Mik Gaspay and Matt Gordon.  When the Shakers' barn burned down, Mik and Matt played the fire.

The play lasted two hours, but the time went by like the blink of an eye, it was all so sparkling and hilarious.  Since Karla's character, "Polly Doe," is really Emily Dickinson with amnesia, the play is studded with Dickinson's poetry, and that evening as we were getting ready for bed, I thought of Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, and I exclaimed to Kevin, "The whole evening kept pointing to Susan Howe, like she's the secret thread connecting everything!"

My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—

Who Invented the Typical Girl

In My Defense

This evening when I was reading the blog of the female member of the poetry couple who have recently broken up, she wrote, "G. said in our last phone conversation (maybe our last ever?) that he didn't want me to be like Dodie, to treat the relationship as Dodie treats hers."  I'm assuming he was referring to my writing about the buddhist here.  To reveal or not to reveal—this is a core question for many writers.  This whole business of women not suffering in public, of having a gag order when it comes to personal drama, such as a break up, connects of course back to larger histories of suppression, such as the literature of victimization, women not daring to speak of rape or incest (and I'm in no way suggesting that my current situation is in any way comparable to those violations), a harkening back to the whole notion that domestic space is private, what happens behind closed doors stays behind closed doors, and somewhere buried in there is the history of the wife being owned by her man and therefore she better keep her trap shut, and bourgeois notions of suffering with dignity—or dignity itself, how oppressive a value is that?  Betrayal happens in private (usually), thus betrayal is less of a bourgeois sin than talking about it.  In my rust belt working class heritage, if someone betrayed you, you would tell anybody within earshot what that son of a bitch did to you—you would cuss and gesticulate and wail—and there would be no shame in that.  In fact, you who had this great emotional burden would be treated with awe—working class people respect anger—and others would join in on your rage, light your cigarette, and say, yes, that son of a bitch doesn't deserve you.  Think of Anna Magnani's fury when Rossellini left her for Ingrid Bergman.  Neo realismo!

Throughout I've tried to use my babbling about loss and betrayal as an opportunity to refine and promote a political/aesthetic position.  In writing about the buddhist here, I admit, there's a passive aggressive (bordering on aggressive) impulse behind it.  I gave him so many opportunities to not have this be hostile, and he remained cold and patronizing, so at a certain point I was fuck this, my not writing about him, given my overall writing project, is remaining loyal to him, and he did not deserve my loyalty.  I felt that in order for me to break with him, I had to perform an act of disloyalty.  Okay, I admit that this doesn't make much sense.  But on some counts I have remained loyal to him, I've not revealed anything personal about him that didn't impact me directly, I have kept him anonymous, I have not included details that would make it possible for the clever reader to figure out who he was—I have not mentioned where he lives, what he does for a living, what sect of Buddhism he's involved in, his name or even an initial.  And I haven't gone into every little thing he did that I felt wounded by—for one thing, it would get tedious quick, and writing is writing, you do anything to make it work, even leave out details you're attached to if it bogs things down.  In other words, aesthetic decisions have been made here every step of the way, and I've tried to forefront that.  And I've made it clear that there was much to care about with him, that he gave me pleasure and affection.  And I've not made myself out to be a rose here, I'm difficult, and I had succumbed to primal urges and needs I can barely comprehend.  But I'm fascinated with mourning, all these layers that one goes through, and with the anniversary of my mom's death looming, how mourning the (symbolic) death of a relationship is similar to and totally different than mourning an actual death.

The unhooking from the buddhist now feels complete; I'm ready to open the door and step out into the rays of my sunlit future.  As a parting gesture—not from the blog, but from this topic—I'd like to share a break up scene to end all break up scenes:

