PoMo Sylvia

Here's Sylvia interacting with drawings Neil LeDoux made of photos I posted of her.  I think she's making a statement about circularity and appropriation.

It Stares Back

In the car I've been listening to Pema Chodron's This Moment is the Perfect Teacher: Ten Buddhist Teachings on Cultivating Inner Strength and Compassion.  Going through the four CDs has been an emotional roller coaster for me, as it brings up so many issues concerning the buddhist.  At times it's like I'm thrown into post-traumatic stress syndrome, the pain is so real, so intense. As I drive around San Francisco I find myself weeping.  I remember how the buddhist told me about teaching a retreat with PC.  He was the guy who leads the meditation portion when PC's not around.  He liked her, and was impressed with her careful preparation and flexibility in speaking.  He mentioned going to her room, where she fed him delicious sliced peaches in a bowl.  He joked about having run into her the week before the retreat, dressed in nun's robes and wearing sunglasses, at the local Target.

I don't know a lot about the buddhist's teaching, but I'm sure he himself teaches the compassion and openness PC speaks of on the CDs.  My first reaction was, why does he deny such compassion and openness to me.  The second reaction was about how many of the concepts that PC discusses on the CD, the buddhist used to criticize me—I wasn't open according to his conception of the word, so he scorned and ridiculed me.  Drive all blames into Dodie.  The third layer was my wallowing in my lack, how if I were more of the ways described on the CD, things wouldn't have gone bad, my life wouldn't be such a fucking mess, etc.  Such wallowing, of course, is exactly what PC warns against.  Throughout she reiterates that one should be gentle and accepting with where one is—and by the time I got through the fourth CD I was giving myself a break, not so much taking on the buddhist's negative projections of me as being a terrible Buddhist—when I never ever claimed to be a Buddhist—but for him perhaps "Buddhist" equals "personhood."  He couldn't accept that I might have other terminology and other mannerisms and still have good intentions.  The question and answer portion of the CD was a bit scary, the way all the questioners sounded similar, with their projection of quiet, calm, thoughtful, heartfull.  Should spirituality equal such a manner?  What about all the lively vulgar people in the world?

Listening to the CDs I slipped into profound mourning, and a longing to write to the buddhist, to convince him that I'm not scary, that I don't want to destroy him, that I'm not that bad.  But in our last exchange my unwillingness to immediately agree to the program he was proposing was met with rage.  He wrote terrible things to me.  About a week later I wrote to him, to again try to patch things up.  He didn't answer.  It's been driving me crazy that there is no room for me to defend myself, to get him to let down his defenses, and be genuine with me.  But even at my most hopeful/desperate I know that it would be foolish to try to contact him.

So I was in this horrible emotional pain (still am at times, it comes in waves), and I turned to the one tool that has saved me throughout my life:  my writing.  I worked on my TV Sutras book, on a section that has narrative impulses, though not a full-blown narrative, and I poured into it my desire and heartbreak for the buddhist—and this relieved the pain.  What I was writing isn't about him or me, it's not about anybody, I made the people up—but it's infused with the energy of the buddhist's interactions with me, as well as his weird interactions with a friend of mine.  And, yes, I got involved with him after I was the confidante to a friend who had difficult dealings with him—her situation with him was very different than mine but ultimately the issues were the same—control, secrecy, intimacy linked to withholding, anger.  The characters in my sketchy narrative don't have names, I wanted to keep them a bit shadowy, a bit generic, with just enough detail to hint at a specificity that's being occluded.  I plan to have more sections with them, which I'll write later, but I wanted to get the vein set up early in the piece.  How to establish the threads that I want to weave can be maddening.

Recently I was talking with a student who showed me a piece she wrote about a painful situation that had just happened to her.  It was well-crafted and effective, a breakthrough piece for her that she had clearly spent a lot of time on.  She said that writing relieved the tension she was feeling around the situation, that the writing held it.  We discussed how journal writing doesn't have the same ability to hold emotional material as does a finished piece.  There's something about having to get a distance from the material in producing a polished piece—and the hours it takes to create it, that meditative state one has to go into in order to create a finished piece—that produce the transformative effect.  A sort of tempering.  The rush of journal writing is more like a wave—there are plenty of waves behind it.  But if you really commit to placing energy into a container, the container absorbs that emotional energy, takes some of it away from you.  Creates space within you for new energies.

When I went to Tariq Alvi's Los Angeles opening last weekend, I asked him how his yoga practice was going, and he said he still did it regularly.  (Like me he prefers Hatha to newer incarnations.)  I asked him if he meditated, and he gave a firm "No."  A little later I asked him if he observed any Muslim practices, and he said, "No.  Dodie, I'm not religious."  But, then, when I look at the meticulous collaging in his art practice, that itself seems a form of meditation.  The strips to the left, for instance are comprised of newspaper print that Tariq has cut out, glued together, and curled.  What looks like one continuous strip here are hundreds of teeny strips glued together.  The craftsmanship is amazing.  I said, "How did you get them so perfect, did you glue them to a backing?"  Tariq said, "No, I just glued them together," in a tone that seemed perplexed by why I was making such a big deal over them.

Similarly, I'm impressed by the patience and care—and hours of labor—that went into producing each twig in his "Disco Twig" piece, the careful ripping up of each club flyer into tiny bits, the meticulous attaching and arranging.  In manner, Tariq is quite calm—and it's not the group-think calm of the Buddhist questioners on the Pema Chodron CD—Tariq can be bitchy as the rest of us—but I imagine his calm is a side effect of his artistic practice.  That during the thousands of hours a year he spends focusing on these exquisite objects, the chaos and turbulence in his psyche flows into them.

