Belladodie

Condensed

2012-01-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

I found this image on my desktop. It reflects how I'm feeling right now. Kind of a mess, very inward, but not too bad. I'm wearing (in the photo) my ruby earrings. The rubies are from Nepal and hand cut in Tibet, or so said the too handsome salesman at the high-end Tibetan shop on Union Street where I stopped in on an impulse right before Christmas. I have my hand in front of my mouth not so much to stop myself from talking but from letting the world fly in the opening. I haven't been writing here because I've been working on my book, and it became clear to me that I needed to contain my energy for that project, to let the pressure build. It's working, the writing is opening up in ways it wasn't before. At first it sounded (and felt) so lonely, just me, my journal, and Microsoft Word, but it's been good, difficult at times, but if I stick with it, there's an opening to glory, which is one of the best feelings in the world. So many wonders lie on the other side of emptiness, but it's hard to have faith to delve into it, kind of like jumping into the icy pool at a spa. Pam Martin and I went to the Kabuki spa last Friday because I found an ancient gift certificate that Brian Bauman had given me. The pools there are shallow, and as opposed to dunking into the cold pool in one clean sweep, as I've done at Korean spas, here you have to squat yourself down into it, a slower process and damned near impossible to follow through on. I did it once. Pam did it 3 times, she said it got easier. Even though they're funkier and more brightly lit, I like the Korean spas better; less attitude. But Pam and I have vowed to return to the Kabuki to use up the rest of the gift certificate. After all that bourgie pampering, we just had to dine someplace upscale, so we chose Dosa—where I once ate a rather unsatisfactory meal with the buddhist, who didn't like the food, and I hadn't been back there since—but Pam and I luxuriated in the Malbec, the dinner, and the best sorbet I've ever tasted. We had a very interesting conversation I vaguely remember, something to do with art and critiques, what sort of feedback is useful to a writer/artist.

Gilbert Sorrentino on writing workshops:

Creative writing workshops are useful in that they tend to bring together young writers who have nobody to talk to. Otherwise, I can say only that in my own experience of them, it is rare that bad writers can be helped or that good writers could not do as well without ever seeing a workshop. Of course, bad writers can often be helped to make marketable products by sheer dint of dogged revision and the mastery of certain modes of "craft," and good writers can be so regularly assailed—by instructors, colleagues, or both and/or mature, become dejected and confused as to the quality of their writing.

I could not agree more. So glad that this semester it's all seminars and working one on one with people.

But, anyway, this is to say, that I probably won't be posting much. You can see I'm kind of dull when it comes to talking to others. I'm doing okay, just doing my private scribbles which Ugly Duckling Presse will make public scribbles in the not too distant future. Much sweetness between Kevin and me these days. We recently watched That Funny Feeling, staring Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin, and agreed it was one of the best comedies we'd ever seen. "Sandra Dee is underrated," Kevin declared. I once was in the women's room of the Castro Theater with Sandra Dee. She was the live guest. She was so drunk, she couldn't get her pants zipped back up and her blouse tucked in, so her handler had to step in and put her back together. So there was the sadness of mortality looming over my watching the superb acting of young Sandra Dee. At a certain point in your life, mortality looms over everything. Oh, yes.

MLA Madness, the Calm Before the Storm

2012-01-05T00:14:00.000-08:00

Kevin and I are staying at the lovely Mayflower Park Hotel in downtown Seattle (according to the internet, known for its "old world charm"), relaxing but with an edge due to Kevin's presenting his paper tomorrow on Robert Duncan's HD Book. I've not read a word of Kevin's paper, "Gay Shame and The HD Book," so am especially thrilled to be in the audience (if I get in, for of course I didn't register for the MLA for no good reason). I'm in the final phases of some sort of stomach bug. I spent Monday and Tuesday either purging or unconscious or reading Charlotte Bronte's Villette, a book I never intended to read but am loving it, her brilliance of detail and psychological depth, etc. The reading took place on the couch, cuddled beneath my Pendleton blanket, which the cats took as an open invitation to party. Here are Quincey and Ted joining/crowding me, taken from my propped up with a pillow eyeview.

This evening, after we settled in at the hotel, Kevin and I had a sweet dinner with local poet, Jeremy Halinen. As an undergraduate, Jeremy studied Ezra Pound's Cantos in a castle in Italy with Pound's daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. Wow, right? We were sitting in the window and poet Chris Nealon walked by, saw us, and came into the restaurant and we all hugged and cooed, and I was reminded that the bumping into old friends—the best part of any conference—was only beginning.

the bluddhist

2012-01-03T12:11:00.000-08:00

Ugo Rondinone's response to the buddhist:

Love is an Angel

2012-01-01T22:46:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year

Like A Hurricane

2011-12-30T23:12:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday at Kevin's birthday party I hooked my MacBook Air up to the speakers on top of the hutch in the kitchen and played a mix of mp3s and Pandora. As the party moved along, suddenly guests were on my computer, choosing songs, and then it was decided I didn't have good enough music, so guests searched YouTube videos and began playing them, and the rest of the evening was taken over with their YouTube DJing. I felt more than a little violated by this, mostly because all these fingers and eyes were touching my computer. Kevin and I share another laptop and a desk computer, but unless we're traveling together, not even Kevin touches this one. I'm typing on it right now.

I've been thinking about the intimacy of our computers, or as Ariana Reines recently called hers, our "instruments." When Eileen Myles was here in November she found herself without a laptop, so I lent her our 13-inch MacBook, which usually sits on the kitchen table. When I got it back I discovered that Eileen didn't clear her trail. Drafts of her writing dotted the desktop, and when I clicked Gmail and FaceBook, I went to her pages—my computer had saved her passwords. And last week when I tried to log on to online banking, I went to her login page. Her online banking ID is a riot, but of course I'm not going to repeat it here. Eileen had infiltrated my space, and I enjoyed following her trail, it was like the ghost of Eileen was waving to me. Valiantly, I logged her out of everything and resisted the urge to snoop.

When Lindsey Boldt was YouTube DJing she put on Sissy Nobby, who I instantly loved. I spent a fair amount of time looking up Nobby as well as New Orleans bounce music. (Sissy Nobby and I have two mutual FaceBook friends: Marcus Ewert and Billy Miller.) The video I can't get out of my head is "Like A Hurricane":

I find this video to be both silly and profound, it's like it creates a new category: the profoundly silly. The butt bouncing looks so fun, like something babies would do because it feels so fucking good. In post-Katrina New Orleans, to chant "Like A Hurricane" with such exultation is so complicated and kinky, I'm not sure how to position myself in relation to it, which is great, as all this bending over and ass-shaking is a big fuck-you to rationality, a delightful fuck-you. Ass backwards. Ass over teakettle. It's impossible to watch this video and not think of Katrina and the havoc it wreaked; it's as if the dancers have felt the core of Katrina's destructive power, and returned to embrace that indiscriminate energy of upheaval, have absorbed it into their bodies. The asses, jiggling so quickly, like humming birds, a pumping blur, aren't so much sexual as libidinal. In them I see the throbbing essence of aliveness, and the marvelous obscenity of our tenacious clinging to life. And I love the queerness of Sissy Nobby, whose gender-bending rap is known as Sissy Bounce, a term not without controversy. According to queer rapper Katey Red, "Ain't no such thing as 'sissy bounce. It’s bounce music. It’s just sissies that are doing it." When women and queers get together and act nasty, as in "Like A Hurricane," it's an occasion for joy.

Here's a mini documentary about Sissy Bounce:

If He Changed My Name

2011-12-26T18:17:00.000-08:00

In the car this evening, Nina Simone was singing, "I told Jesus it would be alright if he changed my name." Her performance was stop-everything-and-just-listen perfection. I'd never heard this song before and wondered if I were mishearing her, the words were so mysterious, like a koan. What does it mean to have Jesus change your name? Online Christian sites say it's about the totality of the conversion experience. Makes sense, but even that's odd. There are all these Westerners walking around with Hindi or Buddhist or Muslim new-names, but I'm not familiar with Christians doing this. I was raised fundamentalist, and being "saved" was a big deal. I still remember the words: "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your one and only lord and savior?" I'm taking mainstream Bible-thumpers, not Martha Marcy May Marlene-type cults. I don't want a rational explanation for "If He Changed My Name." Simone's vocalizations and the enigmatic narrative create a visceral response that analysis adds nothing to, dilutes even.

Here's some pictures from Kevin's birthday party. This is my favorite, which I post guiltily, as people don't look particularly good in it. Note the green-sweatered person on the far left, who's bending backwards or levitating. That's Margaret Tedesco, I believe. She looks like she's pretending to be full-body baptized in a huge pool of water, like the Baptists in my town did.

Kevin blowing out the candles on his cake.

David Brazil looking wonderfully perverse, with his hand on Sara Larsen's ass.

David lent me The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. I'm still trying to figure out how to approach it. Have been reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch to go to sleep at night. I keep thinking that Dick pre-imagined the web, the way one can get lost in browsing. I'm sure that virtual social time would be way better with some Chew-Z.

I deleted what I wrote about Marie Calloway, not because I don't like what I wrote, but because I don't want to be part of that conversation.

Christmas Lights

2011-12-22T01:04:00.000-08:00

Kevin's sister Maureen is visiting from New Jersey. After dinner the three of us drove around searching for the most fabulous Christmas houses in San Francisco. Here is a sampling of what we saw. The first place we stopped at was a house on Castro Street, across from Davies Hospital, featuring a giant Santa. We stopped at another house we didn't photograph, then drove on to the infamous Tom and Jerry house on 21st Street on Castro Hill.

Walking down the hill towards the house, panoramic view of the City in the background. The shadowy figure in the foreground, on the right, is Kevin photographing the same scene.

A closer view of the 30-foot high Christmas tree.

A couple standing underneath the tree, with its giant bulbs and presents.

There were many other people there, photographing the same things we were photographing, and I thought of the Most Photographed Barn in America, from Don DeLillo's White Noise:

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Kevin and Maureen sitting in the love seat placed beside the tree.

Looking up the crotches of life-size marionettes attached to the side of the garage. The marionettes' legs and arms move up and down. There were many moving parts to the display, including two toy trains, twirling Barbie dolls, and an intricate wheel/mandala that spins.

Finally, we headed over to kink.com, which has taken over the old Armory on 14th Street. Here's a very inadequate picture of the lights draping the top of the building. Note the festive American flag on the far left. Kevin says kink.com's proud display of the American flag is controversial, particularly with some Veteran's organizations. But I say, kink.com is a capitalist success story. It has as much right to be proud of being American as anybody.

Everybody Knows

2011-12-20T17:41:00.000-08:00

Since I returned to San Francisco Sunday night, festive social activities are already abounding. Last night was unusually glamorous. We went to a small dinner party in Berkeley hosted by Leah Levy (trustee of the Jay DeFeo Trust), that included her partner Bruce Wilcox, Ugo Rondinone, and John Giorno. John has been involved in Tibetan Buddhism since the early 70s, studying for a time with the same teacher as the buddhist. It's very likely he and the buddhist attended retreats and events together, but Giorno couldn't recall him. It was a stimulating and playful evening. Leah took us on a tour of her art collection, which includes some sweet pieces by DeFeo and David Ireland.

Mostly I wanted to write a bit about the Insert Blanc Press Benefit & Holiday Party we attended Saturday night. It was held at Weekend Space gallery, on Hollywood Blvd, in Los Feliz. The event was way better than it had a right to be. I was steeling myself for the dull panic that a marathon poetry reading can bring on. But host Mathew Timmons wisely broke the evening up into 4 sets, with a handful of readers in each, with smoking and drinking (and book buying) breaks in between, so the overall feeling of the evening was a swinging party interspersed with poetic entertainment. The readings were excellent, and I got to hear a number of younger Los Angeles poets whom I wasn't familiar with. Kevin and I helped Kate Durbin read from the second excerpt of her new chapbook E! Entertainment, for which we played Lauren and Whitney of the MTV reality series The Hills. For the first excerpt Mark Wallace and Brian Stefans played Lauren and Whitney, acting out the mannerisms and facial expressions of the girls. Mark and Brian put their hearts and souls into their roles, and were a hard act to follow.

Kevin was the final act. The photo is of him singing a duet with Geneva Zhao (photo swiped from Erin Jourdan's Facebook page) of "Sweet Jane," with his amazing band behind him. Geneva was a grad writing student at San Francisco State years ago, but I'd met her before that in the poetry scene. It's always odd to have students in my classes who I know from the real world. I fear they're going to think I'm a sham when they see me up there struggling to maintain it in front of a class; it's embarrassing to have them witnessing this role I find so problematic; I worry they will no long respect me in the real world, that they'll gossip about how ludicrous I am to the real world. Geneva was only in one class of mine, if I remember correctly—Writers on Writing, a large lecture hall class where a different writer visits each week and gives a reading and answers questions. The writers don't get paid for this, but everybody in the lecture hall has to buy their book. The class was in fall 2001, and 9/11 hit before we barely got started. Less than a week after the Twin Towers fell, our first reader, Daphne Gottlieb, arrived. Daphne was shaky and frail. Thrown into a crisis of meaning after the enormity of 9/11, she apologized for her writing. Her naked vulnerability embodied all of our pangs of crisis, so her reading took on the aura of a religious rite.

Since Kevin needed to rehearse, we arrived at Weekend Space while the crew was still setting up the place. Originally Kevin was supposed to sing only Nico's "Femme Fatale," but he and the band were so in synch they decided to add "Sweet Jane." I looked up the lyrics on my iPhone, and Kevin and the band practiced the song twice, with Kevin singing the lyrics displayed on the teeny phone screen. Since everybody was busy setting up the sound system and the refreshment tables, getting things just right, I was the only audience member. As I sat in a folding chair, directly in front of him, Kevin sang the song to me, catching my eye, smiling tenderly. It was so touching, just like a scene from a movie. Julia Roberts would play me, her giant doe eyes watering.

Hotel Retreat, Day 10

2011-12-17T12:53:00.000-08:00

Here's Kevin taking a nap. I wanted to make him look like a landscape. While just taking a shower I was thinking about Alistair, how even though he has a brutal teaching schedule that saps him of social energy, he gets up early every day and writes for an hour, and the book that he's slowly accruing sounds fascinating. I won't go into details because he wants to keep that energy contained. I got so little writing done this semester, I've been in a pervasive state of despair, even though the reading and note taking have been exhilarating. I guess I'm talking in extremes today, despair, exhilaration. Because of my growing craving to write, this blog has been the focal point of this residency, and it's not been easy to maintain day after day. After the initial rush, there was lots of what the fuck could I possibly say today, and usually I wouldn't get to it until the end of a long day and I'd stay up too late, knowing I'd be exhausted the next morning, but I pushed on. Lots of pleasure in that pushing through resistance. In the shower I thought back to the connection of blog writing to "real" writing, which I discussed during the buddhist phase of this project, and this morning these posts suggested the equivalent of an artist's sketches, which can be lovely in their own right, who wouldn't like to own a sketch by a favorite artist, but there's this other realm of pushing things even further, where the real glory of producing exists. Another grandiose word, glory. I was also thinking about Thomas Merton, how his aloneness is a metaphor for our own for inescapable aloneness. On a heroic scale he enacted what most of us dare not look at in ourselves. There's a bit of the carnivalesque about that, the voyeurism of watching Kafka's hunger artist. For a hermit, Merton's life was full of people—besides a string of visitors and invitations, he engaged in a massive correspondence. What enormous power, to live in the woods in declared solitude and to have the world begging you for attention. What's likeable about Merton is that he didn't shy away from the contradictions in that; they troubled him and he struggled against them. He was very aware of the games involved in his social beingness. The buddhist was very self aware as well, like he'd talk about his personality traits as if he were discussing another person over which he had no control of altering. When he would refuse to talk to me when the astrological aspects of the day were bad, he'd declare, "I told you I was a superstitious person!" This is a different quality of awareness than Merton's. With Merton you never get the sense of a flat acceptance of his traits; even the need for solitude is constantly examined. In the shower I remembered an ancient conversation where a fellow writer said to me, "I do these things to hurt people, and I know I should feel guilty. But I don't." The tone with which this was said was almost breezy, and it was one of the creepiest things I ever heard, a reaction that Julia Kristeva examines so brilliantly in Powers of Horror, the abject being about crime, but specifically crystallizing around the criminal who smiles. This is the calm before a busy night, where we'll see many friends, old and new. We're especially excited to see Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace, who've been intermittent bleeps in our lives for years, delightful bleeps. Just noticed I've switched into the "we." I'd say that heralds the official ending of the Hotel Retreat. Thank you all for reading. Love.

Hotel Retreat, Day 9

2011-12-16T21:25:00.000-08:00

Here's the pictograph on the baby changing station in the women's restroom of La Cabaña, the Mexican restaurant my colleague Alistair McCartney and I ended up at this evening. The image represents how exhausted and spent I feel, all larval and blank. This is not my last night in the hotel, but this is the end of my monkish retreat. I pick up Kevin from LAX in an hour an a half and will be thrust back into shared space, the pervasive social of coupledom. I'm looking forward to seeing him, of course. Our cat Ted went to the vet hospital this morning for emergency surgery, a blocked urethra and kidney stones, so when I return I switch to cat nurse role, touching Ted tenderly. I have always been his only one.

This is a picture of some seagulls I photographed on the beach, my shadow looming in the bright sun. The squiggliness of the birds on a horizonless landscape reminds me of Yves Tanguy.

Alistair instructed me to take this picture of him. He told me to post it on my Facebook page with the following caption: "I picked up this stud on the beach and I took him back to my hotel room and I fucked him so hard I'm raw. LOL." At the of every teaching residency he and I devolve to potty humor, a co-decompression.