Heart to Heart

I dreamt about the buddhist this morning, very intense and visceral, it didn't feel like my own dream, more like a visitation, I jolted awake at 6:00 a.m., wondering what had just happened to me.  This left me feeling connected to him again, or more precisely, poignantly dis-connected, an aching sense of missing and longing, it wasn't rational, it wasn't about remembering anything pleasant with him, it wasn't even about desire, it was this blunt emptiness I felt in my heart area.  The feeling continued as I did school prep work all morning and afternoon, and as I taught from 4 to 7, the class went well, my Monday class is a delight, this amazing queer feminist space, I'd make every class that way if I could, but usually I can't, but this group emerged that way full grown, like Athena bursting from Zeus' forehead.  I got home around 7:30 and the feeling of longing had grown to the point that I wondered if it had anything to do with the buddhist at all, if he were merely a conduit for the feeling, or if I was associating it with him by habit, but it felt like I had slipped into this deeper sense of emptiness, this primal Lacanian emptiness that's buried in all of us, only mine had somehow bubbled to the surface.  Kevin was lying in bed, so I crawled in next to him and asked him to talk to me, to talk about anything, so he told me about his day and his own feelings of overwhelm with deadlines, etc., he made me laugh, and he said it helped him to talk to me, and I took his hand and placed it on my heart chakra and held it there, tightly, and the warmth of his hand seeped down into the emptiness and soothed it, and since we were lying there all cozy, one thing led to another . . . can't get too graphic on the internet . . . and afterwards as we wilted into that "wow, what just happened to me!" mode, Kevin said he could feel his heart sutra opening, and I said, it's not your heart sutra, it's your heart chakra—the heart sutra is—remember when Steve Abbott died and we went to the service at the Hartford Street Zen Center and Philip Whalen droned that scary "all is nothing you are nothing"— that's the heart sutra—Kevin said whatever it was called, he wanted to rest in that opening, and I asked him if he was feeling oceanic, and he said, no, it's more contained than that, more like a lagoon.

Lost and Found

Last night at Margaret Tedesco's [2nd floor projects], Kevin gave a reading of recent poems and his catalogue essay for Bruno Fazzolari's Lost Paintings show, a portion of which you can see on the wall beside Kevin.  On September 19, I posted about the show's opening, the first post in which I mention the buddhist, so I suppose we've come full circle.














It was a small, invitation-only crowd, less than 20 people, and the intimacy of the event made it feel very special.  If you didn't get an invitation, don't feel left out, as Kevin was busy and he didn't invite anybody.  Thus, with the exception of Drew Cushing, this was a 100% art crowd.  In the photo on the right, that's Margaret behind the camera.  Bruno is sitting on the floor beside her, leaning against the wall, in what looks like a pale yellow shirt, but if I remember correctly, it was actually cream-colored.

In the photo on the left Kevin is telling the story of the green Paul Smith shoes he's wearing, how Mario Garcia Torres was wearing the shoes at an opening at the Wattis Institute, and Kevin asked him where he got them, and Garcia Torres said he'd got them at this big sale they were having at Paul Smith, so Kevin took a photo of the shoes with his iphone and ran over to Paul Smith the next day, showed the photo to the salesperson and got his own pair.

Mario Garcia Torres

Kevin played a game with the audience—as he'd begin reading about a specific painting, he'd challenge the audience to guess which painting he was describing.  The interactivity was delightful.  I wonder if the game playing was, in part, for Bruno's 11-year-old daughter, Lily (in the front row of the photo on the right, in white shirt).  Bruno had warned Kevin ahead of time that Lily might be coming, and requested that he read child-appropriate material.  Kevin was agonizing over this, stunned by how hardly anything he's written is child-appropriate.  Lily, it turned out, is the most sophisticated and intelligent 11-year-old I've ever met.  Kevin said it's probably because she has two sets of gay parents.

We were there for around 2 hours, and Kevin's reading lasted 21 minutes (he pointed this out), and the chat all around it was good.  I see Kevin's reading as a smooth stone in a pond, and our conversations as ripples reverbing off of it.  I wore my smoky plum eyeshadow, I'm really into the too much makeup look.

Heart like a Rock Cast in the Sea

Thinking more this morning about my band of young, mostly white (though my best friend in the group was Evangeline Brown, a Chicana attorney) experimental feminist poets turning to black blues singers to feed their need for emotional porn.  In the early 80s, most of us were not yet published, or barely published, many of us were students at San Francisco State, where we were being indoctrinated into a feminism that wasn't so much about reproductive rights or the history of female oppression or sexist representations of women, this new feminism was more about symbolic order and don't let those male Language Poets dominate your thinking, in other words it was an academic feminism where producing disjunct poetry that forefronted its difficulty was somehow going to free us from the horrors of logocentrism.

Billie Holiday, with her controlled jazzy sophistication, was much more popular with our group than was Bessie Smith.  Bessie Smith was hardcore, with her sprawling viscerality and aura of endangered abjection.  With Bessie Smith you can't twirl your martini glass and comment on her vocal technique the way you can with Billie Holiday, with Smith you're yanked into a sludge of loss and hard times.  Evangeline and I loved her.  I remember our devouring chimichangas at Roosevelt's Tamale Parlor, gushing over Smith's genius, and sharing intimate details of one another's lives.  Evangeline owned two houses in Rockridge, and I was living hand to mouth, but our commitment to feminism, poetry, and sensuality drew us together.