I'm not suggesting there aren't a lot of meticulous yet fucked up artists and writers out there.  I'm not suggesting that this process will make anybody less fucked up.  But I am interested in the way psychic material can be projected into other hosts, other containers.  Reading about Eva Hesse is inspiring these musings.  All four essays in the Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 catalogue discuss dreams and condensation, and Hesse's projection of dream content, trauma, and desire into the paintings (and later her sculptures).

Here's a long passage I copied into my journal, from Helen Molesworth's "Me, You, Us:  Eva Hesse's Early Paintings":

Absence is rendered in the images of single figures by their being singularly devoid of any identifying characteristics.  Nonetheless, they read or feel as if they are self-portraits.  This is largely due to their extreme frontality; they fill up the frame of the picture, as if their faces were pressed upon the glass of a window looking out at the viewer.  And although they lack articulated eyes, their flat frontality implies a gaze, one both direct and unflinching.  There is a kind of closed circuit in these works:  the artist looks at a surface and paints an image that looks back; both gazes are steady; both gazes seem to desire the reciprocal look they engender.  As a viewer of these works, I have sometimes felt almost like an intruder, a feeling I attribute both to the emotional intensity of these small pictures and also to their slightly 'private' nature; it's as if Hesse would like to be alone and I cannot quite let her be.  Or, alternately, that she would like to be alone and knows that structurally, within this system of personhood, she cannot be.

Art writing doesn't get much better than this—Molesworth's willingness to engage in such a personal, intimate relationship with Hesse's work, while never losing her analytic eye.  This idea of the image looking back feels key here.  It's as if the effort made to create a work invests the work with its own personhood—an otherly personhood that stares back at its creator, a stare fed by the psychic bleeding of the creator, that results both in relief and a slap of the uncanny.  If the work doesn't stare back at you, you haven't invested enough energy in it.  The buddhist once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion.  I don't know what religion is for me.  Writing is my calling.

Tariq Alvi Takes Los Angeles

Last weekend Kevin, Kota Ezawa, and I flew to Los Angeles for the Saturday evening opening of British artist Tariq Alvi's first solo show there.  Entitled "XX," the show will be on view at Michael Benevento Gallery through January 15.  The photo at the left is of Tariq and Kota at the opening.  The fellow directly behind Tariq, against the wall, is Michael Benevento.  Since I'm planning on writing about Tariq's art in another post, this will be a brief scrap book post.  Here's an overview of Tariq's artistic practice, from the show's press release:

Often involving processes of accumulation – paper cut-outs, magazine tears, photographs, pins, coins, drawings, club flyers, newspaper collages, silk screen prints, found wood, staples and mirrors – Alvi’s images and sculptural forms frequently deploy elaborate and meticulous elements of collage as they amass, map, manipulate, punctuate and re-direct issues of desire, economy and formalism.

While the entire exhibit is stunning, the show stopper is “Disco Twig,” "a fourteen-foot long mirror segmented into varied widths and assembled with found wooden sticks wrapped in torn-up dance club flyers."  Tariq collaged and assembled the piece onsite.  Due to issues with customs, Tariq couldn't bring his own twigs from London, so the gallery collected twigs, according to his specifications.  Tariq commented that the California twigs looked like British twigs.

A long-shot of Disco Twig.  (Tariq and Kota reflected in the center, Kevin on the far right.)

A medium shot of the right half of Disco Twig (reflected guy unknown).

Close up of a twig.  (Me reflected taking pic.)

These collaged twigs were so adorable, I longed to have one.  I told Tariq he should do two editions of the piece, the colossal version we see here—and another edition where the twigs would be sold separately.  I said I'd pay a few hundred dollars for one of those twigs.  Tariq said there was one twig left over that he did sell separately—for a few thousand dollars—and again I was reminded how my successful artist friends live in a world of commerce so far beyond my "you mean I get two free copies of the magazine I'm printed in, great" economy.

Kota, Kevin and I stayed in Hollywood at the Highland Gardens, the funky hotel Janis Joplin died in.  For $119, Kevin and I got a suite that included a full kitchen, a dressing room, and two huge closets.  Here's a photo of me in our room, in which Kevin's trying out the portrait technique poet Ron Palmer taught him, of holding the camera above the subject's head.  Note the stain on the carpet in front of the door, part of the Highland Gardens' rustic charm.

Here's Tariq and Kevin sitting at our kitchen table on Saturday morning.

Here's a photo Kevin took of Tariq beside the pool, as well as the David Hockney painting Tariq and Kevin are restaging:

Tariq

David Hockney

Kota had an early flight back to San Francisco on Sunday, so in the morning he picked up Tariq from the apartment he was staying at, and they went out for tea.  Then Kota dropped him off at the Highland Gardens to spend the day with Kevin and me.  The three of us walked over to Grauman's Chinese Theater, which is only a couple of blocks from the hotel.  We went out to brunch, then to the Hammer Museum, then to the Whole Foods salad bar on Santa Monica.  It was a day of pure pleasure.  I was a bit down in the dumps when we flew to LA, but spending time with Tariq I found myself coming back to life, my chattiness level soaring by the minute.  At one point during brunch Kevin went to the restroom, and I told Tariq a story about Kevin how affectionate and caring Kevin is, and Tariq got tears in his eyes.  Spending time with him I'm always reminded that it's okay to have such openness to the world, and that even going to the Whole Foods salad bar can be wondrous.

