Insubstantial Rant

Colter says he likes how the references to the buddhist go on and on, but I don't.  This past week I've been consumed with anger towards the buddhist.  I have no desire to be in contact with him, so why this clinging to the connection?  I'm sick as I type this, just a cold, but miserable, and hopefully the fever of the cold will burn away these final buddhist stickies.  When the buddhist came to visit me, there was a raging fire in his area, and his neighborhood was being threatened with evacuation.  He spent the first night in a hotel near SFO, where that evening a gas line exploded in San Bruno, sending up a "geyser of fire" (SF Chronicle).  The first time we "did it" was on September 11th.  Discouraging portents abounded.  In the hotel near SFO he got bitten by something and had a couple of huge, scary welts on his chest.

The buddhist is now on Facebook, and looking at his "friends," the gaggle of well-kept middle-aged women that he tends to favor, so appalled me that I blocked him. With his secrecy and vagueness, oldtime words apply to the buddhist: lech, womanizer.  He told me that I was unusual in that I came as a surprise, and if he'd realized he was going to be interested in me, he'd never have been so open.  He joked about this whole seduction routine he has with women.  Our relationship began with my friend dumping him, and him going into a rage.  I wrote to him—what about compassion, where does that fit in, being a Buddhist aren't you supposed to feel compassion?  He thanked me for reminding him of compassion—and contacted her again to try to patch things up, but she reaffirmed the dumping.  I now appreciate her sharp, self-preserving wisdom, to cut off all ties with such a whirlwind of messy boundaries.

I feel the rage of someone who's been duped in a real estate scam.  This is what our final fight was about, why he described me as a being whose constant mantra is "never enough/never enough/never enough":  I suggested that I come visit him.  He lives alone, his sort of wife is two timezones away, so why not.  Here's why not:  his place is too small, too messy, there's nothing to do in his town.  I never found out the real reason for his not wanting me there, but it soon became crystal clear that I would never be welcome chez buddhist.   It came to me in a flash that this was not the grand life-changing passion that we'd been discussing.  I was merely one of his affairs, whom he wanted locked away in San Francisco, a girl in one of his ports, to visit as he travels along the Buddhist teaching/speaking circuit.  Even though the sort of wife was always in the background, my involvement with him made me feel singular—to realize I was one of many threw me into a categorical crisis, like seeing my doppleganger in a bathroom mirror, like Vera Miles does in the Twilight Zone "Mirror Image" episode.



My friend recently ran into the buddhist, and he glared at her with such antagonism she feared he'd cursed her.  I've also feared he's cursed me.  When he glared at her, it was like he was glaring at me as well.  He hates us.  She and I have been comparing notes throughout, and we've taken one another's side.  If he'd been up front with her—not lied by omission about the sort of wife—there wouldn't have been any tension between my friend and the buddhist. To have so intimately let into my life someone dishonest, I feel violated.  Other people have hurt me—they couldn't love me the way I wanted to be loved, they grew tired of me, other aspects of their lives pulled them away from me—but my involvements have always been what you see is what you get.

With ours being a long distance thing, I saw both more and less than if I'd come to know the buddhist in person.  More:  I saw a core that was wonderful—perhaps that basic goodness that Buddhism talks about.  Less:  his performativity, which in person would have quickly sent me running, was not so apparent long distance.  It was hard to talk to him.  I'd be chatting away, or I'd ask him a question—and he'd give me a long, complacent Buddhist smile and remain silent, so that, like a puppy in training, I'd fall in step beside him, muted and waiting for his next command.

I came to love Kevin because we could talk endlessly—about anything—nothing about either of us was boring or taboo.  I think of my road trip with Bett—we spent four days talking pretty much nonstop, a delightful, open exchange.  I think of Monday's dinner and tarot reading with Marcus, the rush of excitement to catch up.  I think of visiting Matt's studio Wednesday night, of taking in the panoramic view atop Bernal Hill, of sharing a greasy Vietnamese crepe, chattering and guffawing—life felt so easy and open.  Open and open and open—this has been the tone of my relationships and friendships.