This morning I watched Bessie Smith's "St. Louis Blues" video a few times:



The video is fascinating, in terms of how it subverts film conventions of inside/outside—or perhaps back in 1929, the conventions I've come to expect hadn't jelled yet.  Most of my knowledge of film history comes from watching Turner Classic Movies with Kevin, who will shout out things like, "In this movie, she's on loan from Warner Brothers."  He's mesmerized by the machinations of the studio system, the way stars were owned and loaned, like glamorous cattle.  The video begins with Smith lying on the floor in a bedroom, we're talking way abject, and she sits up, drinks some whiskey and begins singing, "My man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea."  She sings the line again, and then we dissolve to what looks like a hotel bar, where she sings the line a couple of more times, then the camera pans the audience/chorus, and then the band, which begins to play.  It's hard to tell what the temporal relationship is of the lying on the floor to sitting at the bar—Smith is wearing the same clothes—is it a flashback to earlier in the evening, is it later in the evening, is it a fantasy?  Who knows.  Once Smith's singing is acknowledged by the audience/chorus, by current musical number conventions, one would expect all the regular action to cease, and the whole room to focus on and actively engage in Smith's singing.  But the audience is disengaged for the most part, their bodies and facial expressions remain impassive.  When the camera backs up, it's hard to tell they're singing—even in some close-ups the only way we know they're singing is that their mouths are moving.  Waiters continue to rush around with their trays, other customers walk in front of the camera, temporarily occluding Smith, and the bartender to Smith's left continues to talk to someone outside the frame, occasionally glancing at her with suspicion and disapproval, like she's a crazy drunk sitting there on her stool, talking to herself.  Smith's got her back to everybody—the bartender, the chorus, the viewer.  Her aloneness in the video is painfully unremittent.  The communal support we expect from the chorus comes across as a half-assed fantasy.  Smith's very specific abandonment is a vortex pulling in the viewer's own sense of abandonment, Smith's body jerks forward and back, like there's nothing left to hold her up, her gaze remains inward trapped in the world of the song, at the end she's so weak and drunk she has to prop her head on her hand.  The video makes me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable, the trappings of cinematic fantasy dissolve, and Smith flaunts the privacy of her suffering, springing from a depth that doesn't belong to me, that I have no right to witness.  Of course I see this as a model for writing, a highly-crafted mystique of the unmediated that seduces the reader into profound discomfort.

Here's Kevin and I getting married at San Francisco's City Hall.  We each invited two guests.  On the left is Kevin's sister, Maureen, and on the right is Evangeline.  Also attending were Kevin's brother David and Bruce Boone.

Stream of Gardenias

Sitting here, computer on bedtray, wearing my new black cotton velvet "skinny" jeans which don't look very skinny on me, but they're nice, they don't have any pockets but when I was standing I kept trying to put my hands in pockets anyway, like the structure of pockets in my head was stronger than the physical lack of pockets, which is similar to my humiliating longing for the buddhist today, I still have the structure of longing for the buddhist even though the buddhist no longer exists for me, I tell myself this is better than repression or denial, but I'm not convinced, I doubt if he's sitting wherever he's sitting at the moment, longing for me, he seems very proficient at breaking up, like it comes naturally to him or he's done a lot of it, I suppose the longing's not so bad, it makes me want to be kind to others, makes me want to be kind to him, which I dare not do, I'm also wearing a sky blue cotton knit top, my only sky blue item, as that's not my color, but I can stand it because it's saturated enough to not be pastel, it's a color my mother would wear, a color I always associate with her, so putting it on this morning was a bit like putting her on.  In two weeks it will be the third anniversary of her death, and when I think of her I also feel longing, different than I feel for the buddhist, deeper and less complicated, that dumb wish to squeeze my eyes really really hard and when I open them she'll somehow exist again, and I can pick up the phone and she'll tell me she loves me, being able to pick up the phone and have someone tell you they love you is such a blessing, we should never take that for granted, though we do.

I'm wearing smoky plum eyeshadow, which makes me feel like Simone Signoret, I saw her recently in two films, Room at the Top and Ship of Fools, I only watched bits of Ship of Fools, it had some of the most exciting overacting I've ever seen, but Signoret was amazing in it, I adored her as a child, and I still adore her, her fleshy sensuality, a woman who loves profoundly and suffers profoundly, she's so unguarded and vulnerable yet totally worldly, the world has not made her jaded, she'll always be willing to squeeze one last drop of desire from it.