Here are pix of Kevin and Tariq on Hollywood Boulevard, posed with a wax Samuel Jackson.

Thanksgiving

Kevin, Marcus Ewert, and I went to Karla Milosevich's for Thanksgiving dinner—an amazing spread, the best Thanksgiving feast ever.  One of the guests was underground film director George Kuchar.  Each semester he makes a film with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute, and after dinner George premiered the latest class effort, a 36-minute orgiastic romp, Lingo of the Lost.  In the photo above, that's George sitting on the couch, surveying his efforts critically.  Like many of his films, it was made on a $600 budget, not all of which was spent—but it looked like it cost thousands.  During dinner, George was filming bits for his annual holiday film, which will include Christmas and New Years Eve as well.  He said it provided him with footage to edit.  "You gotta keep busy," he said.  George is a true inspiration as an artist who's compelled to produce.

In this photo Marcus Ewert and I stand in front of an inspirational Starbuck's neon sign.  He and Kevin and I had just come from seeing the latest Harry Potter, during which I said that I wished I had a friend like Dobby the elf—so this is Marcus pretending to be Dobby the elf, the best friend in the world, and I'm kissing him in gratitude.  But the truth is, Marcus probably is the best friend in the world.  And he's read all the Harry Potter books so he could explain to us what was happening in the ornate Deathly Hallows plot.

It was a sweet day and evening.  I do have much to be thankful for—I always dreamed of living in San Francisco surrounded by kooks and artists.  Boys and girls, dreams do come true.

Double Trouble

This is just a placeholder to say I'm still around.  Have been traveling and busy and tired.  Have much to say, but this evening instead of writing a post I found myself sitting up in bed and reading the catalogue to the Eva Hesse painting show I saw this weekend at the Hammer in Los Angeles.  Eva Hesse makes the quotidian drop away for me, replacing it with a Freudian realm of emotions so real and powerful they pulse before and through me like ghosts.  Thus I find the title of the show/catalogue, Eva Hesse Spectres 1960, to be brilliant.  While I was at the Hammer, Whitney curator Elizabeth Sussman just happened to be giving a lecture on Hesse's paintings, which Kevin, Tariq Alvi, and I caught the last half hour of, and then went to see the exhibit, which was perfect, our being all primed and contextualized.  (Kevin reminded me that many years ago Sussman rejected a pitch by me to write for a catalogue on Mike Kelley, which I don't remember.  The biographical focus of Sussman's talk made her occasional analysis of Hesse's painting all the more satisfying.)   These paintings are intense, spooky, mysterious, nightmarish, simultaneously about aloneness and a fragile interpersonal—they hit you in the gut.  All of them are portraits, with one to three figures each per small canvas, but like the most potent dreams, they're not quite narrative—one gets a flash of a potentially intense situation or relationship suspended in an ambiguous context.  The details are in the unerasable slap of impact.  Lots of dread and angst here.  My understanding of Hesse's paintings is deepening through reading about them, but that pales to their incomprehensible confrontation.  One is stopped before them in awe.  It's rather like falling in love, that compelling and hopeless.  The rational seems a bit silly before such psychic intensity.

I could say more, but I'm not supposed to be writing this now.  I'll finish my placeholder with another cute cat pic, Sylvia and Ted on the bed, sharing the ambiguous plaid field of my Pendleton throw.  They have their own psychic power over me.  Note those hypnotic eyes.

Extradiegetic

Spending the evening home alone drinking organic unfiltered sake, the creamy white kind, which I just discovered last Wednesday when I went out to dinner with David Buuck.  David was paranoid that I was going to write about him here, so I'm remaining mum, except to say that we had a really good time together, and the content of our conversation, which I'm not discussing here, was meaningful to me.  And I almost forgot—David Buuck met the buddhist but doesn't remember him.  I've had enough sake to dull my senses a bit, but not enough to loosen inhibitions—for instance, I'm not going to write the buddhist an embarrassing dirty email, though maybe I should, as I've never written him a dirty email, he was too much of a prude that way, and I felt like saying to him, dude, you're not using me to my full potential.  He seemed to think dirty emails were too generic, and I suppose they are, unless you've got two poets going at it, then it can be an exhilarating ride.  The buddhist isn't a poet, as far as I know, though he does love Jack Spicer.  How perfect for him to have an affair with the wife of the biographer of his favorite poet.  How perfect for me to be writing a book on New Age spirituality and cults and to have a buddhist teacher appear in my life.  Sometimes life can be so neat that way.

I wonder if I could ever write a blog post when really out of it, that would be another exhilarating ride, like the amazing post Jackie Wang did under the influence of Ambien.  The post begins:

6am. hello. fading fast because i took an ambien and am becoming incoherent. but the nice thing about ambien is that you can write and write and write because you don’t give a fuck, it;s good for the loosening that needs to happen in order to speak.

 A little further down the page, grammar and spelling begin to disintegrate:

i was going to wrier sometrgiubf important but i snasccan6y cant read nmyg own handwriting and i hallucinate when i look at things.