I can't think of any other way to end this post other than seaweed. There's no conclusion in this gelatinous spiral, which both frightens and entices. My hands clench with the urge to squish squish squish.

Hotel Retreat, Day 8

2011-12-16T01:18:00.000-08:00

I had the pleasure of hanging out with Bett Williams today, whom dedicated Belladodie readers will remember, lives in Santa Fe. She's in the area, visiting family. She picked me up late afternoon at my hotel in her father's car, and we drove to Venice, not because we really wanted to go to Venice, but because at that time of day it would take at least an hour to drive into any parts of LA we would have wanted to go. Venice is close, we could take surface roads, and I know how to get there without a map. We spent 6 hours together talking nonstop and wandering around, and it went by in a flash. We both wished we had the luxury of the days-long road trip we took through the Southwest last January. But walking around Venice reminded me of the road trip in that everything seemed a bit surreal and magical, as if we were stoned.

We started out by visiting Detox Market, which happened to be across the street on Abbot Kinney, where the car was parked. They sold mostly tea, expensive natural skin care products, and chocolate. The woman who ran it was snooty to us, a rather toxic presence for a place called Detox Market. We found that in general when we went into upscale stores, they acted suspicious of us, like we were going to rob them. It was disconcerting, as both of us usually can pass as bourgeois enough to be carrying credit cards just begging to be filled. But, apparently not on Abbot Kinney.

We then meandered through the residential area to the beach. The beach at sunset was more intensethan we'd imagined, filled with street people, skateboarders, and many intoxicated men. There was a gathering of people on a rising of ground, and we kept wondering why they were there, if it were some sort of meeting, an Occupy Venice movement, a party. After we walked in one direction for ages, we turned around and headed back. The people were still there, so we went over to them to see what was happening. Just as we approached, a yellow school bus arrived, and we realized the people were in line, and it seemed they were being bussed to a shelter. This was just a few blocks away from Abbot Kinney, where we were unfit to look at $30 pieces of jewelry. The disparity was shocking. On the boardwalk, Bett and I stopped in at a shop that sold "Native American" stuff. There I took this sweet picture of Love and Hope.

We were hungry and opted for Mao's Kitchen, a popular Chinese restaurant a couple of blocks from the beach, but far enough away from Abbot Kinney to feel human. It was delicious and comfy. Then we wandered back to Abbot Kinney in search of tea and dessert.

Animal kitsch was popular in many window displays. I love this rather scary deer. It looks like it stumbled out of nature into the wrong world, similar to how Bett and I, emerging from the homeless world of the beach, felt upon reentering the stuffy privilege of Abbot Kinney. Here's another set of window deer:

Would this display make you want these magenta clothes? I can't imagine anybody but a cold-hearted person would buy them after seeing them worn by these cold-hearted deer.

This multi-stoned brigade of Buddhas, I took in a mystical bookstore, which was the friendliest store on Abbot Kinney, besides the place that sold marijuana brownies. I'd never seen marijuana brownies sold in a store. You need a medical marijuana card to purchase them. Bett said she knew a woman who purchased a marijuana brownie and it had worms in it. In the back of the mystical bookstore was a very thin woman giving a talk to a small group of people gathered round her in easy chairs. They were listening intently. She apparently was the author of the stack of books beside her, with "Soul" in the title. She was wearing black skinny pants, and a rather complicated, expensive-looking white top. She looked like an aging trophy wife. When I heard her mention William Burroughs and yage, I started listening. Bett and I stood there transfixed, as she launched into a series of stories about taking ayahuasca. During one "trip," she had a vision of this huge challis above her head, and in the chalice were all these people she knew, and the chalice poured them into her crown chakra, and the chalice said to her, "We all are one."

Hotel Retreat, Day 7

2011-12-14T23:43:00.000-08:00

After a busy day at school, giving my seminar, meeting with students, and catching the beginning of Rick Moody's reading, I met Stuart Krimko for dinner in the hip downtown part of Culver City, which is so far from the part I'm staying at, Stuart asked more than once, "Is that really still Culver City?" Stuart and I had a great time when we were a threesome with Ariana Reines in San Francisco last month, but we had no idea if Stuart and Dodie alone would work. When the waiter announced it was Wine Wednesday, meaning bottles of wine were half off, we both excitedly took it as a sign, for when we went out to dinner in San Francisco, it was Half Off Wine Tuesday. We sipped some nice French wine that Stuart picked out and launched into a three and a half hour conversation, about art and writing, and whether we thought the self resided in the brain or elsewhere, Stuart attempted to explain Kierkegaard to me, we talked about in-laws, Long Island, sex, Ariana of course, we talked about work and love and relationships, Jesus as a cult leader, how kinky devotion is underrated these days. Since Akasha, where we dined, is a classy place, they played quality Christmas music, a jazz version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," etc.

There were these really weird shaped lights hanging from the exposed beamed ceiling. My picture doesn't do them justice. But I like how the eyes of the people in the foreground are glowing white, matching the dots of white light in the background. My mind starts tripping out on some Children of the Damned/zombie scenario, where the dots of light in the background are controlling the trendy eaters in the foreground. When their eyes glow white they turn homicidal, or something like that.

Here's a picture of the parking garage across the street. The section of Level 3 where I was parked was named Gilda. And it had paintings of black-silhouetted people in evening clothes. There's one woman in this picture, the waist down of her black gown between "Gilda" and "Level 3," the top of her body bent and extending across the ceiling. Southern California is such a friendly, pleasure-loving place.

Hotel Retreat, Day 6

2011-12-13T21:34:00.000-08:00

I'm so sick today I didn't feel connected enough to the external world to take any pictures. This is a photo of the raw-ish buckwheat porridge I've been making every morning. We get passes to the hotel breakfast buffet ($13.95 without coupon), but I've yet to try it. My cereal looks like vomit, but it's delicious. If you're ever in a hotel and lug along a travel blender, you can make it too. You soak 3 coffee scoops of buckwheat groats overnight. In the morning you rinse the buckwheat, then blend it, along with some currants (for sweetness), a pinch of salt, and lots of cinnamon, with hot water from the hotel coffee maker. The hot water makes it warm, which I find soothing. Then you add in a glob of raw almond butter and blend again. I top it with chopped fruit and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds. I know this is boring and geeky, and if I wasn't sick and had something better to talk about, I wouldn't bother you with it.

I'm having a hard time with being ill and holding it all together. This is what I wrote to a friend this evening:

"Being sick is making me depressed and abject. I feel like a hideous swollen monster who nobody likes. So thanks for sending me an email where you act like you like me."

Pathetic. But on the bright side, I'm lucky to have friends whom I can write such foolish things to. I long for a mother to wipe my snotty nose. Thinking about being sick as a child, how caring my mother was, lavishing on me a sweetness I didn't experience much of otherwise. In our home there was a myth that I was a healthy, rugged child, when in fact I had recurring bouts of a kidney infection that can kill little girls. I got all sorts of attention being sick and I didn't have to go to school for several weeks. The problem was I loved school and it was boring having to lie around on the couch and eat food with no salt, and I got a shot of penicillin in the ass every week. This is exactly the kind of episode where the child, loving all the attention, turns sickly forever, but maybe that only happens to middle class children. My mother did not believe in "babying" me. Life was rough and you dealt with it; there was no room in her world for a sensitive flower, which I was emotionally. I once read in a Jungian book that the daughter sometimes embodies the shadow of the mother, and I was yes, yes, that's she and I. Emotions are the enemy of the life is rough and you deal with it mentality. As I got older I came to admire her strength. Even when she was dying she was bossing me around, which is awesome, that spirit.

So this is where I'm at right now. I wouldn't be writing this, except for some reason it's important to redo the 10-day hotel retreat series I did a year ago, a version of which is in the buddhist. He was still very present in my consciousness last December. Doing the series again is like erasing him. And yes, it's not passed my notice that Thomas Merton is a sort of substitution for him.

Here's a bonus pic, the persimmon and apple I chopped up for my buckwheat gruel.

Hotel Retreat, Day 5

2011-12-12T21:54:00.000-08:00

This is a diorama I assembled out of the pinecone I picked up the other day, the contents of my DayQuil/NyQuil LiquiCaps Combo Pack, and the green scrubby mitts I got at the Korean spa. It reminds me of the corporate parks in Culver City, tall trees, majestic office buildings, and manicured lawns. Yes, I have a cold. I enacted my typical trajectory with it, in that yesterday I went to Whole Foods and got all this natural immune support stuff that never works, and now that I'm sneezing and snot is dripping all over the place I went to the drug store and got poisonous symptom suppressors. Haven't taken any yet, as I want to get a bit more work done before I fog my brain with a NyQuil. One of my colleagues got excited when he heard I had a cold. "Get NyQuil," he exclaimed in an Australian accent. "I love NyQuil, you take it and you pass out and you sleep for hours." I guess I am looking forward to that.

On Wednesday I'm teaching a two hour seminar on brand names in contemporary writing. The research has been entertaining. I've found out wondrous things, such as: In 1955, when Ford Motor Company was developing the a new car, David Wallace, manager of marketing research, asked poet Marianne Moore for suggestions on what to name it. Car names Marianne Moore came up with included "Resilient Bullet", "Ford Silver Sword", "Mongoose Civique", "Varsity Stroke", "Pastelogram", "Turcotinga", "Andante con Moto," and "Utopian Turtletop." Edsel, which they chose, wasn't on her list.

I think I'll name by diorama "NyQuil Towers."

Hotel Retreat, Day 4

2011-12-11T22:55:00.001-08:00

I don't know how well this photo "reads." It's a detail from an artwork that's hanging in the hall, outside the room where my writing workshop is held. It's an insect made out of silverware. The background is recycled iron. I love this little bug. I think it's made from forks. Insects are so good at survival, like didn't the cockroach survive the Ice Age? This fork morphing into insect is also about survival and transformation and valuing the tiniest things, valuing the the outcast, the forsaken, the superfluous. Hotel life makes me treasure what in my regular life might pass for garbage. A large plastic bag. Great! It becomes a laundry bag to separate my dirty clothes from those who somehow survived the trip unsullied. One time I scissored off the top of a plastic water bottle and turned it into a vase for some flowers. Twists and rubber bands also bring joy. Now I'm thinking of Ajit Chauhan, who is masterful at using the discarded in his art. Last October, Kevin and Ajit did a show together at Sight School gallery in Oakland. The exhibit was inspired by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. It was incredible and I was planning to write about it here, but life demands swallowed my writing energy. Besides working with Kevin, Ajit also collaborated on a motorized piece with Kal Spelletich of Survival Research. Kal was fun to hang out with. He was so friendly and at ease with people, he reminded me of a large dog who didn't know the meaning of stranger. Since the opening went on for 3 hours, I got to spend a lot of time talking with Ajit, and he discussed many of the pieces with me. He had one piece loaded with those little square plastic things that are used instead of twisters to close loaves of mass-market bread. Ajit said his roommate is an intense recycler, and she has a drawer full of these little squares, and looking at them all together, Ajit was impressed with their beauty. To be open to the glory in things so cast aside, so disenfranchised most of us don't even register them—this is a form of grace. If I were critiquing this blog entry in a workshop, I'd say, "Unpack this grace thing, Dodie." My thoughts on the point are, indeed, muddled, but I guess it's that I'm suspecting that moments of intense spiritual awareness more often than not are humble; they're almost humiliating in their humbleness. Maybe I think that because I'm so not a visionary.

I just called Kevin and asked him to email me this photo. It's not the piece I'm writing about here, but if you look closely, there are a few of those bread wrapper squares punctuating the grid and string. If I remember correctly, Ajit found the board with the grid paper attached it it, and the string is also recycled. Looks like there's some paperclips attached as well. Garbage in, art out.

Hotel Retreat, Day 3

2011-12-11T00:39:00.001-08:00

Here's my yellow Chevy waiting for me outside Leaf Cuisine, a vegan/raw restaurant where I went to get some lunch to go for Sunday, which is a super busy day at school. Since nights here are in the 40s, I left the food in the trunk and drove to the Olympia Day Spa, one of the many spas in Koreatown. I was meeting poet Christine Wertheim. There are 3 pools at this spa, a mildly hot one for the wimpy, a boil your skin off hot pool comprised of mugwort tea, and an icy cold pool. When I first arrived and stuck a toe in the mugwort, it burned so bad, I was no fucking way. Someone in the pool told me to go in the cold pool first. So I hung out in the wimpy pool, dunked in the cold pool, hung out in the herbal steam room, dunked in the cold pool, then gingerly approached the steaming vat of mugwort, and it felt great, I could stay in it for extended periods of time. Everybody is totally naked and lunging from one temperature extreme to another. I'd gone here with Christine last June, so I was used to that part.

This time I booked a Milky Scrub, which is described as, "As you are basked in warm citrus milk, dry and dull skin is sloughed away with gentle strokes." You like naked on a table covered with plastic, and a middle aged Korean woman wearing a black bra and black panties—old fashioned to-the-waist briefs—scrubs the shit out of you with these exfoliating mitts she wears. She scrubs every part of you, including the crack of your ass and your inner thighs all the way up to the genitals. She occasionally throws buckets of water over you, and ends with some creamy fluid that makes you rather slick. My scrubber was friendly and impersonal and I relaxed into it. I am no longer Dodie, I thought, I am merely a slab of flesh whose dead flakes need to be sloughed off. The treatment ends with a rather brutal shampoo which by then I totally enjoyed, this woman attacking my scalp with her strong fingers.

Thomas Merton's involvement with the student nurse began in a hospital, when he was recuperating from back surgery. Margie gave him a bath. Lying on the plastic table being professionally scrubbed in places where only a lover has touched, I thought of the indignity of being frail and having to rely on these anonymous others to prod and turn one's tender physicality. Nurse Margie knew who Merton was; they could talk easily. He could talk to her for hours, as he could with no one else. I wondered if I were a celibate hermit and this Korean woman knew who I was, had read my writing, understood my world—would her ministrations seem caring to me, would I feel for once my humanity had truly been touched by this other, wonderful, angelic being? Would I fall in love with her? I began by lying face down, then on my back, then on each side. When I was lying on my left side I saw a row of white gleaming bodies lying on plastic covered tables, each with a Korean women in black bra and briefs attending to it.

After the spa, Christine and I headed over to Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant for Stone Pot Bibimbap, which we both love. Here's Christine admiring the rustic wooden walls.

Hotel Retreat, Day 2

2011-12-09T14:34:00.001-08:00

Christmas in Culver City. Here's a reindeer in front of some birds of paradise on the Antioch campus. I also saw a lovely white rose bush in its final gasp of flowering. I plucked a velvety petal from the plant and carried it around for a couple of hours. Walking to campus I passed some trees with pinecones scattered beneath them. As I picked one up, I thought of my Jaycee Dugard pinecone necklace. Jaycee was the woman who was kidnapped from her Lake Tahoe neighborhood at the age of 11 by pervert Phillip Garrido and his wife, and kept captive for 18 years, bearing two daughters by Garrido. When he zapped her with a stun gun, the last thing she touched was a pinecone lying on the ground. So, as a fundraiser for her foundation, she sells the pinecone necklace as a symbol of hope. The 4-inch tall real pinecone sitting on my desk, I have no idea what it symbolizes. I hadn't picked up a pinecone since I was like 10, so maybe it symbolizes my childlikeness. When I had it at Antioch, a small bug crawled out of it, so maybe it symbolizes my willingness to live with something that may be infested. It's lopsided, so maybe it symbolizes my ability to love the lopsided.

For the 10 days I'm at the residency I get to camp out in the office of a fulltime professor who's on break. When I entered this residency's office, there were several issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education and other mail stacked up, the file cabinet was covered with dust, and the computer hard drive was missing. I stacked the mail in a corner and left a voicemail with the department about my lack of computer access. Then I noticed the guy's plants. They were all dried up and crotchety. He's obviously been on leave, and he didn't make provision for the poor plants. So I filled a pitcher with water and gave them all drinks and picked off the shriveled leaves. A colleague, who was waiting to go to dinner through all this, said, "He must be a Buddhist," and she pointed to a "Buddha Loves You Too!" sticker on the side of the bookcase and a photo of a Buddha statue. We made snotty jokes about how his Buddhist compassion must not extend to his houseplants. Maybe watering the plants, for him, would be an example of the "idiot compassion" the buddhist would talk about. Maybe he was teaching the plants a lesson about abstinence and attachment. You only think you need water, you ravenous plants.

I didn't mention my colleague's name because we were playing hooky from nighttime campus events and I don't want to bring her down with me. Yes I'm aware that I missed the Friday night lasagna dinner and reading, no I will not reveal the name of my coconspirator. The first time I was ever called a colleague it grossed me out. It was when I had a visiting writer gig at Mills; I was at a party at Robert Hass', and this woman from the department introduced me to someone as her colleague, and I thought "Colleague!" What a pretentious bitch. I would have been okay with coworker. I probably would have said, "X and I work together." I wonder if the word colleague was invented so academics wouldn't have to associate with a proletariat word like "work." Academics have secretaries who work; academics, on the other hand, have vocations, passion, they do it for the love of it.

I just looked up the origin of playing hooky: "Play hooky is probably derived from the Dutch term hoekje (spelen) 'hide-and-seek'. The Dutch word hoek means 'corner'—the boys in 17th-century New Amsterdam played this game around the corners of the street. Hide-and-seek was a different game back then—the players had to search for a hidden object."

It's late and it's past a reasonable bedtime and I wish I could get up before dawn and watch the lunar eclipse, the huge red moon. Those of you who do, I adore you. This is for you—the Christmas reindeer at night, all lit up. So magical! I photographed it as my colleague and I were fleeing from campus and heading towards our hooky.

