Outside the Outside

Here's a topiary lion for all the brave poets (and everybody else) who were arrested at Occupy Oakland yesterday, and for Andrew Kenower, who was hit with a rubber bullet.  I've heard that David Buuck, Jacqueline Frost, Juliana Spahr, and Charles Weigl were arrested, with Juliana and Charles released on site.  The lion in my photo doesn't "read" very well, but yesterday when it popped out to me as I rushed to class at SF State, I was so stunned to see it, right there where I walk, twice a week, besides the outdoor cafe, that after class I beelined back to take a better look.  The fluffy lighter colored plants emerging from the ivy is the lion's mane.  There's actually two lions standing side by side, like at the entrance to the Chicago Art Institute.  It's so perfect for budget-crisis-plagued SFSU, that their topiary lions are a such a mess.  With all my heart I long for Occupy Wall Street to be successful.  I imagine a glorious light streaming down from the heavens, through a nontoxic, non-globally-warmed atmosphere—a dazzling world where tuition hikes are rolled back (even supercheap SFSU is now becoming too dear for some of the poorer students) and public education is available to all who want it (like it was when I went to college).  And there's even enough extra to trim the topiary lions.

Last Thursday Kevin and I read at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, as part of their Carolee Schneemann retrospective.  The exhibit is awesome, as was the reading—the perfect audience, but beyond that, reading in the context of Carolee Schneemann, my work made sense.  I experienced none of the embarrassment that sometimes pangs me at the extremeness of my subject matter, the in-your-face sexuality.  Schneeman laid the groundwork years ago, and I felt part of a historical continuum.  To commemorate, I snapped a closeup of Schneemann's Interior Scroll, which I wrote about on this blog last December.  I was too crazy with my eternal sense of overwhelm to remember I'd written about Schneemann—until I was sitting in the auditorium about to go onstage.  I flipped madly through the buddhist, but I couldn't find the passage where Schneemann is discusssed, so I read the 4 short sections I'd planned.  I could feel Schneemann's spirit infusing my every word.  Kevin followed me, giving one of his typically genius readings.

 The rattiness of what remains of Interior Scroll reminds me of the 5th century papyrus of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which was purchased in Cairo by Carl Reinhardt 1896, and which I spent too much time reading about yesterday.  Only 8 pages (estimated to be half the text) exist.  Glued to my computer, fingers googling like mad, I discovered that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute; she was an apostle of Jesus!  His favorite apostle.  I have no particular interest in Christianity, and I have no way of knowing if this is true.   But this is so perfectly typical of the historical repression and reframing of women.  I'm reminded of the 80s when I was reading all the feminist goddess books, and I learned that the horns on the devil were a perversion of the horns associated with the moon goddess.  Again, who knows if this is true.  Does it matter?  The story of this reconfiguration of a female spiritual symbol to a symbol of evil radicalized me.  My eyes were opened, and from them streamed rage, and that rage fueled my determination to remain uncompromised in my writing, to push my version of clarity as far as I could take it, regardless of consequences.

Now I have two new images to guide me—the frail, lacy corrosions of Schneemann's and Mary Magdalene's artifacts.  Before our reading, Henry Gallery's Betsey Brock read the entire text of Schneemann's scroll.  Here's an excerpt:

I met a happy man
A Structuralist filmmaker
—But don't call me that
It's something else I do—
He said we are fond of you
You are charming
But don't ask us to look
At your films
We cannot look at:
the personal clutter
the persistence of feeling
the hand-touch sensibility
the diaristic indulgent
the painterly mess
the dense gestalt

