Private Geography

A photo of our neighborhood should accompany this brief post, but there isn't one on this, my travel laptop, so here's a 2010 pic of Sylvia looking bad.  Sylvia's not beautiful, but she's unremittingly cute, and I love it when she looks bad in photos, like the candid shots of stars that tabloids are so fond of printing, where the star looks awful.  BRITNEY SPEARS LETS HERSELF GO.

In preparation for this week's trip to Portland, I just made an appointment to get my nails done.  Kevin asked, "Where is this place?"  I replied that it was next to where Laura Brun lived.  Even though Laura hasn't lived in San Francisco for years, I guess 14th Street near the Safeway will always be designated for us as where Laura Brun lived.  I was thinking how couples have secret vocabularies, and how so many of Kevin's and mine are about local geography.  "Where'd you leave the car?"  "By Mark Bingham's."  Mark Bingham, you'll remember, was the only San Franciscan on Flight 93, the SFO-bound plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania in the 2001 9/11 attacks.  His office was located a block over from us.  Another local landmark we often mention is the sap-spitters, as in "The car's down by the sap-spitters."  The sap-spitters are a couple of trees, who when they first were planted, would drip goo all over the car, so if you parked there you had to get the car washed.  The sap-spitters seem to no longer spit sap.  Another landmark is "the fake driveway," a favorite of ours for it looks like a driveway but isn't so it's often available to park the car.  Now it's time to get back to work, so anyway, hi!

Zina: My Latest SFMOMA Blog Post

I just posted a column on Open Space, the blog for SFMOMA, about having my portrait painted by Zina Al-Shukri.  Kind of crazy, switching from their WordPress to my Blogger, but here I am.  I really enjoyed writing this article.  Zina did the portrait in February, and I meant to write about it from the get go—it was too interesting an experience to allow to dissolve into memory.  But I kept writing other things for Open Space, mostly because I felt so frazzled with the semester and I knew this was one I'd have to think about, really think about.  I dabbled on the post on Thursday and Friday, and then yesterday I threw myself into it.  When things are finished, they seem so effortless, it's odd.  But, I suppose if they don't seem effortless, they're failures.  Nobody wants to see the author sweating behind their words.  I don't think that last sentence is universally true, in fact I think there's lots of writing where we very much do want to see the writer sweat.  But this wasn't one of them.  Friday I realized I'd been flaky in my note taking, and I called up Zina and declared, "I have no facts!"  So, as I sat in a Pakistani restaurant stuffing my face with aloo palak, vaguely staring at a Bollywood movie on a flatscreen TV on the wall, she graciously gave me a recap of what I should already have had in my notebook.

Coming to Portland!

Kevin and I will be reading in Portland next Wednesday, May 30th.  Here's the divine announcement Donal Mosher made for the event:

Real Life

Here's a photo of Brooklyn poet Dottie Lasky, her friend/coworker Karla, and Kevin.  Dottie and Karla were in the Bay Area this weekend, attending the Maker Faire, a "a two-day, family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement."  We picked up Dottie and Karla in San Mateo and whooshed them back to San Francisco for a Thai dinner.  According to Dottie and Karla, the faire originated out of a DIY movement that incorporates technology.  As Kevin and I stood outside the gates of the faire, we saw geeky guys wheeling all sort of robots, and we saw hippie types with long flowing hair and skirts.  A high-tech Renaissance fair.

I'm sitting in a cafe eating a barely edible dinner.  I had to send my barely edible dinner back twice.  I asked about the obvious potential gluten-laden item, but I didn't pay close enough attention to the supporting elements, which were a gluten frenzy.  It's been one of those days.  Breakfast was half a bowl of buckwheat cereal—what I could scrape off the top because I burnt the shit out of the bottom.  The rest of the day was filling out forms, making medical appointments, and dealing with the upheaval of getting a new refrigerator in a small place that's overrun with bookcase.  Yesterday, Kevin spent hours clearing a refrigerator-sized pathway to the kitchen, and I spent most of the day today dealing with the rest of it, which I won't detail.  Just think boring physical labor.  This wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't frantic to be writing.  Instead of relaxing into summer break, I'm feeling panicky about time, as if the whole summer were a giant hour glass, and if I'm not vigilant, all the sand is going to rush out in a whoosh, and I'll have dip shit to show for it.  My therapist says I have a distorted sense of time.