Hotel Retreat Day 1

2011-12-08T22:46:00.001-08:00

This is a photo of my rental car. At Dollar, they don't assign a car to you. All the cars in your price category are parked together and you pick out whichever one you want. I grabbed this bright yellow Chevy so I could find the car easily in a parking lot. Gray rental cars take so much effort, you have to pay all that attention to keep track of them. My yellow car is a bright slash in a sea of gray and white cars. You glance in its direction and it grabs you.

It's quarter to 11 on my first day of my 10 day hotel stay in Culver City. I'm still unpacking and unearthly tired, having gotten only 4 hours of sleep last night. I'm listening to "Miles Davis Radio" on Pandora. They're currently playing Lester Young's "Prisoner of Love." This is so fitting as I've been reading about Thomas Merton's late-in-life romance with a student nurse half his age. Volume 6 of Merton's edited journal, which chronicles that period of his life, is called Learning to Love. It's fascinating and unbearable to hear him go on and on and on and on about the depth of his love for Margie, alternately rationalizing it and guilt tripping over it. He kept his Trappist vows of chastity in that he and Margie never had sex-sex, but it sounds like they fooled around. Merton's excesses remind me of my own excesses, remind me of the excesses of anybody who falls passionately in love, as if being in love were a form of possession, or a disease with predictable and inevitable stages—even though when you're in that state, you're sure what you're going through is unique to you and your muse. Here's Alica Keys singing "Love is My Disease":

I thought love would be my cure/but now it's my disease

When the affair is found out and Merton is forbidden to see her (he does continue to see her a bit, even after forbidden not to), this fuels a new wave of love for now that the physical temptation is removed, Margie and his love for her can be idealized, and he can hold her image with him day and night, possess it. Woman as divine muse. I'm also reading John Howard Griffin's Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton. The trauma of Merton's passion causes him to glide over a lot of details. It's hard to tell what Margie's like and what actually transpired between them in some of these furtive meeings. Griffin's book fills in gaps. The sex life of repressed spiritual types continues to fascinate. People in love always seem foolish, and the more dignified the persona, the more foolish they seem. I look at Merton and I look at my blatherings about the buddhist, and I look at a dozen other books dealing with spiritual life I've read this past year and I wonder: do any of us really know anything? Would life be interesting without flaws? According to Griffin, Merton didn't feel comfortable with the idealized version of himself that the world held, and he undercut it when he could. I'm so tired I feel dull and rather animal, like I just want to roll around on the floor, stretch and scratch my back on the hotel carpet, which is dark blue with small, irregular beige dots. Now Pandora is playing "All the Things You Are" by Charlie Parker, which, besides being great exit music, brings me back to the beloved enumerations in Merton's journal. Margie you are all things Margie you cannot be all things I am a man of God I am a man of passion this human love is good this human love is bad they can take you away from me but they'll never touch my love this love I have for you is huge as the nature that surrounds me I look up at the moon and your love is there in the moon and the solitude of this dark night.

Muscle Memory

2011-12-06T20:35:00.001-08:00

Today was my last class for the semester. Really the semester should go on for another week and a half, but I'm rushing away early to fly to LA on Thursday to teach at Antioch's winter residency. The December residency is always a shock, the brutal lack of transition. Tomorrow I run errands and pack, and then I'm gone, off to a new world. Yesterday, after our class potluck, we took the leftover food over to Occupy San Francisco State, which consists of maybe a dozen tents outside the student union building. It was sweet. They eagerly accepted all the great food and thanked us for contributing to the cause. It was a difficult semester, I was teaching more than was comfortable for me, and there were, to be very vague, some compatibility issues. But there were also many instances that touched me. And some writing was done in my classes that really excited me. This morning when I was getting ready to leave, I put on a dress I rarely wear, mostly because I don't like it that much, but I did wear it when the buddhist was here. (I know, why would I wear a dress I didn't like when he was here?) I wasn't thinking about him when I was pulling the dress over my head, I was thinking, why does it take me so long to get dressed, I'm going to be late, and then my mind began chanting I hate him I hate him I hate him. This was totally surprising. I don't even think it's true; I don't hate him. In fact, I don't think I hate anybody. But there it was, this primal voice in my head, ranting. In class one of the students talked about muscle memory, how in the yoga she does, as she holds the poses memories will flood her. And this made her believe that yes, we do hold trauma in our bodies.

Speaking of the buddhist, I sent a copy of the buddhist, the book, to a local Zen roshi poet, and he emailed me about it today. He said he couldn't put the book down, was sad when it ended. I love the p.s. to his email: "ps - is any of the stuff in the buddhist actually true?" Oh my friend, let me tell you . . .

I haven't given any more readings, but the past week has been full. Friday night Kevin and I went with Christopher Russell and Cameron Popham to see Carolee Schneemann at Eli Ridgeway Gallery. An evening of films and videos and her briefly speaking and answering questions. I went up and gushed and gave her a copy of the buddhist. I told her she was in it, and that I had read at her retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle. She knew who I was! She instructed me to autograph my book, and I stupidly signed it, "your fan." The final section of clips were from Precarious, which was installed at the Henry in its full large screen multi-projectorhood. The subject of Precarious is dancing in captivity. The moment that broke everybody's heart was a clip from Sergei Eisensteins's Strike (from Googling I believe it's from Strike) of a dancing bear, a black and white clip, full of light and faded to softness, that felt painfully slow. I don't know if Schneemann slowed the footage down, but it felt slow, like movie syntax for lost memories, I've seen it in film after film, the childhood birthday party with the glowing candles, not quite slo-mo, but slower than real life, which, no matter how cheesy the movie, feels tragic. But here it was real tragedy, the brutality and humiliation of a dancing bear.

After the films, Kevin and I went out for a drink with Cameron, who was visiting from Winnipeg. Our mutual friend, poet Colin Smith, sent him to us. In the picture to the left, Cameron is standing behind a postmodern Christmas tree in a hotel lobby. "Pretend you're feeling the magic of Christmas," Kevin instructed. Cameron was very patient when Kevin and I commented on how his accent doesn't sound Canadian. Winnipeg, I learned, borders the U.S., and so people from there have a more Fargo accent than our friends in Vancouver and Toronto. But Cameron's is more of a drawl, like he could have been from the South. Cameron is a poet and a musician, and he entertained us with stories of touring with bands, driving around in a van, the hardcore/punk drummer blasting Kate Bush in the middle of the night. We also talked about writing—Cameron's well informed about the contemporary poetry scene. He's even read The Grand Piano. All ten volumes! At City Lights he bought Ariana Reines' Mercury, even though he'd never heard of her. "You'll love it," I gushed. He told us of poets and writers in Alberta who work in forest fire lookout towers. He said they get lots of writing and art done in the towers. There's such a wonderful dreamlike quality to this image, the artist alone in his micro-cabin, looming above the ordinary world, isolated from it, yet essential to its survival. I want to go to sleep and dream of lookout towers night after night.

Kevin told me how, during the 50s, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac spent their summers working in fire lookouts.

There's even a picture book about it, Poets on the Peaks by John Suiter.

Last night Kevin and I went out to dinner with Kaplan Harris, a young scholar who writes about New Narrative, among other things. I'd met Kaplan a few times, but always in large groups, often in auditoriums. This was the first time I'd ever talked to him. He's one of those scholars who has a passion for research and ideas. His excitement was refreshing, contagious. To better understand New Narrative, he's been reading back issues of the 70s gay literary journal Gay Sunshine, which he has found mind bending. He said, for instance, he'd never again look at Joe Brainard's I Remember the same, having seen it published next to a photo of a naked guy with a huge cock. Which got me to go on and on about how important it was to me when I was a young writer to be exposed to this aesthetic where sex and high culture were intertwined. Kevin asked Kaplan if he could take a picture of him holding the drawing Raymond Pettibon did of a cock and balls—as I've reported here before, Kevin is doing a project where he's photographing a number of male artists and writers holding Raymond's genitals, many of them naked. Somebody has to write about this some time, how so many of these naked artists and writers are straight, and they're posing (and helping to direct the posing) in homoerotic constructions. I suggested that since Kaplan was into Gay Sunshine that Kevin photograph him in the restaurant's bathroom, beside the urinal—an important site of homoerotic desire. The (fully clothed) pix came out great—if Kaplan ever gets tired of academia, I'm convinced he'd have a future in hustling—but I'm not allowed, due to privacy considerations, to post any of the cock and balls photos on my blog. Kevin has promised his models that none of their pictures will appear on the internet, that these photos are meant for "gallery and high art" contexts. And Belladodie is definitely and proudly low art.

Plastic Fantastic

2011-11-27T13:04:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, Kevin and I had brunch with Kota Ezawa and Katya Bonnenfant and their 3-month-old daughter, Masha. I don't usually relate to babies much, but Masha is adorable. Her sense of presence and otherness is fascinating. I said, "She looks like she hasn't quite arrived." Katya said that in some Native American cultures the child is said to arrive only after she laughs—before that she's seen as being in an in-between space—and there is a celebration to honor the child's laughter. Masha, according to child development charts, is due to laugh in a couple of weeks. After brunch we drove to Kota's studio, where he showed us some of the stereoscopic images he made for an exhibit of the New Children's Museum entitled Trash.

Here's Kevin looking through a stereoscopic viewer as Kota looks outside the frame at Katya.

In the evening, Kevin and I went to the annual group costume birthday dance party for Gerald Corbin, Craig Goodman, and Karla Milosevich. The theme this year was plastic. The photo to the left is me in the dress I made by adding a belt to a transparent yellow rain poncho. That's Karla in the background in a much more elaborate outfit, purple and yellow like a pirate, sexy like a gypsy, and her beautiful smile. Pointing to my yellow hood, Ben Furstenberg said I had a space age druid thing going on. In the dance room DJs were spinning thumping retro club music so loudly you could hear it all the way down the street, and on a wall was projected clips from 80s rock videos and trashy films. I danced, of course I danced, which was daring, given the still-mending back, but I'd done 40 minutes of yoga earlier in the evening, and I was fine. I had to force myself to go to the party, feeling peopled-out, but ended up having a great time. Not much was expected of me, and it was such a pleasure to be part of a group hilarity that had nothing to do with me. I could be totally present and anonymous at the same time. Talking was reduced to shouting in the kitchen, and of course much of the conversation centered around the costumes. Matt Gordon, draped in a shower curtain robe, was who I talked with the most. We did manage to catch up and to gossip, and then he too was bopping around on the dance floor.

I didn't take any photos, but here's a few more that Kevin clicked with his iphone, starting with a crowd scene featuring Craig (in the white) and Karla.

Here's another group pic, with Craig in it. If you look closely, you can see the intricate laticework headdress of balls connected by rods. When Craig announced he was a polymer, someone asked him if he was an actual polymer or the scientist who invented the polymer. Craig paused thoughtfully, and said, "A little of both."

Here's Gerald wearing a gown he sewed out of a shower curtain. He said that if I ever wanted my own shower curtain gown, he'd make one for me.

Here's Scott Hewicker and Darrell Alvarez, wearing the most amazing hats.

The party was a good transition from a very public phase to what I hope will be a more private, winter hibernation and rejuvenation. This is code for: I'm dying to lose myself in writing. All the repurposed table clothes and garbage bags and shower curtains I saw last night made the world feel plastic in that other sense of the word, meaning malleable, capable of being reformed. The way things of the world open to you in the heat of writing. I got a wonderful email from Dana Ward yesterday, where he told me how something I wrote in a recent blog post clicked for him, how it resonated with strands of thinking he's been engaged in, and gave him an entry into pulling it all together. Dana clearly is in that glorious phase of writing, where you're high with the magic of the world, of language, where the difference between the two blurs in ways that ordinary mortals cannot comprehend. I feel so envious of Dana. This is what I'm craving—to get back to that place myself. That heightening is what really keeps us going back to writing year after year, regardless of fame or no fame, or whatever anybody thinks of the work. I imagine a sacred circle around Dana, etched in the earth, as he performs miracles.

Lying Low

2011-11-25T13:38:00.001-08:00

Kevin took this picture. I call it "Cats on Bed as Low Lying Rocks." I came across it on iphoto when looking to see if Kevin had downloaded any Thanksgiving pix, which he apparently hasn't. The lithograph on the wall is
"Death of the Poet" by Fran Herndon, from the series she did for Jack Spicer's Homage to Creeley. It's been at the foot of the bed for years and I've spent so many hours vacantly staring at it, it's entered my blood.

My back hasn't fully recovered, but it's doing much better. The flow of red wine at Thanksgiving yesterday at Karla Milosevich's was a nice relief from the pain. It was a huge Thanksgiving, like 30 people, great food, great music, all vinyl, on an incredible sound system. Margaret Tedesco set herself up as dj for much of the evening. A particular hit was We Five's "You Were on My Mind," which is really a sucky song, but in the moment it was like heaven. I told anybody who would listen that when I was in junior high, our lesbian gym teacher would play the album while we were in the showers. She was short and round like a basketball. I chatted and played with people for hours, I was not at all grumpy, morose, or withdrawn. A student who's never taken a class with me recently told me that some students find me intimidating, so Thanksgiving was good practice for the new non-intimidating Dodie. Though, thankfully, there were no students there. I heard all sorts of great stories and information, but what comes to mind is Bruno Fazzolari's mini-lecture at dinner about the history of scent. As part of his art practice, Bruno creates perfume. I do not like perfume, but I love the bottle of Bruno's that Kevin brought home one day, after he visited Bruno's studio. As we discussed the hierarchy of the senses, Kevin grew excited over the idea that when you smell, actual molecules enter your body. Bruno said that sight reigns in Western Culture to the extent that while scientists know everything about the mechanism of sight, the physiology of scent still isn't totally understood. As an example of how emotional our reactions to scents are, Bruno told of a radio program where the announcer said they were going to send out scents via radio waves, and, no surprise, the audience reported various smell-related reactions. Bruno's telling of this was infinitely better than what I'm putting down here. Just now I'm flashing to another part of the evening, of Anne McGuire playing with a small pumpkin. She'd hold it upsidedown by the stem, pretending it was a mike as she lip-synched the backup for whatever record Margaret was spinning. At one daring moment, she put the pumpkin under her jacket, turned sideways and struck up a huge-breasted pin-up pose.

During my back recuperation I've been reading Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, about Ted Bundy. Rule worked with Bundy at a Seattle crisis clinic, back in the day before he was Ted Bundy. I'm not really interested in the murders. You can read about them online, and I in fact did read about them online, last Saturday, the first day in weeks where I had nothing at all scheduled. I had all these plans for great accomplishments, and I'd even turned off the modem to keep me from fucking around online, but I found myself reading the Wikipedia entry on Bundy, on my iphone, since you don't need WiFi to use the internet on the iphone. It's a long article, and I read the entire thing, tiny screen after tiny screen. It was 5:00 p.m., I was slouched on the couch still in flannel pajamas, and I felt miserably useless and abject, but I couldn't stop myself from moving on to the next tiny screen. What I find interesting about Rule's book is the ways Bundy mimicked normalcy, even empathy. And all the groupies, how he married while he was on death row and even fathered a child. Kevin says all the imprisoned serial killers have wives, didn't you know that, Dodie? Having read so much lately about charismatic leaders, especially gurus, it seems that the charisma of the serial killer is cut from the same cloth, just another bleep on the same continuum. It's all about pathological narcissism, the pornography of control. And of course this all connects back to the buddhist for me. That sense when I was with him that there was something missing in him that other people have. It's hard to explain, but it was eerie. When I was younger I got involved with a lot of weird people, but I've never experience this sense of something missing. It was the sort of thing where you bring somebody into your home and the cats flee and the dog starts growling. Do I remember in the Ann Rule book her saying that her super-friendly dog shunned Bundy? Maybe I made that up, I've been reading so eclectically and talking to so many people lately, it's all a blur, these bits of information pop up in my head and I can't remember who or where it came from.

An example of the weird people I slept with in my my 20s. My book Pink Steam ends with a story called "Not Clinical, But Probable," about a love affair with a schizophrenic. I dedicated the piece to John Wieners because I wove bits of his poetry throughout. To this day there is a rumor that I had an affair with John Wieners, which is amusingly ludicrous. The schizophrenic poet in the piece was a compilation of not one, but three different schizophrenics I had slept with, none of them Wieners. I did spend one lovely evening with John Wieners, with Kevin and Raymond Foye. We went to dinner and out for drinks at Tosca Cafe in North Beach. Afterwards, Wieners asked us if we'd like some digestive aids, and he went into a corner store in Chinatown and bought us each a pack of Lifesavers. I keep that pack of Lifesavers in a drawer in my desk. Here's a photo of it I clicked this morning:

Embraced

2011-11-22T14:22:00.001-08:00

Donal Mosher sent a link for his latest post to his photo/text-based blog, GhostType. I love Donal's blog, the intimacy of both his photos and his writing. Can one write directly about one's personal experience with honesty and directness, and not be an egomaniac? Donal's work makes me believe that, yes, we can do this. I particularly loved his Halloween post, touching upon the intensity of working on his and Mike Palmieri's next feature documentary, about the horrors of medical testing and prescription drugs:

Thanks to editing the new film, the terrors of this season are medical testing gone awry, drug induced suicide, and war trauma –hauntings that belong to others but bleed just as easily into the holiday as any of the domestic terrors my family have to face. I catch glimpses of pharmaceutical side effects in the bubbly skin and the vacant eyes of a Walgreens’ monster mask. A plastic severed limb sets off flashes of the bloody photos and footage we were given by a very young medic who suffers PTSD from his service in Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

Donal's blending of inner and outer, personal and cultural expands the self rather than fetishizing it. A tone of openness and vulnerability needn't be all stagy; it can be disconcerting in its humbleness.