This rant is the final rant about the buddhist, it has to be.  As my guide Tiffany said—so you called this one wrong—let go of it.  Poof!  That I could love so deeply when given so little, does not mean I'm pathetic.  It's a testament to—if not the largeness of—the creativity of my heart.  My friend said that though the buddhist looms iconic on my blog, in real life he's like a dust ball or sagebrush.  So here he is, insubstantial and lacy, tumbling out of sight, my anger swirling along with him, a faint, dusty aura.

Angel of Continency

Here is the costume Matt Gordon designed for me, for my role as "Continency, an Angel," in I Confess! a dramatization of St. Augustine's Confessions, by David Brazil and Evan Kennedy, premiering this Saturday as part of Small Press Traffic's 10th Annual Poets Theater Festival at California College of the Arts , 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, at 7:30 p.m.

During last weekend's rehearsal, I asked David and Evan if "continency" was like "incontinent," and they said it had a similar root, but different meaning.  I just looked up continency:  "the exercise of self constraint in sexual matters."  Who knew?

Narco-Imaginings

I've been thinking about Ramsey Scott, who lived in the East Bay for a couple of years but is now in NYC, because I'm not thinking of the buddhist all the time and have mental space to think about my friends again, and because I'm going to NYC in March and hoping to see him, and I have that Ramsey I'm coming to NYC in March and hope to see you email that I want to write circling around in my brain.  So yesterday, when I was grabbing all my stuff to rush to my first class at SF State, I noticed the latest issue of Kenneth Warren's poetry journal/zine/newsletter House Organ (Number 73, Winter 2011—which has relocated from Ohio to Youngstown, New York) sitting on the coffee table.  House Organ is comprised of xerox paper folded lengthwise and stapled on the spine, with stamp and mailing info on the long skinny back, and a substantial table of contents on the long skinny front.  I noticed a subtle hand-drawn black arrow pointing to the first contribution, Ramsey Scott Notes on the Narco-Imaginary.  I'm a fan of Ramsey's writing, so I threw House Organ in may bag and darted out the door.

Here's a copy of a previous issue of House Organ.  I would scan the current one, but our scanner broke and we haven't hooked up the new one.  In fact, I don't know where the new one is, I haven't seen it for a couple of weeks, we never took it out of the box—this is me, in the middle of writing this blog, calling up Kevin at work and asking, where's the scanner.  Apparently it's in the basement.  But now we've made a commitment to bringing it up from the basement, which in my building you can only access by trudging down the outside stairs, which means you either have to get dressed or go out in public in your flannel pajamas, etc.

So after my third crazy-busy day in a row, which had its own pleasures, meaning from moment to moment there was no frou-frou self-negotiating, what should I do now, I don't want to do that, I want to do this, I'm bored, I'm lazy, etc.—it was all this needs to be done now, do it, which I found relaxing but also exhausting—and I was proud I got so much done, like, wow, I do have a super-ego—so after my class at State I went to Stonestown mall, which is so trashy a thing to do, but I was hungry, and I got a veggie bowl at the Korean barbecue place in the food court, and I sat down at a table surrounded by teens and families with bouncing children, and savored my veggie bowl while I read Ramsey's essay.

Several feet in front of me were three color-coded garbage bins—green, blue, and black—that everybody panics a bit before, not sure what's compostable, recyclable, and trash (or as some places try to guilt trip you by naming "landfill").  At Stonestown they have a video that shows one tray of trash after another being emptied into similar bins— examples of what goes in which bin—and I found it frighteningly fascinating—and informative.  A paper cup?  You put the plastic top and straw in recycling (blue), and the paper cup in compost (green).  A partially full plastic cup or bottle?  You empty the contents into compost (green) and then throw the cup/bottle into recycling (blue).  I never would have thought that different parts of one item would go into different bins.  But no matter how many times I watched the video, I still wasn't sure what to do with the plasticy bowl my Korean veggies were in.  Bang it against the side of the compost bin (green) and throw it in recycling (blue)?  Or is it a compostable type of plastic?  Or is it non-recyclable plastic?  Or would the inefficiency of banging off the extra food bits make it a non-contender for recycling, doomed to landfill (black)?  The decision was so traumatic, I can't remember what I did with my bowl.

Ramsey Scott at the 2008 off-site MLA poetry reading,
wearing spiderweb glasses Kevin found in a costume shop.