I've been meditating regularly again—that had slipped with the end of the semester overload.  A stupid thing to let slip, as when I started up again, the positive effects were instant.  It's not that I didn't have a total meltdown this afternoon over the refrigerator, but afterwards, as I sat with Quincey by my side and just breathed for half an hour, at a certain point the chaos just melted—or, more accurately, even though nothing had changed, it no longer felt like chaos.  Listening to the traffic in the background, I thought to myself, "Thoughts are music" and I thought of Leslie Scalapino, how her poetry was so much about thought music.

One of the things unearthed in our cleaning out of two over-stuffed bookcases was the original draft of my novel The Letters of Mina Harker, which is dramatically different than the print version.  This version is unfinished, and contains the letters as they were written to the original recipients, as well as responses from some of the recipients!  I don't have a Word file for this version, so this is the only copy that exists.  I pulled this version together because an editor asked to see it.  The manuscript was far from finished, but since she wanted to see it, I gave her what I had.  Her suggestion was to get rid of the letter format, turn it into a journal or something.  When I acted like you gotta be kidding me, she not only rejected it from her press, she also rejected it from Another Important Press, where she also worked—even though I hadn't submitted it to that press!  Years later, when Another Important Press agreed to publish an anthology Kevin and I been accepted for, she demanded that Kevin and I be removed from the lineup.  Not too long ago this woman asked me and Kevin to be Facebook friends.  Kevin accepted; unlike me, he understands the redemption of forgiveness (a Christian concept I've been learning a lot about from watching Tyler Perry movies).

These original Mina letters shocked me in their aggressive sexuality.  Particularly, the ones between me and poet Dan Davidson—I'd forgotten the eros in our early encounters.  But back then I was into this pan-eros mode, which seems so foreign to me now.  The original manuscript is divided into sections.  The second section is called "Too Intense for Real Life," which made me stop as I recently had an email exchange with someone from my past—who I knew before I was involved in the writing scene, and he brought up my intensity, which ended in an email skirmish—I don't want to go into details here about him—but my intensity was presented as something to deal with, either a person could deal with it or not deal with it—and this wasn't settling well with me.  I think everybody has their own intensity—even people who on the surface seem quite mild—plus, considering the divas in our experimental writing fishbowl, I'm rarely the most intense person in the room.  It occurred to me—why would I want to be involved with someone who had to "deal" with my intensity.  I was obsessed with this person in my late 20s, and I felt sad for that girl, that she wouldn't have questioned being involved with someone who clearly didn't get her, didn't value the amazing energy she had.  If things worked out with him, I imagine myself ending up all gray and haggard, desperately whining I'll make myself less for you, I know I can, sorry I'm too much for you, sorry sorry sorry.  I asked Kevin if he thought I was intense, and he said yes, that's why I'm with you.  Thank god I found him.

Will we ever stop protesting?

Here's a pic of Sylvia, sitting on my lap as I prepared to write this.  This bitch goddess with the accusing glare is a common expression of hers.  She's always wanting something:  food, petting, playing.  And whatever I give her, it's never enough.  She's always on the lookout for my water glass.  Sometimes she doesn't even drink the water, she just sticks her tongue in there to taint it, like the disgruntled restaurant employee who spits in the customer's soup.

Here's a link to my latest post on the SFMOMA blog, with more pix from the In Protest event.  This is the last time I'll mention In Protest here, I swear.  I wonder if in online writing culture it's considered gauche to use the word "link" in a post in order to create a link????  Check out Suzanne Stein's comment in my link.  What she has to say is more meaty than anything I say in my post.  I was trying to write something quickly for a change, and I don't do well writing quickly.  I only have one SFMOMA post left for the 6 commissioned posts.  It will be the one I've been planning to write since January; it will be a slow one.