I'm supposed to be spending the day in bed, due to having pulled out my lower back yesterday. Big time. Karen, my chiropractor, agreed to stay late to see me. I didn't know if I was even capable of making it to her office, the pain was so unbearable. Karen's in the final year of a 5-year osteopathy program, for which she flies to Vancouver several times a year. She—and osteopathy—are amazing. No cracking. Karen worked on me for like an hour, and a day later I'm sitting here in my brace, able to move about with minimal pain, and it's clear I'll be fine in a day or two, rather than the weeks of torment I've seen others go through with similar injuries. The white brace encircling my waist reminds me of the truckload of cars I recently saw being hauled about in the rain, each wrapped in a white car raincoat, with clear patches over the front and rear windows. The cars were directly in front of me on a day that was a bad day, emotionally, I can't remember why, but they instilled within me a sort of childlike glee, so I got out my iphone and waited for a stoplight and clicked a photo. The white coverings look like hazmats for cars, which perfectly fits the post-apocalyptic Philip K. Dick I've been reading.

Moe's Books is having a Philip K. Dick event this evening: Philip K. Dick's Exegesis: A Conversation, about the weird religion Dick received in visions. At a party at Juliana Spahr's house Friday night, David Brazil was telling me about it, and I wanted to sit at his feet cross-legged and shout, "More, more." Dick's religious experiences fascinate because they're in line with the readings I've been doing about cults and inspired teachings. But going to Berkeley is not in synch with my order to stay in bed, so I'm having one of those should I/shouldn't I/what should I do moments. Eileen Myles, who was here last week, and whom I had the luxury of spending time with three evenings in a row, seems to go through such decision crises frequently, with her eagerness to devour life, to not miss a minute of it.

The past few weeks have been insanely packed, all of it good, but overwhelming. Reading with Ariana Reines and Stuart Krimko's visit at Dog Eared Books and Moe's (Kevin also joined us at Moe's), plus their visit to my Experimental Fiction seminar and our dinner afterwards. Reading with Dennis Cooper at City Lights, and the dinner afterwards. Dennis said his latest book, The Marbled Swarm, was not meant to be read outloud, but his reading was totally engaging. The SFMOMA celebration for The Air We Breathe exhibit and book. Eileen read a delightful (and smart) play in which her deceased dog Rosie appears on a puppet talk show. The puppet's version of the horrors inflicted by humans: "They put their hands inside us!" Elijah Burgher's show at [2nd Floor Projects]. The cleanse I did with Kathe Izzo. The Grand Piano reading at Wheeler Hall in Berkeley, a choreographed extravaganza by eight of the project's authors. Private dinners with Donna de la Perriere, Suzanne Stein, and Marcus Ewert. The reading/party for Daniel Borzutzky and Ronaldo Wilson at the Josephine Miles house, where Judith Goldman, UC Berkeley's current Holloway poet, is staying. (Insert praise for anything I haven't already praised, for it was all wonderful.) Small Press Traffic's Steve Abbott event, featuring his daughter Alysia, who I've known since she was barely a teen. Her slide lecture about her life with Steve was touching, and she convinced me that Steve's importance as a literary figure has been underestimated. Robin Tremblay-McGaw's excellent write up of the event can be found here. Later that evening there was a Right Window opening in the same space (Artists Television Access) for a video installation by Abner Nolan, of Nolan's son building a construction out of colored blocks. The window in which the video was displayed was covered with plywood, with a hole cut out of it that hugged the construction the boy made. This child-father project resonated perfectly with Alysia's talk about her father, even though the pairing was accidental. My father was a carpenter and I'm taken back to how thrilling it was when I was a child to hammer nails in boards. And when I was a graphic artist—before computer graphics, when the job involved a lot of physical skill—how I sometimes felt like a white collar version of my father, all the precise measuring and cutting, and the reign of the right angle.

I'll end with a few more images of the recent past.

The audience listening to Ariana at Dog Eared Books.
The fellow in the front with his head in his hand is Elijah Burgher.

Dennis Cooper and Ted Rees at Caffe Macaroni, after our reading at City Lights.

A group shot from Caffe Macaroni.

Margaret Tedesco and Ted Rees (he's everywhere I go)
at a dinner for Elijah Burgher a couple of days before his opening.

Daniel Borzutzky and Ronaldo Wilson.
These two, besides being super talented, definitely fit in the "fun" category.

Frank Smigiel toasting us all, at the Air We Breathe afterparty,
takeout from Fang's in the SFMOMA catering kitchen. That's Eileen in the foreground.

Me with Ted Pearson at the Grand Piano event.
I have my typical deer in the headlight photo clench.
I love Barrett's weird hand gesture in the space between us.

Stretching back to October, Anna Moschovakis with geese in Golden Gate Park.
Her and John Sakkis' Poetry Center reading was also amazing and deserves a post all to itself.

So, anyway, as you can see, life has been fucking full.

Sylvia attacks Kevin's CCA ID badge

2011-11-16T11:57:00.001-08:00

News Flash: Stuart Krimko Joining Me and Ariana Tonight!

2011-11-09T14:13:00.000-08:00

Stuart Krimko has agreed to read with Ariana Reines and me tonight at Dog Eared Books (8 p.m., Valencia at 20th, San Francisco). Ariana and Stuart are touring the West Coast together, and will also be reading Friday night at 7:30 at Moe's Books in Berkeley.

The three of us had a wonderful time together yesterday, driving to my class at SF State, where Ariana was the best class guest ever. She instigated soulful discussions of writing and introduced rare issues for a grad writing class, such as the importance of bringing heart and morality into your work (and in a way it seemed that heart and morality were the same), and the vibrancy of form versus the emptiness of style. I may be getting this wrong, but style, the way Ariana was using it, involves writing practices that become institutionalized and sapped of their original formal energy/radicality. She opposed this to the formal genius of, say, Dennis Cooper or Genet. Afterwards Stuart and Ariana and I went to Catch for dinner, the first time I'd been there since I had dinner there with the buddhist. Ariana was reading at Small Press Traffic while I was having dinner with the buddhist, and I regretted not seeing her that weekend. So returning to the scene of the crime with her completed a cycle, though this was an after the fact analysis, not a predetermined ritual or intention. It was 50% off a bottle of wine Tuesday, so we imbibed Malbec and delicious food and talked and talked. Around 10:30 we went back to my place, as Kevin was home from teaching at CCA, and I made ginger tea and the four of us chatted for another couple of hours, with a great sense of liveliness and ease.

This morning it seemed odd to me that Stuart would be sitting out this leg of his tour with Ariana, that it made sense for him to join us tonight, so I asked Ariana what she thought and she agreed. I was reminded of how when I was in my 20s, when I took LSD, I couldn't bear to part with whomever I took it with. For instance, one time here in San Francisco I dropped acid with my lover and a friend of his who was visiting from the East Coast, and the three of us had a magical evening together (including seeing Sarah Vaughn at the Concord Pavilion while we were peaking), and later back at my lover's place when it was time to go to bed, I insisted that the friend come to bed with us. It wasn't a sex thing, I didn't like sex on acid, it was too literal for my grand surges of love, I just couldn't bear for the three of us to part. I whined and whined but my lover said no. Behind all this was the fact that when my lover lived back east he'd secretly carried on an intense affair with the guys' wife. Even on acid, I knew not to blabber about that. I wonder if this is how some communes formed in the 60s, people on drugs who couldn't bear to part. But, anyway, Stuart and Ariana and I worked so well together hanging out, I felt we just had to read together tonight.

Here's info about Stuart copied from Moe's website:

Many of the poems in Hymns and Essays, Stuart Krimko's third collection, employ an almost abusive form of rhyme to address theological concerns. It should come as no surprise, then, that he makes reference to such predecessors as Heinrich Heine, Shel Silverstein, and the 17th century English balladeer and joke-writer Thomas d'Urfey. All humor aside, most of these poems are flecked with iridescent glints of rage, joy, and gloom.

The Final Two Books of Héctor Viel Temperley is Krimko's first published volume as a translator. Viel Temperley (1933-1987) was an Argentinean poet who achieved cult status as a writer of intensely surreal and mystical works. Krimko has translated his last and perhaps most famous books, two long poems that are formally idiosyncratic investigations of faith. 'Crawl' approximates the breath of a swimmer as it juxtaposes maritime and Biblical imagery in violently strange tableaux. 'Hospital Británico' was written just before Viel Temperley's early death from cancer, and just after he underwent an operation for a brain tumor; in an interview at the time of its publication, he called it a 'book written by a man with a hole in his head.'

Stuart Krimko is the author of Not That Light (2005) and The Sweetness of Herbert (2009) both published by the Key West-based independent publisher Sand Paper Press. Krimko 's poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in publications like Fence, Maggy, the Poetry Foundation website, Post Road, and Vanitas. In addition to his literary activities, Krimko has worked for many years in the art world. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where is an Associate Director at David Kordansky Gallery.

Come See Me and Ariana!

2011-11-08T11:37:00.000-08:00

I'll be reading with incredible Ariana Reines, tomorrow. Here's the info, copied from the Fence Books website:

Wednesday November 9, 2011
8:00 pm
Dog Eared Books
900 Valencia St. (@ 20th)
San Francisco, CA 94110

Ariana's promoting her hot-off-the-presses new book, Mercury. A truly lovely thing to behold. She's also visiting my experimental fiction seminar at SF State this afternoon. Wow wow wow.

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

2011-11-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

The title of this post quotes Steve Jobs' last words, left over from a post I started days ago, but never wrote. It's still a good title, don't you think?

Driving over to the cafe I'm sitting in, I was snacking on a dried fruit and nut mix in which all the ingredients were grown in California or Washington. Persimmon, sour cherry sweetened with West Coast honey, hazel nut, pistachio, the thinnest most tenderest of apple, and one or two something elses. The mix is very expensive, so I only bought a small amount, and I was savoring it. I thought about how years ago when I was in group therapy for eating disorders, many of the women confessed to bingeing in the car. I'd just gotten my driver's license when I entered group therapy for eating disorders, so I did not have a history of bingeing in cars. Eating and cars has no particular associations for me. When I typed that I thought of being a kid and driving with my family to White Castle for their little square hamburgers, affectionately known locally as "sliders." We never ate them in the car though, we'd take them home and my brother and I would be bouncing for joy at getting to eat take-out, a rare occurrence when I was a kid. It usually happened on Sunday evenings, my mother's self-proclaimed day off from cooking dinner. I thought of the eros of Drive-In restaurants, the food served on a tray attached to the driver's rolled down window, teenagers trolling for someone to make out with post burger and shake. I didn't have such a teenagerness. My hijinx came later in life, which looking back I think was a fortunate thing, but probably is also why I still occasionally take a foolhardy turn, e.g., the buddhist. But driving this evening, eating my expensive fruit and nut mix, I didn't think of my youth, I thought of how someone—I don't remember who—from Los Angeles, who drives a lot, once told me they frequently saw women driving in cars, bawling their heads off. My Angelino narrator suggested that people cry in cars because that's the only place where no one will hear them wail.

All of this makes me think of the privacy of compulsions, engaging in behavior that no one dare know. A devastating pleasure that leaves you spent, and you repeat it over and over again. There's a gloriousness to that, even as it sucks the life out of you. I wasn't feeling any such Bataillean intensity as I primly nibbled on my fruit and nut mix, but I was enjoying my drive alone. I've been savoring my alone time; thus the lack of posting to this blog. My journal is growing fat and I've been devouring books. Ideas for my own book are exploding in my head, ideas which I scrawl down as quick as I can. Oh wow, oh wow. It all feels excruciatingly private, yet most of that privateness is being harvested for the book. It's like the book is a jealous lover who won't tolerate a threesome with the blog. Clearly the book and I need to sit down and have a talk about our relationship. Dearest book, I think you're being a bit clingy.

Outside the Outside

2011-10-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-02T16:58:00.000-07:00

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.

Now and Then

2011-09-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

This morning I received a group email from Margaret Tedesco, sent to all the "stars" of Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich's forthcoming play, Dance World Gym. Since many of the characters are dancers, Margaret sent links for creating costumes—how to make a leotard out of a T-shirt, how to put on ballet shoes, etc. The eHow Style site also had links to other helpful female-centric instructions, including how to walk in high heels. I watched all the high heel videos with great interest. First of all, when standing, never lock your knees. Always walk from heel to toe, placing one foot in front of the other. No wonder I have such a hard time getting around in heels. My shuffle about on your tippy-toes is all wrong. Female rituals such as heels fascinate and terrify me. I wore heels to Stephanie Young's wedding, and all the women I talked to complained about how their feet hurt, and I felt so bonded to them, like I was part of this femmy world I've always longed for, while simultaneously being repulsed by it. This evening, after yoga at the Y, I stopped in Whole Foods to buy some kale for tomorrow morning's smoothie, and since today was the Folsom Street Fair, there were a couple of women dressed head to toe in black, pale cleavage spilling out, and in ginormously steep high heels. They moved back and forth with grace, confidence, and ease past the salad bar. I zeroed in on their feet, and sure enough, both of them were walking, heel-toe, heel-toe, one foot in front of the other. It's like every woman in American knows how to do this but me. (The photo to the left are some irises I got to commemorate my Whole Foods enlightenment experience.) I can't wait to put on some heels and click-skip from one end of my apartment to the other, heel-toe, heel-toe.

The last time I wore seriously high heels was in July, at Kevin's and my 25th Anniversary party, which we held at the Purple Onion in North Beach, the club where Phyllis Diller, Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Dick Gregory, etc., performed back in the day. This legacy gave the event a magical feel—surrounded by red leather and dark wood, we were a dot along this long, long timeline of the Purple Onion, we were part of the flow of San Francisco history. We invited 25 friends to celebrate with us. I wore my black and white Fluevog heels. Walking the two blocks from the car was so excruciating, I wanted to throw myself down on the sidewalk and crawl to the restaurant on hands and knees. But my feet were dazzling. I felt like Cinderella going to the ball, in my gray stretch silk sheath.

X-buddhist

2011-09-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

It seems I never announced Robin Tremblay McGaw's wonderful meditation on the buddhist that was posted September 8 on the X Poetics site. I'm honored to have such intelligent, sensitive eyes cast upon me. Thank you so much, Robin.

"[I]t is all about discomfort, distances, contagion."

Systems Reset: Symbols Ricochet

2011-09-18T18:55:00.000-07:00

Here is the continued. I'm feeling rather awkward in my body today, so where is my center of gravity? I think it's in my upper back, between my shoulder blades, up too high, and thus my aura of off-kilter. When something happens or is observed, and a persons says they feel it in their body, this confuses me. As opposed to what, I wonder—feeling it outside your body? Since I was in my 20s I've encountered a series of stagy women who competed with me sexually. The first one I recall would do stretching exercises in Washington Square Park in a lowcut Danskin top, with her tits threatening to fall out. She would flash dramatic cleavage to any guy who happened to be in the park, including the alcoholic homeless guys that were ubiquitous in North Beach at the time. The nondiscrimination of her exhibitionism shocked me, mostly because I couldn't imagine the mindset that would make flashing my tits to a homeless drunk possible. I was having a grand, operatic affair, and she was between involvements, and she'd insinuate that I was too stiff to have good sex. I suspect she was writhing around in the grass more for my benefit than the homeless guys'. When stagy women have competed with me sexually, I've always wondered why bother with a socially dysfunctional nerd like me—I'm just trying to get by here—why not set your sights on someone more in your league? But this isn't what I was planning to write about. I can see this is going to be one of those posts where I have a plan, but I keep rambling, and then I run out of steam for the plan and spit it out in a rush. The last few days have been odd in that I've had to submit to the urgencies of my environment, which forced me out of my typical M.O. Our desk computer was going crazy, crashing, working unbearably slowly, that horrid multicolored spinning wheel twirling on and on for the simplest of tasks, like opening a folder. I spend several hours both Thursday and Friday on the phone with Apple tech support, which resulted in erasing the hard drive and reinstalling the system software, then copying all the programs and files from the backup. The desk computer is where much of the relationship with the buddhist took place, the zillions of hours I spent writing to him, the several emails a day I received from him. And on the eve of the one year anniversary of our "break-up," to the day, I erased the hard drive and started out fresh. The computer is now perky as a young girl. The next day, my new house cleaner came over—Kevin and I have been doing spot cleaning, but the place hasn't had a thorough cleaning all summer. So, on the one year anniversary of the break up, I cleaned house with the house cleaner from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. I didn't plan for her to come on this super symbolic day—after many negotiations this was the first day we could agree on. I'm reminded of one of the rituals for the dead that I read about when I was doing research on vampires for The Letters of Mina Harker, something about sweeping the floor after a person dies, to keep the spirit from lingering. I'm horrible at housecleaning, but I was going at it like a maniac yesterday. After the cleaner did the kitchen floor, I went back over it with a squirt bottle, on my hands and knees. I felt weepy, waves of mourning, but it wasn't for the buddhist. It was for my mother. Cleaning is so tied to her and to a femininity I rebelled against. I was determined to not be a housecleaning slave—this was a site of constant battle with my mother, a battle that I ultimately won. Now I admire my mother's ability to clean. The efficiency of the house cleaner reminded me of her. The house cleaner is wonderfully calm and pleasant, a middle aged Chinese woman with a daughter who goes to City College. Her ability to clean and restore order is awesome. Being able to clean well was highly valued where I was raised. My mother would say of some women's houses, "Her floors were so clean you could eat off of them." My grandfather, who was a garbage man, would say of some people's garbage cans, "They were so clean you could eat out of them." And now my apartment is so clean you can eat off of it. To earn extra money to put me through college, my mother worked as a janitress. Housecleaning would be an occupation more in line with my background than grad writing teacher. So there was all this confusion—being with the house cleaner was like being with an alternate reality for myself, plus it was like being with a surrogate of my mother. It was really intense and exhausting, but it was beautiful, cleaning with her.