I wish I could see colors streaming from my body 
the way Bhanu Kapil does, but I can't, I wish I could twist my sentences into ecstatic surprises the way she does, but I can't.  However when I had a Taoist internal organ massage today, I had two big releases, where you come out of the trance with a gasp, and have to gulp in air, and after the first gasp I distinctly smelled gardenias, even though there were no flowers in the room.  Afterwards, since I was already downtown I went to the flower stand across the street from Macys and bought a gardenia, I've been buying gardenias from that stand since the late 70s when I first moved to San Francisco, and of course gardenias remind me of Billie Holiday, which reminded me, in turn, of the early 80s, how the experimental feminist poets I knew were into Billie Holiday, they were also into Frida Kahlo.  It wasn't really acceptable for experimental feminists to be into strong emotion and suffering, if we addressed such intensities in our poetry they had to be coded and intellectualized, there was all this pressure to be smart and fragmented, and Holiday and Kahlo were a place were we could admire directness and raw emotion, I'm sure that the non-whiteness as well as the non-writerness of Holiday and Kahlo had much to do with their being acceptable, for it would not have been cool to admit to liking Sylvia Plath, for instance, she was bad emotion, bad suffering, but putting on a Billie Holiday album made you a hip experimental feminist, Holiday and Kahlo were victims, but Plath, she did it to herself.  And of course I loved Plath, and I did address raw emotion in my poetry, I was embarrassingly nonfragmented and direct, and, yes, my work was considered stupid and my eyeliner was too heavy and I talked too loud and whenever the opportunity presented itself I was always eager to fuck.  I was a bad experimental feminist.

Bonus track:  a gardenia-laden Joan Crawford.

Private Rites

Had another brief skirmish with the buddhist yesterday and today. (Suzanne Stein wrote to me, "i think we should demote him to lowercase," and I am following her suggestion.)  The skirmish is not worth going into, our involvement remains this dead thing.  I remember watching my mother die, how right afterwards in her neck there were these little contractions like animals were scurrying under her skin, that's what it feels like with the buddhist, those final musculature contractions of a dead thing.  I'm tired of writing about him.  Back in the early days of New Narrative, when we were all wanting to be in one another's work, I complained to Kevin, why don't you write about me, and Kevin said he didn't write about me because writing was an exorcism, and he didn't want to exorcise me.  Writing about the buddhist here has been a sort of exorcism, but the time for that has passed—no more soap opera narrative for this blog, time to return to random bleeps of experience and observation.

This whole experience has made me keenly aware of the limits of thinking and analyzing when trying to recover from matters of emotion/the heart.  At a certain point I realized that rationality wasn't working.  I could go over and over all the things he did, all the things I did, could rehearse all his bad traits, could try to repress all the caring and pleasure I'd lost, but none of that was really helping.  So I turned to ritual and the nonrational—I had some excellent help with this, and it's been profound, but I can't share it here, because there's this power in secrecy, a density of energy.  Speaking my rites would dissipate their magic.  I'm thinking of a story Eileen Myles told me of how she was giving a reading one evening—I can't remember the details of the story—but for some reason she performed the piece she was planning to read for someone before the reading, and then when it came time for the reading, her energy for the piece wasn't there and it fell flat.  I'm thinking of how when I'm in the process of writing something, I don't like to talk about it too much, that I need a monogamous relationship with the piece, like I have to be in love with it in this private bubble.  And when I finish a piece I email it to a handful of friends—who I send any given piece to will vary, depending on who's in my life at the time, and the content, though there are a couple of people who are willing to read anything—and this emailing the work to a core group is its real publication for me, a heart publication, allowing these few people to step into the bubble when the writing is fresh and my relationship to it is still raw and vulnerable.  Other publications invariably follow, but none of them count as much as this initial sharing.  Each layer of publication after that becomes more denatured—maybe the piece will be in a journal, and then it may be beat in a larger book I publish, and some pieces will end up anthologized, totally stripped from their original context.

I get a similar heart thrill from reading a new piece for my local writing community, and will sometimes use an upcoming reading as a deadline—a practice I borrowed from Cedar Sigo.  Last March I was scheduled to read with Chris Martin at Jason Morris' house, and I got this horrible cold, and had also bought a new bed and couch.  Thursday night the old bed and couch were hauled out to the street awaiting pickup by Sunset Scavengers (Jason along with Matt Gordon did the hauling, such lovely, generous, strong young guys), and the new furniture wasn't arriving until Saturday, so for a couple of nights, Kevin and I used a mattress on the living room floor as both bed and couch, it was kind of fun, like being back in college, when friends would come over and lie on your bed and listen to music.  My cold got worse and worse, I was miserable and feverish and sneezing, but I propped myself up on that mattress and wrote like a maniac for my Friday night reading at Jason's house.  I finished the piece around suppertime on Friday, and Kevin read it over and made a few suggestions, and I quickly edited it.  That evening, in Jason's living room, I leaned against a counter and read it, all faint and woozy, blowing my nose throughout the reading, to maybe 20 people, and it was amazing, the writing was so alive for me, practically glowing on the page.  I offered it to these people with such tenderness and excitement.  I felt bonded to them in ways I don't typically feel during a reading, like these were my loved ones, my people—even the ones there whom I'd never met.  Nothing in the future I do with that piece will ever approach that original runny-nosed initiation of it.

