Belladodie

In the Pink

2013-01-01T21:12:00.000-08:00

When I arrived, there were Christmas lights strung from the disco balls, and when Craig stood on a chair to switch on the revolving mechanism, the balls wouldn't turn. Maybe unhook the Christmas lights, I suggested. That worked, and New Years Eve could begin for real. I drank some of Cliff Hengst's amazing bourbon sangria and danced to dj-ed New Wave disco, music I'm not particularly fond of or familiar with. But the longer I danced the more it grew on me.

Disco balls and spiky potted plant cast a shadow play upon the wall. And even though Kevin and I had agreed to only stay an hour, I danced on and on.

The earrings I wore mirrored the disco balls—crystal pave balls hanging from silver wires. The crystal chips are gray and therefore called "black diamond," which made me think of Elizabeth Taylor. I'd like to say I felt like her, but I have no idea what Liz would have felt like dancing beneath the pink disco balls in black dress and heels, black diamond earrings swaying to the beat.

The crystal ball earrings are an Etsy knock off of balls made from real diamond pave called Shamballa. Rap musician Jay Z was the first person to custom order a Shamballa bracelet. From the Shamballa website: "We make precious jewellery that encourages the possibility of connecting to our inner compassion and wisdom."

And later: "The Star of Shamballa—two intercrossed thunderbolts, represents the irresistible force created when creativity springs in a pure, conscious mind. The creative force is found in everyone, we invite you to explore the force within you."

So, I guess there's magic and then there's materialism, and I hope for the New Year I'll have the capacity to discern the difference between the two, if indeed there is a difference.

Today Kevin and I walked to a nearby cafe and ate breakfast-lunch-dinner, all at once, and he told me about the lives of Bunny Lang and Henry Fonda, alternating so quickly between the two that sometimes I didn't know who was living which life. "How's your meatballs?" I asked. "Too spicy."

Listen

2012-12-31T19:26:00.001-08:00

For today's image, I went to my iphone and downloaded the last photo I took. It's Quincey on the couch, buried in wool and velvet. It's a good image for the end of the year, as I hope that we all can feel such comfort—and a sense of protection, no matter how fragile.

This has been a disappointing day for me in that I slept nearly 12 hours and still woke up groggy. Have been sleeping like crazy. I know this is part of my body healing from various issues—I'm being as vague here as Hilary Clinton has been about recent health stuff, and yes it pains me that we live in such an environment where right-wingers were calling her illness a Benghazi flu, and instead of backing off from that, they're going all conspiracy and saying it's a fake blood clot. As much as I adore Rachel Maddow, I have this urge to stop paying attention to the news, to curl up like Quincey in luxurious muddledness. She eats, she shits on the floor, she offers her body for petting. And most of the time she's unconscious and she doesn't feel guilty or frustrated by that.

My psychic told me that I didn't need any more information, that I was full of information and it stays in my head and gets stuck there. She said that I should do whatever feels good to my body, to start making choices in life by how it feels in my body. I pulled my back out Christmas Eve—as I was getting dressed to go to KK's birthday party. I somehow managed to get dressed and hobble down our endless stairs and up Anne McGuire's endless stairs, and at the party I was my old freakish self, relaxed—pain in a way is like being drunk. I felt touched by someone more than once in the course of the evening for I was not capable of erecting those dear barriers. I'm under orders to rest the back and keep wearing a brace, but last night I had the urge to stretch, like it was driving me crazy, so I started with a few cat-cows, and then a few more hands and knees poses, and then child's pose, and then sphinx, and then I was on my back doing happy baby, and I was twisting and rolling and it felt like heaven, like I could stay up all night doing yoga. When I finally stopped and went to bed, and I was so so sore.

This evening I checked out Ariana Reines' and Bett Williams' blogs. They both seem to be doing well, both intense as ever in their unique ways. Earlier in the month in Los Angeles, Kevin and I had a couples dinner with Bett and her partner Emily Stern. It was far too little time to spend together, it made me thirst for more. I haven't answered the last couple of Ariana's very sweet emails. That's the kind of friend I've been of late, as if thinking fondly of someone is a relationship. I suppose it is a relationship, but I want to bring that out of my head and into my body and into the world.

I guess I'm going to a New Year's Eve party tonight. It sounds impossible, as I sit here all muddled and in need of cleansing and a good teeth brushing, but it will be good, this stepping outward. Sitting before me on the desk is a print out of CA Conrad's interview with Alice Notley on trance writing. I'm reading it because I feel like I lost the ability to let go in my writing, not lost it, misplaced it, and I want to get back to it. I wrote an essay for a show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and it turned out well, but I had barely begun to say everything I had to say, so I extended the essay, including material about the Bay Area, and read it mid-December at the Machine Project in Los Angeles—after dinner with Emily and Bett. But this past week, all sorts of other ideas have opened up, and now I'm extending it again, like it will not stop, and with each layer of revision, it gets closer to the personal. There's little of the personal in the ICA version, which works for it, but there's only a whiff of it in the extended version. It's like the pulsing self that infuses my writing is hiding, and I guess I need to coax her back out.

To go to sleep at night I'm reading Waking the Moon, an early novel by Elizabeth Hand, a gothic supernatural thriller, and I'm enjoying it tremendously, but am upset by some of my reactions to it, which center around how some of her choices would come across in a grad writing setting. I'm half dozing, propped up in bed, holding this battered used paperback, and I'm thinking, at the end of this long section of close third, she switched perspective to what these other characters were doing that the main POV wouldn't know about, and I'm thinking this is an odd choice, this would never fly in a grad writing program, everybody would tell her not to do it, I probably have told people not to do such a thing, and then I'm shaking my head about how MFAs make people into POV fascists, like, as a reader, I'm totally fine with her switch in POV here, and in regular conversation, the larger world, such shifts happen all the time, modern audiences are capable of switching all over the place, but writing workshops make people act stupider than they are, any variation from internalized rules and they're confused and not understanding, when in the real world I doubt they'd be confused at all. And as I continue reading the Hand, pages later I see what the shift in POV was setting up, and I think, the shift wasn't necessary, we would have read this scene fine without it, and then I'm thinking I bet some stupid editor had her put that in there. And then there was another section where she summarizes a whole relationship before showing the characters in a scene together, and I can hear a dozen voices in a classroom in unison chanting PUT THAT IN SCENE. But, again, as a reader, do I really need those scenes? It's all working and building, and some of the writing is gorgeous, and I'm interested and the tension is dripping off the page. I put down the book and I thought—student-centered learning is over-rated, as it often means that students learn very little. Anything that goes on in an institution is inherently conservative, why not own up to it. From what I've seen, grad writing students love formulaic teachers. The longer I teach, the more I'm in the if it ain't broke don't fix it camp. If most writing students took my psychic's advice and just did what felt right in their bodies, they'd be better off for when I see writing get broken, it's when the person can't get out of their own head and take a look, a good long look, at the world outside, don't allow their selves to fully resonate with that world. They shouldn't be thinking, is it okay to shift from first person to third person in the same narrative. Anything can work, honey, anything if you really own it and connect with it.