This sense of misplaced maternal reminds me of Matt Borruso's show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts.

Though Borruso's collages reference horror films, their most disturbing elements are the afghans that are spliced throughout. This symbol of cozy femininity, of grandmotherliness, within Borruso's horrific landscapes, turns monstrous. Not only do these colorful security blankets fail to make us secure, they threaten to engulf us. That's pretty much what I felt about domesticity when I was younger—that I'd rather die, or more precisely, that it was a living death. But I did love to crochet.

So this is day one of a new year. After the steam room my skin feels dewy and fresh as a baby's.

Systems Reset

2011-09-18T16:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the Ferry Building, at a large square wooden communal table, facing the bay. Blue water, sail boats, blue cloudless sky. I'm eating a veggie bento box—not my number one choice, but the great taqueria was closing when I arrived. I love lotus root, so I can't complain. I had my first session with my "wellness coach" at the Embarcadero Y. Wellness coach means free trainer. I love my trainer, a transman with lots of tattoos. I'm so pleased to be having a queer workout. We started by setting up and learning some of the weight machines. It's all automated. Once it's set up, I type in my code and the machine tells me the settings my trainer has inputted and how many rounds. It also beeps when I get to the far range of a motion. I thought of Kathy Acker's love of weight training, how she had a toy stuffed animal that she would attach to a machine she was working out on. I thought of the opening last night at [2nd Floor Projects], of Laurie Reid and Ben Echeverria's collaborative show, which was wonderfully playful and smart. In the hallway, curator Margaret Tedesco was showing a catalogue essay Kevin wrote about filmmaker George Kuchar, which includes a photo Kevin took of George naked, covering his own genitals with genitals drawn by Raymond Pettibon—part of a series Kevin is doing, which includes naked photos of many of the local Bay Area guy poets, all holding Raymond's genitals. We have a screen saver that shows random photos from our hard drive, so you can imagine how disconcerting it is to walk past my computer and see a naked David Buuck or Andrew Kenower slowly floating by. Earlier in the month, a few days before George died, Margaret showed him the catalogue. George said that he looked good in the naked picture. Vince Fecteau joked that George was a real gym queen. When someone asked what a gym queen was, I found that so odd, how anybody could live in this area and not know what a gym queen was. I sometimes forget how insular the worlds I inhabit are. Someone added that George said he worked out because because you never know when someone will want you to appear naked in a video.

After the trainer, I did a mile on the treadmill, overlooking the bay and the Bay Bridge, window open, fresh, fresh, breeze, then steam room and shower. It was a spa day. I'm going to a Korean spa on Friday with Pam Martin, whose picture reminded me of a puppet a few posts ago. After reading the post, Pam brought her antique puppet collection to last Sunday's workshop pizza party. Exquisite. She also gave me a photocopy of "Puppet Theater," an article published in 1810 by Heinrich von Kleist. I loved it—it has a sense of the marvelous, like Tales of Hoffman. Von Kleist recounts a meeting with "a certain Herr C., who had recently been engaged as premier danseur in the opera" in the town of "M." Herr C. shocks von Kleist when he claims that the dance of marionettes is superior to the dance of humans. A marionette, he explains, always moves from its center of gravity, whereas humans basically think too much and lose the innocence in their gestures. Affectation sets in, throwing them off center. The center of gravity is where the dancer's soul resides. "Or look at young F., as Paris, standing among the three goddesses and handing the apple to Venus; his soul—it is really horrible to see—is in his elbow." Another favorite passage: "Puppets only use the ground as fairies do; brushing it lightly in order that the momentary check may give a new impulse to their bounding limbs." As I read the essay, I thought of people whose personas get out of control and even though they're fascinating, there's a deadness to them. I also thought of procedural writing, how one of its agendas must be to circumvent the cycle of affectation, to recapture a touch of lost innocence.

I haven't gotten to the core of what I wanted to write here, but the hour of Pete's internet I received for buying an iced green tea is about up, so I'll sign off and continue later.

She Spreads Sunshine

2011-09-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

My dreams have come true—Michelle Tea has written about me! Check out her hilarious, pithy, brilliant discussion of the buddhist here.

Thank you Michelle! I love you.

"maybe the most personal book I’ve ever read"

Another World

2011-09-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this in a coffeehouse in Sausalito, right on the water, and far enough down Bridgeway to be frequented mostly by locals. My friend Rachel Brod, who's lived over here, once showed me some of the locals' hangouts, this was years ago, but they all seem to still be here. I ate lunch in a hole in the wall Indian cafe, which felt more like the woman behind the counter's kitchen than a restaurant. They had several types of homemade chai—decaf, lowfat, regular, and soy with ginger. I had some of the soy, which tasted rather burnt, but I drank it anyway. Everybody who came in there was around my age, and seemed mildly bored, like they spent every afternoon lounging around all this quaintness and lush scenery. They all looked like they'd go to Buddhist retreats, except the one white woman in a sari who sat by the window and would yell, "Namaste!" to people passing by. She also said "Namaste!" to people leaving the cafe. She hugged some of these people, for an extraordinarily long time. Instead of a Buddhist retreat, I imagined her at a yoga retreat.

The place I'm in now used to be the Marin branch of the Cafe Trieste. Nothing about it is changed except the name. And like the Trieste in North Beach, there are some old guys here who seem to have been sitting in the same seats they sat in, in the 70s. They tend to be staring intently into laptops. Since I just watched Catfish on TV, I imagine them to be having internet affairs with made-up women. Any one of them look like I could get into a snarling fight with, like the guy I did in the North Beach Cafe Trieste, the time I went there with Dana Ward. I wrote about that in a previous post, which you can access here.

I'm in Sausalito because I got my hair cut. I know—with a zillion hairdressers in San Francisco, it's weird to drive to Marin for one. My hairdresser cuts hair according to a special process based on "sacred geometry." A number of places do that in LA, but she's the only person I could find in the Bay Area. It sounds crazy, and I'm sure it is, but she gives a really good cut. The first time I went to her, she said my haircut would last 4 months, and it did. As I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, which never ceases to be stunning, I kept thinking about how it was the number one suicide destination in the world. Someone said they were planning to put nets underneath it to catch all the people who leap off. I have no idea if this is true. I drove past two lovers kissing on the walkway and I wondered if they were saying one last goodbye before they went sailing through the air. My hair is now closer to a blunt cut, but not really a blunt cut, just more subtle layers, to maintain its movement. My hairdresser blow-dried it so now it looks sophisticated and kind of big, like I could interview people on TV like Diane Sawyer. I can't wait to get home to put some gunk on it to weigh it down.

I've been thinking about secrecy the past couple of days, as part of this uncelebrate-able anniversary with the buddhist. I've been thinking of his love of secrecy and my discomfort with secrecy. I associate sex and secrecy with molestation and with forbidden gay sex, the pain of being in the closet, both of which I've had some experience with. For many of us, being able to shout to the world "I fucked X" is a triumph over histories of oppression. And then there's the smarminess of cheating versus the dialogue integral to an open relationship. The buddhist wanted us to have secret names for one another that only we knew, and he told me to come up with for one with him. I've made up names for every person I've been close to, even some close friends. I call my cat Ted, "Tedster" and "Ted Offensive," for instance. Quincey is "Quincerina," "Quincetta," or "Thump Thump." Syliva is "Squawks;" Kevin calls her "Sylvester." But I couldn't think of a pet name for the buddhist, couldn't perform endearments on demand. I didn't sit down and design the epithet "the buddhist." It arose organically, and it isn't even clever—in fact, its lack of cleverness is what makes it work. When a name is right, it feels inevitable, fits the situation/person like a glove. Kevin and I have the same nickname for one another that we toss back and forth, which fits the post-gender, post-hetero, post-everything tone of our interactions.

The dinner crowd is upon the cafe. Time to sign off and marvel over the Golden Gate Bridge at dusk.

Man in the Moon

2011-09-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

Last night, after my class at SF State, as I drove down 14th Street at the tail-end of dusk, a huge round moon hung low in the gray-blue sky, the moon's radiance softened as if it were covered by a layer of gauze. An occasional wisp of cloud sailed across it. A tranquility so captivating it was hard to focus on my driving. I wanted to keep driving towards it, frightened though I was of slamming into something, to keep moving towards it all through the night until I drove off the end of the world.

I drive a white car and the buddhist drives a black car—this week (Saturday to be precise) it's exactly a year since I told him that maybe we should break up—even at the time that sounded like an odd word choice, as in were we together enough to break up?—and he responded with an abusive tirade, followed by occasional miscommunications for a few months, and then silence. Will 9-11 forever remind me of strange sex in the Kabuki Hotel?

From 14th Street I went to CCA, where I photocopied passages from Assata Shakur's Autobiography and Kass Fleisher's Talking Out of School: The Memoir of an Educated Woman. The title of Kass' book reminds me of Frances Jaffer's She Talks to Herself in the Language of an Educated Woman (1981), which Kevin came across recently when sorting through our books. When he showed it to me, I spent a good half hour reading Frances' collection, looking in vain for a direct reference to the title in one of the poems, and remembering Frances, when we took a poetry workshop together at SF State, her reading aloud a poem about visualizations she used to help endure torturous cancer therapies; I remembered going to a party at her house, when the Bay Area scene still felt so fresh, magical. I then put the book in the To Sell box, but it may not stay there.

When I arrived home, the moon was higher in the sky and brighter, ringed with a thin red line and a large blowzy aura. The surface was mottled, so from my landing I stared at it until I could see the man in the moon. The outer corners of his eyes drooped down. He looked weary, and even though he was smiling, a little sad.

It was a warm day, and my sprouts had grown wildly, the lentils in need of immediate harvesting, so I steamed and prepared them using a favorite recipe, which calls for ground coriander, fennel, and cumin. To grind the spices I used Donald Allen's coffee grinder—this is one of the perks of being the wife of a biographer, to own the editor of The New American Poetry's coffee grinder. After Allen died, his executor invited Kevin over to choose a few mementos. Kevin brought me home the coffee grinder and a pale turquoise Japanese dish. Extra photocopies of texts I hand out in classes are stored in a suitcase that also belonged to Allen. He received the suitcase from Frank O'Hara's estate, filled with O'Hara's manuscripts. In our bathroom hangs a photo Allen took of the San Francisco skyline. One time Allen had a heart attack, and instead of calling an ambulance, he called Kevin at work, and Kevin took the rest of the day off and drove him to the hospital. Donald Allen's coffee grinder is a bright burnt orange. It's in perfect condition but old, with a non-polarized plug. Whenever I grind spices in it, I think of Allen and I think of death, how we should honor our dead, and this adds a touch of melancholy to whatever I cook, an ineffable depth, like unami.

Before dawn, I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep, so I sat up in bed and finished Divided Soul, David Ritz's biography of Marvin Gaye, which I've been reading at bedtime for weeks, having read a couple other bedtime books in the middle of reading it. The ending is heartbreaking, Gaye descending into a drug-induced psychosis, which sparked off thoughts of Lawrence Braithwaite's suicide, and how we really need to move forward on publishing his final novel. At 6:30 this morning Gaye was shot to death by his father. Now that he's dead and the book is over, what will I turn to next at bedtime? It has to be a novel. In my novel writing class the students have been waxing poetic about the glories of the novel, which has left me craving the fictive.

When I drove home this evening it was wondrously foggy, like tunneling into nothingness. At the top of Twin Peaks, instead of the usual San Francisco panorama, a vast paleness surrounded me, a nonspace I read as distance. No moon.

Body Lying on Bamboo

2011-09-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

I got a new bamboo rug for my kitchen, a pale grass green, composed of narrow wooden slats, slightly less that a quarter of a inch wide. It's 4 x 6', and perfect for yoga, so to celebrate, I got out my yoga mat and did a session to a favorite DVD. The session ends with my lying on my back, observing my breath for several minutes. This is something I have to make myself do. In a live class, the final deep relaxation is a luxury I sink into with ease, but getting myself to do that, lying in the middle of the kitchen floor can be challenging. I'm too close to all the things that tug at my anxieties, all the things that need to get done; often a cat is milling around, rubbing up against me, chewing my hair. But what I learn when I allow myself to relax on my kitchen floor is that my body is happy to have been stretched and encouraged to take deep breaths, that my body is full of love, the way a cat's body is full of love when it curls in your arms, vibrating with purrs. I think of all the ways we—women in particular—disapprove and abuse our bodies, this loving creature that so wants to purr and be petted, by others of course, but moreso by ourselves. Sweet, sweet body. This fills me with tenderness and sadness. I've never been comfortable speaking of The Body as an abstraction. My body and other bodies I've encountered in my life, with their frailties and mortality, point to the futility of abstraction. My mother's terminally ill cat who shits, pees, and vomits all over the floor. Sometimes I will clean up all three leakages in less than an hour, and it's so easy to resent her, but then she looks up at me with her huge blue eyes, her body rumbling with love, or after I take a shower, she leans over and licks the coconut oil off my feet with her little pink tongue that tickles, and I'm reminded that part of my duty in adopting her is to love her, and resentments dissolve. And of course, taking care of her spewing body is about my being a thousand miles away for much of my mother's terrible cancer death, and by taking care of her cat, I'm symbolically taking care of my mother. I imagine with it being the anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow, many of us are thinking about mortality, both individual and global. On his Facebook page, Christopher Breu was talking about the difficulty of writing an ending that isn't a conclusion, and that's what I'm feeling now. I started this post, but how do I get out of it, a process which entails it's own sort of mortality. Or we could be more glass-half-full and focus on new beginnings. I'll end this post, and at 3:00 in the afternoon, I'll get dressed, and I'll do something gloriously productive with my life. Or not.

After I finished the above, I found this video posted on Karla Milosevich's Facebook page. Perfect.

Clown Potlatch

2011-09-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

Blogger has a new interface, so things look off-kilter here, which fits my mood, as the full schedule I had planned for today has fizzled. Being busy from wakeup to 7:00 at night on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays doing class prep and teaching, Wednesdays and Fridays get crammed with errands and appointments—but I'm gloriously sick today and canceled the first two appointments. I've had this intestinal thing going on for over a month, and finally am in the purging phase, which I feel will end a difficult and irritating cycle. It's not as bad as I feared it would be, my horrible headache has subsided and I did not spend the entire night puking as I have in previous incarnations of this syndrome. Last night, since I knew this was coming on no matter what I did, I said fuck it and went out for a drink with Suzanne Stein. We sat in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel, drinking Malbec and nibbling on french fries and salad, and having one of those satisfying conversations that leave you with the life is good feeling.

If I stick to a holier than though food regime, I don't get this physical distress, but believing certain foods will make you sick is very difficult, it's akin to having a conversion experience. Gluten got to the point where reactions were so intense and sudden, I became terrified of it, and there's no temptation, though, being sick I always want simple foods that children would like, am longing for a slice of toast with butter or peanut butter. Of course I have no such substances in my kitchen. What I did have was a buckwheat blini (they make them in Marin and sell them at Rainbow Grocery) spread with almond butter and a whisper of umeboshi paste—tasty, but nothing close to my vision of food heaven. I also had a coconut smoothie, made from a young Thai coconut, mostly for the electrolytes, as coconut water is an amazing source of electrolytes, great for times, like now, of mild dehydration. I'm on the verge of my dairy conversion experience, accepting that I cannot get away with occasionally cheating with chai and unctuous melted goo. I'm working with a nutritionist who is great. She's a vegan, but she used to be a radio DJ. There's nothing woo-woo about her. New Yorkers would like her. She's tiny and has a giant dog I sometimes see her walking.

Repeatedly I learn that you cannot judge on superficials who will be a good teacher or healer for you. For instance, my life was changed by a therapist who led women's groups at night, and was a hairdresser by day. Teaching writing I learn, over and over, the wisdom of the old cliche, don't judge a book by its cover, as it's impossible to predict who in a new class will be the talented writers. I've had people who when I met them seemed totally hopeless, whose work then blew me away. Many people have read me as hopeless, and then had to revise later. In first grade the idiot teacher put me, who was eager to read more than anybody in the school, in the second reading group instead of the first, and I had to prove to her that I was too good for the second group, and she eventually moved me to the first. That pattern and its ensuing humiliations and triumphs has followed me my entire life.

I've been reading German sociologist Max Weber, for personal fulfillment, and for research for the book I'm working on. Theory of Social and Economic Organization. The Sociology of Religion. I'm mostly interested in what he has to say about charismatic authority. According to Weber, there are 3 types of authority: rational/legal, traditional, and charismatic. Charismatic authority can be found in cult leaders and in those super poets who can mesmerize a room, where the atmosphere feels charged as if we were at a rock concert instead of a poetry reading. Since the buddhist isn't really famous (his Facebook page still only has 571 friends listed), but he's well known and respected within his Buddhist world, I often felt a resonance with his life and my involvement in an experimental poetry/narrative network. Not really famous, not a superstar, but with a certain amount of status within an insular group. I'm confused and intrigued by those with room-mesmerizing abilities—it's as if their pores exude a drug into the air and everybody's stoned and smiling in this demented way. There's a vampiric quality to the whole exchange, as if the charismatic one were feeding off the crowd's energy, and growing stronger and more vivid, they could burst with all the energy they're guzzling. Think of Paul Jones in Peter Watkins'1967 film Privilege:

It's exciting to have Weber talking about this, in his dry, categorical way.

