Muscle Memory

Today was my last class for the semester.  Really the semester should go on for another week and a half, but I'm rushing away early to fly to LA on Thursday to teach at Antioch's winter residency.  The December residency is always a shock, the brutal lack of transition.  Tomorrow I run errands and pack, and then I'm gone, off to a new world.  Yesterday, after our class potluck, we took the leftover food over to Occupy San Francisco State, which consists of maybe a dozen tents outside the student union building.  It was sweet.  They eagerly accepted all the great food and thanked us for contributing to the cause.  It was a difficult semester, I was teaching more than was comfortable for me, and there were, to be very vague, some compatibility issues.  But there were also many instances that touched me.  And some writing was done in my classes that really excited me.  This morning when I was getting ready to leave, I put on a dress I rarely wear, mostly because I don't like it that much, but I did wear it when the buddhist was here.  (I know, why would I wear a dress I didn't like when he was here?) I wasn't thinking about him when I was pulling the dress over my head, I was thinking, why does it take me so long to get dressed, I'm going to be late, and then my mind began chanting I hate him I hate him I hate him.  This was totally surprising.  I don't even think it's true; I don't hate him.  In fact, I don't think I hate anybody.  But there it was, this primal voice in my head, ranting.  In class one of the students talked about muscle memory, how in the yoga she does, as she holds the poses memories will flood her.  And this made her believe that yes, we do hold trauma in our bodies.

Speaking of the buddhist, I sent a copy of the buddhist, the book, to a local Zen roshi poet, and he emailed me about it today.  He said he couldn't put the book down, was sad when it ended.  I love the p.s. to his email:  "ps - is any of the stuff in the buddhist actually true?"  Oh my friend, let me tell you . . .

I haven't given any more readings, but the past week has been full.  Friday night Kevin and I went with Christopher Russell and Cameron Popham to see Carolee Schneemann at Eli Ridgeway Gallery.  An evening of films and videos and her briefly speaking and answering questions.  I went up and gushed and gave her a copy of the buddhist.  I told her she was in it, and that I had read at her retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle.  She knew who I was!  She instructed me to autograph my book, and I stupidly signed it, "your fan."  The final section of clips were from Precarious, which was installed at the Henry in its full large screen multi-projectorhood.  The subject of Precarious is dancing in captivity.  The moment that broke everybody's heart was a clip from Sergei Eisensteins's Strike (from Googling I believe it's from Strike) of a dancing bear, a black and white clip, full of light and faded to softness, that felt painfully slow. I don't know if Schneemann slowed the footage down, but it felt slow, like movie syntax for lost memories, I've seen it in film after film, the childhood birthday party with the glowing candles, not quite slo-mo, but slower than real life, which, no matter how cheesy the movie, feels tragic.  But here it was real tragedy, the brutality and humiliation of a dancing bear.

After the films, Kevin and I went out for a drink with Cameron, who was visiting from Winnipeg.  Our mutual friend, poet Colin Smith, sent him to us.  In the picture to the left, Cameron is standing behind a postmodern Christmas tree in a hotel lobby.  "Pretend you're feeling the magic of Christmas," Kevin instructed.  Cameron was very patient when Kevin and I commented on how his accent doesn't sound Canadian.  Winnipeg, I learned, borders the U.S., and so people from there have a more Fargo accent than our friends in Vancouver and Toronto.  But Cameron's is more of a drawl, like he could have been from the South.  Cameron is a poet and a musician, and he entertained us with stories of touring with bands, driving around in a van, the hardcore/punk drummer blasting Kate Bush in the middle of the night.  We also talked about writing—Cameron's well informed about the contemporary poetry scene.  He's even read The Grand Piano.  All ten volumes!  At City Lights he bought Ariana Reines' Mercury, even though he'd never heard of her.  "You'll love it," I gushed.  He told us of poets and writers in Alberta who work in forest fire lookout towers.  He said they get lots of writing and art done in the towers.  There's such a wonderful dreamlike quality to this image, the artist alone in his micro-cabin, looming above the ordinary world, isolated from it, yet essential to its survival.  I want to go to sleep and dream of lookout towers night after night.

Kevin told me how, during the 50s, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac spent their summers working in fire lookouts.

There's even a picture book about it, Poets on the Peaks by John Suiter.

Last night Kevin and I went out to dinner with Kaplan Harris, a young scholar who writes about New Narrative, among other things.  I'd met Kaplan a few times, but always in large groups, often in auditoriums.  This was the first time I'd ever talked to him.  He's one of those scholars who has a passion for research and ideas.  His excitement was refreshing, contagious.  To better understand New Narrative, he's been reading back issues of the 70s gay literary journal Gay Sunshine, which he has found mind bending.  He said, for instance, he'd never again look at Joe Brainard's I Remember the same, having seen it published next to a photo of a naked guy with a huge cock.  Which got me to go on and on about how important it was to me when I was a young writer to be exposed to this aesthetic where sex and high culture were intertwined.  Kevin asked Kaplan if he could take a picture of him holding the drawing Raymond Pettibon did of a cock and balls—as I've reported here before, Kevin is doing a project where he's photographing a number of male artists and writers holding Raymond's genitals, many of them naked.  Somebody has to write about this some time, how so many of these naked artists and writers are straight, and they're posing (and helping to direct the posing) in homoerotic constructions.  I suggested that since Kaplan was into Gay Sunshine that Kevin photograph him in the restaurant's bathroom, beside the urinal—an important site of homoerotic desire.  The (fully clothed) pix came out great—if Kaplan ever gets tired of academia, I'm convinced he'd have a future in hustling—but I'm not allowed, due to privacy considerations, to post any of the cock and balls photos on my blog.  Kevin has promised his models that none of their pictures will appear on the internet, that these photos are meant for "gallery and high art" contexts.  And Belladodie is definitely and proudly low art.