Happy New Years to All.

Mooning

2012-12-28T21:37:00.000-08:00

I know, it's been ever since I've written here, and as I've been feeling very private, I'm surprised to be here, but there is this urge tonight to dust off the cobwebs. I've had some physical issues that have screwed with all aspects of my life, but now I'm in rest and recover mode (see how private, me not going on and on about whatever). Last night I began throwing out candy, etc., trying to get my space back to its low-glycemic pre-holiday state. We're having a cold spell in San Francisco, and I haven't adjusted to that yet, perhaps I will never adjust, and I know compared to the East coast I must sound like a pussy complaining about it being 50 degrees out with lows in the mid-40s, but when your only heat is space heaters, it's rough. When we go to bed at night, there is no heat, and I love that, humans and cats snuggling together beneath down comforter and piles of blankets. The cold brings out base, survival consciousness, like I know I own two pairs of sweatpants, and one is in the wash, which means the other is in the bottom of a drawer—and which will win out—my laziness and not wanting to hunt for them—or my shivers. In the photo I'm modeling my upcycled cashmere cowl and wrist warmers I bought on Etsy last winter from some woman in the UK, but they were so perfumed, I couldn't stand to wear them. Off gassing for a year they're fine now and I love them. The original cashmere sweater they're made from must have been expensive for they're the softest things I've ever worn; they're weightless and fluffy like cotton candy, light gray with bold red Frankenstein stitching around the edges. On each arm warmer is attached a small felted cashmere rose. Originally a larger rose was pinned to the cowl. The photo was hard to take, holding the iphone with one hand at arm's length and trying to click without blurring the picture. I was concentrating so hard on that, each image would come out with me looking all dour. I tried smiling, but this is the best I got.

Last night I was up late reading a book about changing one's relationship with time—something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and the book suggested that you go outside at night, lie on your back, and absorb the moon and the stars until you feel a sense of spaciousness. I wasn't going to lie on my back, but I put on Kevin's bulky cardigan over my bathrobe, and Sylvia (my cat whose picture I endlessly post online) went on the back porch, which is 3 storeys up, and we looked at the moon, one day short of full. It was two in the morning, and no human sounds. Sylvia and I felt strangely alone. Half a block away an office building was billowing smoke into the air, or at least the cold was making it look like smoke; it was more atmospheric than toxic in tone. And I looked at the moon and the sparse rippled clouds, and the few stars that broke through the urban sky, I stood there with my head crammed up, heart open until I'd had enough vastness and cold, and I called Sylvia, who was exploring somewhere, out of sight, and we went back inside, and I felt joy. No superlatives or qualifiers. Just joy. I registered that for a few minutes, then I searched out my iphone and went back outside to document, of course. So, here's the moon last night from my back porch.

In the bottom right quadrant, the couple of specks that look like dust on your monitor, are actually stars.

Even though I don't do Christmas I got 4 presents this year. David Brazil gave me a Tommy James & the Shondells greatest hits CD, which I'm listening to in my car. Andrew Kenower posted a video for me on YouTube of the Tiffany cover of "I Think We're Alone Now," the 45 played on 33 rpm so Tiffany sounds like a man. Kevin gives me a book about Sylvia Plath every Christmas. This year was Kathleen Spivak's With Robert Lowell and His Circle, which contains a chapter on Plath. The book looks interesting but kind of sad—to be in the position of being the not famous member of a group, writing about one's famous peers. Been thinking about fame, how little appeal it has for me. Online I was reading bits of Mary Pipher's Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World, how the success of her earlier book Reviving Ophelia destroyed her, her sense of inadequacy before the adoration and expectations of her admirers. I know I'd be the same. I've had the experience of being nervous at a party and not giving the right attention to someone I didn't know, and then having that person hate me for years and years. I'm not immune from projecting stuff onto people, but it's such a bizarre experience when it happens to you. Person to person will project totally contradictory stuff onto me. At my level of marginal success, my social value varies radically from room to room, and it's always just me trying to survive the moment. It makes me think people are remarkably superficial, the judgements we make on so little data. So often when we think we're having a relationship with the outside, we're really just relating to ourselves, our little insecurities and paranoias. Kevin was having a discussion with a friend recently about aging, and the friend said one of the pleasures of aging is that you can let go of past selves. So, that's another thing I've been thinking about, which seems a suitable approaching New Years thing to be thinking: which selves would I gladly part with?

I forgot the 4th present: Anne McGuire's hosting Kevin's birthday party. That was the greatest gift of all.

Balmy Photo Journal

2012-09-25T21:07:00.001-07:00

I'm updating my iphone as I write this, so there's the terror that the thing is going to explode or something in the process. Right now, it's just sitting there with an Apple logo and this long, thin white lozenge-shaped outline on a black background.

Now my life has been swept through with school stuff, all the big projects, beginning of the semester organizing have been taken care of, and life should proceed like clockwork, with time for writing, once I finish a major personal avoid-like-the-plague project this week. This summer, to balance the intense writing, I petted my witchy side with two projects. One, to create a successful non-dairy vanilla ice cream, and two, to make a luxurious body oil to slather on after showering. Both projects took many trials, but ultimately met with success.

Tastiness was easy for the ice cream, but to get an acceptable texture proved surprisingly difficult. I did a lot of research, and I found out various strategies to keep it from freezing so hard. I ended up adding eggs to my homemade almond milk and cashew base, which makes it not vegan. Part of me thinks I should keep trying, but I don't mind the eggs, and my homemade vanilla ice cream is the best nondairy vanilla ice cream by a mile that I've ever tasted. It's insanely good.

The body oil also took many trials, but, again, it's this divine luxury product that would cost $$ in a fancy boutique.