The text becomes a brilliantly pathetic montage of family secrets and typos, and even though it's highly reminiscent in tone, there's the sense that nothing exists in this text beyond the present moment.  I think of the Huffington Post article that Matias Viegener recently linked to his Facebook page, "Is Death the End?  Experiments Suggest You Create Time," the main point of which I took away with me is that our mind creates the illusion of time, but time in and of itself does not exist.  Change exists, but not time.  Change is a series of frames at rest.  "[T]ime is the inner sense that animates the still frames of the spatial world."  It's all very trippy, I know, but memory in Jackie's Ambien post feels like a series of still frames that become increasingly jumbled.  She's very brave to take Ambien and fight against sleep.  You hear of people doing horrible things on Ambien that they don't remember the next morning—eating huge amounts of food, wracking up debt on the Home Shopping Network, crashing their car and getting arrested, having sex with god-knows who.  My friend Donal Mosher told me that he likes to take Ambien and watch TV until he's about to pass out and then dash to the bedroom before he falls down.  Many times he has fallen flat on his face and slept on the hallway floor.

What do you know of the extradiagetic?  I'm no theory-head myself, so I'm assuming that some of my readers won't know what "extradiegetic" means, and I'm not sure I can explain it clearly or accurately.  But here goes.  Intradiegetic refers to the reality that exists within the narrative of a movie or fiction.  The plot, characters, dialogue, etc.  Extradiegetic refers to elements that exist outside that narrative.  A first person narrator would be intradiegetic, whereas an omnicient narrator would be extradiegetic.  The musical score to a film, which presumably the characters can't hear, would be extradiegetic.  If a work is based on something from "real life," the audience's pre-existing knowledge of the events would be extradiegetic, as would the audience's familiarity with the life of the actors—the way Heath Ledger's death added a frisson to his portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight.  New Narrative—and this blog—are about problematizing and confusing the division between intra- and extra- diegetic.

So where this is leading is Donal's connection to documentary films.  Along with Mike Palmieri, Donal directed the feature-length documentary, October Country.  An article I wrote about the film is included in the liner notes of the DVD.  October Country centers around Donal's family in upstate New York.  A favorite "character" in the film is his aunt, Denise, who is a witch, and with whom Donal goes to a cemetery with a camera to try to capture ghosts on film.  I happened to be in Los Angeles when the film premiered at the 2009 LA Film Festival.  I went with my friend Lamar, who, as Lara Parker, used to play the witch Angelique on Dark Shadows, a gothic soap opera that aired on ABC from 1966 through 1971.  (The black and white still at the beginning of this post is of Angelique.)  When Donal was a kid, he and Denise were avid fans of Dark Shadows, and watched it together regularly.  Donal said that Denise was thrilled to have Angelique watching her in a movie.  See how intra and extra are getting all mucked up here?  Who is fan—who is character—who is audience?  Where does the movie stop and life begin?  Lamar signed a still of Angelique and sent it to Denise.

Lamar and Donal at the film festival.

A still of Denise from October County.

Donal himself was featured in another documentary, Robert Arnold's Key of G (2007), which "follows Gannet, a charismatic 22-year-old with physical and developmental disabilities, as he leaves his mother's home to share an apartment with a close-knit group of artists and musicians who support him, not only as paid caregivers, but also as friends."  Donal is the main caregiver in the film.  I saw Key of G at the San Francisco Film Festival not long before Donal was moving to Portland, and I was already missing him, as he was a dear friend, an important part of my life.  Watching him on the "big" screen of the Kabuki Theater I found my eyes tearing.  He's been reduced to image, I thought.  With Donal moving to Portland, that's all I have left of him, image.  I was making a big deal out of him leaving, and here he was in enormous closeup, disappearing.

Film still of Gannet and Donal.

I imagine Donal's subjecthood in Key of G had an impact on Mike and Donal's decision to make their own feature-length documentary.  Before October Country, Donal did still photography and Mike made rock and corporate videos.  The same time Robert Arnold was filming Donal in Key of G, Kevin and I were being filmed for yet another feature-length documentary, Justine Pimlott's Fag Hags.  Kevin and I would kvetch with Donal about the process of filming—for instance, having the filmmaker ask us to "redo" certain moments.  "A bus went by, would you say that again?"  At a certain point, Donal said he put his foot down and refused to do retakes of his own life.  Fag Hags aired on Canadian TV.  Not long afterward, Kevin saw Michael Ondaatje at a memorial service, and Michael told Kevin that he and I were famous because Michael saw us on TV.  I've always been confounded by the "real," but with these documentaries swirling in and around my life, it gets uncanny, especially when Donal entertains me by making fun of documentary clichés, the contrived narratives, the silly (extradiegetic) upbeat music played during road trips, the gratuitous moments of "beauty."  And then there's my compulsion to document everything in writing, it's like writing is a race against time, if it doesn't get written down, it gets lost, the way I read my old journals and think, could this life really have happened?

New Pornographers video by Michael Palmieri:

Cat Meditation

At home lately I sit cross-legged on the couch to meditate.  My mom's cat Quincey and my male cat Ted sit on either side of me, like the two bronze lions flanking the entrance to the Chicago Art Institute.  This afternoon when I sat I was quite tired, still being sick and having woken an hour early with vivid dreams I just had to write down. Quincey was on my left, purring loudly; Ted leaned against my right leg, the heat of his body uncomfortable in the freakish 76 degree mid-November day.  I kept fighting falling asleep, but eventually moved through that and was able to be present in a way that I found quite enjoyable, where something shifts and the environment is so vivid and multi-layered, sound and space feel sculptural.  When that was done I of course had to spend several minutes cuddling Quincey and Ted.  My bag was nearby so I grabbed my iPhone and took some photos of them.  The blue/pale blob beside each cat is my leg in the organic cotton nightgown that I slothed around in—until I went out to teach.  The top two pix are Quincey, the bottom two Ted.  They hate each other but sometimes I'll catch them engaged in affectionate behavior, such as ear licking, that they both quickly deny ever happened.