Moving On

Or maybe it's moving through.  Due to my allowing emotional excesses to bleed around my words here, people keep asking me if I'm okay, people write all the way from France to ask Kevin if I'm doing okay.  I'm doing fine, more than fine, I'm feeling good, it was a beautiful warm day today and I was wearing a gauze plaid Western shirt I got at Old Navy, not something I'd normally wear, a plaid Western shirt, but this one was light gray plaid with apricot and yellow accents, and the inside is gray gingham checks, which show when you roll the sleeves back, with pearly snap buttons, I couldn't resist it, and the gauze reminded me of when I was an undergrad and wore gauze hippie shirts, a gold square necked pull-over, and also a blue one, and it put me back to warm days in college in Indiana, especially around dinnertime when it cooled off, I was in downtown San Francisco, South of Market, but still downtown, tall buildings and traffic, but that was superimposed with sense memories of the brightness and calm of early evening in Indiana, the ecstasy of being young and walking around the thickly-treed streets, it was like the present and the memory were equally there, equally vivid, superimposed, and I had one of those, wow life is rich moments that are so precious but kind of embarrassing to admit.

Friday and Saturday, the last interactions I had with The Buddhist, he was so weird and cold and paranoid, not a flurry of compassion or kindness towards me, or any softening, I was stunned, I was reminded of how they say when you have cats that are close and one dies, if you show the dead body to the survivor, they'll move away from it, move on, forget their mate, that's what this was, anything I had with him was like this dead cat, and that was helpful, it made me recoil, and I've done stuff that I'm cleverly not mentioning here, to facilitate my unhooking from that situation, and it's good, I'm not feeling angry or resentful, just moving away from this dead thing.  The end result is a sense of clarity, the ability to look at and engage with what's right in front of my nose, so many great things and people right in front of my nose.  I don't feel like I need much right now, just sitting on the couch cuddling the cats makes me happy, slouching on the couch watching Glee with Kevin makes me happy, even reading student work makes me happy.

Meditating also makes me happy, even though that's not supposed to be the goal of it, but I guess I'm happy that I can do, as it's so tied up with The Buddhist, like how do I look at spirituality having been on the receiving end of such a damaged teacher, a professional Buddhist, and I've realized he's just one person going through his own crisis, it has nothing to do with spirituality or Buddhism, and I'm sure there's plenty of spiritual teachers out there who are way more damaged, and I wasn't his student or anything, and let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater or any other cliches, Bhanu Kapil has been very helpful in talking through this, so thank you Bhanu, and I know that when I sit down to meditate it's about my relation to the process, period, and I would never want to be a spiritual teacher, being a writing teacher is more than enough responsibility, and I know from teaching writing you have to put your heart into it or it doesn't work.

So, if you're the type who worries, don't worry about me, and let's talk about other things here, like this great moving-on video I found on YouTube, "The White Rose," Bruce Connor's 1967 film, which I've longed to see like forever, about the moving of Jay de Feo's 11 x 8 feet, one-ton painting "The Rose" from her apartment on Filmore Street, after she got evicted in 1965, the thing was so fucking massive movers had to cut away part of the wall and use a forklift.



Like I said, I've wanted to see this film for years, but I never expected it to be so beautiful, the melancholy but stately Miles Davis soundtrack, the luscious black and white footage, the guys in black suits (who would wear a suit to unearth a painting?), the white jumpsuited movers, I was raised in the 50s but I didn't know any men who wore suits, my upbringing was with the white jumpsuits for sure, and Jay de Feo so nonchalant and young, lounging on fire escape smoking, sitting in the hole cut in the wall smoking, lying on her painting, I wonder as she lay there if she thought the painting was a live or a dead thing, after it was moved she kept working on it, drinking brandy and smoking Gauloises, so I imagine she felt it was still alive, time itself feels languorous in this film, like if we all cut holes in our buildings and dangled our white-shoed feet, life would be good and full, and would last a really long time.