Today I took things up a notch and made my first herbal balm. I took photos to commemorate the occasion.

First I solar-infused olive oil with calendula flowers for 6 weeks. I purchased all my ingredients at Rainbow Grocery. There are special places online you can get everything for cheaper, but it's wonderful to be able to buy all the witchy supplies I could possibly want, a few blocks from home.

Today I strained the oil through cheesecloth:

Here it is in bottles. You're supposed to put it in dark bottles, but I didn't have any, so I'll store it in a cupboard or the refrigerator.

Then I grated some beeswax. I read that you should use a dedicated grater for the beeswax, so I used a microplane grater that sits in a drawer because I don't like it. A box grater would be easier because with the microplane the wax wanted to fly all over the kitchen, but I developed a technique that minimized that. Note the glove in the following picture. I've learned from repeated finger gratings to use a cut-resistant glove.

Then I melted the beeswax in the oil. The measuring cup is sitting on top of a canning ring, which left rust marks on my pot. Fortunately with a bit of Bon Ami, they were easy to remove. It was really hard to keep the water from boiling like crazy. Next time I'll use a makeshift double boiler set up.

Then I stirred in some vitamin E oil and poured half of the concoction into a jar. I added lavender essential oil to the remaining stuff and poured it into a jar. The third jar contains a mixture of the scented and unscented. There are indentations in the surface because I couldn't keep myself from poking it while it cooled.

I'd refine my technique next time, and future infusion plans involve herbal blends, things like comfrey and plantain and lavender, but I rubbed this stuff on and it was velvety and amazing in every way. I'm having this fantasy of living in the backwoods somewhere, stirring my cauldron and making magical potions for all my friends.

Guru Movies

2012-09-17T21:53:00.001-07:00

Hi All—the deadline for my book has been moved back, and there's still tons and tons of writing to do, but I can now proceed at it in a more relaxed state, but not too relaxed as I have much to cover and I'm such a slow writer, but I so love the slowness of writing, alternately losing myself in brainstorming and precision. As part of my research I've been seeing guru-themed movies. This summer I saw Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which, despite it surface flutters of appearing provocative, was basically one long spin-doctored advertisement for Shambhala. I have no gripes against spin-doctored advertisements for Shambhala, but I do take issue at having to pay to see one. This movie should be shown for free as part of a recruitment process. My therapist, who's practiced Zen for 30 years, felt the same way about it. But, in the teeny women's room of the Roxie Theater, one of the multitude of aging bourgeois spiritual types was wearing these great leather sneakers, and she told me what brand they were, so now I'm wearing them as I type this. The CTR-woman told me they were very expensive, but worth it.

A couple of weeks ago, Kevin and I went to see Kumaré, the feature-length documentary about the Indian-American guy from New Jersey who decided to become a guru named Kumaré to explore issues around spirituality and belief. I found myself quite swept up in the movie, partially because impersonator/director Bikram Gandhi is so cute and charismatic. He has star quality oozing from his pores. Kevin and I went to the late show at the Roxie, and the crowd leaving the first show looked exactly like the aging bourgeois spiritual audience I sat among at Crazy Wisdom. Gandhi eventually comes up with a philosophy he can believe in—that we all carry a guru within us and therefore we don't need external gurus. He uses this idea to convince himself that he's doing good through his deception of his loyal followers. That afternoon I watched online interviews with him and the film's producer in which they appeared quite sympathetic, and by time the movie ended, I'd totally bought their schtick.

Kevin wanted to take a picture of the film's producer, who did a Q&A after the movie. The producer was this totally paranoid guy who acted like we were stalking him, which was funny considering we'd just watched a movie about luring in the unsuspecting, and this guy seemed to suspect everybody. Kevin said, can I take your picture, and the guy said why, and Kevin said for Facebook, and the guy said, suspiciously, what Facebook? Kevin said his personal Facebook page, and he finally agreed, but since the light was so dark, Kevin said he'd get him later in the lobby. Even before Kevin freaked him out, I told the guy that I was writing a book about cults and I so resonated with what they were saying in the movie, and again, the vibe that I was this crazy stalker. When the guy exited to the lobby, he skirted past us. Kevin nabbed him outside as the guy nervously tried to ignore him. He's an idiot, as Kevin's really good at portraits, and some of his photos are going to be shown in the near future at White Columns. Spending nearly all of your time in the bubble of a writing/arts scene, as Kevin and I do, it's odd to be in a situation where you're not known. Kevin and I must project a much creepier front than we realize. So, instead of the producer, I've included a photo Kevin took of Molly, one of the duped followers, who couldn't have been sweeter. I suppose the duped are always sweeter than the dupers.

This week, on a DVD from Netflix we watched The Guru, a 2002 romantic comedy starring Jimi Mistry and Heather Graham. Jimi Mistry as a fake guru is just as cute as Bikram Gandhi is in Kumaré, but not nearly as charismatic, probably because Mistry's character never believes what he preaches—until the end when he tells his betrayed number one follower, Marisa Tomei, that she would be fine because really what had changed her was not him, but her guru within. Kevin and I turned to one another, our jaws dropped, and Kevin said it first, exactly what I was thinking: This is the same movie as Kumaré! That Mistry's guru slept with Tomei is just considered okay, not really addressed—Guruji's cavalier attitude towards the power dynamics of his involvement with Tomei's cardboard heiress character is perhaps the only genuine moment in the film. In a couple of interviews online, Bikram Gandhi is asked if he got involved with any of his students, and he said something like the morals of fake gurus are stricter than those of real gurus, implying no, he didn't.

I allowed myself to love Kumaré as a character. Like his followers, I squelched his contradictions, his narcissism, his smarmy exploitations, so seduced I was by the focused sexiness of his yogic goodness. But after seeing The Guru, my attitude towards Kumaré shifted and I feel kind of dirty having been sucked into believing.

Long time no see : Come see me on Saturday!

2012-07-26T22:39:00.000-07:00

Let's get the come see me part over with first. On Saturday the 28th, at 8:00 I'll be reading with London-based writer Francesca Lisette—which is so exciting, and I can't wait to meet her—and with Jason Jimenez, who I'm also excited to be reading with. Last spring, Jason graduated from the grad writing program at California College of the Arts. I worked with him every semester he was there and I was the chair of this thesis committee. I worked with Jason so closely I sometimes refer to him as my spawn. He's a very talented writer and I advised him to read all the weird kinky stuff because the crowd at Woolsey Heights where we'll be reading is super sophisticated and will get what he's doing. As an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, Jason studied with Rob Halpern, so he has serious New Narrative cred. The reading's at Andrew Kenower's house in a teeny—like one block long—neighborhood in Berkeley that seems much more like Oakland than Berkeley—Woolsey Heights. Even though Andrew's smeared his address all over Facebook, I don't feel comfortable putting it down here. If you want to come and don't know where it is, email me.