Yesterday at my book party I talked some more with Neil LeDoux about the Cat Gourd, as well as some hyper-kitschy drawings of bunnies and owls he'd hung in Lindsey's hallway for the evening.  The drawings of cats and owls were elaborations on drawings that Neil did 5 years ago.  The originals are simple practice sketches, which Neil added to, creating formal arrangements he found compelling.  Where originally there were two owls, there were now a swirl of 5 or 6 owls.  For Neil, one bunny drawing in particular—sentimental and excessively ornate to the point of creepiness, an orgy of cuteness, one bunny morphing into another—represents the essence of my chapbook Barf Manifesto, in that his drawing problematizes the everyday.  To comfort ourselves we create cultural objects, such as the twisted bunny montage—but rather than giving comfort, the objects cause more problems.  Neil added that the Cat Gourd coughed up immaculate hairballs of culture.  "Did you say 'immaculate' hairballs?" I asked.  "Yes," he replied, "the Cat Gourd is a god and therefore its hairballs are immaculate."  This is not how I would characterize Barf Manifesto, but I love what Neil's saying here.  Similarly, he enjoyed my blog post about the Cat Gourd, even though in his memory he mentioned the cat vagina in passing, and I made far too big a deal of it in my writeup.  I've never thought writing or art was about getting anything right.  In fact, the skewedness of getting things wrong can be more stimulating that accuracy.

My conversations with Neil resonate with what I was saying in my Cyclonic Separation post, where I gripe about dividing high and low, spiritual and base.  My old friend Rainer added a comment in which he caught me in a contradiction:

Your post really cracked me up, and intrigued me, partly because of a multi-decade deja vu aspect, partly because of how you said this is the last one, really, (and so I am now eagerly awaiting the next one), and partly because of the way u refer to Real Writing, only steps away from talking about divisions being BS.

The deja vu aspect he's referring to is a fucked up affair I had with another spiritual teacher so long ago, it's like it didn't exist.  And he's right, I'm practically having to bite my fist to keep myself from writing about the buddhist—even earlier in this post, I was just dying to bring up the buddhist when discussing Neil's point that objects we create for comfort can cause their own problems—even though I'm poignantly aware the buddhist is not an object, he's a complex person.  I don't think the buddhist is seeing me as a complex person in return.  His last email spoke of me in such over the top terms that it seems I've switched into devouring goddess mode—no mortal woman could be so gruesome and powerful as he made me out to be, like I should wear a necklace of human skulls.  One would think he would know better, but no, he doesn't know better, which is kind of wonderful—it was such wholeheartedness that drew me to him in the first place.  But, the part of Rainer's comment I'm really wanting to address is that, after poopooing divisions, I made a distinction between blog writing and Real Writing.  That's a hard one, for I don't know what I'm doing here, why I'm putting all this energy into these posts, like why am I being so excessive?  I think of poets who speak of their "writing practice," meaning it's all part of the process; they don't separate out precious, discrete poems as the real work, and letters and journals as lesser work.  Thus the fetishization of George Oppen's daybooks, for example.  I've always thought of the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets' insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they're such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed.  Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice?  I doubt it.  Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny?  My posts are too slight, too femmy, too sloppy (I'm a compulsive reviser), too easy.  And what's with all these cutesy pictures of cats—it's one thing for Sianne Ngai to write an academic paper on "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde," but propagating cute cat pictures, give me a break!  So Rainer's right: I'm conflicted.

Mystery of the Cat Gourd

Even though I'm sick, and getting sicker by the minute with a cold/flu, this afternoon I went over to California College of the Arts to see Neil LeDoux's MFA review show, which was hung for one day only, in the nave of Hooper, which houses both classrooms and grad student studios.  Here's a photo Neil sent me, with an overview of his show.  (The rest of the photos in this post were taken by me, with my iPhone.)

The centerpiece of the show is the Cat Gourd painting.  To the left is Neil standing in front of it.  (He'd just gotten off his shift as a security guard at CCA, and he's still wearing his uniform.  He also hadn't slept for a couple of days.)  The Cat Gourd is based on a gourd decorated as a cat that writer Lindsey Boldt lent Neil.  I took a photo of the original gourd besides my iced tea to give a sense of scale.

I've been following Neil's work—and getting to know him—for the past year or so.  The first time I saw his work was after a reading at Small Press Traffic, which is located in the main building of CCA's San Francisco campus.  Kevin knew that some of Neil's paintings were hanging in the building's endless main corridor, and he pointed them out to me and Suzanne Stein.  Suzanne and I were both immediately taken by the small group of rather abstract, mystical pieces.  A couple of those paintings were also in his MFA review show.  Neil's art has been moving in two almost polar opposite directions —a serious, somewhat static, version of mystic expressionism, based on mandalas and triangular forms—and a more gestural exploration of the kitsch and cartoony, particularly cat images.  All the work addresses patterning—the way the paint is laid down or lines are carved into a wooden background, as well as patternings of images and private associations.

Here's a full frontal of the Cat Gourd:

 

Here's a close-up of the cat's face and check, showing the stippled patterns that roam throughout the large painting, a month's worth of meticulous labor:

Here's a close up of the area between the Gourd Cat's bottom paws.  Neil says this is the cat's vagina, and that there are a few other vaginal motifs in the patterning.