I'm also reading, as research for a seminar I'm designing, Christolph Linder's Fictions of Commodity Culture. The book "considers how fiction, from realism through modernism and into postmodernism, accommodates and resonds to the commodity's colonization of the social imagination and its desire." The book costs $110 on Amazon, so I got it through interlibrary loan. Funny how a book on commodity culture itself is too dear a commodity for even shopping-crazy me to own. I picked it up Wednesday night at the SF Public Library, and when I left, the alarm went off, which led to interrogation by a guard. Then I went downstairs to give a reading in Michelle Tea's Radar Series. After Radar, I dashed back upstairs to use the restroom before the library closed, and again, when I exited the alarm went off, and again the interrogation. The book has an uncanny aura of agency, a commodity with consciousness and will. On the cover of my copy, above the woman's head is a bar code that reads "University of Nevada, Reno. 3 1233 01151 0716."

After my mom died, I took her entire clown collection to UPS and had them pack it up and ship it to California. This felt vitally important at the time, saving those clowns. Kevin used the clowns for a show he curated with Matt Post at Right Window Gallery, and since then, for the past 3 years, the clowns have been sitting in our basement. A couple of weeks ago I realized the clowns were never going to be integrated into my home, that I didn't have room for them, that I no longer wanted them. I have one blown glass clown on my desk, which my mother gave me long before she died. That was enough. Kevin suggested I give them to my writing workshop, so that's what I did. I opened the huge packing boxes they were stored in, wrestled them out bubble wrap, set them on the coffee table, and people oohed and ahhed, and chose. It felt more like an adoption than a gifting. One box was in the back of our place, in the office area, and while everyone was in the living room, I stood there beside my desk, poignantly alone, unwrapping the clowns, one by one, and I was overcome with intense grief, that sadness that knows no bottom, that shakes you to your core, and writing this sentence I feel like I'm being faux high Frenchified, like Julia Kristeva's adolescent niece. Still, it's awesome the energy some objects can hold.

That's artist Pam Martin on the far right of the frame. I love the way her arms and hands seem to be dangling, and the tilt of her head. She looks puppet-like to me, as if the clowns were turning her, were turning us all, into puppets. As if clowns were the most charismatic of all commodities. Perhaps that's why so many people fear them.

The Institute for the Advanced Study of Cuntology

2011-09-04T17:03:00.000-07:00

I wish every night were Feminist Movie Night. Last Wednesday night a group of us—Bay Area women poets, as well as a few visual artists and visitors—went to see Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution at the Shattuck Theater in Berkeley. Afterwards, most of us walked across the street for pizza and drinks. Here's most of the group in the theater lobby:

Front row: Sara Wintz, Amanda Nadelberg, Corina Copp, Jack Frost, Cassie. Smith, Jennifer Manzano
Top row: Nancy Popp, Stephanie Young, Lauren Levin, Serena Wellen, Lauren Elder, Lara Durback

It felt important, to meet with a group of highly intelligent, intellectual women as women (how essentialist of us!), and to talk about ways we're all swimming around together in the thick bumpy stew of the experimental poetry community. What I hear, privately, over and over, is that some women feel an uneasy tension between form and content in the local (and beyond) writing community. I hope more discussions arise about this, not in order to bash anybody, but in order to promote an atmosphere that encourages permission for women—especially younger women—to produce work that feels right for them, and to discuss that work in a way they feel comfortable. Some modes of discourse feel like a violation to me—and I'm not saying anybody's out to violate me, but some modes alienate the intimacy that we all put into our work and experience the world through, implying that we are professionals here and we need to use the specialized language of professionals so we don't sound like a bunch of whining pussies or whatever. Some work and some discussion makes me want to dash home and write. Others make me feel hopeless and want to give up. !Women Art Revolution and discussing it afterwards made me want to write. I loved the blatant corniness of some of the work shown in the film, the play where one woman wears a giant vagina and another a giant cock and they argue about who needs to do the dishes. I was even enjoying Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, which I always secretly thought was stupid, but it isn't stupid, it's fist in the face over the top, which is good good good. More women need to be a pain in the ass. More women need to embarrass people. Anyway, the evening was great, and I hope more discussion and events and magazines come out of it. At the bar afterwards there was talk of opening a new local women's building, which would be named The Institute for the Advanced Study of Cuntology.

A few days before that Kevin and I went to a small gathering to honor Leslie Scalapino. It was organized by Laura Moriarty and hosted by Leslie's husband, Tom White. It was held in Leslie and Tom's living room. Fourteen of us sat in a circle; each read a portion of Leslie's work and talked a bit about it. I didn't talk much, but I listened intently. Tom frequently enlightened us with the real life origins of certain passages, and much of the discussion centered around Leslie's relationship to autobiography in her work. It was agreed that no matter what real life material Leslie drew upon, by the time she was finished, it was something else. The intimacy of sitting in Leslie's home, among her things and quietly remembering her was almost unbearable. I discovered Leslie's work in the late 70s—this was before I became involved in the experimental writing scene—I became somewhat of a groupie, and went to every reading of hers that was announced in the Poetry Flash. At the gathering, Aaron Shurin read Leslie's 1979 This walking and eating is associated all right, which I used to own, and wish I still owned, and I still love, and I sat there, full of nostalgia, trying to imagine my unsophisticated self reading this work and hearing Leslie read this work, and what did I get out of it back then? I know her work opened possibilities in my relationship to language (and meaning). The last time I saw Leslie was about a week before she died. It was at Norma Cole's birthday party, and Leslie came in late, just for a few minutes. From across the room our eyes met. It was a jolt of recognition, and then she was gone. Many people at the party didn't even know she was there.

I'm excited that Christopher Breu has started a blog. Reading Christopher's blog is what made me want to post here. I haven't been posting because I'm busy, but I've also felt inhibited. The public-ness of this space, when one isn't insane with mourning and heartbreak, as I was during the buddhist era, is poignant. If I, after all these years of writing and being public, still need others to create a web of permission, imagine how much younger women (and I'm sure guys as well) need it. We're all serious about our work, but there's many ways of expressing intelligence. I hate that some things are still risky that long ago should no longer have been risky. Censorship can be very subtle and insidious. I know I'm being vague here, but I'm not secretly thinking of any one thing, just an atmosphere, a cloud of abstraction and bespectacled aestheticism.

Photo Op

2011-08-25T17:27:00.000-07:00

I'm too busy to blog right now, too busy for much "me" time in general. Maybe I should try something drastic, like giving up sleep the next couple of weeks. But here's few pix from the past week. Last Saturday we went to artist Cliff Hengst's birthday party. Think bitchin' dj-ed music, glam people, lively conversation. When we left it was a total hug fest, a gauntlet of hugs as we slowly wove our way to the front door. It was so much fun, hurling myself into person after person's arms—I felt a glee akin to when I was I kid and I'd spin around and around until I got dizzy and threw up. Here's Cliff blowing out the candles on the killer flourless fudge birthday cake that Karla Milosevich baked him:

That's me on the far right, with the blue thumb, and metallic sleeve of the tunic I got on sale at H&M for $10. Since Kevin and I are working on clearing our stuff out of the basement, he brought a mannequin to the party that he borrowed from Karla over a year ago:

The mannequin was used in a couple of poets theater productions. In my play "Turn on the Heat," it played a private eye, in trench coat and hat. In another play it played a corpse. It was excellent in both roles.

Last night Kevin and I went out to dinner with Sara Wintz and London poet, Sophie Robinson, who's doing a casual tour of the State, due, in part, by the really good exchange rate she's getting, thanks to the weakness of the U.S. dollar. I was haggard and distracted yesterday, but I calmed down and focused and had a great time. Sophie is delightful in all ways, including her food choices and the size of her personality. And, of course, it's always a treat to spend time with Sara. Here's a photo Andrew Kenower took of us, using Kevin's camera: Sara, Sophie, me and Kevin.

I look old and such a mess in this photo, no make up and in that horrid gray cardigan. Others post photos of me where I look old and blobby, but I never do. This seems important, like I'm making a great step forward in some New Age way, posting this here, like it's saying look at me world, I'm fucking fine. I'm always impressed when visual artists use images of themselves in their work—or even in documenting their work—where they look like shit. There's a tremendous strength in that. I look so bourgeois in this photo, I long for tattoos on my face and buzz cut.

Out of the Blue

2011-08-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

Yes, this week it's deep cobalt blue nails—or maybe you would call them blue-jean blue. The last couple of weeks were bubble gum pink gel nails. These are done with "natural" polish, which means they'll last a day or two on feral me. I had a meeting with my intuitive, Tiffany, today, and we went so deep, I'm reeling. I've never had anyone be able to read me like she does. She reads me the way I've read people I was in love with. I went into her sitting room through one door and exited through another. I feel very clear. Yes, I'm being vague here, but my deep psychic shit goes into real writing, not blog writing. In the buddhist it's the difference between the soul-shredding final piece and the rest of the book, and to a lesser degree the kinky-ass beginning. I'm reading the pdf of a friend's upcoming book, and I'm gasping it's so beautiful and real. My friend said of writing the book, "i went so far down i died." (I'm sworn to secrecy, thus I'm not naming names here, though names certainly deserve to be shouted from the rooftops.) And I knew exactly what said friend meant, that's the place you have to go to really do it in writing, at least the type of writing I'm interested in, but there's always the problem of how do you do that and walk down the street, how do you do that and go teach a class and claim authority? Also just received Dana Ward's Squeakquel Parts 1 & 2, which he sent me the pdf of, as the 100 copies of it sold out instantly, and I whined to him about it. It looks, predictably, amazing. Dana has become the new golden boy. If I could buy stock in him, I would. Also reading a draft of an intense long poem by Donna de la Perriere, which also floors me. I thought, what do all these pieces have in common—they're all no bullshit writing, and I thought to myself, I should declare a new school of writing, the No Bullshit School. If no bullshit were the core aesthetic principle, it would rid experimental prose/poetry of at least 90% of its problems. So, after my intensity with Tiffany, I went down the street to Sephora and put on Dior eyeshadow, using a duo called Tropicals, smearing sparkly lime green on the lid, and a mat brown on the crease, then I drew on some charcoal liner, and finished everything off with brown mascara, because all the black samples were used up. I felt like a new woman, even though I had to suppress the teeny fear of getting eye disease from using public makeup. Then I walked further down the street and got my bright blue nails. Now I'm sitting in a cafe writing on my MacBook Air, listening to my ipod nano, with my iphone sitting beside me just in case Aaron Vidaver calls. Don't let anybody tell you I don't believe in the American way of life.

Twister

2011-08-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Our Fran Herndon collage is at the framers being retrofitted for Fran's upcoming show at Altman Siegel Gallery, leaving a large empty space on our bedroom wall, which we've filled with a piece from Susan Silton's "Twisters" series, "digitally manipulated photographs of tornadoes originally taken by professional storm chasers, which she then reduces to a small, intimate scale, and converts to black & white with a richness and subtlety reminiscent of drawings or a fine silverprint." (Kinz + Tillou Fine Art)

In the group photo, Susan's Twister is in the center, the small image in the huge field of white mat. Upclose it looks more like a watercolor to me. Lovely. A work such as this piece, which rides the uneasy border between figurative and abstraction, never loses its charge. It's like a relationship you can never figure out, it's like an endless wrestle between mind and emotion.

The buddhist's sort of wife is in town again, giving a workshop on spiritual "art." Which means maybe he's here as well. He loves the Bay Area. I swore (to myself) that I'd never write about him here again, I mean, I have moved on, as much as that well-scrubbed American concept is possible. No need to beat a dead horse, etc. Where did that awful metaphor come from? I'm surprised how much I don't want to run into the buddhist on the street. He could be anywhere, right—and so I have this lowkey pervasive sense of paranoia, like evil is lurking around every corner, watching me. I found myself yesterday looking him up online, an activity I thought I was firmly over. I found a photo taken earlier this month, at a weekend thingy he taught. The photo is of him and the other teachers and facilitators, six of them in a row. Everybody but the buddhist has their arms around one another. The buddhist, however, has his arms in front of him, pointing down, framing a belly that wasn't there last September when everything blew up between us, he has his hands in tight fists, the fists abutting one another. Everyone else is showing lots of teeth in broad smiles, but the buddhist sports a tense closed mouth grin. He's a staunch pole of containment in the midst of group gaiety, which is, in part, what drew me to him in the first place, the thrill of worming my way inside the fortress.

The psychological threesome between the buddhist, my friend who introduced us, and me has been on my mind lately. In many ways I feel like I was a surrogate for her involvement with him—and it's the two of them who really belong together. Even though I eagerly entered into the situation, I sometimes feel like a virginal pawn in the hands of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses. A ridiculous interpretation of the situation, to be sure, but that doesn't stop me from going there, when I'm having one of those moments. I could go on and on, but no more beating a dead horse.

Speaking of animal cruelty, last night Kevin and I went to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which I loved, and which he grudgingly enjoyed but had some issues with. He found it too cartoonish, and I countered with it IS a cartoon. The motion-capture animation is amazing, didn't feel creepy at all, like in Avatar and Polar Express (I only saw the trailers to both of them). Very fluid. I loved Caesar, and totally believed and rooted for his and the other apes' rise to power. It's like the workers' revolution that we need for democracy as we know it to survive, though really it's more like a prison revolt movie. That it was filmed in the Bay Area of course added to our pleasure—real San Francisco police cars being blown up, real San Francisco Animal Control vans having their doors ripped off them. And the final showdown on the Golden Gate Bridge! Any movie scene is better if it happens on the Golden Gate Bridge. When we learned that the evil animal testing lab was in San Bruno, Kevin and I looked at one another in amazement, for we were watching the movie at the Tanforan Mall in San Bruno! Neither of us could remember ever having been to Tanforan before (we'd gone to Lowes, which is in a neighboring mall, to get supplies to deinstall Cecilia Dougherty's video installation at Right Window), so our seeing this particular movie there seemed deeply symbolic—but of what? Does it matter? Do symbols really need to point anywhere beyond themselves? Can't they just sputter and twist around in the awesome funnel of coincidence?

Here's a sample of motion capture animation, of Andy Serkis, who masterfully played Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, performing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. For me this video evokes the uncanniness of the doubling of realms. It's like simultaneously seeing one's physical and one's astral bodies, one's figuratives and one's fantasticals:

"Leave now and never come back."

Ordinary Marvels

2011-08-09T20:03:00.000-07:00

Today I had an appointment at SF State with folks outside the Creative Writing Department, so I wore my Female Academic drag: black slacks with black Mary Janes, linen tank and cardigan in contrasting shades of beige, pearl earrings (single large pearl on each ear hanging from a gold wire). It's still summer and this was a casual meeting, so I carried a backpack stuffed with my laptop. The Mary Janes make me think of Bruce Benderson. When I stayed with him in the spring, I was wearing a pair of black clogs around his East Village condo, and he pointed to them in horror, and told me to not wear rounded-toed shoes because they look orthopedic. To the left is a snapshot of my orthopedic lady-faculty footwear.

It was oddly pleasurable driving out to State. With the campus emptied of students, I breathed in the ancient, giant trees in the middle of campus—I'm a sucker for ancient trees. I was surprised by the amount of public art there, tucked in various nooks of nature, that I never noticed before. This one in particular I stopped and marveled at its podlike strangeness:

When I walked to the other side of it, this is what I saw:

It wasn't a sculpture at all, but a streetlamp that seems to have died a horrible death! A ways down the path, I spied one of its healthy cousins:

After my meeting I stopped in the school bookstore and bought the teeniest pink flash drive. Here it is attached to my keyring. Beside it is a silver pharaoh ring that belonged to Kathy Acker. The cross was a valentine Loring McAlpin sent out many years ago, like in the 90s. Engraved on it is, "Love to love ya baby," and his phone number. It came attached to a whistle.

The teeny pink flash drive holds 4 gig of data, which is amazing when I think that The Letters of Mina Harker, my first book, was composed on a MacPlus with 1 mb of ram and a 40 mb external hard drive. Whatever technology you're reading this post on, in the future—probably not too distant—will be laughably primitive, like the candy-colored clamshell ibook Reese Witherspoon carried in Legally Blonde.

Today was a lowkey glorious day, where I didn't need a brain, like brains were so unnecessary—the cool breeze blowing across my cheek was reason enough for whatever. People, even downtown, were unusually friendly today, like everybody was feeling the perfectness I was feeling. I thought of the awed lackadaisical tone of the Mamas & the Papas song, "Twelve-Thirty." "At first so strange to feel so friendly/ To say good morning and really mean it." As in "California Dreaming," in "Twelve-Thirty" the Mamas & the Papas celebrate the freshness and unguardness of California as compared to the rigid grayness of New York City. In the refrain they delight in young girls "coming to the canyon," which I assume is a reference to Southern California, Topanga or one of the other hippie-infused canyons of yore. In the 70s Marvin Gaye moved to Topanga with Janis, his teenage girlfriend, who eventually became his second wife. Gaye's first wife, Anna, sister to Motown mogul Berry Gordy, was 17 years his senior. Janis was 17 years his junior. Gaye moved to Topanga, partly to hide the not-yet-legal Janis, and partly, according to David Ritz in Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, my current read-yourself-to-sleep book, because he was so in love with Janis he wanted to spend all his time alone with her.