I'm planning to read stuff from the book I'm working on. Not sure what. There's a shitload of material, but it's not yet been officially organized. Will pull something together by Saturday. Which brings us to the long time no see. I've been writing my book. Seriously. No more researching (that's not really true, everything I'm reading is towards the book), no more taking notes, no more organizing and organizing. I've been sitting down and plowing through and writing the thing. To do so I've pretty much chained myself to home, cancelled all appointments except therapy, haven't seen many friends, have been horrible on email. I mean seriously not leaving the house, sometimes for a couple of days at a time, only sort of getting dressed, my writing uniform being floral knit pajama bottoms and a tank top. When I'd go out, I'd switch the pajama bottoms to yoga pants. My immersion method worked—in less than two weeks I broke through my resistance and got in synch with the book. Now I'm pretty much doing the same immersion, but I've added in long walks and going to cafes, where I write or critique the work of my low residency grad students.

It was miserable at first, I was climbing the walls with anxiety and boredom, but now I'm having a wonderful time. I feel like I could do this for the rest of my life, it's such a luxury. In the fall, no one is going to be able to say I wasted my summer.

So, anyway, hi! I think of blogging fondly, but I'm in monkish mode. Writing a book is like having an intense affair, and to extend the metaphor into groan corniness, the book is a jealous mistress. This one especially.

The image at the top is as still from Fulci's The Beyond, which is so great at evoking emptiness. Though, thankfully, I have the emptiness but not the gruesomeness of that movie. No gouged eyeballs here. A full emptiness rather than an empty emptiness. This is bringing up a memory for me, but I can't go there, not right now.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 11

2012-06-24T00:19:00.003-07:00

Kevin got in late last night, we slept until 11, I wrote for a bit, Kevin answered email, we got dressed and were out all day and evening playing with the locals. It's late again and I'm tired, so I'll end the Summer Hotel Retreat series with a photo log.

We began our day on Venice Blvd. in Culver City, lunching with Hedi El Kholti at Cafe Brazil. Hedi's a wonderful story teller and I was moved by his love of reality TV, how his enjoyment goes beyond simple irony to heartfelt identification with the artificially constructed realities of the participants. A reminder that you don't have to believe art in order to be moved by it. I adore Hedi's willingness to invest in the cheesy.

After lunch we drove over to La Cienega and stopped in at a few art galleries. Here's Hedi walking behind Jason Sherry orbs comprised of eyeglasses at Luis De Jesus gallery.

Since our next stop was Chinatown, which is on the way to Hedi's home, he led us there in his car. It was so much fun, following his Subaru, letting go of my agency, and cruising through backroads of LA that Mapquest would never suggest. Once in Chinatown, we ate more food with Vanessa Place and Christine Wertheim at Via Cafe. Vanessa instilled within me a great desire to hear Dolly Parton's cover of "Stairway to Heaven."

Vanessa Place, Christine Wertheim, Kevin Killian

Then we walked over to Poetic Research Bureau to hear Julia Bloch and Frank Montesonti. Here's PRB principal Joseph Mosconi proudly standing beside the placard in the plaza outside the venue.

Here's Frank Montesonti at a particularly dramatic moment of his text. Frank went to Indiana University, as did I, where he met Andrew Kenower before Andrew moved to the Bay Area. Small world. Frank presented two bodies of work. The first was comprised of well-crafted poems that he jokingly derided as "journal gems." The second manuscript, of newer work, was more experimental, looser, shaggier, much more out there. But he seems equally comfortable in both modes. It was a satisfying range of tone.

Julia read from her new book Letters to Kelly Clarkson, whom you'll remember was the first winner of American Idol. Julia began the collection 10 years ago in my private workshop. Kevin and I sat in the front row like proud hens as she gave a stunning reading. She ended with newer work, one poem inspired by Terry Castle's talk at the Q.E.D. panel I was on that launched the Summer Hotel Retreat series, so Julia brought my Southern California experience round full circle. I loved the Terry Castle poem.

Here's Diane Ward and Aaron Kunin standing in the courtyard after the reading. I dreamed about Aaron last night, so Kevin said I brought him to the reading. I've known both Diane and Aaron for many years, and it was a treat to get to spend time with them this evening.

The readers and most of the audience ended up at Hop Louie, a nearby bar. Here's Kevin, Diane, Julia, and Allison Harris horsing around outside.

And now, as I click away at the keyboard, Kevin's lying fully clothed on top of the kingsize bed doing heavy sleep breathing. I'm exhausted and can't wait to climb on there with him. Tomorrow night I'll be back in San Francisco, with my three cats, each in their own special way guilt-tripping me for being gone so long. Thank you all, whoever you are, for sharing my Summer Hotel Retreat with me. I couldn't have done it without you.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 10

2012-06-23T02:16:00.002-07:00

As I type this, Kevin is on a plane heading this way, a plane that took off three and a half hours late. Poor Kevin. I had plans for the evening that fell through last minute, too late to set something up with somebody else, especially with my being on the west side on Friday, the traffic out of here is monstrous. So I decided to go to Santa Monica, simply because it's not here, and it's easy to get to. I started with a Taoist yoga class. It was at a laid back neighborhoody studio, a mile or so away from the water and all the shopping. Here's the back door to the studio. This was a beginning class. It was packed, mostly with regulars. Lots of slow movements that strengthen your core and limber your joints. A heavy emphasis on openness and relaxation. I enjoyed the balancing poses, and I normally hate balancing poses. The teacher said that balance wasn't static, so we'd be balanced on one leg and then we were supposed to sway in all directions, bend forward and backwards, exploring the limits of our balance, and experiencing the shifting nature of balance. Usually in balancing poses people are wobbling and gritting their teeth, but this was fluid and fun. Even though I felt good afterwards I didn't feel totally transformed like I tend to after a Hatha class. But I'd go back again because I liked the energy of the place

Then I headed over to downtown Santa Monica and used up the remaining funds on my $75 gift certificate to Real Foods Daily. I like hippie vegetarian food, and that's one thing that's almost impossible to get in San Francisco. I ate beans and quinoa and greens and vegan caesar salad. And then I took a walk, and of course I took another photo of one of the dinosaur topiary fountains.