Oppositional Weakness

On Facebook, when I recently quoted Octavio Paz:  "When society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?" —Nada Gordon countered with, "or even a weak, ignorant, unreliable one?"  Of course Nada's critique is right on—to accept that one has to be strong, knowledgeable or responsible in order to speak is to assimilate Western capitalism's narrative of progress; it denies otherness and represses vast arenas of human experience.  This is what I was getting at in my posts on public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one's vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy.  Writing is tough work, I don't see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness.  Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power.  To deny behaviors and experiences gendered as weak or "feminine" is not feminist or queer, it's heteronormative to the hilt.  Like Kathy Acker, I long to quiver and terrify in the same gasp.

Kathy Acker writing on the body.

In an incisive blog post about queer negativity in the work of Judith "Jack" Halberstam,  Jackie Wang uses the phase "hegemony of happiness":

The issue, for me, does not come down to hope vs. cynicism, but figuring out how we can resist the tendency to normalize from the position of a privileged affective response or attitude. This means challenging the hegemony of happiness, which invalidates people who are too crazy or angry or fucked up by the world to function or participate in a polite way.

After I read Wang's post, "hegemony of happiness" rang through my head like a mantra.  Since I'm writing a book about New Age spirituality and cults, and I've been dealing with The Buddhist's slinging of Buddhist jargon (such as "spaciousness") at me whenever we got in a fight, the notion of peace or happiness or selflessness or any other "positive" trait being the pot of gold at the end of our spiritual/therapeutic quest has, as put succinctly in a video I posted lately, made me was want to puke in my mouth.  I don't want to be miserable, but I also want to embrace the fucked-up, to move towards a maturity and strength that can include and express weakness and embarrassing content of all sorts without shame, to allow myself the full resonance of being a female subject (and all the other categorical adjectives that could be applied to me) living in a fucked up nation, in a fucked up world, in the 21st century.  May we each become a queer head on what Judith Halberstam calls "the monstrous entity that opposes global capitalism":

We need to craft a queer agenda that works cooperatively with the many other heads of the monstrous entity that opposes global capitalism, and to define queerness as a mode of crafting alternatives with others, alternatives which are not naively oriented to a liberal notion of progressive entitlement but a queer politics which is also not tied to a nihilism which always lines up against women, domesticity and reproduction. Instead, we turn to a history of alternatives, contemporary moments of alternative political struggle and high and low cultural productions of a funky, nasty, over the top and thoroughly accessible queer negativity. If we want to make the anti-social turn in queer theory, we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate, and, to quote Jamaica Kincaid, to make everyone a little less happy!

—Judith "Jack" Halberstam, "The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies"             

Like the miraculous lesbians in Miss March, radical writing should propose a subversive relationship to the heteronormative gaze.

Here's a photo of me being what The Buddhist called "peremptory and monarchical."

Over and over on my grade school report cards, one snooty teacher after another wrote "Doris has a bad attitude."  These comments were a source of shame for me, and threats from my mother to stop my damned pouting and behave myself.  But reading Halberstam makes me proud of young, frowning Dodie for balking at her powerlessness at such a young age, and for being such a "loud, unruly, impolite" little girl.

Last Letter

Here's a draft of Ted Hughes' "Last Letter," a recently discovered poem he wrote about the night Sylvia Plath committed suicide.

And below is Jonathan Pryce reading the poem.



Despite the brouhaha that this is a great poem, I don't think so.  Indulgent and over written—such as the barking dog "choking on infinite German hatred."  His image of the wife and lover as two mad needles jabbing him is simply (or complexly) offensive.  Poor cheater!  Life is so hard for you.  And why change the exotic Assia to something as bland as Susan?   I'm still trying to figure out why, if he was so concerned about Plath, he abandoned phone contact, and hid out with "Susan" in his and Plath's wedding bed.  What a passion for kinky tawdriness.  What cowardice.  But I admire the blunt ending of the poem, after all the excess.  I know it's wrong to heap moral judgment on a poem, but the urge to do so in this case is intoxicating.
--------
I stand corrected:  according to Al Alvarez, the woman Ted hid with wasn't Assia Wevill, but the poet Susan Alliston.

Public Display

I've been thinking a lot about the recent break up of two well known poets in our experimental writing fishbowl, how the female poet has been expressing her pain on Facebook and her blog, something I've been following and moved by.  A few weeks ago for his status update on Facebook the male poet wrote, "Must it really all be so public?"  And some guys chimed in with how pathetic airing one's business in public is.  Breakups, I guess, are like death, old age, insanity—best locked away behind closed doors.    I'd love to see more operatic, grand suffering in public.  The relationship between these two poets was very much a public relationship, so why shouldn't its dissolution also be public?  The type of writing so many of us do, and the community we live in, the personal and the public are so blurred, anyway.

I googled "operatic suffering," and this is the first image I found.

Jackie Wang recently did a blog post I enjoyed:  "If you date a writer, they're going to write about you:  brutal honesty as performative writing."  At least in my community, truer words have never been spoken.  For a few months I was involved with someone who's very private and was terrified I was going to write about him.  This guy must have some self-destructive streak—he's read my writing, what was he thinking?  My involvement with him throughout had a sense of performance art, in that a handful of others knew about him and eagerly awaited updates.  Even those who knew his name referred to him as The Buddhist.  People would say to me, "How are things going with The Buddhist?"  "Are you going to have sex with The Buddhist?"  They were happy to be hearing about someone outside our world.  If I were getting involved with someone like, say David Buuck, they would have rolled their eyes.  They've heard that story a zillion times before.  And it's exactly this community involvement that led David to declare at one point, "No more poets!"  Really, who wants to have sex with an entire community?  No one but the community.

The Buddhist kept my interest by being freakishly secretive—for instance he was sending me all these seductive boundary crossing emails, and he wouldn't let me know if he was gay or straight.  He said it didn't make a difference, and I was all, on the contrary, it makes a great deal of difference.  So, finally I got out of him that he's straight, and my small audience of fellow writers, eagerly nursed this new detail.  Then later I told them, The Buddhist had a partner—and they nursed that.  Then I told them that I read online in the New York Times he was married!  And they nursed that.  Then he told me they weren't really married, he'd lied on some insurance forms.  News flash!  None of his secrets were all that interesting; they were banal, in fact.  He basically leads the evasive lifestyle of a cheating straight guy.  The Buddhism gave it a sort of otherworldly, aura, as much of the online romance was happening while he was leading meditation retreats.  He's a Buddhist priest, of sorts.  You don't think of a meditation retreat leader sitting in his room, drinking beer, writing to his long-distance girlfriend, when his "partner" is also at the retreat, how bored and lonely he is.  When he came to visit me in San Francisco, he wouldn't tell me when his plane got in because he didn't like people to know what he was doing—my friends loved that one.  And then the morning we were to meet, he wrote me a series of weird, aggressive emails, very disturbing.  Later when we talked about it, he said that he felt pressure to be happy about seeing me, and he didn't like to be pressured into being any way, and that's why he wrote the emails.  He said he had anger management issues.  He said he was notoriously difficult in relationships because he tended to withdraw.  A few days before he came to visit, I was listing all his flaws to my friend Donna de la Perriere, and after each one, Donna would should out, "Check."  By the end of the list, we were bending over and snorting with laughter.  When I met him at the restaurant, I went in the bathroom and texted her my first impressions.

When I've been pissed at the Buddhist, I've posted bits of his emails on Facebook. "This is how a Buddhist mocks you:  'The selfless compassion here is astonishing, is it not?'"  "Here's how a Buddhist signs an insulting, attacking email: 'May all bodies find comfort and ease.'"  People "like" these or make comments.  And of course I emailed particularly crazy bits of his emails to my writer friends for feedback.  They'd root for me.  They'd say he was horrible.  They'd tell me to get rid of him.  

Ariana Reines wrote:

o dodie, i think this is awful.  i don't know the story or whatever, but it seems like he is a nonartist who is excited by your artwork and the raw emotions inside it, thinking he is like making art or something by playing this game with you because he never risks his own feelings i don't know.  probably someone who also can only handle emotions when they arrive packaged in some form.  i don't like him.  i mean i guess noncommittal flirtation is also a domination technique and teasing + denial is erotic.  to a point.  and not to me!  i hate being fucked with like that, usually it's just a turnoff or it makes me very sadistic and mean.  i don't have the fortitude to be played with like that, i think maybe i'm too weak for it.

Of course it ended badly. Recently I tried to smooth things over with The Buddhist.  It was disastrous.  Bradford Nordeen on my efforts:  "Aren't these awful experiences best when they're funneled into the work so that heartache is turned into a piece, made productive?  That piece is written (and lovely) so why on earth would you get back into the sandbox?"  Bradford's referring to a 1000 word piece I recently completed called "The Buddhist."  1000 words sounds right, like I have no desire to write any more "real" writing about him.  Is 1000 words and a community who's been entertained for 5 months worth the pain?  And, yes, for much of it, there was lots of pleasure as well.  It was sort of like being in a cult, a strange narcissistic Buddhist sex cult.  I wouldn't have passed it up for the world.