I loved Ramsey's essay, and knowing Ramsey's biting sense of humor and his sweetly jaded personality, the Stonestown food court felt like the perfect place to read it.  Frail humanity wafts off Ramsey in waves.  Much of my conversation with him has been about our imperfections, the way with a close friend you can laugh at those parts of yourself that horrify you, and get a little breathing space from them.

Now that voice you should not be blogging you have so much to do is coming in, but I want to say a bit about Ramsey's essay, this is what all these ramblings have been leading to.  "Notes on the Narco-Imaginary" is about the influence of drugs—hallucinogens, tobacco, cocaine—on the development of religion and contemporary poetry, the subversive and generative effects of drugs, as well as attempts of the state to control and profit from such effects.  A huge topic, which Ramsey juggles deftly, each paragraph tightly honed like a poem.  Less personal that some of Ramsey's essays, straightforward exposition is interspersed with more meditative italicized snippets.

Dose of the Land:  the egg in the frying pan ("this is your brain on drugs").  In the prohibition of drugs, the state commits to the sanctity of the narco-imaginary, acknowledges without reservation the revolutionary potential of the drug experience.  No shaman but the state preserves the potency of the narco-imaginary.

It's not a topic I've thought much about, but Ramsey has convinced me that the development of Western culture—and perhaps humanity itself—has secretly been imagined by people stoned out of their gourds.  A wonderful, not quite whimsical, exploration of the dark underbelly of logocentrism.

A Song from a Dangerous World

When Kevin read my last post, he said, "You're never going to get tired of writing about how awful this guy is, are you."  But that's not quite true.  The buddhist's sort of wife is teaching and lecturing at a center 4 blocks from my home, which has stirred a lot up, so this attention to him is a temporary flurry.  Maybe he's here too, a shadowy figure in a rental car, creeping around MY streets, rather than staying any place else, where he belongs.

On my kitchen table, I have a bamboo egg-shaped box, with a Tara figurine sitting on top.  It's my god box.  Marcus told me about god boxes, which I guess are common among 12-steppers.  You write what you'd like on a slip of paper, date it, put it in the box and turn it over to god.  I've not put anything in my god box for a long time, but once I did write that I'd wanted to hear from the buddhist, and not long after that I got a hand-written letter from him.  As dedicated readers of this blog will remember, that interaction turned out disastrously.  The old be careful what you wish for.  If I were going to put a new wish about the buddhist in my god box, it would be to never think of him again.

The title of this post is from the stage directions of "Lycanthropes/Entre Chien et Loup," Cecil Giscombe's contribution to Small Press Traffic's 10th Annual Poets Theater Festival, to be held next weekend (January 28 and 29) at CCA.  Yesterday afternoon I was in Timken Hall to rehearse my part as "Continency, an angel" in David Brazil and Evan Kennedy's play, "I Confess!: An Adaptation of The Confessions of Saint Augustine in Six Scenes."  An ambitious play, to be sure, but marvelous.  In it Taylor Brady will play, not one, but two different trees.  Matt Gordon is designing my angel costume, and it's still being worked out what my relationship to Augustine's genitals will be.  David and Evan envisioned me gesturing to them, while Kevin's impression is that I should practically fondle them.  When I reported Kevin's suggestion to David, he said, "We like that, go with it."

Cecil, whose play was rehearsed before ours, was sitting in the theater, and as I walked past him, he said, are you still going to be in my play, are you still going to scream from the audience?  I have vague recollections of volunteering to shout from the audience, months ago, during after-reading drinks in Oakland, but I have no memory of saying I'd do any screaming.  Cecil said Giovanni Singleton was also going to scream, and I replied, that's perfect, she's as repressed as I am.  Cecil said that when he told Giovanni I was going to scream, she said that I was the best screamer.

The fear of standing on stage, dressed as an angel, interacting with St. Augustine's genitals, is nothing compared to my fear of sitting in the audience and screaming.  Being onstage you're handed authority.  I can cavalierly lecture, give readings, be on panels, but I find it nearly impossible to ask a question from the audience, where I have to claim my own authority.  And the unmediated viscerality of screaming, how do I generate that for no reason other than Cecil's asked me to do it, in public, how can I?  I have dreams where something terrible's about to happen to me and I open my mouth to scream and nothing comes out.  What if on Saturday night I throw open my mouth and there's nothing but silent grunts?  Giovanni's across the auditorium, screaming her brains out, but my mouth's a frozen circle of failure.