It looks like the dinosaur's spitting light, but it's water. It's surprising how indifferent the people in the photo seem to the dinosaur. I think we all should be bowing down to it. I saw one young blonde woman posing in front of it, and she stuck her tongue all the way out, so it looked fat and wide and hung down towards her chin. It was a very unflattering look. Clearly, the dinosaur held some strange bestial power over her. She maintained this pose for a really long time as a friend slowly took her picture.

Every few feet there were singers with guitars and other street performers. Here's a blurry photo of a guy who was doing a combo of break dancing and acrobatics. He was part of a troupe. They were very professional and really worked the audience. When they passed around a neon green bucket, I felt enchanted and dropped in a $5 bill.

And then, as my hippie food digested, I went to Santa Monica's art theater and saw Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, starring Jane Fonda as a hippie grandmother who wins over the affections of her uptight lawyer daughter who she hasn't seen in 20 years, as well as her teenage granddaugher and grandson. The movie was filled with accomplished actors—it had enough star power to light a small city, but it was dreck. No development, the kind of movie where characters will say two lines to one another, and then we're supposed to care about them and their relationship. In 80 minutes, the movie developed 3 new love relationships, each of which was given like 5 minutes of tension when everything was falling apart at the end of Act II. The movie also developed, not one, but two alienated mother/daughter relationships that moved, predictably, towards understanding. Jane's character lives in Woodstock, which has been frozen in time, having never left the 60s, and everybody who comes there, regardless of age, starts smoking grass, going to protest marches, dancing at music festivals, and howling at the full moon. I think they should have made it a horror film, about the sinister effect this town has on all who enter it, with Jane the head sorceress of a horde of tie-dyed zombies. That would have been fun to watch. Jane Fonda professionally emoted like crazy, but had no chemistry with anybody. It was like she was acting up a storm to a blank space into which the other characters were later digitally inserted. Here's a series of pix I took on my iphone of Jane emoting.

Kevin will be here in half an hour or so, and aloneness will be no more. I'll still be as weird as ever, but he'll be here to soften the edge.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 9

2012-06-21T23:08:00.001-07:00

Here's a palm tree at the Howard Hughes Center, to give this blog that Southern California feel. Of course they have palm trees in San Francisco, but they don't look this festive. Spent the evening in the sushi place at the Howard Hughes Center, eating veggie sushi, drinking beaujolais, and reading student work. I don't usually drink wine while reading student work, but sometimes the occasion just calls for it. There were so many other fun things I could have done this evening, so many wonderful people here I want to see but won't have time for, but I was drooling with social exhaustion, plus my whole evening was geared towards my being able to sleep in tomorrow morning, which won't be that late because I have to get up in time to do my writing project before I head out. I wore my new black sweater to the sushi place. I avoid Nordstrom Rack as most things I've bought there instantly end up in the Goodwill bag, but this sweater is a find. Here I am, via the wonders of my MacBook Air's Photobooth program, wearing my black sweater. Note the abstract hotel art on the wall behind me, and the glamorous golden drapes.

I look mean in the photo, like I'm a serious writer. This blog for me is the equivalent of an artist's sketchbook. It's all about quickly putting things together in a way that appeals to me. Often I could care less about the content, it's all about the quick formal coalescence. Some people who have commented on the blog have gotten that. I gave a seminar today and one of the students came up to me and said she was enjoying my Hotel Retreat. I told her not to tell any of the other students about it. I've never figured out how to teach and be fully human. I sometimes feel like a figure, a functionary, not a person.

I almost went this evening to see Snow White and the Huntsman. It sounded so luxurious to get lost in something large and colorful and loud. In San Francisco I tried to get Kevin to go see it, and he was willing but he said he heard it was awful, so I gave up, and then we got busy and ended up not going to see any movie. I rarely go to the movies alone. The last one was Bridesmaids, in Fort Bragg, where I'll be going at the end of the month with Bett Williams. I looked at the trailers to Snow White and the Huntsman, and just from that it was clear that a major problem with the movie is that Charlize Theron is gorgeous and fabu up the wazoo, and Kristen Stewart is like this tense little rodent. No way would I ever buy KS as being more fair than CT. Disney got it right, making Snow White cuter than the evil queen. And what's up with Snow White wearing armor and going into battle???? What about the miraculous power of female passivity? And a sexuality so powerful that when aroused it awakens you from the dead? Flailing around on a battlefield isn't repressed enough; Kevin's right, it's awful.

This is the end of this round of aloneness. Temporary aloneness is such a joy, knowing that tomorrow night Kevin will swoop in, in a huge metal bird and relieve it.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 8

2012-06-20T23:02:00.002-07:00

In my head today, reading about narrative time, and not finding it as interesting as I'd hoped and also thinking about with the popularity of "new technologies" there needs to be new theories of narrative time, ones which address the subversion of closure of say blog-based narratives, and I'm sure there are plenty of such theories already and I'm showing my ignorance here. It struck me how even something as straightforward as the buddhist works against conventional notions of narrative time in that the narrator does not know the ending ahead of time. The ending was not a planned ending but revealed as the narrator-writer went through the process of living/writing the material. It was not a neatly plotted looking back, and events do not follow one another with a sense of causal inevitability.

I'm very much in my head today. As I mentioned at the beginning of the Summer Hotel Retreat, I'm working on another writing project. I do that first thing in the morning, so my days are framed by writing, and that's basically all I want to do. The outside world doesn't feel very real (except as a palette for details) when you're in writing mode. Hi, you're a person, I will engage with you because that's what people do with one another, and I am programmed to do that. But I come alive when alone and writing.

The picture is of the black whisper-thin wool pullover I got this evening, on clearance at Nordstrom Rack. Antioch is so cold, and I couldn't bear another day of shivering. I don't know why I forgot that and didn't pack something cozy to wear at school. The sweater has raglan sleeves. According to Wikipedia, "A raglan sleeve is a type of sleeve whose distinguishing characteristic is to extend in one piece fully to the collar, leaving a diagonal seam from underarm to collarbone." I include the definition because I'm used to Kevin whose vocabulary for women's clothing is surprisingly paltry. Those buttons there don't button, they just dot the left distinguishing diagonal seam, and there's a bit of shirring that also comes off of that seam. For this sweater it's all about that seam.