I applauded for Betsey, then stood behind the podium, fueled to present a reading full of "the diaristic indulgent," including the section of the book where I discuss being a bad experimental feminist.  Afterwards, Jeanne Heuving, who curated the reading, joked how I position myself "outside the outside."  I think what she meant was that experimental feminist poetry is so marginalized to begin with, to position myself outside of that, it's like hurling myself into outer space.  I've thought a lot about Jeanne's gentle goading since I got back, about my need to outside myself whenever possible.  I suppose I see that as a position of purity.  To move towards the mainstream, to go after success is somehow corrupt.  And often enough, it is corrupt, and it has ruined many a talented writer/artist.  But success can also give an enormous thrust of permission, something which comes up over and over in Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World, an HBO movie Kevin and I have been watching in bits before we go to bed. I've never been much of a Beatles fan, but the development of their music as suggested in Scorsese's film awes me—fame creating a protective aura of privilege that allowed them to really push the work.  All of us who make a career (paid or not) out of creativity, need that aura of protectiveness.  Jackie Wang recently wrote about this need for creative protection on her private blog, and in an article on HtmlGiant:  "BECAUSE IF I AM TO WRITE I CANNOT BE DESENSITIZED."  Positioning myself outside the outside is a way of keeping myself sensitized, even though I know, that as women and as experimental writers, we're all in this together.  As Jesus said in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene:  "Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other."

At a cafe before our reading:  Rebecca Brown and Kevin Killian.

[Corrrection:  It was Jeanne Heuving who read the scroll.  See Betsey Brock's comment.]

Gremolata

Sick and sitting up in bed eating long grain brown rice with olive oil and gremolata, which is minced lemon peel, parsley, and garlic.  It's main appeal is that it isn't sweet, though it may be a bit much, too intense.  Maybe plain rice would have been better.  Being sick brings you back to the basics, your core animal beingness.  I spent yesterday purging from all portals for hours.  Horrible nausea, with scary reoccurring throat spasms.  I had to lie on my right side and take long slow deep breaths for the nausea to be bearable.  This also made the throat spasms milder.  As the day and evening progressed I could sleep longer and longer stretches of time, which was a blessing.  Mid-evening it was time to get some food in my stomach, or the dry heaves would never go away.  I fixed some weak green tea, stuck a glass straw in a pre-opened young Thai coconut Kevin picked me up at Whole Foods (coconut water is the best natural source of electrolytes, good for dehydration), and attempted a half of a plain rice cake, a glutenfree substitute for saltines.  I felt like an alien who had never eaten Earthfood before.  The fullness of the coconut water's flavor, salty and sweet, was overpowering.  I could only handle teeny sips.  I took a few nibble of the rice cake, its cardboardiness more complex than usual.  Even though it's miserable, it's refreshing to be reduced to such basics, like a reset.  I'd like to stay at this simplicity a little longer.  I guess I am because I'm disappointingly weak today.  Was planning to go to the Occupy SF march, but that's a bust.  Standing up for more than a few minutes is challenging.  I'm mildly bored.  Kevin just came in and read me a joke from a magazine.  He's concerned I won't be able to play Alice Waters in his play, Dance World Gym (5:00 at Timken Hall at CCA San Francisco) tomorrow, but I'm planning to be there hell or high water.

Yesterday, when I was awake and sitting up I read about charismatic prophets, people following them to gain heightened experiences, a more intense experience of love than in their daily lives, and I, in this state of physical collapse, longed for the experiences of global love I was reading about, a love so depersonalized, so fundamentally different than human love, it shouldn't be called love at all.  One guy talked about this cosmic love state he went into that terrified him—he imagined someone coming in and murdering his children, and in that state he wouldn't care, he'd love the murderer as well as his children, he would feel it all was good—and the guy feared he was going crazy and was an evil person for having this love that's greater than morality or human ties.  He also imagined someone murdering his wife, and felt the same way.  I suspect that people who go around talking about how much they love everybody do not love at all.  Love isn't something to brag about.  Why do we buy into public performances of love?  Before it we become as children—here is this person who takes away the scariness of the world, who offers us a tit and pats us on the back and we suck and suck.