Cecil gave me a copy of the script so I could study my part.  My name is in there, as the screamer.  The play is wonderful, a woman, some wolves, and a guitar playing "St. Louis Blues."  Towards the end, there's a blackout.  15 seconds go by.  A Whole Foods bag is ripped quickly and violently.  And I cry out, a lone shriek in the dark.

Touched

Yesterday I stumbled upon this interview with Stephen and Ondrea Levine (part one of three parts), who are known for their Buddhist-inflected work on death and dying. Now they're very ill, too sick to travel—Ondrea has leukemia and lupus, Stephen is frail from something unspecified. After devoting their lives to the terminally ill, it's like they have absorbed death and dying into their own bodies.



They are remarkably casual about their conditions. The tone is: they've witnessed it intimately, this dying thing, over and over, and now it's their time to go through it. Even though, after the buddhist, I'm skeptical of anybody who gives talks on spirituality, who's, as my therapist puts it, "on the circuit," I was touched by these two. Sure, they say, we've tried to live the principles we've written about in our books, but we weren't perfect. They have the awesome groundedness of nurses, the kind of people who can clean up shit with tenderness, but not too much tenderness. The impression I get from the interview is that their lives are in fairly close alignment to their teachings. I may be wrong, but I want to believe this. With the buddhist, it was always disconcerting to witness the gaps between his teachings and his life. When I was walking with the buddhist, a guy asked him for some money. The buddhist took a dollar out of his wallet, bowed as he handed it to the guy, and made that careful Buddhist eye contact. As we walked away, he said, that guy's awfully well dressed to be asking for money, I think he's going to use it for drugs. He went on and on about the guy and the drugs, and I—the jaded non-Buddhist—suggested maybe he should just give the money more unconditionally—that I had learned this living South of Market, that was the only way to do it—and not worry about what it was being used for. As my friend who used to work in a homeless shelter once said, "Shit, if I was living on the street, I'd use drugs too." To me, that the guy could get it together to be cleanly dressed does not suggest a heavy drug user. But that's beside the point.

This video begins with the Levines recounting the most romantic story of how they got together. Which made me feel all gooey for the 25 years I've been with Kevin. Ours wasn't love at first sight, but I remember when I realized it was happening. I moved a couple of blocks away from Kevin, and out of convenience we'd been hanging out a lot together. Then on my birthday—this would be February, 1985—I didn't have anyone to celebrate it with, so Kevin took me out to dinner. I wore a pale lavender knit cotton dress, and I looked at him across the table and it hit me. I loved this guy, as improbable as it seemed. We got married a year and a half later.

Organization

Reading this morning how obsession is a way to organize your life.  Which makes me think, not of the topic of the book I read it in, but of the buddhist.  How these past few months I've been devoted to mourning him, but when we'd be in contact, invariably—instead of fulfilling my longing—it was disappointing. He can be one cold bastard, even when he's being "friendly."  After a series of emails he signed "love," he sent me one on New Years Day, saying he was thinking of me, and signed it "with warmest regards."  When I told this to my therapist, he burst out laughing.  I thought a lot about the buddhist's perplexing "warmest regards," and it highlighted how manipulative he is, never allowing the ground to be firm, for firm ground would mean he might lose control.  He'd give up anything, even something he passionately desired, if he felt it might cause him to lose control.  Which makes him a sad person, don't you think?  Not being in contact with him and obsessing about my mourning has been my way of being in control.  "With warmest regards" is a small thing, a mere twitch of communication, but it was important in that it was the point where I finally, finally gave up.

Last night, around 12:30 I drove Ted to the emergency vet, as his urine was bright red.  They checked him with an ultrasound, said he wasn't blocked, and sent us home without charging anything.  This morning I talked on the phone with the holistic vet, who has now prescribed Ted Western meds, that I need to go pick up.  But the streets were so empty, here in South of Market last night, it was me, cabs, cop cars, single men standing on corners looking suspicious, and zooming little parking ticket carts, ticketing like crazy the cars parked in the "NO PARKING on Fridays 12-4 a.m" zones.  They looked like hyper-enthusiastic insects.  I thought of Laura Brun, when I first moved here in 1990 saying that she wouldn't live in warehouse-y, vacant at night, South of Market because that's where women get raped.  The first week in my apartment, Laura and I went for drinks at the Paradise Lounge on Folsom and 11th, and on our way home, some guy exposed himself to us, as if to prove Laura's point that I'd made a big mistake.  That's never happened since, except the one time I wrote about in Mina, I believe, where the guy exposed himself to both Kevin and me.  I'm not counting the zillions of guys I've seen peeing on the sidewalk.  Last night, on 12th Street, I drove past a man and a woman on bicycles, riding side by side, taking up most of the lane, with looks of pure pleasure on their faces.  The silent stretches of street and them appearing, almost magically, felt like a metaphor for how I'd like my mind to be.