Been thinking how every time I didn't get what I wanted when I was young, it turned out to be a blessing. I guess that means that loss and suffering can be a blessing even if they don't make you a better person. They may simply be about propelling you into other situations. Don't want to say better situation or to get into anything like destiny here because that would bring us back so some kind of inevitable narrative closure. Fuck that.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 7

2012-06-19T22:43:00.002-07:00

Today was all school school school, and afterwards I went out to a very nice dinner with former students. This morning I raced to get dressed so I could walk to my office. I'm like this kid who can't wait to scamper through the streets. It was overcast and not warm or cool, an oddly temperatureless atmosphere, but the mugginess was such that you'd feel clammy and sweaty no matter what you wore. When I got to campus a guy in a lime green safety vest was mowing the lawn, and there was that intoxicating suburban grassy scent, which like the scent of freshly cut wood makes my father loom large in my consciousness. All that I'm doing here is punctuated and framed by my reading of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, which Meredith Quartermain suggested after she read the buddhist. And it's the perfect book for me right now, the waves and waves of charismatic prophets. This book is proving to me beyond a doubt that my suspicious that human rationality is a total myth have been correct all along. I'm very interested in charismatic poets as well as religious figures. My studies of cults have revamped my understanding of poetry communities. Since I started with grass, I went to Google images and typed in "green." I chose the frogs because they seem so adoring of one another. Two beings on a leaf—is that enough to constitute a community? My father is the only person I've ever heard call French people "frogs."

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 6

2012-06-19T01:11:00.000-07:00

I didn't take any pictures today, didn't talk with anybody not connected to Antioch, except for Kevin on the phone. Kevin's doing fine, very busy with many laughter-invoking stories to tell.

I went to a dinner in downtown Culver City this evening at the chair's house, for faculty and graduating students. Catered in his backyard, with great food and wine, it was fun. You access Steve's house by "passing through a walkway between two pairs of small salmon-colored Spanish court-style apartments (one of which was allegedly occupied by Marilyn Monroe in her early studio days)." Passing MM's door was just the beginning of my Hollywood history tour. Afterwards as Alistair McCartney and I walked back to the parking garage, he pointed out Culver Studios, where Gone With the Wind was shot. We stopped and peered through the gates.

Here's a picture of the studio in 1920. It still looks the same, an ornate white mansion. We also passed the Culver Hotel, where most of the Munchkins stayed during the filming of Wizard of Oz. From the hotel website:

The reputed stories of the Munchkins' supposedly drunken shenanigans are legendary, and helped inspire the 1981 movie comedy Under the Rainbow (starring Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher). The producers used the actual hotel as a shooting site for that fictionalized version of the making-of-Oz story.

According to some of the not-so-tall tales, many of the 124 adult midgets got drunk, sang choruses of "Ding Dong, The Bitch Is Dead," and almost wrecked the hotel.

No one so far is trashing my hotel, but you never know from day to day who your floormates are going to be, who's going to propel you into wondering what in the world could be causing that person to pace incessantly, what combination of effects makes other people slam doors repeatedly, as if they want the whole floor to know they're there—the kind of person who is constantly shouting I EXIST. Here's a photo I took a couple of days ago of the mirror I use to put on make up. It has suction cups on the back of it, and I stuck it on the window because I've found that facing natural light I can best see what I'm doing. The room heater and a foot-wide ledge are between me and the mirror, so I have to lean towards it. I usually put my left hand on the window for balance, and I sometimes wonder what someone in the parking lot below who happens to look up thinks when they see me peering so intently and awkwardly into the window. Perhaps they think I've taken some bath salts, the evil designer drug I was reading about online, and I'm trying to eat my way through the glass. Perhaps they think I'm a voyeur staring down at them, or an exhibitionist about to throw off all my clothes. Or perhaps they just look and don't think anything at all.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 5

2012-06-18T01:06:00.001-07:00

Tonight I drove over to Matias Viegener's house in Silver Lake. Connie Samaras and Jeannie Simms arrived a few minutes after I did. Jeannie is in town from Boston, where she teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. The four of us went to a nearby pho house and shouted at one another over noodles and a shared rice crepe. It was very loud and hip in the pho house and communication was difficult. But we had fun. I taught Connie a closed-mouth smile that seems to be popular with many young women on Facebook. You pooch out your lips in a pout and then you crank up the corners of your mouth. So we were practicing that and then we all got out our iphones and started shooting pictures of one another.

Here's my favorite of the ones I took:

It was decided that the overhead bulb was too harsh, so Jeannie held her hand up to mute the light, and in the bottom left, that's Matias holding up a napkin to bounce fill light off of. Connie's shots of Jeannie and herself were tightly framed, and sweet.

Afterwards, walking to the car, we all photographed the window of the fetish shop down the street, which had a Houdini/magic act theme. A woman in a gold latex gown is levitated/held in midair by strings attached to bondage straps around her neck and ankles. The photo above, taken before dinner in daylight, registers the full effect. But at night, the lighting added drama and mystery, like we had stepped into a Hammer film, and when we turned our backs the mannequins would come to life, and if not get us, get somebody. I was burnt from lack of sleep and teaching all day, and it was such a treat to be able to step out of conversational mode and just play, to fart around doing iphone snapshots with real photographers who have shows, and in Connie's case, a forthcoming retrospective. My mother played with people a lot, and she never stopped doing that. I see her laughing so hard, she's bent over, gasping and sputtering.

On the way up the hill to Matias' house, one block was loaded with police cars stopped at erratic angles, and in the middle of the block we could see yellow tape cordoning off an area, and our carload decided the yellow tape meant there had been a murder. And the rest of the three or so blocks to Matias' house, we discussed how when you see ghastly car wrecks or other personal disasters that you're sure have resulted in death, you can google and google and you can never find reference to them, can never find out what happened.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 4

2012-06-17T00:28:00.000-07:00

This one's a quickie, as I have to get up at 6 in the morning. I had a wonderful evening with Christine Wertheim, Sheree Rose, and Anna Gibbs. Anna's visiting Christine from Australia, and she tells me we met before, in San Francisco years ago, back in the days when Dan Davidson and Kathy Acker were still alive. I can't remember if Dan and Kathy knew each other, but Anna knew both of them. We met at the Olympic Day Spa in Koreatown, and soaked and exfoliated for a couple of hours. Moving back and forth between the steaming mugwort pool and the ice water pool, after the initial shock of it, becomes so exhilarating. Sitting in my robe on a couch outside the pools, sipping tea and taking in all the naked female bodies, all shapes and ages and races, I found my heart twirling open, embracing all of them. It was one of those moments that are very quiet, but fucking intense.