Newsflash:  Kevin Killian's amazing Jupiter 88 video/reading can be found here.

Here's a couple more pix of Sylvia on my lap:

Jupiter is not monstrous nor starving

I swiped this photo from Brent Cunningham's Facebook page.  He writes that he can see it from his desk at Small Press Distribution.  It's my contribution to the In Protest show that was up for one night only at the Berkeley Art Museum.  Other protest posters from the show can be seen here.  The top half of the poster is a quote from my novel The Letters of Mina Harker.  That was going to be it, but Kevin said that it should have another beat—yes, that's what it's like being married to another writer, you get your protest poster critiqued—and I was feeling grumpy about something at one of the schools I teach at, I can't remember what at this point, so I blurted onto the computer the rousing second half.  It was exhilarating, like a hyperactive child kicking over somebody else's Lego Block castle.

Kevin went the collage route, creating a poster from bits of Jack Spicer's poetry.

On another note, CA Conrad has posted a clip of me reading from the buddhist for his fabulous video poetry journal, Jupiter 88.  Conrad's technique of placing his MacBook Air up high, looking down on you, and then turning on the blobby Jupiter effect makes everybody look good.  I'm at David Buuck's house here, in his office.  Late March, David was out of town and CA took over the house and hosted a video party, with a fabulous spread.  It was fun, and one by one each poet there would mysteriously disappear behind a closed door with CA and several minutes later emerge with a stunned look on their face, but smiling.

Queen of Hearts

Here's Quincey helping me model my new "Queen of Hearts" red gel nails.  If you look closely you can see her little pink tongue in the second picture.

The color here no way captures the deep vibrant red of this toxic gleaming extravagence.  Queen of Hearts, first I think of Alice in Wonderland.  "The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed 'Off with her head! Off — '"  And then I think of the Queen of Cups, for cups are hearts in the Tarot.

A yellow cup in each picture—and I'm sitting here drinking tea from a yellow mug!  Scary coincidence, no?

The Queen of Cups is the Queen of the realm of emotions. She is a beautiful, introspective woman who sits on a throne at the edge of the sea. In her hands, she cradles a beautiful cup with handles shaped like angels. The cup is closed, an indication that the thoughts of the Queen originate from the unconscious, from the depths of her own soul.

A cup with handles shaped like angels, yes.  It's like I'm piecing together clues here of a mystery that is no mystery.  I have the end of the semester giddies.  Even though I was exhausted and withdrawn yesterday, I went to a party at Anne McGuire's, with that giant full moon so low it looked like it was going to hurl into the planet.  One hour, Kevin and I agreed, we would stay for one hour.  Of course we found ourselves boisterously yacking away with all these fascinating revelers, we were among the last to leave, and didn't get home until 2:00 a.m.  Then we proceeded to attempt to watch the end of Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail, a filmed version of his 2006 play (not to be confused with his 2009 movie Madea Goes to Jail).  During the last hour, all pretense of a plot devolves, and Madea delivers unbelievably extended moral monologues, and then, one after another, the cast members sing soul songs, and all of this is loaded with Christian propaganda.  It's a fascinating mishmash of ultra-conservative and radical, and it stutters back and forth between those modes.  It's much rougher and therefore more interesting than Perry's movies, which Kevin was resistant to watching at first, but I've won him over.