Polenta and Spicer

The moon is God’s big yellow eye remembering
What we have lost or never thought.

(from "Imaginary Elegies")

Polenta and Plath

Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable,
And the tongue, sapphire of ash.

(from "Berck-Plage")

This and That

Reading Ariana Reines' blog, about Haiti, my life seems so small right now.  I'm mostly settling into ordinary life, getting grounded/routined after the amorphousness of the holidays and traveling.  The new year tends to bring that out in people.  All my friends are making new diet and exercise and time management plans.  I've been clearing out and rearranging my kitchen, to support my goal of cooking and eating at home more often.  Yesterday I made lentil soup; what could be more humble than lentil soup.  Mine was kick ass, as far as lentil soup goes.  Today I'm making polenta to accompany the soup and whatever.  Trying to eat one huge salad a day.  Made one yesterday with Stonehouse roasted garlic olive oil, that Kevin brought home from his office over the holidays—I'm sure someone regifted it to him.  I dressed my salad with this incredible oil, meyer lemon juice, salt, and a handful of chopped parsley, mint, and dill, and it was the best salad I ever ate.  I'm trying to bless my food before I eat it, but sometimes I don't remember until something's almost finished.

It's so great to not be trapped elsewhere in a limbo of longing, to be able to take pleasure in what's in front of my nose.  Last night I said to Kevin, "Meditation made me horny, how about a quickie."  Afterwards he joked about my "romantic" approach.  And then we got up and gave Ted his subcutaneous fluids.  He's got crystals in his urine and has been prescribed fluids for a few days to dilute the urine and flush out the crystals.  Kevin has to wrestle ever-panicky Ted into submission.  He wails and struggles as if we were dripping acid into his back. 

Here's a photo I took of the January 13 Rebecca Quaytman event at SFMOMA, while seated in the audience, from miles away, using the zoom on my new iPhone:

Apsara DiQuinzio, Rebecca Quaytman, Kevin Killian

Quaytman's exibit at SFMOMA was in part a response to the poetry of Jack Spicer, and for this closing event, Quaytman spoke eloquently about themes in Spicer's poetry she was exploring.  Kevin spoke a bit about Spicer, but mostly he read samples of Spicer's poetry that resonated with Quaytman's show.  Kevin's an amazing reader of Spicer, he brings out the beauty of Spicer, without shying away from his creepiness.  From Spicer's "[Goodnight]":

But goodnight
I have seen enough of you, good night
I have seen that anyone can write a poem.
Hart Crane died so that faggots could write poetry
And faggots have written poetry
Olson says that he wrote nominative poetry.
Forget it, I said, goodnight.
This is the last trick.  I have discovered
How easy it is to write poetry.
How little it counts.  How few sighs
At the best are at the end of a poem.
But goodnight.  I have learned
How little poetry has to do with anything.
Goodnight.

I've heard Kevin read from this poem many times, and it always sends chills.

I didn't go to the dinner afterwards, but here's a photo from it, of Kevin and Rebecca:

Kevin adores her because after a couple of drinks she gets candid and gossipy.

Last Saturday I read with Taylor Brady at the Condensary, a house series in Oakland, curated by Zack Tuck and Jackqueline Frost.  Here's a photo of them introducing me:

All my bitching about the Bay Area writing scene, I take it back.  Taylor was awesome, and so was the audience.  The combined brain power and energy in the packed room could launch a rocket to the moon.  It's such a delight to read something and to feel like you've been totally "gotten."  All writing communities generate a love/hate relationship, but right now I'm in love.