Then we drove down Olympic a few blocks to the Beverly Soon Tofu House. In the photo, from left to right: Christine, Sheree, Anna. Great conversation, great food. Christine ordered barbecued squid, and just this morning on Facebook somebody had posted a link to an ABC News article, "Cooked Squid Inseminates Woman's Mouth." It was gruesome. Each time one my tablemates stuck a slice of this like 10-inch long squid in her mouth, I'd feel kind of squirmy, and it took every social grace that's ever been instilled in me not to mention the article as they ate.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 3

2012-06-16T01:21:00.000-07:00

Feeling homesick. Talked with Kevin on the phone this evening for an hour and a half. Here's a photo of a prop he sent me, for the video/play he's collaborating on with Darrell Alvarez for SFMOMA. It's a crown of thorns Takming Chung made out of canvas and chalk. He painted it black, and while it was wet, rolled and shaped the canvas around his head and inserted the chalk and then let it dry on his head for 8 hours. Artists do amazing things. Around them, I feel so incompetent with physicality. The black ball thingy it's perched on is just for display and is not a part of the project.

Kevin said he was a little down as well and that talking to him, I "diverted" him. And I was like, diverted is a strange word to use, isn't that something you do with traffic, like divert it to another lane. So then we talked about the various meanings of divert and diversion, and this is why it was so easy to be on the phone for an hour and a half. When I said to Kevin we lived in a police state, he said that someone could be listening into our conversation right now, and then we discussed whether they would have been amused, and we agreed that it was a fun lively, conversation, and that they probably would have been amused. Kevin told me his father was at the Battle of the Bulge, something I hadn't heard before.

Here's a little wail: I want to go home.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 2

2012-06-15T01:00:00.002-07:00

Settled into my hotel room, am sipping chamomile tea and nibbling on half a rice cake with Brazillian pepper tree honey produced in Long Beach. I never heard of a Brazilian pepper tree. According to the label, "Brazilian peppertree has a rich, vibrant flavor, from the nectar of this familiar tree that blooms throughout California in the late heat of summer." Coming from San Francisco, I think what late heat of summer? I wonder if it grows up there. Probably in Golden Gate Park for Golden Gate Park miraculously contains the plants of all nations and ecosystems.

I looked up the Brazilian pepper tree, and it's the plant pink peppercorns come from, which really aren't peppercorns at all. The Brazilian pepper tree isn't very popular online for it's considered an invasive species. From Wikipedia:

In the United States, it has been introduced to California, Texas, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, Louisiana and Florida. Planted originally as an ornamental outside of its native range, Brazilian pepper has become widespread and is considered an invasive species in many subtropical regions with moderate to high rainfall, including parts or all of Australia, the Bahamas, Bermuda, southern China, Cuba, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Hawaii, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Mauritius, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Norfolk Island, Puerto Rico, Réunion, South Africa, and the United States. In drier areas, such as Israel and southern California, it is also grown but has not generally proved invasive. In California, it is considered invasive in coastal regions by the California Invasive Plant Council.

California Invasive Plant Council? Wow. For me the Brazilian pepper tree embodies female excess. In the above photo, the man is looking at her in fear and disdain. He's thinking to himself this tree is too much, too fucking much. He finds himself drawn to her anyway, and he hates that. I'm enjoying the honey from this pushy plant, which is surprisingly spicy and a touch bitter.

At Venice Whole Foods, when I sitting at the outside tables, eating dinner, I saw a very attractive, well put together young woman digging through the trash cans for takeout containers that had food remaining in them. She gathered a few containers then sat down and ate from them. In San Francisco, I've seen plenty of people digging for food in garbage cans, but none of them approached this woman's glamor. I thought of the website I found a month or so ago about which Hollywood stars had been homeless. There are many such lists online. Here's one. It was surprising how many stars once lived in their cars or shelters or slept outside. I imagined this woman as the next Cameron Diaz, and at first she'd suppress her Whole Foods scavenging, but then she'd embrace it for it gave her street cred. After I ate I went back into Whole Foods to shop, where I saw a real star, more of a character actor, an aging man with a full head of beautiful white hair who plays older male parts, reassuring us that we can look our age but still be incredibly handsome. Hopefully I'll recognize him in something while we're watching TV and Kevin can tell me who he is.

Driving back to the hotel I heard a cut from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on the radio, which made me feel like I'd really arrived. Every time I'm here they play Dark Side of the Moon on the radio, something I've never heard on any other radio. But then I never listen to the radio except when I'm here, so maybe all cities are constantly broadcasting Dark Side of the Moon.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 1

2012-06-14T02:19:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm back in Culver City. When I got in to LAX, getting bags and rental car took way longer than I would have dreamed. This was going to make what I'd imagined as a relaxing time before the Q.E.D. panel at the MAK Center into a rushed frenzy, except I was too tired and steeped in the endless monotone of airport time to feel frenzy. I played on Facebook on my iphone as I waited in the scandalously long line at the rental car place. I had fun standing in the scandalously long line, turning fucking off into a survival skill. I stopped at the Trader Joe's near the airport and picked up a few things like water and soy coffee creamer and some organic apricots and blackberries, and these lovely peonies. What do you put peonies in, in a hotel room? The full stems I put in the ice bucket, and the blossom that broke, I put in a water glass. These peonies make me insanely happy. Small comforts excite in a hotel room. I brought with me the sprig of mugwort Ariana Reines gave me when we had dinner on Sunday. Ariana's mugwort also makes me very happy.

Here's a picture of Ariana at Ritual Cafe on Valencia Street, looking wonderfully happy.

I don't know how regularly I'll be chronicling this summer's hotel retreat, as I plan to work on other writing projects while here, but doing this is oddly seductive for me—again, the small things make you happy in a hotel room, so we'll see.