Apocalyptic Apocrypha

Yesterday Kevin returned from his 3-day reading, lecturing, teaching stint in Chicago.  I picked him up from the airport around 4:30 and we immediately drove to downtown Oakland to the reception for This Means War is Personal at Krowswork, a gallery that specializes in photography and video.  The artists were David Gregory Wallace and CCA alum Jason Hanasik.  Both bodies of work, as expected, center around the human experience of war.  To the left is Kevin sitting in an installation by Wallace, a chair haloed with photo lights, the lights trained on a pile of dirt/rubble in the corner.  The piece instantly brought up images of interrogation, torture, and death.  Wonderfully spare and gutful.  When we told Wallace that Kevin sat in his piece, he seemed surprised but totally fine with it.  I guess that's the beauty of engaging with art in small edgy galleries—no guards to haul you away for bad behavior.

I've seen Hanasik's work before, as he and Kevin are friends and collaborators.  For several years Hanasik has been exploring images of military masculinity and vulnerability.  Two projects are represented at Krowswork—filling a small room is a video of a teenage boy who Hanasik has been tracking as he goes through junior ROTC training.  The boy is giving a long salute and painfully slowly turning in a circle.  The tension in his attempts to remain still as he turns, his inevitable stumbles and tremors, is heartbreaking.  To the right, in a spacious room filled with pews gallerist Jasmine Moorhead found on Craig's List, is In the Green Zone: November 2007, a video that employs raw footage taken by a friend serving in the Marines in Iraq.

In the video, two Marines, dressed in camouflage, dance and dip one another.  Hanasik's editing creates an emotionally complex experience, suggesting a confused eros and tenderness.  Outside the gallery, I said to Jason that I thought that these two guys were really just goofing around, but the slowing down of the footage gave it a homoerotic edge.  Jason said one little girl, when she saw the video, asked if the guys were getting married.  He said that he was more interested in intimacy than eros per se.  At one point one of the soldiers puts his head on the other soldier's shoulder.  Jason reads that as not necessarily sexual, but an expression of the need to be touched and held.  I asked him how he knew the soldier-photographer.  He said he went to high school with the photographer, as well as the two guys dancing.  He began documenting the group when another high school friend was killed in Iraq.  I said, "So you have a Deer Hunter thing going on," and he agreed.

Kevin and I then drove to Valencia Street in San Francisco, to attend the opening of Scanners, Matt Borruso and Nick Hoff's month-long bookstore project.  A list of events that will occur in the space can be found here.  The temporary bookstore was packed, and people were buying like crazy.  I saw tons of people I know, including Nick Dorsky, Charlene Tan, Glen Helfand, Margaret Tedesco, Tanya Hollis, Pam Martin, Chris Nagler—and Thurston Moore, who performed Friday night at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival.  Matt Borruso came over to our apartment a month or so ago, and bought a slew of books from us—it was disconcerting to see our discarded books reframed in this context.  They looked so exotic and important.  When I saw Tanya Hollis carrying our copy of Art and the Occult, I wanted to snatch it from her hands.  MINE.  The books seemed to be arranged either by topic or by cover design—for instance, one row displayed so their covers were facing out, all had graphic circle designs on the cover.  Some books weren't for sale, and I witnessed some negotiating/begging going on at the cash register to get them to reconsider the not for sale policy.

I mentioned to Steven Black, acquisitions librarian at the Bancroft (the special collections library at UC Berkeley), how I was browsing the cults section, but the books either seemed dull or stupid.  He suggested I purchase Marco Vassi's The Stoned Apocalypse, as super wild Vassi joined lots of groups but dropped out.  When Margaret Tedesco saw me carrying Vassi's book, she reminded me that earlier in the year in her gallery, [2nd Floor Projects] she curated a show that included work by Vassi, and that my buddy Bradford Nordeen had written the catalogue essay.  So now I'm dying to read Bradford's essay, and will make that happen soon.  For my research into cults, Steven also suggested that I get a copy of John Sladek's The New Apocrypha.  And indeed I will.  There's something in Steven's gentle yet authoritarian tone that, even though I just met him last night, I'd read any book he'd recommend.

I rarely hang out in used bookstores these days, but were in them constantly in my youth.  Scanners made me nostalgic for a musty print-only world, a magical time before the abstraction of realms such as this blog.  It was exciting to see a bookstore, in and of itself, be such a social event, to be the best party happening on a Saturday night.