In the Gourd Cat, Neil is applying to a kitsch object the meditative ornamentalism of his mandalas.  I said I found the Gourd Cat more inviting and dynamic than the mandalas.  Neil replied that his intention with the Gourd Cat was to take a mundane object and make it into a temple.  He pointed to his giant cat painting and smirked.  "Look at it, it wants to reach off the wall and hug you."

Cyclonic Separation

Things with the buddhist are over—not in terms of him and me being in contact (though hopefully that too has finally run its course)—but in terms of my heart.  Something switched there, and my clinging went away.  Last night he wrote me yet another long email about what a terrible person I was and how I deserved/caused the treatment I received from him.  A classic pattern.  What was interesting about his final email was his comment that our combustible hostility created so much energy that perhaps we should continue the relationship, that there's something there.  The two of us are, indeed, capable of generating an enormous amount of energy between us.  Which got me to thinking—what have I been longing for these past couple of months?  Is it him or is it that energy?

I remember a warning that my friend Marcus gave me more than once throughout my involvement with the buddhist.  He told me to not go all oceanic with him, to not direct energy towards him that belonged on the altar.  And of course I went ahead and did exactly what Marcus warned against.  I don't want to start tripping out all abstract about energy here, though I'm totally capable of it, but I realized I do not have a boring isolated life, and that excitement is available to me, energy is available to me—from people I know, from the general environment in which I live, and from my writing.  It never was a matter of no buddhist, no energy.

Since he was engaged in "spiritual" writing projects, the buddhist and I talked repeatedly about spiritual writing.  He's included very little of his personal life in his spiritual writing, and he grapples with the issue of how to insert the personal in such writing—should he, could he.  My position, of course, is how can you separate the two, ever.  I've always been irritated by poetry that was labeled as "spiritual," which I guess by default makes other poetry base.  Spiritual versus mundane, high versus low culture, and of course the old mind versus body—they're bullshit divisions.  The only way we know the world is through the imperfect fucked-up lenses of our personality and body.  Writing about the buddhist here has been public display, of course, but it's been a public display of trying to figure something out, I'm not sure what it was—but it's been compelling to me—something about desire, obviously, and the trajectory of mourning—but also about boundaries, about secret/public, about embodiment and meaning, and the frailty of the ego, about the embarrassment and shame of being left or rejected, about pushing myself into ever uncomfortable spaces in writing.  I'm not talking about my life here because it's particularly interesting, it's more like the whole "push the personal until it's universal" cliché, though of course nothing is ever universal.  I'm not an essentialist.  A handful of women have been writing me fan letters, have been egging me on in this.  The buddhist became a sort of soap opera character for them.  And they wrote me about their own lives, their own breakups, their own wrestling with relentless attachment.

But I've had enough of my cyber vulnerability and honesty.  It's time to direct those forces into these book projects I want to finish.  So, I'm saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here.  I already said that, but I mean it this time.  Any more I'd have to say about this stuff needs the intense focus and discipline of Real Writing to tease it out.  I'd planned a longer, more meandering post—a rant on cheesy symbolism, a couple more jabs at the buddhist's character, etc.—but who cares.  He is who he is, and ours was a cyclone created by combined forces.

Whistle Book Party Flyer

Here's the gorgeous flyer Neil LeDoux made, based on a pic of Sylvia I posted on this blog last week, for this Sunday's book party for my new Summer BF Press chapbook.  I love this flyer so much!  Cartoon hearts spiraling in the air for Neil.


And, below, is the illustration Neil made for the book's cover.

 

Just Like That

This weekend I received a handwritten letter from the buddhist requesting to talk on the phone.  He spoke of our "enormous mutual affection" and said that he realized neither of us intended to harm one another, though hurtful things were said and done.  I should have known that, despite the exciting embodiment of his handwritten text, things were hopeless—from his abstract tone, and from the untruth that neither of us intended to harm one another.  When things were falling apart between us, he wrote horrible, cruel things to me and when I told him how hurtful this was, he never backed off.  And I also did some cruel things—if not to hurt him, I didn't know if I could hurt him, to at the very least piss him off.  I was angry and I wanted to make an impact.  How is making up possible if the request already contains a lie?

Anyway, I emailed him on Sunday agreeing to talk on the phone on Wednesday, but by Monday afternoon our communication had disintegrated to the point that he again sent me a ranting email attacking my personality.  I wrote back don't call me.  So, after all this longing, he came so close and I again turned him away.  What happened?  He continued with his abstract, non-forthcoming mode.  I wrote to him about the soul searching I'd done during our time apart, and he wrote back about the weather.  I asked him what he'd been doing, and he gave a list of places he'd traveled to.  His communication was closed, no warmth.  I asked him why he wanted to talk with me, and he wrote back that he'd rather be in touch than not in contact.  After that vagueness, I began to feel we needed to come to some agreements about the conversation.  I told him that I wasn't yet ready to be friends—but if he wanted to look at the wreckage together to see if anything was salvageable and move forward, I'd be willing to do so.  He wrote back that he hadn't considered either possibility, friendship or moving on—that both positions were a "framing" and he wanted to approach our discussion in openness, with nothing on or off the table.  By the end of the day, my suggestion to see if anything was salvageable was called "an iron-clad agreement."  He accused me of trying to sabotage our communication.  He tossed off a platitude about love requiring bravery and courage, risking a broken heart—he's writing a book on spiritual bravery, so I assume that's something from his book.  And he used the deadly "as always" phrase—what he offered wasn't enough for me AS ALWAYS.  He declared he wasn't going to email me any more and that he'd call me on Wednesday.  I told him I felt no joy in his return, no tenderness on either side, and if he were really brave he'd be vulnerable and touch me.  I told him I wouldn't talk with him until I understood why he wanted to talk.  Nothing felt right about our exchange.