The Authentic Objects panel was great. Terry Castle was spunky and playful and super smart, projecting an eccentricity of someone who's put up with so much in life and just isn't going to fucking put up with it any longer. Judie Bamber talked about her series of drawings and paintings based on photos of her mother. Kevin and I were lucky enough go to a show of them in Culver City the last time I came down here. Here's a link to some of the images, they're awesome, with an eroticism that really mucks around with conventional notions of the mother-daughter romance. I loved what Judie had to say about how making the pieces was an enactment of her unfulfilled desire for her mother. I got the sense that making the art was invoking a love that's never attainable. Lots of talk on the panel about the unattainability of the loved object. Vanessa Place was a marvel of spontaneously explicating threads she saw in all our work, and she brought our discussion of objects back to women, women's status as objects. At dinner afterwards she said she wanted the panel to be all women, to hear women, who are objects, speaking about objects. The event deserves much more unpacking than my tired brain will allow. I'll end with a group photo taken outside the sushi place we ate at after the panel.

Terry Castle, Judie Bamber, Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place, Kimberli Meyer

Q.E.D.

2012-06-12T11:03:00.002-07:00

I'll be giving a panel presentation tomorrow night (Wednesday) as part of Les Figues' Q.E.D. series. The topic of the panel is Authentic Objects. I made a handout!

Does an object need a form?
Does an objection?
Does anything speak for itself?

Wednesday | June 13, 2012 | 7:00 p.m.
MAK Center Schindler House 835 N. Kings Road West Hollywood, CA 90069

FEATURING:
Judie Bamber
Dodie Bellamy
Terry Castle

Moderated by Vanessa Place.

$7 General; Free for Friends of the MAK Center and Members of Les Figues Press with RSVP (office[at]makcenter.org).

Q.E.D. is a short series of long conversations on queer art and literature. The series includes three events over the course of three months (April 11, May 9 & June 13, 2012); each evening features a writer, an artist and a critic in a conversation about contemporary issues and conditions of queer art and literature. The series is hosted and moderated by Les Figues Press Co-Director Vanessa Place, and will be recorded and made available online. The program is curated by Les Figues Press and supported through a Cultural Resource Development Grant from the City of West Hollywood.

Q.E.D. takes its name from a novel by Gertrude Stein; Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or Things as They Are) was one of the earliest coming stories, written in 1903 though not published until 1950, after Stein’s death.

Quick Return

2012-06-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

Back from Portland, where Kevin and I read in the fabulous drag bar, Embers. Here's a pic of Siren lip-synching to a Kylie Minogue song. That's Publication Studio's Matthew Stadler approaching the stage to give her a tip. Siren opened the evening with a song, then I read, then Siren did another Kylie song, then Kevin read, then Siren closed the evening. She was singing for tips, so audience members would hand her dollar bills or (preferably) stick them in her cleavage. Of course it was hilarious seeing the poets do this, and adorable when Meredith and Peter Quartermain, who were visiting from Vancouver, did it. One poet said she never imagined she'd do something like stick a dollar bill in Siren's cleavage, and when she did it she felt surprisingly sexual. It was a great evening. Thanks to Donal Mosher and Matthew for arranging it. We stayed at Matthew's house and hung out with him, went to a couple of dinners, and Kevin took some photographs for his vast Raymond Pettibon genitals project, where he photographs men in various states of dress and undress, holding an ink drawing of a lurid pink lifesize set of cock and balls Raymond did, over their own genitals.

When we got back to SF, we dropped off our luggage and headed over to CCA for an exhibition at the Wattis Institute centering on the letter K. "An exhibition curated by Kadist Curatorial Resident Juan A. Gaitán, featuring works by Johanna Calle, Liam Everett, Ceal Floyer, Claire Fontaine, Ken Lum, Ciprian Muresan, Pedro Reyes, Chen Shaoxiong, Gabriel Sierra, and Carey Young." A smart, playful show. Here's Kevin, aka "KK," paying homage to his letter.

At the reading in Portland, Publication Studio gave me my contributor's copy of their new anthology edited by Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler, Revolution: A Reader. I have two pieces in the book, both reprinted from my book Academonia. When Lisa and Matthew asked me if they could include the pieces, nobody could have acted less interested than I. I sent them a "yeah, whatever," email. Imagine my surprise when I get the book and it's jaw-dropping awesome. I can't believe I'm in the same book as this stellar lineup:

Kathy Acker • Etel Adnan • Giorgio Agamben • Arakawa + Gins • Hannah Arendt • Dodie Bellamy • Hakim Bey • David Brazil • Edmund Burke • Thomas Carlyle • Bernal Diaz del Castillo • Mahmoud Darwish • Guy Davenport • Angela Davis • Gilles Deleuze • Stacy Doris • Hal Draper • Frantz Fanon • Shulamith Firestone • M.F.K. Fisher • Michel Foucault • Charles Fourier • Mavis Gallant • Jean Genet • George Grosz • Ian Hamilton Finlay • Alan Halsey • Donna Haraway • Harry Hay • William Hazlitt • Christopher Hill • Langston Hughes • Ivan Illich • The Invisible Committee • Calvin Johnson • J. Krishnamurti • Thomas Kuhn • Violette Leduc • Mina Loy • Lucretius • Asmaa Mahfouz • Agnes Martin • Marshall McLuhan • Louise Michel • Eileen Myles • Elena Poniatowska • Miguel Leòn-Portilla • Michel Ragon • Jacques Rancière • Kristin Ross • Edward Said • Saskia Sassen • Percy Bysshe Shelley • Situationist International • Valerie Solanas • Rebecca Spang • Gertrude Stein • Jalal Toufic • Edward John Trelawney • Flora Tristan • Oscar Tuazon • Vivienne Westwood • Oscar Wilde • Raymond Williams • Mary Wollstonecraft • George Woodcock.

I love the format, where Lisa and Matthew include marginal annotations—annotations isn't the right word for most of them—Lisa and Matthew carry on a conversation in the margins of each piece. Their witty, quirky, brilliant dialogue alone is worth the cover price. The book is arranged by lifestages, "from 'beginning,' to 'childhood,' 'education,' 'adulthood,' and 'death.' The hope is to bring the embodied fact of revolution into the lived present by engaging readers with language that takes them there, no matter where they are to begin with." I believe that if a person were to read this amazing book from cover to cover, it would change their life.

Private Geography

2012-05-28T14:44:00.001-07:00

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

2012-05-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

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!

2012-05-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

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

2012-05-21T22:01:00.002-07:00

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?

2012-05-12T11:07:00.002-07:00

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

2012-05-11T10:33:00.000-07:00

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.