No Underwear in Space

Recently Kevin and I watched Carrie Fisher's one woman show, Wishful Drinking, on HBO.  I love aging divas, particularly the terrible and awesome deepening of women I didn't take seriously in the first place.  Aging Debbie Harry is fabulous, but Debbie Harry has always been fabulous, no surprise there.  Aging Stevie Nicks is another thing.  Aging Stevie Nicks' transformation from her youthful boring fluffness is divine.  (I know this is a controversial opinion, but no one would ever accuse young Stevie of being deep.)  I have to stop whatever I'm doing and bow down when old Stevie, bloated and stiff in her witchy black dress and hat, her voice deepened, hoarser, belts out, "Dreams unwind/ Love's a state of mind/ Dreams unwind/ And still it's hard to find. I know."  Yes, Stevie, I say, you do know, I can tell you know.   Kevin told me that Stevie used to do so much cocaine it destroyed her nostrils, so that before a show helpers blew cocaine up her vagina.  When I recounted this to Bett, she said she heard it was up Stevie's butt.



Carrie Fisher takes my aging diva compassion to a whole new level.  In her "comic" stand up act she spoofs the freaky betrayals and couplings of her Hollywood royalty parents, her alcoholism, her bipolar episodes, her time in mental hospitals, and her electric shock treatments (which sound ongoing).  She jokes about how when you get an electric shock treatment, it wipes out 4 months of your recent memory, but it's worth it.  She goes on and on about the fall out from and the vapidity of her fame from playing Princess Leia.  Fisher is heavy, stomps around without charm, has a vulgar, stagey manner.  "I didn't warm up to her," Kevin said.  After the audience applauds, the camera cuts to outside the HBO studio, with Fisher strapped to a gurney, being carried and loaded into an ambulance.  She creates a frightening and wondrous spectacle, subverting and very consciously parodying our romantic yearnings for grace and salvation.  You don't get the sense her successful show has saved her, or that she necessarily will survive.  It doesn't even feel like a come back really, more like a discouraged bleep of laughter in the dark. Which makes the show kind of genius.

Here's a couple of clips from the show:

Comments

Funny, but after I made such a deal about comments in the Spring Cleaning post, somehow that post—and apparently that post alone—I cannot get to allow comments.

To the left is from the wall beside the cash register at the "trading post" where Bett bought each of us a white onyx arrow necklace, and I bought Marcus' 40th birthday present.







Here's a shovel that was hanging on the wall of a restaurant we ate breakfast at:

Here's an entry made out of antlers:

 Here's the paper towel dispenser in the restroom of a restaurant we ate dinner in:

Another "cute" stuffed animal in a convenience store:

These are but a few of the marvels we admired.  It was a great trip.

Spring Cleaning

Today I deleted the buddhist from my "contacts" on my iphone.  No need to elaborate on the significance of this.

I've missed doing the blog, and I've gotten a number of emails from others who were sweet enough to write to me that they missed it as well.  I've not been writing here, in part, through a sense of being swamped with work, and struggling through the difficulty of reentering daily life and all its deadlines and responsibilities, after the holidays and my wonderful trip to the MLA with Kevin and subsequent road trip with Bett Williams from LA to Santa Fe (mostly backroads, even the mythic Route 66 of my favorite TV show as a child), which was so healing.  I came back astonished that I'd cling to someone who told me that who/what I was, was wrong.  No more masochistic clinging to asshole buddhists!

Bett and Spanky at Salvation Mountain.

I've also been dreading addressing the controversy of my previous blog post, but I no longer feel the need to do so.  I no longer care what anyone thinks about it or commented on it.  I deleted all comments from that post, the positive as well as the cranky.  I have discussed the situation with various female friends, and one wrote to me, "One's blog feels like one's living room."  This was important.  This blog is public, but not an open forum, such as when I blogged for SFMOMA. In the future, if comments aren't to my liking, for any reason, I will feel no shame in simply deleting them.  (Even SFMOMA allowed me choices as far as the posting of blog comments.)  This is my space, I make no claim to be rational, accurate, or to represent all sides of an issue.  If what I write bothers you, don't read it.  But those of you who read me kindly, thank you ever so much.

Negative Space

After David Buuck's reading last Thursday, one of my favorite young female poets came up to David and said, "I loved what you were saying about negative space."  She was referring to David's collaboration with Juliana Spahr, a delightfully perverse first person rant by a female protagonist who has recently given birth, whose nipples squirt milk and whose stretched-out hole cannot be filled, no matter how much she fucks her lovers.  She also becomes an arms dealer.  So, by "negative space," the young female poet meant a messy, ravenous cunt.  After she left the room, I said to David, "What's this 'negative space'?  She's hanging out with the wrong crowd."  I was referring to intellectually elite factions of the local poetry scene.  David chuckled and said, "We all went through it. I went through it."

At home that night I spewed about this in my journal.  Here's some highlights of my spew.

Intellectual snobbery of the Bay Area, it started with the Language Poets, and just when you think it's dead, some graduate of the Buffalo Poetics Program will move out  here, or somebody of similar ilk will get a teaching gig, and the whole machine churns back into operation.  (I'm not thinking of Juliana.)  Why "negative space" would be preferred over hole or cunt.  There's this pressure to be taken seriously, to use abstract language to gain approval.  Ever since the early 80s I've been talking with women about female-centric ways of claiming space, but can you really do that and be taken seriously?  Thinking of 60s feminist art made from crochet and needlework. Thinking of Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)—she's making a statement about the oppression of domesticity, but also a statement that women's tools, female-gendered space, could be the subject of art.



It's impossible to write from the position of unflinching femaleness without being marginalized or considered a monster.  I am a monster.  I lied when I told the buddhist I wasn't a monster.  I am a monster and that's why he fled from me.  To be female and claim power—to want to be accepted on your own terms—to claim one's vulnerability and fucked-upness as part of one's power—one is a monster.  Lady Gaga glamorizes this, the Gurlesque performs it in skinny femmy drag—but to put oneself out there like the female narrator of David and Juliana's piece—an outlaw female presence with squirting nipples and an insatiable flabby hole—is to instill a terror that's reacted to by fleeing or dismissal.  This is not the realm of negative space.  It's the realm of the cunt.

Is the purpose of a cunt solely to surround something?  I looked up negative space.  According to Wikipedia, it's "the space around and between the subject(s) of an image."  The subject is the positive space, and everything else is negative space.  Couldn't we see the cock as the negative space, and the hole the main event?

Yellow New Year

Nothing new worth mentioning about the buddhist, don't know if I'd write about it if there was, because then I might be tempted to add this post to the buddhist book, and editing the thing is such a bear, I don't need any more words to maneuver.  Editing is all the work of writing with little of the pleasure.  I'm over half way though the 80+ space-and-a-half pages, and I still don't know the rules of the editing, like how radical I'll get with the changes.  Thus far, the most out there I've been is to combine a couple of posts and add a few jolts of graphic sex—I figure if you're going to make it a book, you should give the reader some candy they can't get online.  But not too much sex, the TV Sutras, the supposedly "real" writing project I'm working on, is so kinky, no need to get redundant.

Applying picky editor brain to my originally dashed off posts, it's hard to reset my brain and turn back here and dash something off.  For New Years, Kevin and I went to a party artist Marcella Faustini held in Kota Ezawa's Russian Hill cottage, where she's catsitting.  It was a hip, shoeless art crowd (no shoes was Kota's one condition).  Curator Joseph del Pesco made me a cocktail of champagne with a spash of his homemade herbal liquor.  Someone else gave me a small cup of aquavit.  You'll like it, they said, it tastes like rye bread.  Aquavit sounds like an effervescent health drink that you'd be served after your hydrotherapy at a 19th century spa, but this stuff was strong enough to knock my pantyhose off.

Marcella served sausages, sauteed peppers, cheese, warmed herbal infused-olives, and Brazilian-styled black eyed peas.  Kevin and I asked Marcella about New Years traditions in Brazil, where she was raised.  She said that in Brazil people put bay leaves in their wallets and they wear yellow underwear.  She threw her hands in the air and said, "Like who has yellow underwear!"

New Years day I put a bay leaf in my wallet and when downtown I stopped in a department store to look for some yellow panties.  They only had one kind, yellow lace roses with pink accents.  I bought a pair and wore them to dinner that night, underneath my jeans.  (The yellow is much brighter than in the above photo.)  I don't know what the panties are supposed to bring me.  Maybe it's simply about the willingness to sit around with your ass wrapped in yellow roses.  An attitude of why the hell not.