I was moaning about all this to my friend Donna and she wrote, "He really should just be able to say he misses you & loves you & wants to see whether he can make it right.  But he apparently can't."  This got me to thinking about making up in general.  I remembered an encounter I had with poet Dale Smith.  In the 90s a disagreement between us about poetics and representation escalated into name-calling and vindictiveness.  He lives in Texas and I'm in California, so I didn't think of him often, but when I did, my thoughts were something like, that Dale Smith is a pig.  Then ten years later, the doorbell rang and a gorgeous bouquet of flowers was delivered.  There was a note that said something like, "I'm sorry if I did anything to hurt you.  Dale."  Kevin and I were scratching our heads, who the hell is this flower-sending Dale?  Then I received an email from Dale Smith saying he was sorry for what he'd done back in the 90s, and I instantly wrote back and said he wasn't the only one to blame in the matter, that I'd done various things that were obnoxious, and that I should have handled things differently.  He wasn't asking me for that, but it was so easy to give that to him, I was happy to give that to him.  Our exchange was joyful.  The flowers were unnecessary, but I loved the extravagance of the gesture, and my heart opened to Dale Smith.  Now whenever I think of him, a smile crosses my mouth.

I thought of other situations where making up went well.  It seems in each there was an admission of wrong done, an asking for forgiveness, an approach that's ruthlessly honest and from the heart.  The apology is given as a gift.  It's so easy to meet that.  It makes one eager to share the burden of the wrongful past.  And it ends with an opening to love.  I experienced this recently with Cedar Sigo, I've done it with Bruce Boone—and Kevin and I have done it a zillion times over the past 25 years.  Making up is pleasurable—they don't have the term makeup sex for nothing.

With the buddhist, I don't even know if he wants to make up, he's that vague.  And how can we have openness if he's hiding from me how he's feeling?  Can you simultaneously have openness and fortressed secrecy?  The sadness is that the "real" part of the buddhist, that tender core, is quite lovely.  Whenever someone is willing to hold that part of you, it's a gift.  But that part of him continues to be locked away from me.  It's like his heart is a closed book, an ancient leather-bound esoteric text wrapped with a huge gold padlock.  The sadness is that it's obvious what he really wants—why else would he come back—is for me to again hold that tender part.

Last night throughout the evening I'd complain about the buddhist to Kevin.  He was mostly sitting at the computer writing, and I'd walk in and rant about what I wrote to the buddist.  "I told him, wanting to return to our original vagueness is like longing to return to the womb.  You can't go back."  Kevin would critique my comments.  "Well said."  "That was a good comeback."  "Very clever."  And I wondered how much of my relationship with the buddhist, how much of my relationship with life in general, is a literary exercise—whether I write about it or not.  How being a writer and living in a postmodern world, all life is a text.  Of course this has been theorized up the wazoo, but I'm not talking about theory here, I'm talking about a cognitive shift, a gut-level viewing of life as a text.  A fascination with what's projected on the veil of illusion.  When I was in college and all spiritual, I named my cat Maya, which means illusion, and I felt very daring to name my cat such a "negative" thing, a kind of spiritual punk.

Recently I watched the 1932 horror film White Zombie, mostly because it stars Madge Bellamy, who I thought was a relative of mine, but it turns out that when she was living in Denver she married a cousin of my grandfather's.  The photo at the left is Madge after she's been turned into a zombie by a young somewhat handsome Bela Lugosi—during some of his closeups Kevin and I would giggle because of Lugosi's striking resemblance to Berkeley writer Charles Weigl.  Throughout the movie, Kevin kept exclaiming, "Madge Bellamy looks just like you."  And I'd counter with, "No she doesn't."  Of course I related to her.  Her shuffling state of elsewhere reminded me of how my involvement with the buddhist put me in this state of elsewhere, how I was so focused inwardly on raging emotions and thoughts of him, the world felt insubstantial.  Astonishingly, for one as enraptured as I, one of the actors who plays another zombie in the film has the same last name as the buddhist.  White Zombie was our movie, enacting our joint enchantment.  Eventually Lugosi is killed and Madge returns to the world of the living.  And, extending my godawful figurative reading of this film, that's what these weeks without the buddhist have felt like to me, a gradual return to the living, a removal of that elsewhere glaze in my eyes to focusing on what's in front of my face.

Saturday night Kevin and I went to dinner with Elizabeth Hatmaker and Dottie Lasky, and it was a delightful evening, with an unguarded intimacy that's rare for four people to achieve, lots and lots of laughter and delight.  When we got home I told Kevin that it was the first time since I'd broken up with the buddhist I'd been in a social situation and felt joy.  Something had switched, and my heart had opened.  And now I'm wondering if the buddhist isn't right about my sabotaging our reconnection, that now that I've glimpsed a state of joy, no matter how evanescent, I'm resistant to slip back into that state of elsewhere.

This is the scariest scene of White Zombie, the zombies laboring in the sugar mill.