In an article in Ebony, "How Tyler Perry Rose from Homelessness to a $5 Million Mansion," Perry says, "They say that Tyler Perry has set the Black race back some 500 years with these types of 'chitlin' circuit' shows. The problem with the naysayers is that they don't take the opportunity to see my shows."  His life before he started writing:  "I was unhappy and miserable during the first 28 years of my life. The things that I went through as a kid were horrendous. And I carried that into my adult life. I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy."  Then came Oprah:  "I was watching the Oprah show one day and she said that it's cathartic to write things down, so I started writing down the stuff that was happening to me. I started using different characters' names, because if someone had found my journal, I didn't want them to know I had been through that kind of stuff. That's how my first play started, which features a character who confronts an abuser, forgives him and moves on."

Recently as we were sitting in Dolores Park, a friend told me how watching Oprah when she was young changed her life.  This was back when Oprah was still local Chicago, and Oprah talked about sexual abuse, and my friend, who was sexually abused, didn't know there was such a term, that there were others who went through similar things to what she was going through and they survived.  And this gave her hope, and she too became a writer.  So, I raise my yellow mug to Oprah.  Giving people a vocabulary is a marvelous gift.

Off Label at Open Space

I just put up a new post on the SFMOMA blog, Open Space—on Donal Mosher and Mike Palmieri's second feature-length documentary, Off Label.  There were 3 showings of the film this past week at the SF Film Festival.

Here are Donal and Mike framing veterans' activist, Andy Duffy, who features prominently in the film and flew up from San Diego for the screening.

In Protest

Come to the Berkeley Art Museum on Wednesday, May 9, 7:00 p.m. (Gallery B) for "In Protest" and pick up a protest poster. Kevin Killian and I each wrote one, along with Zarouhie Abdalian, John Baldessari, Amy Balkin, Amy Franceschini, Doug Hall, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Shaun O'Dell, Rigo 23, Piero Golia, Jordan Kantor, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mungo Thomson, and Natasha Wheat.  I'm thrilled to be in the same anything with Martha Rosler.  I have to teach that night, but Kevin will be there, helping spread the rage.

From the BAM site:

"'How can the arts participate in a creative and collective production of our shared future? How can we make visible our shared concerns about the political landscape of this country?' Protest signs, posters and banners are some of the clearest manifestations of the visual language of political action. For this project, the Kadist Art Foundation, in collaboration with BAM/PFA, invited politically inclined artists and writers to make a protest poster that addresses specific events or generalized demands. Come view the results, join some of the artists in a wide-ranging conversation of protest, and take home a poster."

The curators are Joseph del Pesco and Connie Lewallen.  My poster is perverse and about artistic freedom, with red type on a garish orange background.  I love it.  Kevin's is a mash up of lines from Jack Spicer.  Classy black type on white.  100 copies of each poster was printed by Horwinski Letterpress, a Bay Area printer who has printed protest and union posters for decades. Half of these will be displayed and given away at the May 9th event. The other half will be distributed to local groups and organizations for use in upcoming protests and events.

Fortune Cookie Time

Today was my final Irresponsible Essay class at California College of the Arts.  We met at 4:00 at an Indian restaurant downtown for half priced happy hour drinks and chaat, then the guys in the class and I BARTed over to the Mission to join Kevin's Queer Writing Today seminar (many of whom were in my creative nonfiction workshop last semester) for dinner at Big Lantern, next to Adobe Books.  Here's my guys, Ryan Buresh, Jason Jimenez, and Ryan Funk, opening fortune cookies.

Here's some of Kevin's crew opening their fortune cookies, Militza Jean-Felix, Jill Tydor, Sarah Bushman, and Jeremy Ravdin.  That's Leonard Crosby's nose, and Kevin's arm holding up a soda can.

So, what do you call this, sharing drinks and food with students during class time?  Maybe you just call it fun.  That's what it was like, we were all playing hookey and having fun.  They're a great bunch.  I can't remember my fortune.  It wasn't really a fortune, it was an idiom, and then there was an extra fortune cookie that someone cracked open, and it was a spin off of my fortune, and someone said they were sister fortunes.  This is so typical of me, I remember structure and effect, but content, oh my, I forget that dreaded content.  The hardest part for me in writing anything is describing what happened, I'm so eager to get to the part where I spin and spin.