Nel Mezzo Del Cammin Di Nostra Vita

This evening Kevin and I had dinner with some friends in honor of artists Ryan Thayer and Sarrita Hunn being in town.  We've missed them dearly since they left San Francisco for a year or so in Berlin, finally settling in St. Louis.  Here's a photo of the bulk of our party in U-Lee, an excellent hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant on Russian Hill:

Gareth Spor, Ryan Thayer, Kota Ezawa, Sarrita Hunn, and baby Lena

After dinner we walked up the hill on Jackson Street and hung out in the cottage Kota lives in.  His daughter, Zora, now eleven, acted as dj—in Kevin's honor she put on "Love at First Sight" by Kylie Minogue—and people danced and played with Ryan and Sarrita's daughter Lena.  Kota mentioned an audio piece on UbuWeb by Caroline Bergvall, a piece that his friend the sound artist Cobi van Tonder emailed him from her home in South Africa.  It's Bergvall performing "Via," a compilation of English translations of the opening lines from Dante's Inferno, as archived in the British Library up until May 2000—48 variations on "Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark wood, for the right/direct/straight path/way had been lost."  Kota had never heard of Bergvall, but he said he could relate to the piece because he was midway in the journey of his own life.  He told a story about being in Europe a few years ago, feeling melancholy, and looking out the window upon an actual dark forest.  I was struck by the literalness of his associations—and in general with the intensity with which he interacts with art.

When I got home I listened to "Via" on my own computer, and found it to be quite moving, the variations on darkness, crookedness, being lost, mortality echoing and bouncing off of one another, creating waves of tenderness and sadness that are heartbreakingly beautiful.  The piece suggests that translation is more than mere academic exercise, that coming this close to Dante's words, these guys must have been touched and disturbed, perhaps even frightened.  It's exciting to experience conceptual work that has such profound emotional resonance.

(Here's Caroline looking lovely and melancholy herself.)

Flinching before the Gaze

After I finished this morning's Miraculous Lesbians post on the lesbians of Miss March's powerful subversion of the male gaze, I happened to read a review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.  As an example of Franzen's astute social observations, the reviewer quotes the following passage:

"Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence – the drama of being her – was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy's doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity."

Reading this, I flinched big-time.  Due to all the stagy point of view switches the novel apparently has, I'd thought of assigning it to students at some point, but after reading the above passage I was like, not in 100 fucking years.  The cruelty and hubris of this view of the woman—and the reviewer points out that Katz is the character who seems closest to Franzen himself—is astonishing.  Middle aged women are such easy prey, like they're supposed to walk around with eyes averted, hanging their heads in shame at their wreckage. 

Here's an sappy image of a crone to wipe out the evil Franzen-view.  She looks complete, does she not, with her moon and bunny and snake.  When you've got such cute animals to pleasure you, who needs men?  When I talk with "aging-female"s—meaning straight women, not miraculous lesbians—some of them seem to welcome being outside that gaze.  Some of them have no interest in attracting men, and from that they feel powerful, freed up to direct libidinal energies into other pursuits.  I've felt that myself, no desire for men equals feeling centered and powerful—and no matter what men I interacted with, I felt in control.

A few months ago when Dana Ward was in town, we had coffee at the Caffe Trieste in Northbeach, which seems to have become a real loser place, or at least it was that Friday afternoon.  There were a lot of old guys who I recognized from the late 70s, when I lived in the neighborhood.  They were still hanging out there writing notes in their journals, making sketches of patrons, reading quality paperbacks.  They were like ancient earthbound ghosts, sticking around a site they had no idea how to free themselves from.  So Dana and I were talking about this piece I was working on at the time, about spiritual teachers who sleep with their students.  And this old guy cut in and said something about how secretaries wanted to sleep with their bosses, it was a side benefit of the job.  And I snapped at him that we didn't want some sexist asshole intruding on our conversation.  Dana looked at me, with a mixture of awe and fright, and we continued talk—actually we moved to another table because the guy kept listening to us and smirking and writing little notes in his journal.  The interaction pissed me off, but it also left me feeling clean and mighty, like there was nothing this pig could say to me that could make a dent in my self-image.

I recently, despite all intentions to never do that again, got involved with a straight guy.  At first it was great, but the longer I was in it, the power dynamics switched, until I ended up being treated like a petulant child.  At one point he told me not to hint for what I wanted, to just say it—and since that's something Kevin has also asked me to do, I figured he had a point—so I did start to ask for what I wanted, very directly.  Much of the time he'd simply say no—no explanation, just no—or he'd offer something flippant.  And when I said these blunt nos weren't going down well with me, my behavior was called "peremptory and monarchical."  The more he'd treat me like a child, the more childish I became—until one day this rage came welling in and this Crone Vision came upon me:  this is fucked up!  And off I went, back to my animals and Kevin and the delightful queerness of my writing/art world.  Now I'm channeling the spirit of CA Conrad.  What would Conrad say to end this post?

FUCK YOU JONATHAN FRANZEN!!