Telling innocent lies/ Throwing dust in my eyes:

If I Were a Loving Person

Last night Kevin and I drove to Oakland for the Open Studio reading of Dorothea Lasky and Elizabeth Hatmaker—a lineup that gave me pause when I first heard about it, I admit this, because earlier in the year there was a discussion of my reading with Dottie and there was a discussion of my reading with Elizabeth—at different venues, both of which fell through—and then here they were together and I was all what happened with me, how did I get erased from the picture, even though I knew their reading together had nothing to do with me.  But there it is, my knee-jerk eagerness to make it all about me, to activate my inner sonar that's always scanning for rejection and marginalization.  Beep beep NOT ABOUT ME beep beep.

But of course I went to the reading, I was eager to hear them both, and it was a great pairing.  Dottie has a wonderfully straightforward and eager to the point of demented delivery.  Even though at least one poem argues against irony, the gushing sincerity of the poems put them on a razor sharp edge where they kept tottering between humor and and slicing us with our own vulnerable fucked-up-ness.  Dark and brilliant, the poems did what all good writing should do, they don't tell us what to think, they trap us into new ways of thinking.



Elizabeth read from her new BlazeVOX collection, Girl in Two Pieces, a book of poetry about the 40s Hollywood murder of Elizabeth Short, "The Black Dahlia."  Though I hadn't met Dottie before, as impossible as that seems, given all our mutual friends and conditions, Elizabeth is a dear (if distant, her living in Illinois) friend, whose work Kevin and I have been championing—so it was delightful to witness her making such a smash at her reading.  Her book is a touching, remarkable analysis of the personal and cultural impact of this marginal woman who was cut in two halves, with a smile carved into her face.  The case has never been solved, and Elizabeth deftly explores the notion of the unsolved from so many angles, it morphs into an existential condition.  The reading so excited Erin Morrill she envisioned writing an essay about women poets writing about dead women.

Dottie Lasky, an off-kilter Clay Banes, Cecil Giscombe, Sara Mumolo (hand holding beer).

Afterwards a group of us went out to a bar on Telegraph.  We grabbed a corner and tried to hold conversations in the deafening Friday night boozie roar.  I found myself sitting next to Cecil Giscombe, who like many people who live in the area, I hadn't had a conversation with in years, so I was doing my best, and he seemed to be putting in a effort as well.  "So how are you liking teaching at Berkeley?"  "It's fine."  That kind of conversation, but then I mentioned Bhanu Kapil and his face lit up, not just his face, his whole being lit up.  He said he'd flown to Boulder recently, mostly to talk with Bhanu.  You'd be surprised how often I get this reaction when I mention Bhanu, people get this far away look in their eyes, like they're in love.  Like Cecil, they use the word "magical."  And every time it happens, I feel jealous, and then I feel pangs of guilt for feeling so petty because I myself love Bhanu, she's been such a wonderful caring friend, besides being one of my favorite writers.

When Kevin and I returned to San Francisco, and were driving around looking for parking, on the next block from our home we came upon perhaps 10 people dressed in black pants and tank tops, standing in the middle of the street, twirling flaming batons, trails of white fire from both ends of their battons convulsing in the air.  There was no audience besides Kevin and me, these people were doing it for themselves, for the love of twirling fire.  Kevin spied a parking place, and just as we were pulling into it, two police cars arrived, I can't imagine what dried up petty asshole would call the cops on such gloriousness.

When we got home, my guilt over my Bhanu jealousy was growing and I moaned to Kevin that I wasn't a loving person, if I had been more loving, the buddhist wouldn't have turned against me, and Kevin said I was plenty of loving towards the buddhist, that he was a horrible boyfriend.  Kevin said you are a loving person, you're difficult but loving, and you're making the mistake of not distinguishing the two.  But if I were really a loving person, I would have unconditionally agreed to help Kevin set up tomorrow for Matt Gordon's opening at Right Window Gallery, rather than negotiating his driving me to the doctor this morning in exchange for my help tomorrow.  If I were a loving person I would have answered Ramsey Scott's and Dana Ward's last emails.  Whenever I get an email from Dana it's so exquisitely written I'm delighted but also jealous, like how could he just toss off such amazing writing, he breathes brilliance like a dragon breathes fire, whereas I have to work so hard for any sparkles.  Kevin says I'm jealous of Ramsey's correspondence with Hoa Nguyen.  I don't think that's true, but maybe my jealousy is buried, some old crusty monster, waiting for a pin prick to give it the life to roar up and flail and screech, "Ramsey you have to love me best of all!"  If I were a loving person I wouldn't have had to go up to Matthew Zapruder last night and apologize for being such a bitch the first time I met him (and he was such a gentleman, claiming not to remember).  If I were a loving person, I would have called Bruce Boone back, even though I've been insanely busy the past couple of days.  If I were a loving person, people would glow when my name was mentioned.  If I were a loving person, I wouldn't care if people glowed when my name was mentioned.  So, when Kevin was driving me to the doctor this morning, I got out my cellphone, dialed my brother and wished him a belated happy birthday—his birthday was yesterday, the day my mother was buried, which must be so hard for him.  He was sitting beside me at the funeral home when we made the arrangements, he could have said, no, we can't bury her on my birthday, but he didn't say anything, and I didn't think of it, but when I realized, if I were really a loving person, I would have insisted on changing the date, regardless of the hassle, so he wouldn't have to go through the rest of his life remembering his mother's funeral on his birthday.  After the funeral he went gambling in Michigan City.  I wasn't invited.

Cat Attack

Here's Sylvia this morning as I attempt to read student manuscripts: