This morning I received a group email from Margaret Tedesco, sent to all the "stars" of Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich's forthcoming play, Dance World Gym. Since many of the characters are dancers, Margaret sent links for creating costumes—how to make a leotard out of a T-shirt, how to put on ballet shoes, etc. The eHow Style site also had links to other helpful female-centric instructions, including how to walk in high heels. I watched all the high heel videos with great interest. First of all, when standing, never lock your knees. Always walk from heel to toe, placing one foot in front of the other. No wonder I have such a hard time getting around in heels. My shuffle about on your tippy-toes is all wrong. Female rituals such as heels fascinate and terrify me. I wore heels to Stephanie Young's wedding, and all the women I talked to complained about how their feet hurt, and I felt so bonded to them, like I was part of this femmy world I've always longed for, while simultaneously being repulsed by it. This evening, after yoga at the Y, I stopped in Whole Foods to buy some kale for tomorrow morning's smoothie, and since today was the Folsom Street Fair, there were a couple of women dressed head to toe in black, pale cleavage spilling out, and in ginormously steep high heels. They moved back and forth with grace, confidence, and ease past the salad bar. I zeroed in on their feet, and sure enough, both of them were walking, heel-toe, heel-toe, one foot in front of the other. It's like every woman in American knows how to do this but me. (The photo to the left are some irises I got to commemorate my Whole Foods enlightenment experience.) I can't wait to put on some heels and click-skip from one end of my apartment to the other, heel-toe, heel-toe.
The last time I wore seriously high heels was in July, at Kevin's and my 25th Anniversary party, which we held at the Purple Onion in North Beach, the club where Phyllis Diller, Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Dick Gregory, etc., performed back in the day. This legacy gave the event a magical feel—surrounded by red leather and dark wood, we were a dot along this long, long timeline of the Purple Onion, we were part of the flow of San Francisco history. We invited 25 friends to celebrate with us. I wore my black and white Fluevog heels. Walking the two blocks from the car was so excruciating, I wanted to throw myself down on the sidewalk and crawl to the restaurant on hands and knees. But my feet were dazzling. I felt like Cinderella going to the ball, in my gray stretch silk sheath.
It seems I never announced Robin Tremblay McGaw's wonderful meditation on the buddhist that was posted September 8 on the X Poetics site. I'm honored to have such intelligent, sensitive eyes cast upon me. Thank you so much, Robin.
"[I]t is all about discomfort, distances, contagion."
Here is the continued. I'm feeling rather awkward in my body today, so where is my center of gravity? I think it's in my upper back, between my shoulder blades, up too high, and thus my aura of off-kilter. When something happens or is observed, and a persons says they feel it in their body, this confuses me. As opposed to what, I wonder—feeling it outside your body? Since I was in my 20s I've encountered a series of stagy women who competed with me sexually. The first one I recall would do stretching exercises in Washington Square Park in a lowcut Danskin top, with her tits threatening to fall out. She would flash dramatic cleavage to any guy who happened to be in the park, including the alcoholic homeless guys that were ubiquitous in North Beach at the time. The nondiscrimination of her exhibitionism shocked me, mostly because I couldn't imagine the mindset that would make flashing my tits to a homeless drunk possible. I was having a grand, operatic affair, and she was between involvements, and she'd insinuate that I was too stiff to have good sex. I suspect she was writhing around in the grass more for my benefit than the homeless guys'. When stagy women have competed with me sexually, I've always wondered why bother with a socially dysfunctional nerd like me—I'm just trying to get by here—why not set your sights on someone more in your league? But this isn't what I was planning to write about. I can see this is going to be one of those posts where I have a plan, but I keep rambling, and then I run out of steam for the plan and spit it out in a rush. The last few days have been odd in that I've had to submit to the urgencies of my environment, which forced me out of my typical M.O. Our desk computer was going crazy, crashing, working unbearably slowly, that horrid multicolored spinning wheel twirling on and on for the simplest of tasks, like opening a folder. I spend several hours both Thursday and Friday on the phone with Apple tech support, which resulted in erasing the hard drive and reinstalling the system software, then copying all the programs and files from the backup. The desk computer is where much of the relationship with the buddhist took place, the zillions of hours I spent writing to him, the several emails a day I received from him. And on the eve of the one year anniversary of our "break-up," to the day, I erased the hard drive and started out fresh. The computer is now perky as a young girl. The next day, my new house cleaner came over—Kevin and I have been doing spot cleaning, but the place hasn't had a thorough cleaning all summer. So, on the one year anniversary of the break up, I cleaned house with the house cleaner from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. I didn't plan for her to come on this super symbolic day—after many negotiations this was the first day we could agree on. I'm reminded of one of the rituals for the dead that I read about when I was doing research on vampires for The Letters of Mina Harker, something about sweeping the floor after a person dies, to keep the spirit from lingering. I'm horrible at housecleaning, but I was going at it like a maniac yesterday. After the cleaner did the kitchen floor, I went back over it with a squirt bottle, on my hands and knees. I felt weepy, waves of mourning, but it wasn't for the buddhist. It was for my mother. Cleaning is so tied to her and to a femininity I rebelled against. I was determined to not be a housecleaning slave—this was a site of constant battle with my mother, a battle that I ultimately won. Now I admire my mother's ability to clean. The efficiency of the house cleaner reminded me of her. The house cleaner is wonderfully calm and pleasant, a middle aged Chinese woman with a daughter who goes to City College. Her ability to clean and restore order is awesome. Being able to clean well was highly valued where I was raised. My mother would say of some women's houses, "Her floors were so clean you could eat off of them." My grandfather, who was a garbage man, would say of some people's garbage cans, "They were so clean you could eat out of them." And now my apartment is so clean you can eat off of it. To earn extra money to put me through college, my mother worked as a janitress. Housecleaning would be an occupation more in line with my background than grad writing teacher. So there was all this confusion—being with the house cleaner was like being with an alternate reality for myself, plus it was like being with a surrogate of my mother. It was really intense and exhausting, but it was beautiful, cleaning with her.
This sense of misplaced maternal reminds me of Matt Borruso's show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts.
Though Borruso's collages reference horror films, their most disturbing elements are the afghans that are spliced throughout. This symbol of cozy femininity, of grandmotherliness, within Borruso's horrific landscapes, turns monstrous. Not only do these colorful security blankets fail to make us secure, they threaten to engulf us. That's pretty much what I felt about domesticity when I was younger—that I'd rather die, or more precisely, that it was a living death. But I did love to crochet.
So this is day one of a new year. After the steam room my skin feels dewy and fresh as a baby's.
I'm sitting in the Ferry Building, at a large square wooden communal table, facing the bay. Blue water, sail boats, blue cloudless sky. I'm eating a veggie bento box—not my number one choice, but the great taqueria was closing when I arrived. I love lotus root, so I can't complain. I had my first session with my "wellness coach" at the Embarcadero Y. Wellness coach means free trainer. I love my trainer, a transman with lots of tattoos. I'm so pleased to be having a queer workout. We started by setting up and learning some of the weight machines. It's all automated. Once it's set up, I type in my code and the machine tells me the settings my trainer has inputted and how many rounds. It also beeps when I get to the far range of a motion. I thought of Kathy Acker's love of weight training, how she had a toy stuffed animal that she would attach to a machine she was working out on. I thought of the opening last night at [2nd Floor Projects], of Laurie Reid and Ben Echeverria's collaborative show, which was wonderfully playful and smart. In the hallway, curator Margaret Tedesco was showing a catalogue essay Kevin wrote about filmmaker George Kuchar, which includes a photo Kevin took of George naked, covering his own genitals with genitals drawn by Raymond Pettibon—part of a series Kevin is doing, which includes naked photos of many of the local Bay Area guy poets, all holding Raymond's genitals. We have a screen saver that shows random photos from our hard drive, so you can imagine how disconcerting it is to walk past my computer and see a naked David Buuck or Andrew Kenower slowly floating by. Earlier in the month, a few days before George died, Margaret showed him the catalogue. George said that he looked good in the naked picture. Vince Fecteau joked that George was a real gym queen. When someone asked what a gym queen was, I found that so odd, how anybody could live in this area and not know what a gym queen was. I sometimes forget how insular the worlds I inhabit are. Someone added that George said he worked out because because you never know when someone will want you to appear naked in a video.
After the trainer, I did a mile on the treadmill, overlooking the bay and the Bay Bridge, window open, fresh, fresh, breeze, then steam room and shower. It was a spa day. I'm going to a Korean spa on Friday with Pam Martin, whose picture reminded me of a puppet a few posts ago. After reading the post, Pam brought her antique puppet collection to last Sunday's workshop pizza party. Exquisite. She also gave me a photocopy of "Puppet Theater," an article published in 1810 by Heinrich von Kleist. I loved it—it has a sense of the marvelous, like Tales of Hoffman. Von Kleist recounts a meeting with "a certain Herr C., who had recently been engaged as premier danseur in the opera" in the town of "M." Herr C. shocks von Kleist when he claims that the dance of marionettes is superior to the dance of humans. A marionette, he explains, always moves from its center of gravity, whereas humans basically think too much and lose the innocence in their gestures. Affectation sets in, throwing them off center. The center of gravity is where the dancer's soul resides. "Or look at young F., as Paris, standing among the three goddesses and handing the apple to Venus; his soul—it is really horrible to see—is in his elbow." Another favorite passage: "Puppets only use the ground as fairies do; brushing it lightly in order that the momentary check may give a new impulse to their bounding limbs." As I read the essay, I thought of people whose personas get out of control and even though they're fascinating, there's a deadness to them. I also thought of procedural writing, how one of its agendas must be to circumvent the cycle of affectation, to recapture a touch of lost innocence.
I haven't gotten to the core of what I wanted to write here, but the hour of Pete's internet I received for buying an iced green tea is about up, so I'll sign off and continue later.
I'm writing this in a coffeehouse in Sausalito, right on the water, and far enough down Bridgeway to be frequented mostly by locals. My friend Rachel Brod, who's lived over here, once showed me some of the locals' hangouts, this was years ago, but they all seem to still be here. I ate lunch in a hole in the wall Indian cafe, which felt more like the woman behind the counter's kitchen than a restaurant. They had several types of homemade chai—decaf, lowfat, regular, and soy with ginger. I had some of the soy, which tasted rather burnt, but I drank it anyway. Everybody who came in there was around my age, and seemed mildly bored, like they spent every afternoon lounging around all this quaintness and lush scenery. They all looked like they'd go to Buddhist retreats, except the one white woman in a sari who sat by the window and would yell, "Namaste!" to people passing by. She also said "Namaste!" to people leaving the cafe. She hugged some of these people, for an extraordinarily long time. Instead of a Buddhist retreat, I imagined her at a yoga retreat.
The place I'm in now used to be the Marin branch of the Cafe Trieste. Nothing about it is changed except the name. And like the Trieste in North Beach, there are some old guys here who seem to have been sitting in the same seats they sat in, in the 70s. They tend to be staring intently into laptops. Since I just watched Catfish on TV, I imagine them to be having internet affairs with made-up women. Any one of them look like I could get into a snarling fight with, like the guy I did in the North Beach Cafe Trieste, the time I went there with Dana Ward. I wrote about that in a previous post, which you can access here.
I'm in Sausalito because I got my hair cut. I know—with a zillion hairdressers in San Francisco, it's weird to drive to Marin for one. My hairdresser cuts hair according to a special process based on "sacred geometry." A number of places do that in LA, but she's the only person I could find in the Bay Area. It sounds crazy, and I'm sure it is, but she gives a really good cut. The first time I
went to her, she said my haircut would last 4 months, and it did. As I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, which never ceases to be stunning, I kept thinking about how it was the number one suicide destination in the world. Someone said they were planning to put nets underneath it to catch all the people who leap off. I have no idea if this is true. I drove past two lovers kissing on the walkway and I wondered if they were saying one last goodbye before they went sailing through the air. My hair is now closer to a blunt cut, but not really a blunt cut, just more subtle layers, to maintain its movement. My hairdresser blow-dried it so now it looks sophisticated and kind of big, like I could interview people on TV like Diane Sawyer. I can't wait to get home to put some gunk on it to weigh it down.
I've been thinking about secrecy the past couple of days, as part of this uncelebrate-able anniversary with the buddhist. I've been thinking of his love of secrecy and my discomfort with secrecy. I associate sex and secrecy with molestation and with forbidden gay sex, the pain of being in the closet, both of which I've had some experience with. For many of us, being able to shout to the world "I fucked X" is a triumph over histories of oppression. And then there's the smarminess of cheating versus the dialogue integral to an open relationship. The buddhist wanted us to have secret names for one another that only we knew, and he told me to come up with for one with him. I've made up names for every person I've been close to, even some close friends. I call my cat Ted, "Tedster" and "Ted Offensive," for instance. Quincey is "Quincerina," "Quincetta," or "Thump Thump." Syliva is "Squawks;" Kevin calls her "Sylvester." But I couldn't think of a pet name for the buddhist, couldn't perform endearments on demand. I didn't sit down and design the epithet "the buddhist." It arose organically, and it isn't even clever—in fact, its lack of cleverness is what makes it work. When a name is right, it feels inevitable, fits the situation/person like a glove. Kevin and I have the same nickname for one another that we toss back and forth, which fits the post-gender, post-hetero, post-everything tone of our interactions.
The dinner crowd is upon the cafe. Time to sign off and marvel over the Golden Gate Bridge at dusk.
Last night, after my class at SF State, as I drove down 14th Street at the tail-end of dusk, a huge round moon hung low in the gray-blue sky, the moon's radiance softened as if it were covered by a layer of gauze. An occasional wisp of cloud sailed across it. A tranquility so captivating it was hard to focus on my driving. I wanted to keep driving towards it, frightened though I was of slamming into something, to keep moving towards it all through the night until I drove off the end of the world.
I drive a white car and the buddhist drives a black car—this week (Saturday to be precise) it's exactly a year since I told him that maybe we should break up—even at the time that sounded like an odd word choice, as in were we together enough to break up?—and he responded with an abusive tirade, followed by occasional miscommunications for a few months, and then silence. Will 9-11 forever remind me of strange sex in the Kabuki Hotel?
From 14th Street I went to CCA, where I photocopied passages from Assata Shakur's Autobiography and Kass Fleisher's Talking Out of School: The Memoir of an Educated Woman. The title of Kass' book reminds me of Frances Jaffer's She Talks to Herself in the Language of an Educated Woman (1981), which Kevin came across recently when sorting through our books. When he showed it to me, I spent a good half hour reading Frances' collection, looking in vain for a direct reference to the title in one of the poems, and remembering Frances, when we took a poetry workshop together at SF State, her reading aloud a poem about visualizations she used to help endure torturous cancer therapies; I remembered going to a party at her house, when the Bay Area scene still felt so fresh, magical. I then put the book in the To Sell box, but it may not stay there.
When I arrived home, the moon was higher in the sky and brighter, ringed with a thin red line and a large blowzy aura. The surface was mottled, so from my landing I stared at it until I could see the man in the moon. The outer corners of his eyes drooped down. He looked weary, and even though he was smiling, a little sad.
It was a warm day, and my sprouts had grown wildly, the lentils in need of immediate harvesting, so I steamed and prepared them using a favorite recipe, which calls for ground coriander, fennel, and cumin. To grind the spices I used Donald Allen's coffee grinder—this is one of the perks of being the wife of a biographer, to own the editor of The New American Poetry's coffee grinder. After Allen died, his executor invited Kevin over to choose a few mementos. Kevin brought me home the coffee grinder and a pale turquoise Japanese dish. Extra photocopies of texts I hand out in classes are stored in a
suitcase that also belonged to Allen. He received the suitcase from
Frank O'Hara's estate, filled with O'Hara's manuscripts. In our bathroom hangs a photo Allen took of the San Francisco skyline. One time Allen had a heart attack, and instead of calling an ambulance, he called Kevin at work, and Kevin took the rest of the day off and drove him to the hospital. Donald Allen's coffee grinder is a bright burnt orange. It's in perfect condition but old, with a non-polarized plug. Whenever I grind spices in it, I think of Allen and I think of death, how we should honor our dead, and this adds a touch of melancholy to whatever I cook, an ineffable depth, like unami.
Before dawn, I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep, so I sat up in bed and finished Divided Soul, David Ritz's biography of Marvin Gaye, which I've been reading at bedtime for weeks, having read a couple other bedtime books in the middle of reading it. The ending is heartbreaking, Gaye descending into a drug-induced psychosis, which sparked off thoughts of Lawrence Braithwaite's suicide, and how we really need to move forward on publishing his final novel. At 6:30 this morning Gaye was shot to death by his father. Now that he's dead and the book is over, what will I turn to next at bedtime? It has to be a novel. In my novel writing class the students have been waxing poetic about the glories of the novel, which has left me craving the fictive.
When I drove home this evening it was wondrously foggy, like tunneling into nothingness. At the top of Twin Peaks, instead of the usual San Francisco panorama, a vast paleness surrounded me, a nonspace I read as distance. No moon.
I got a new bamboo rug for my kitchen, a pale grass green, composed of narrow wooden slats, slightly less that a quarter of a inch wide. It's 4 x 6', and perfect for yoga, so to celebrate, I got out my yoga mat and did a session to a favorite DVD. The session ends with my lying on my back, observing my breath for several minutes. This is something I have to make myself do. In a live class, the final deep relaxation is a luxury I sink into with ease, but getting myself to do that, lying in the middle of the kitchen floor can be challenging. I'm too close to all the things that tug at my anxieties, all the things that need to get done; often a cat is milling around, rubbing up against me, chewing my hair. But what I learn when I allow myself to relax on my kitchen floor is that my body is happy to have been stretched and encouraged to take deep breaths, that my body is full of love, the way a cat's body is full of love when it curls in your arms, vibrating with purrs. I think of all the ways we—women in particular—disapprove and abuse our bodies, this loving creature that so wants to purr and be petted, by others of course, but moreso by ourselves. Sweet, sweet body. This fills me with tenderness and sadness. I've never been comfortable speaking of The Body as an abstraction. My body and other bodies I've encountered in my life, with their frailties and mortality, point to the futility of abstraction. My mother's terminally ill cat who shits, pees, and vomits all over the floor. Sometimes I will clean up all three leakages in less than an hour, and it's so easy to resent her, but then she looks up at me with her huge blue eyes, her body rumbling with love, or after I take a shower, she leans over and licks the coconut oil off my feet with her little pink tongue that tickles, and I'm reminded that part of my duty in adopting her is to love her, and resentments dissolve. And of course, taking care of her spewing body is about my being a thousand miles away for much of my mother's terrible cancer death, and by taking care of her cat, I'm symbolically taking care of my mother. I imagine with it being the anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow, many of us are thinking about mortality, both individual and global. On his Facebook page, Christopher Breu was talking about the difficulty of writing an ending that isn't a conclusion, and that's what I'm feeling now. I started this post, but how do I get out of it, a process which entails it's own sort of mortality. Or we could be more glass-half-full and focus on new beginnings. I'll end this post, and at 3:00 in the afternoon, I'll get dressed, and I'll do something gloriously productive with my life. Or not.
After I finished the above, I found this video posted on Karla Milosevich's Facebook page. Perfect.
Blogger has a new interface, so things look off-kilter here, which fits my mood, as the full schedule I had planned for today has fizzled. Being busy from wakeup to 7:00 at night on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays doing class prep and teaching, Wednesdays and Fridays get crammed with errands and appointments—but I'm gloriously sick today and canceled the first two appointments. I've had this intestinal thing going on for over a month, and finally am in the purging phase, which I feel will end a difficult and irritating cycle. It's not as bad as I feared it would be, my horrible headache has subsided and I did not spend the entire night puking as I have in previous incarnations of this syndrome. Last night, since I knew this was coming on no matter what I did, I said fuck it and went out for a drink with Suzanne Stein. We sat in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel, drinking Malbec and nibbling on french fries and salad, and having one of those satisfying conversations that leave you with the life is good feeling.
If I stick to a holier than though food regime, I don't get this physical distress, but believing certain foods will make you sick is very difficult, it's akin to having a conversion experience. Gluten got to the point where reactions were so intense and sudden, I became terrified of it, and there's no temptation, though, being sick I always want simple foods that children would like, am longing for a slice of toast with butter or peanut butter. Of course I have no such substances in my kitchen. What I did have was a buckwheat blini (they make them in Marin and sell them at Rainbow Grocery) spread with almond butter and a whisper of umeboshi paste—tasty, but nothing close to my vision of food heaven. I also had a coconut smoothie, made from a young Thai coconut, mostly for the electrolytes, as coconut water is an amazing source of electrolytes, great for times, like now, of mild dehydration. I'm on the verge of my dairy conversion experience, accepting that I cannot get away with occasionally cheating with chai and unctuous melted goo. I'm working with a nutritionist who is great. She's a vegan, but she used to be a radio DJ. There's nothing woo-woo about her. New Yorkers would like her. She's tiny and has a giant dog I sometimes see her walking.
Repeatedly I learn that you cannot judge on superficials who will be a good teacher or healer for you. For instance, my life was changed by a therapist who led women's groups at night, and was a hairdresser by day. Teaching writing I learn, over and over, the wisdom of the old cliche, don't judge a book by its cover, as it's impossible to predict who in a new class will be the talented writers. I've had people who when I met them seemed totally hopeless, whose work then blew me away. Many people have read me as hopeless, and then had to revise later. In first grade the idiot teacher put me, who was eager to read more than anybody in the school, in the second reading group instead of the first, and I had to prove to her that I was too good for the second group, and she eventually moved me to the first. That pattern and its ensuing humiliations and triumphs has followed me my entire life.
I've been reading German sociologist Max Weber, for personal fulfillment, and for research for the book I'm working on. Theory of Social and Economic Organization. The Sociology of Religion. I'm mostly interested in what he has to say about charismatic authority. According to Weber, there are 3 types of authority: rational/legal, traditional, and charismatic. Charismatic authority can be found in cult leaders and in those super poets who can mesmerize a room, where the atmosphere feels charged as if we were at a rock concert instead of a poetry reading. Since the buddhist isn't really famous (his Facebook page still only has 571 friends listed), but he's well known and respected within his Buddhist world, I often felt a resonance with his life and my involvement in an experimental poetry/narrative network. Not really famous, not a superstar, but with a certain amount of status within an insular group. I'm confused and intrigued by those with room-mesmerizing abilities—it's as if their pores exude a drug into the air and everybody's stoned and smiling in this demented way. There's a vampiric quality to the whole exchange, as if the charismatic one were feeding off the crowd's energy, and growing stronger and more vivid, they could burst with all the energy they're guzzling. Think of Paul Jones in Peter Watkins'1967 film Privilege:
It's exciting to have Weber talking about this, in his dry, categorical way.
I'm also reading, as research for a seminar I'm designing, Christolph Linder's Fictions of Commodity Culture. The book "considers how fiction, from realism through modernism and into postmodernism, accommodates and resonds to the commodity's colonization of the social imagination and its desire." The book costs $110 on Amazon, so I got it through interlibrary loan. Funny how a book on commodity culture itself is too dear a commodity for even shopping-crazy me to own. I picked it up Wednesday night at the SF Public Library, and when I left, the alarm went off, which led to interrogation by a guard. Then I went downstairs to give a reading in Michelle Tea's Radar Series. After Radar, I dashed back upstairs to use the restroom before the library closed, and again, when I exited the alarm went off, and again the interrogation. The book has an uncanny aura of agency, a commodity with consciousness and will. On the cover of my copy, above the woman's head is a bar code that reads "University of Nevada, Reno. 3 1233 01151 0716."
After my mom died, I took her entire clown collection to UPS and had them pack it up and ship it to California. This felt vitally important at the time, saving those clowns. Kevin used the clowns for a show he curated with Matt Post at Right Window Gallery, and since then, for the past 3 years, the clowns have been sitting in our basement. A couple of weeks ago I realized the clowns were never going to be integrated into my home, that I didn't have room for them, that I no longer wanted them. I have one blown glass clown on my desk, which my mother gave me long before she died. That was enough. Kevin suggested I give them to my writing workshop, so that's what I did. I opened the huge packing boxes they were stored in, wrestled them out bubble wrap, set them on the coffee table, and people oohed and ahhed, and chose. It felt more like an adoption than a gifting. One box was in the back of our place, in the office area, and while everyone was in the living room, I stood there beside my desk, poignantly alone, unwrapping the clowns, one by one, and I was overcome with intense grief, that sadness that knows no bottom, that shakes you to your core, and writing this sentence I feel like I'm being faux high Frenchified, like Julia Kristeva's adolescent niece. Still, it's awesome the energy some objects can hold.
That's artist Pam Martin on the far right of the frame. I love the way her arms and hands seem to be dangling, and the tilt of her head. She looks puppet-like to me, as if the clowns were turning her, were turning us all, into puppets. As if clowns were the most charismatic of all commodities. Perhaps that's why so many people fear them.
I wish every night were Feminist Movie Night. Last Wednesday night a group of us—Bay Area women poets, as well as a few visual artists and visitors—went to see Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution at the Shattuck Theater in Berkeley. Afterwards, most of us walked across the street for pizza and drinks. Here's most of the group in the theater lobby:
Front row: Sara Wintz, Amanda Nadelberg, Corina Copp, Jack Frost, Cassie. Smith, Jennifer Manzano
Top row: Nancy Popp, Stephanie Young, Lauren Levin, Serena Wellen, Lauren Elder, Lara Durback
It felt important, to meet with a group of highly intelligent, intellectual women as women (how essentialist of us!), and to talk about ways we're all swimming around together in the thick bumpy stew of the experimental poetry community. What I hear, privately, over and over, is that some women feel an uneasy tension between form and content in the local (and beyond) writing community. I hope more discussions arise about this, not in order to bash anybody, but in order to promote an atmosphere that encourages permission for women—especially younger women—to produce work that feels right for them, and to discuss that work in a way they feel comfortable. Some modes of discourse feel like a violation to me—and I'm not saying anybody's out to violate me, but some modes alienate the intimacy that we all put into our work and experience the world through, implying that we are professionals here and we need to use the specialized language of professionals so we don't sound like a bunch of whining pussies or whatever. Some work and some discussion makes me want to dash home and write. Others make me feel hopeless and want to give up. !Women Art Revolution and discussing it afterwards made me want to write. I loved the blatant corniness of some of the work shown in the film, the play where one woman wears a giant vagina and another a giant cock and they argue about who needs to do the dishes. I was even enjoying Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, which I always secretly thought was stupid, but it isn't stupid, it's fist in the face over the top, which is good good good. More women need to be a pain in the ass. More women need to embarrass people. Anyway, the evening was great, and I hope more discussion and events and magazines come out of it. At the bar afterwards there was talk of opening a new local women's building, which would be named The Institute for the Advanced Study of Cuntology.
A few days before that Kevin and I went to a small gathering to honor
Leslie Scalapino. It was organized by Laura Moriarty and hosted by
Leslie's husband, Tom White. It was held in Leslie and Tom's living
room. Fourteen of us sat in a circle; each read a portion of Leslie's work and talked a bit about it. I didn't talk much, but I listened intently. Tom frequently enlightened us with the real life origins of certain passages, and much of the discussion centered around Leslie's relationship to autobiography in her work. It was agreed that no matter what real life material Leslie drew upon, by the time she was finished, it was something else. The intimacy of sitting in Leslie's home, among her things and quietly remembering her was almost unbearable. I discovered Leslie's work in the late 70s—this was before I became involved in the experimental writing scene—I became somewhat of a groupie, and went to every reading of hers that was announced in the Poetry Flash. At the gathering, Aaron Shurin read Leslie's 1979 This walking and eating is associated all right, which I used to own, and wish I still owned, and I still love, and I sat there, full of nostalgia, trying to imagine my unsophisticated self reading this work and hearing Leslie read this work, and what did I get out of it back then? I know her work opened possibilities in my relationship to language (and meaning). The last time I saw Leslie was about a week before she died. It was at Norma Cole's birthday party, and Leslie came in late, just for a few minutes. From across the room our eyes met. It was a jolt of recognition, and then she was gone. Many people at the party didn't even know she was there.
I'm excited that Christopher Breu has started a blog. Reading Christopher's blog is what made me want to post here. I haven't been posting because I'm busy, but I've also felt inhibited. The public-ness of this space, when one isn't insane with mourning and heartbreak, as I was during the buddhist era, is poignant. If I, after all these years of writing and being public, still need others to create a web of permission, imagine how much younger women (and I'm sure guys as well) need it. We're all serious about our work, but there's many ways of expressing intelligence. I hate that some things are still risky that long ago should no longer have been risky. Censorship can be very subtle and insidious. I know I'm being vague here, but I'm not secretly thinking of any one thing, just an atmosphere, a cloud of abstraction and bespectacled aestheticism.