In the car today I was playing the second disk of the deluxe edition of Gaye's What's Going On, which is mostly from a live performance at the Kennedy Center. At first I didn't care for this performance as much as other live performances of his I've heard, but listening to it over and over in the car, I now love it. Each day a different segment will open itself to me. Today it was his jazzy, sophisticated reenvisioning of some of his 60s hits. As a tribute to Tammi Terrell he sings a knock your socks off rendition of "Pride and Joy." He introduces the song saying that in their duets, he and Tammi strove "to sing of love, and about love." According to Ritz, Gaye and Terrell were never lovers, but it was like they were in love while they were singing, that Terrell for Gaye represented the possibility of love. When she died, he was heartbroken; people said they'd never seen anyone so heartbroken.

So how can I move from Marvin Gaye's heartbreak to a gracious ending to this post? There's been so much heartbreak already on this blog, stopping and resting in it feels natural. So that's what I'll do.

Morning Light

2011-08-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged for ages, but I've had lots of ideas for posts that I never posted. Why haven't I posted? Busy, for one thing, doing major cleaning and reorganizing at home, which feels great, but is endless. It's like I'm seeing my apartment through my mother's eyes, how could anybody possible live in such disarray! Some days I'll be reorganizing, and some days I'll have my spray bottle of nontoxic cleaner and a microfiber cloth and be scrubbing like crazy. I don't believe that one should need external order to create internal order—one doesn't want to be buffeted about by "accidents," as Marcus Ewert calls them, external forces in one's environment over which one has no control—but external order certainly makes internal order a hell of a lot easier.

What else have I been doing besides blogging—working on my book and other smaller projects, writing lots in my journal, more so than I have in ages, meditating, reading, doing yoga on a thick rubber mat on the kitchen floor. I place the mat on top of the bamboo mat that sits in the middle of the kitchen floor. I have to vacuum the bamboo before I lay down the yoga mat, so I got a hand vac, rather than dragging out the big vac for a couple of whooshes. As a cat owner, I'm really into the hand vac, the way it disappears litter kicked onto the bathroom floor and crunchies knocked out of feeding bowls. I don't think my mother would have approved of my hand vac, as she was a big proponent of elbow grease over appliances. I'm thinking of the episode of the Julia Child show I watched either when in high school or as an undergrad, where Julia with bowl and wire whisk raced a mixer for either whipped cream or egg whites, and guess who won. That would be my mother, kicking an electric mixer in the ass.

I loved Julia Child, had her picture pinned to my bedroom wall, her on the cover of Time magazine. One time when I was a sophomore in college, my girlfriend and I went over to our next door neighbor's and we all got so stoned we were drooling, and we watched an episode of Julia Child, she made this chicken in white wine-y tarragon cream sauce, and the next day I made the dish and fed it to everybody, and my neighbor acted like I had superhuman powers, to be able to watch Julia in that condition and retrieve enough to repeat her efforts. My neighbor, who would borrow my albums and then blast them late at night, keeping me awake, one time did acid every day for a month, and in that state came over and watched Children of the Damned with us, and he was convinced the movie was true. He was short and very blond, and he kind of looked like like the children of the damned. He was involved with a pair of twin sisters, not at the same time, he'd alternate back and forth between them, which caused the sisters much pain. In my writing workshop last Thursday, we got sidetracked, telling stories about twins. This would have been a perfect story to tell my workshop. It didn't matter if your twins story was interesting or not, if it was about twins, the workshop was down with you.

I've also been doing school work, Antioch packets as well as working on the syllabus for the undergrad poetry class I'm teaching in the fall. Since it's been years since I've taught poetry, I don't have a backlog of material to rely on, so it's been daunting, making it up from scratch. But, yesterday, working on the syllabus was glorious, reading poetry all day and coming up with categories to contain them. I got into the time-loss frenzy I can get in when writing, didn't eat lunch, didn't take a shower and get dressed until 6:30 in the evening.

I've also been socializing, but being in a rather tender state, I've been sticking to group outings with Kevin and only seeing privately old friends who I trust, who are reliable. Fuck the fair-weathered. Speaking of weather, it's freakishly cold out. I had to have my car at the detailers at 9:00 a.m.—the inside will be nontoxically steam cleaned, the outside coated with all sorts of stuff to protect it from the daily assault of not being a fancy car with a garage. I'm in a cafe eating an organic locally grown breakfast, caffeine-splurging on some black tea. I'm rarely out of the house in the mornings, I walked here from the detailers, maybe half a mile, and there's something magical about being out before most stores are open. I know, fulltime workers are now thinking spoiled yuppie scum, and you're right. Been thinking a lot about people who—for reasons I can't fathom—claim to be working class when they're not, people with "educated," as my mother would say, parents with white collar jobs requiring a college education, calling themselves working class, which to me is shitting on those of us who were really raised working class, and the difficulty it is to adapt to the social codes of middle class life, never getting it right. At a certain point I stopped wanting to get it right. After my mom died, I had her mail forwarded to my address, so now I get, not only her mail, but mail my brother forwarded to her address. The one bit of brother mail I enjoy is the United Steelworkers newsletter, and yes, I hate the fucking republicans who are trying to destroy the unions. My father was a union carpenter, and that's why our lives weren't so bad, as far as creature-comforts go. We weren't well off, but we weren't hurting. My parents were proud of never having been on welfare. The United Steelworkers newsletter is full color, with lots of pictures of smiling overweight men and women celebrating, graduating from union-sponsored classes. The last issue was about global labor violations in places that didn't have unions.

While not blogging, I went to many things. Went to the kick off of New Road Home Tour with Nomy Lamm, DavEnd, and one other woman whose name I can't remember. At first I was disappointed it wasn't all about Nomy, but the three of them worked so well together, they all were great, and totally sexy. I went with Donna de la Perriere, and she loved it as well. Every once in a while I have to immerse myself in a queer space, and this space was marvelously queer, mostly lesbian and trans, some gay men, and, in part I imagine due to Nomy's activism, people of all sorts of ablenesses. For a couple of hours it was like the "normal" world of white hetero abled didn't exist. Instead we were in a realm of good will, coziness, riotous humor, permission, acceptance, and love. And it was wickedly smart too. Here's a photo (when I emailed the photo to myself from my iphone, autocorrect changed my subject "Nomy" to "bony"):

Bonus pic: the opening of Cecilia Dougherty's show at Right Window Gallery. In the blurry, taken from across the street at night photo, you can't see how gorgeous Cecilia's rear-projected video is. Iphone renamed "Cecilia" as "Geckos."

I also saw lots of movies, the ones I thought about the most: The Red Riding Trilogy, Zodiac, Madea's Family Reunion (I should make this whole post on Tyler Perry), and Cinema Verite, a docudrama about the making of the first reality TV Show (1973), An American Family, about the Loud family. In the Cinema Verite, the Loud's are shown watching dailies of their lives, and this must have struck me, for that night I dreamt about the buddhist, and he was presented to me in the form of dailies some film crew had taken of him.

I went to some readings. The one that pops into my mind was the bookparty for Summer BF Press' rerelease of Bruce Boone's The Truth About Ted. Bruce read the entire chapbook. The general atmosphere of the room was of people being touched and delighted. Bruce held the audience with an authenticity and tenderness that the poetry scene could use more of. It made me happy to know him.

The photo at the beginning of this post is of Quincey, sitting on top of a long serial poem from 1981 that I unearthed and edited, which may be part of my TV Sutras book, or, as Ariana Reines and Kevin have suggested, its own chapbook. I've always been of the opinion that any post is made better with a picture of a cat.

Green Breakfast

2011-07-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

Green smoothie (homemade almond milk, orange, apple, parsley, romaine, kale, flax oil, ground flax seed, vitamineral green), green tea, green fingernail.

New buddhist sighting

2011-07-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

Jackie Wang has written an amazing epistolary review of the buddhist on Bomblog. I'm swooning, having been read this deeply and smartly; I have that rare, luxurious feeling of having been totally gotten. Thank you, Jackie, you rock my world.

I was planning earlier to write a full-blooded post, including a more detailed response to Jackie's review, but when I clicked to this blog, all the images were gone and I was so confused and dispirited by that, I spent writing time trying to figure out what the hell happened. Somehow I got the inspiration it had something to do with Google+, so I looked into my account info there and unclicked some box I didn't understand under photo sharing (which was really hard to locate), and the pictures reappeared on the blog. Maybe a coincidence? Who knows. I want to delete the whole Google+ account, like who needs it, but I was afraid to.

But last night at Wayne Smith's opening at Gallery 16 (an amazing show, I loved it all, both the figurative and the abstract pieces, what Wayne can accomplish with little dots is mind-boggling) I was talking with artist Laurie Reid, and she'd read Jackie Wang's review, and Laurie was swooning with me. How perfect a form, the letter, for the personal, episodic format of the buddhist. Laurie and I were also talking about Jackie's confidence that with such a casual tone her intelligence would show through. It's rare to see such knowledge and keen intelligence demonstrated without pretension. The review seemed to arise out of a sense of personal urgency for her. And of course, I'm reminded of Bett Williams' wonderful review of the book on Fanzine. Bett said she wanted to review the book around the same time Fanzine editor Casey McKinney agreed to publish a review on the site, so I put them together. Casey was a bit hesitant, as I'm friends with Bett—this was a murky arrangement according to the journalism ethics he learned in grad school at UC Berkeley. But, Bett's forefronting her relationship with me and this blog in her review was the perfect note, creating a thoroughly compelling piece of writing. A big part of the buddhist project was to muck with the boundaries between writer and audience. I love it—with these reviews and other women writing online, it feels like a female movement is brewing, demanding that everybody acknowledge that the world is personal, goddamn it, perception is personal, reviews are personal, and what and who we love and hate are personal as well. The stance of objectivity is cruel and dangerous, don't you think?

I didn't take any photos at the opening, but here's one I stole from Karla Milosevich's Facebook page, of Wayne with Karla and Amy Rathbone.

Wayne is the designer of the buddhist.

the buddhist, the book: sightings

2011-05-27T18:29:00.000-07:00

Bett Williams has written a smart and moving review of the buddhist for the webzine, Fanzine. That's too neutral—her writing about my book knocked my socks off as I sat in the veterinary clinic's waiting room, having taken my cat Quincey to her acupuncture treatment, which happens every six weeks, like a haircut. Bett's very personal take on the book is so perfect for the project. She throws objectivity out the window and writes nakedly of her personal experience of encountering this blog and the book. It's a response that every writer dreams of receiving, to have such an impact on someone with razor-sharp intelligence who's capable of getting the nuances of your every grunt.

An excerpt from the buddhist has recently been published on the webzine, Radius. It's part of a very interesting series in which a poet chosen by the site then presents and introduces a poet whom she has an affinity with or who influenced her—as well an emerging poet whose work she finds interesting. I'm so honored that Dapne Gottlieb chose me as her influence. The "emerging" poet is Danielle Montgomery. Daphne and Danielle's poems kick ass, and the three of us resonate together wonderfully, all presenting an aesthetic that fuses power and vulnerability. The three pieces also intersect in their exploration of desire and otherness. My excerpt is from the material at the end of the book, which was never posted online. But read all 3 of the poems in Daphne's series, for this is an excellent example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

Anti-conform

2011-05-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

Early Friday evening I made the 3 1/2 hour drive from the raw foods school to Kevin and the cats in San Francisco. I began by listening to a compilation CD Kevin bought, of "hits" from Apple Records. At first I thought the CD was dreadful, but it grew on me. I do have to skip Brute Force's banned "King of Fuh," because one day its sing-songy melody got trapped in my head and it nearly drove me crazy. It was banned because the King of Fuh is called the "Fuh king" most of the time in the song. "Hail to the Fuh king." It's really silly and makes me giddy when I hear it. When I got to the redwood forest, this vast presence slapped me in the face—tears came to my eyes—the trees generate enormous power that demanded silence on my part. I turned the CD off, and rolled down the front windows to take in all that energy, which felt simultaneously ancient and fresh. It's a place where seductive spirits roam. I had a fantasy of being called by my tall wavering translucent pale jade friends, and pulling by the side of the road and walking into the trees and never being heard from again.

When the dense redwoods were behind me, I continued to listen to the audiobook I began on the way there, Maggie Gyllenhaal reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. I know this sounds ludicrous, but once you get used to her, Gyllenhaal is really good, I think—subtle and nuanced for an audiobook. Maggie's own craziness and bitchiness worked well for Esther's voice—much better than Plath's own stagy reading style would have been. It had been a zillion years since I read The Bell Jar. I wasn't prepared for how brilliant it is. It angers me that this book isn't more respected. It's far from being obscure, but there's still an aura of snickers around it, like it's a pathetic book. Plath's use of image is in the novel is as sharp as in the poems, and her ability to capture fleeting impressions and shifts of consciousness is jaw-droppingly good. Reread the part where Esther is zooming down the hill on skis. I was touched that Plath would dive into such vulnerable, intimate material. The book must have been very painful to write. Says one who always seems to be wanting to write things that are painful to write—and to read. The book exposes the fucked up social systems women were trapped in in the 50s like no other.

Saturday afternoon I accompanied Kevin to Fort Mason's Southside Theater for a panel discussion on William Burroughs' novella Queer, in honor of the restaging of Erling Wold's operatic adaptation of Queer. The panelists were RE/Search Publication's Val Vale, Bob Glück, and Kevin. Erling Wold also spoke. Nobody was there. In fact, I was the only person there who wasn't somehow connected to the panel or the theater. It was declared that as audience, I played an important role in the event. Vale and Marion Wallace decided to tape the presentations, with the hope of broadcasting them on their public television show, and so they moved the camera from the audience to the stage. I had to switch my seat to the far left, as they were blocking the podium. Here's an image of the stage, with Kevin talking directly to Bob, as Vale sits in a chair in front of him and Marion operates the camera.

Kevin's T-shirt bears the tagline from Friday Night Lights, "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."

It was a fascinating event. Everybody should have been there. The papers Bob and Kevin read on Queer were, as expected, superb. Bob focused on the meaning of queerness in the book, and how it tied into a now vanishing, late 40s/early 50s spectrum of gay masculinity. Bob also wrote about money and how it operates in Burroughs in general, a provocative angle. Kevin focused on Queer as an 80s phenomenon, even as an AIDS novel. At one point he discussed sections that Burroughs wrote of Kevin and Marcus Ewert's collaborative rewriting of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, which he then tied back to Burroughs' biography and fascination with the grotesque. Vale presented a slide show of rare images of Burroughs from his personal collection, many of them revolving around guns, as he and his friends would go to shooting ranges with Burroughs. Here's Vale standing beside a slide of the cover of the RE/Search publication dedicated to Burroughs.

That's Erling Wold's head in the foreground. I was moved by Vale's off the cuff discussion of Burroughs' personality and aesthetics—Burroughs' insistence on nonconformity to the point of being an alien. This struck home after the regimentation of raw cooking school. By the final day of it I was seething with rage, like I wanted to run out of the place screaming. The students in the school may have come from all over the world, but for the most part they weren't a fringy crowd. Being immersed day and night with all these normal people, living in the same house with athletic straight guys, I felt like an alien, and I must have been acting like one, as some people were treating me that way, like my need for privacy was unfathomably strange. It takes balls—and entitlement—to declare oneself an alien. That's a totally different experience than having alienness thrust upon one. Like Plath, I've always been a conformist who's just fucking unable to do it, a failure of sorts. One half of my brain is always saying "fuck this shit," and the other half is suffering over my difference. A failure that generates tremendous energy; I think it's the core of my creative drive—and of Plath's. Maybe it's that way for a lot of women. I don't know.

Here's a couple more snapshots from the rest of the weekend. Saturday evening Kevin and I went to Small Press Traffic's Reliquarium fundraiser, and I bid on and won Dottie Lasky's magical bottle of sunshine:

Sunday Kevin and I visited Kota Ezawa in Marin at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where he has a residency. Here's Kota in his studio standing beside a video installation:

Kota scavenged the TV monitors from around the Headlands. I loved Kota's looped video, City of Nature, originally conceived as a work of public art and shown in New York's Madison Square Park. Kota animated the nature scenes from many, many feature films, leaving the original (and often over the top dramatic and sentimental) musical scores and nature sounds. Kota told us which movie each scene was taken from. I remember Brokeback Mountain was in there, and Fitzcarraldo, Fire Walk With Me. Kota's editing was really tight. What looked like a single bird flying through the sky was in fact, with each cut, a different bird from a different movie. The installation was previously shown on state of the art flatscreens, but Kota was saying he was liking how it looks on old TV monitors. He smiled and said Headlands makes you more of a hippie.

Raw Up North

2011-05-17T21:08:00.000-07:00

I know, long time no see. The end of the semester was really crazy, actually it's still not totally over for me, but it's getting there. At the end of the crazy end of the semester, I went on a 2-week cleanse, which was ridiculous, given that it was a time when I needed extra energy, not to be detoxing so I was nauseous, headachy and couldn't focus. I couldn't even write in my journal I was so out of it. But somehow I managed to attend 3 student fiction thesis meetings, and critique their work. I saw Pierre Guyotat read at City Lights fasting, and afterwards had dinner with my Newing the Narrative class at Cafe Macaroni, fasting. Kevin's fiction workshop joined us, as did Guyotat (at another table), eventually. He was great, so haughty, yet also a miracle of survival, having his book Eden Eden Eden banned, which he said was financially disastrous. His haughtiness and his survival are probably very much co-dependent. I wish I could pronounce dramatically that I was reinventing the English language, the way he said he was reinventing the French language. I wish I could be proud of what I haven't read, rather than feeling guilty and ignorant, the way Guyotat declared with a tinge of condescension, that he's never read Bataille or Genet or the nouveau roman, as if they were beneath him. "I read the classics," he said. I got the impression that he saw himself as a direct heir to the classics, so why distract himself with the lowly competition. His reading from his new Semiotext(e) book, Coma, was amazing. He read a long section of it in French, then translator Noura Wedell read the ending. The English of her translation is beautiful; the audience was awe-struck. Coma is my dream book, tracking consciousness and unconsciousness as it intersects with physicality. I mourn how the (American) novel no longer is primarily about consciousness in our plot-driven era.

I'm staying at a lodge 3 1/2 hours north of San Francisco, along the coast, attending a raw food cooking school. I'm being purposely vague, so this isn't google-able. Here's the apple crumble tart my team (Team 3) and I made.

There are three of us in team 3, a young woman from Malaysia (which I didn't know before I met her was a county, I'm such a god-awful Westerner), and a white woman with dreadlocks who lives in Willits, who has a sweet white boyfriend who also has dreadlocks. I saw her 11 year old-ish daughter one day in the lobby, and she too had dreadlocks. Observing the dreadlocked mother and daughter, side by side, I thought of Austin Powers and Mini Me. But she's great, as is the woman from Malaysia, who studied bio-tech in college, but has a passion for graphic design. She's read a lot about it and loves to talk about her favorite graphic designers. She's been sent by the restaurant she works in in Malaysia so she can learn raw food cooking and go back and teach the other people there how to prepare raw food. She's a Buddhist, a real Buddhist. The woman from Willits plans to open a raw food cafe as part of a holistic healing center she wants to start with some friends. I'm here for no good reason other than I wanted to get myself to actually prepare this stuff, which is surprisingly easy. The tart was delicious but cloyingly sweet. Each of us in Team 3 ate a slice of it and instantly became so sleepy we couldn't keep our eyes open.

Yesterday we made raw veggie sushi. I posted a pic on Facebook, but here it is again. It tasted surprisingly good. We each made 2 rolls. My first one was nice and tight, but for the second one we ran out of sprouts, and it's clear the sprouts are the secret to tight rolls (at least for novices), as my second roll was a bit flabby. Today we also made pesto and marina sauces, and spiralized zucchini for pasta. The sauces were good, but I'd never eat this. Below is a pic in a to-go container (we were each given one corn-based to-go container to take home food we make that isn't whisked away from us and either sold in their cafe or fed to us at lunch the next day; we're to wash out and reuse our one to-go container; if we don't we have to pay $2 for a replacement).

The lodge I'm staying at is cute and clean and has raw food kitchen, but it's noisy as hell, being an old wooden structure, and the communal feel is perhaps too much for a loner like me. I think of the buddhist last summer, spending 3 months at mediation retreats, hiding in his room eating take out from a Whole Foods that he had to drive an hour to get to, and writing compulsively to me. If I didn't have Kevin to talk to on the phone, I think I'd go crazy. I've developed an enemy, this snotty party girl from Peru, or Pay-Roo, as she says it. She's blonde. I don't know if blonde people are common in Peru or not. The only Peruvian I ever met was Chinese, and he said there was a sizable Chinese population in Peru. People from all over the world go to school here. I have to get up every morning at 6:30 or 7:00 to be at school on time, which is really a feat for me, as I'm used to staying up all hours and getting up at 9:00, the earliest. We have quiet hours here, supposedly from 9 p.m. to 7 p.m., so my Peruvian enemy was in the hallway talking really loud on her cellphone at 12:15 at night, and finally I said to her she was keeping me up—so now I'm the voice of adult oppression. She moved to the living room and woke somebody else up, then she ran up to the floor above me and stomped around and banged things nonstop until after 1:00, keeping not only me up, but also my teammate from Malaysia, whose room is across the hall from mine. (I later learned it was someone else who was doing the stomping, but in my heart it's still the girl the Peruvian blonde). I ended up taking an Ambien last night, which makes me feel rage, as I just came off of a cleanse and I'm eating all raw here, and the last thing I want to be doing is to take an evil pharaceutical. The Peruvian acts snooty and stern whenever I'm near her. I found myself purposely going and sitting near her so she could do her snooty act. I have childish, nasty revenge fantasies about her.

Being here, I'm feeling a lot of compassion for my students. Learning is hard work, and it requires such discipline. I'm amazed my students put up with all my demands. I waver here from being totally in it, as I am learning wondrous things, such as when you dice an onion, leave the root end attached, and dice it that way, and all the layers don't go sliding all over the place. I'm sprouting. I'm making flax seed crackers, almond cheese. I'm overcoming my fear of dehydrators. I'm learning to use a knife like chefs do on TV. And yes, I'm constantly thinking of Julia Child in the Julie and Julia movie, Julia in French cooking school screwing up, I feel so awkward sometimes, practicing new techniques. Sometimes I feel so fucking rebellious, all the rules, and it's so regimented, like if class starts at 8:30, they're taking roll at 8:30. They take roll after lunch as well. And that means you're at your station in your chef clothes, hair under control, and hands washed long enough to sing Happy Birthday twice, and rinsed and dried with a paper towel, and then you turn off the faucets with the towel. Sometimes I'm all, who gives a fuck, what do they have over me, I'm not in the army (though it sometimes feels like it), but other times I'm so excited I want to stay longer than a week and do the whole program and get certified as a raw food chef, even though that's not in any way a goal of mine. I just get swept away in the excitement of it all. The owner is a diva supreme. Kevin would love her. She was born in 1947, but looks like 20 years younger. She's fascinating to watch and she seems like a controlling bitch. I was gossiping with one of the local shopkeepers about her, and they said they'd heard she was impossible to work for. I love to see what cute chef outfit she has on each day. Sometimes she wears more than one cute chef outfit a day. You should try on a chef outfit, it's not easy to look cute in one. Today as she demonstrated how to make our apple crumble tart, she started talking about her father, how he's who got her interested in cooking. And when he was dying of cancer, she cooked for him, what he liked to eat, chicken and pot roast, even though she hadn't cooked meat in 40 years. She said, I love my daddy. She said it intensely, like that big smile of hers was going to crack. And then she talked about her mother, how her mother didn't appreciate her creativity. The room felt totally Freudian, like Joan Crawford were standing up there, the head of a cooking school rather than the chicken place in Mildred Pierce.

When I told Kevin I bought a chef's coat, he said he was going to write me a part in the play he's writing with Karla Milosevich. He said I would play China Chow's personal chef. Kevin, who's written over 30 poet's theater plays, said that many a good part started with an outfit.

the buddhist on the Poetry Foundation blog!

2011-04-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Alan Gilbert has written a great piece on the buddhist, for Harriet, the blog for the Poetry Foundation. What can I say, I'm touched and flattered, and I love the attention—and I really felt like he got what I was hoping to do in the book.

the buddhist can be purchased at the Publication Studio online store.

It's been an emotional day. Weird emails and one intense, rather stunning, but ultimately heart-warming phone conversation on my cellphone as I pulled over to the side of the road on 15th Street, between Market and Church, the front half of my car parked legally, the ass-end in a driveway.

Hi There

2011-04-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted, and I'm not really posting right now. Sylvia and I are just waving hello. I've been busy, a surplus of events, people, deadlines. You know. The past few weeks I've shared a meal/drink with or seen their reading/art, or both: Jay Sanders and Elizabeth Sussman, Colter Jacobsen, Marcus Ewert, Blake Butler and Justin Taylor, Kasey Mohammed, Rodney Koeneke, Lindsey Boldt, Ryan Thayer, Kevin Killian and Leon Baham, Eileen Myles, Robert Pinsky, Donna de la Perriere, Linda Geary, Donal Mosher—all of which I could have written thousands of words about.

Candid

2011-04-08T16:17:00.000-07:00

Just thinking how candid is so similar to candida, wondering if they have the same root.

Candid: Latin candidus, glowing, white, pure, guileless, from candre, to shine; see kand- in Indo-European roots.

Candidia: Latin, feminine of candidus, white; see candid.

So the candid is white and itchy. In the spirit of candid, I'm posting an accidental pic of myself where I look like shit—old, lumpy, no make up, from that dreaded underneath angle. My iphone camera will do this reversal thing where it focuses on you as you take the picture rather than the big outside you're looking at. I was trying to photograph the glorious clouds above Golden Gate Park (a futile touristy gesture, as amateurs doing clouds always fail, and has there ever been an interesting photo of glorious clouds?). And if my punctuation at the end of that last sentence is incorrect, that's because I have no idea what the correct formula is. I did what makes sense, but punctuation at the end of sentences in American English doesn't always "make sense." And students muck it up so much I lose track. So this is me, realizing the camera eye is trained on me and my having no idea how that happened and my wondering how I can make it stop. I didn't realize I was taking a photo, I thought I was making it stop. So I named the photo "Dodie candid," and that's the origin of the name of this post.

It's a splendid day out. Bright, warm in the sun, with a cool breeze. Saw a vivid yellow flowering tree. I'm wearing my rudrani necklace in solidarity with Bhanu Kapil, who's reading from Ban in Denver today; I'm sending her the energy to be as candid as she longs to be. I wore this necklace the first time she and I went to the ocean and meditated to Shakti. Only later did I learn than rudrani are associated with Shakti. Rudrani are small seeds from the rudraksha tree. The larger seeds, called rudraksha, are associated with Shiva, the masculine. The small seeds are associated with the feminine. Of course.

I keep thinking of a line Ariana Reines recently posted on her blog:

But aren’t blogs supposed to be all about vulnerability; subjectivity

I would imagine that most people would answer this with a resounding NO. I love, though, that she would assume this, that so many women are now aiming towards this. Yesterday, Kevin quoted Muriel Rukeyser to me: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." YES.

the buddhist now available online

2011-04-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

the buddhist is now for sale at Publication Studio's online store. Here's its new and improved description:

While ending an affair with a Buddhist teacher, Dodie Bellamy wrote about it simultaneously on her blog. This experiment in writing in extremis explores nuances of public shame, the vagaries of desire and rage, and Bellamy's confusion over the authenticity of group and individual spirituality. What is personal, what is public? In the electronic age, can anybody tell the difference?

the buddhist celebrates marginalized subjectivity as enacted in the work of female artists from Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Carolee Schneeman, to Bhanu Kapil and Ariana Reines. The Allone Co. Edition contains the essence of the blog, as well as more extended narratives too explicit to post on line.

Our latest reader response comes from artist Ajit Chauhan: "I started dodie's book & it has just absolutely knocked me on my ass with its depth of humor & insight & understanding."

Ajit Chauhan, ReRecord, 2009, 162 erased record (album) covers

Saatchi Gallery: "For one of his most recent body of works entitled ‘ReRecord’ Chauhan uses old vinyl albums. The work is composed of 160 erased record covers pinned together onto a wall, forming unresolved and slightly faded portraits that recall and highlight the ephemeral nature of things."

Biladderal

2011-04-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

Laura Mullen sent me this image in honor of the publication of the buddhist. The subject of her email was "ladders to you!" This made me insanely happy. I think I was looking for a reason to be happy, and Laura provided it. This followed immediately after a riotous email from Bhanu saying she expected a blog report on my book party. Laura, Bhanu, Kass Fleisher, and I were on a panel at the Adfempo conference in NYC a couple of years ago, or whenever, and our panel fucking rocked. I was so proud to be in league with these women. We need to team up again.

What do I say about the book party? Kevin read a few deliciously smart and funny Amazon reviews from his new collection, edited and published by Jason Morris. There's such a vein of dry surrealism in his wit, which is unique—because surrealism and all that impulse towards unconsciousness is watery, right? But not with Kevin. With him it's more like walking on sand in high heels.

We sold a lot of books, had a large and glorious audience, a mix of poets, prose writers, and artists—all ages. Many audience members were in the book, even more than were in the New York audience. Here's some of them, off the top of my head: Kevin, Colter, Marcus Ewert, Jason Morris (not at reading but at dinner afterward), Matt Gordon, Lindsey Boldt, Cynthia Sailers, Donna de la Perriere, Joseph Lease, David Buuck, Anne McGuire, Wayne Smith—there were more. In New York, buddhites included Bhanu, Eileen Myles, Anna Moschovakis, Thom Donovan, Dottie Lasky, Bradford Nordeen, Nada Gordon—again there were more. In Philadelphia, David Buuck was the only buddhite in the flesh, but CA Conrad was very much there in spirit. And audience members Diana Cage and Rachel Blau du Plessis infused the book, but weren't mentioned by name. The first piece in the book, "The Buddhist," was inspired by Diana's anthology Bottoms Up: Writing About Sex. Not subliminally—I thought about the anthology the whole time I was writing the piece. And in the middle of my reading I cried out, "Oh no, Rachel's in the room!" The section I was reading was pointedly referencing our shared history—coded, but in a way that Rachel would instantly be able to decipher. It's beautiful to be speaking, not merely for myself, but so directly for a larger community.

Here's a picture Del Ray Cross took, of Kevin, Colter, and me at yesterday's SF Camerawork reading:

My hair was a mess because on Friday I was running late for the chiropractor, and it was warm out, like summer, so I left with my freshly washed hair still wet, and then I laid with it damp on the massage table as she worked on me for an hour and it scrunched all over the place, with abandon. Behind Kevin, on the wall, is Colter's and my TV Sutras collaboration, which Colter is adding to bit by bit. Here's a closer view Kevin took:

What Colter's doing here is alternating hand lettered cards, each containing of one of my TV Sutras—which will form the first half of my book, the TV Sutras—with photographs he took of circles. Scale collapses here— my hoop earring in the middle of the bottom full row fills the frame in a similar proportion as a tree stump or a manhole cover. I can't work it out logically, but that feels, on a gut level, very important to my writing, this collapsing of scale. If it's not already, then it needs to be in the future.

Double Book Party: Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian

2011-03-26T15:41:00.000-07:00

Please join us to celebrate two hot off the presses books:

Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist
from Publication Studio's
San Francisco Branch, Allone Editions.
Designed by Wayne Smith,
handmade by Colter Jacobsen.

and

Kevin Killian's Selected Amazon Reviews, Volume Two
Edited by Jason Morris (Push Press).
Cover by Ryan Coffey.

Saturday, April 2, 5 - 8 p.m.

SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA

the buddhist: What is personal, what is public? In our electronic age, can anybody tell the difference? While ending an affair with a Buddhist teacher, Dodie Bellamy wrote about it simultaneously on her blog. In her experiment in writing through states of extremis, she explores nuances of public shame, the vagaries of desire and rage, and her confusion over the authenticity of group and individual spirituality. Her book becomes a celebration of marginalized subjectivity as enacted in the work of female artists from Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Carolee Schneeman, to Bhanu Kapil and Ariana Reines. This volume contains the essence of the blog, as well as more extended narratives too explicit to post on line. Like Duras’ The Lover, Bellamy’s writing glorifies the abject and the discarded; it is a passionate evocation of a love lost and a raw depth plumbed.

Selected Amazon Reviews, Volume Two: When Hooke Press published Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews in 2006, the book quickly sold out. Cultural critic Trebor Scholz wrote that “Killian uses Amazon.com as a platform for his writing practice- a place with an immediate broad readership. I can't help but being fascinated by this project.” Volume One, edited by poets Neil Alger and Brent Cunningham, showcased an aspect of Killian’s work that had operated almost anonymously, as he became one of “Amazon’s Top Reviewers” by sheer assuidity. Now here comes Volume 2, edited by poet Jason Morris, the mixture as before, with perhaps a higher percentage of “serious” reviews than the previous compilation, which showcased the surreal and carnivalesque. On Amazon, everything’s for sale, and everyone’s an unpaid content provider, but on the other side of the coin, you can say almost exactly what you want, and you can chip away at the machine, maybe do it some harm.

Perigee

2011-03-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a photo Bhanu Kapil snapped of me reading the final two lines of the buddhist. Bhanu just happened to be visiting from Colorado, and she didn't know it was the end of the reading when she took the photo. I love the ghostly "moon" above my head. Afterward, Bradford Nordeen and I went for drinks with Bhanu and her good friend, the poet Melissa Buzzeo, where Melissa gave me an electrifying palm reading.

Here's the photo again, "enhanced" by iPhoto:

The ghost moon is even larger.

Touch Down

2011-03-25T17:48:00.000-07:00

So much has happened since I last posted, it's overwhelming to think of even suggesting it all here. The readings in New York and Philadelphia went wonderfully, very engaged, supportive audiences, super co-readers. (As I typed the word "super" I felt like Michelle Tea, just for an instant.) Though I read from the buddhist in both places, I gave two very different readings. At the Bowery Poetry Club I read the long, intense, abject ending of the book—a very difficult piece for me, as Nada Gordon reported on her blog. At Fergie's Pub in Philly I read a couple of essay/memoir posts that had little to do with the buddhist; then the raucous, raunchy beginning of the book, which, like the ending, was never posted online. After the Philly reading I had a very candid and healing conversation with Rachel Blau DuPlessis about 80s feminist experimental poetry. In New York, I read during the SuperMoon, in the afternoon, just a couple of hours after it was at its fullest. I'm not sure what that means, but it's an intense time to first present my book project to the world. It was like the heavens were reeling. Equally amazing and auspicious was Bhanu Kapil's presence in the audience, as the book is dedicated to her. It was amusing to me as I read, how many people in the New York audience were written about in the book—that wonderful fluidity we are privileged with in our marginalized avant-garde community. Dottie Lasky and Sara Wintz each had a small braid on the right side of their heads, so before I got on stage, Dottie made a small braid on the right side of my head, an act of solidarity. People said that we might not be able to actually see the moon in New York City. But late that evening, as Dottie, Sara, and I—the 3 right-braided sisters—left the bar we ultimately ended up at, the moon was stunning in the sky.

The first person to read the buddhist from cover to cover is poet Anna Moschovakis, who read it on a red-eye from New York to Paris. The handful of people I gave copies to were instructed to let me know if they found any typos, so we can fix them before the next batch of books are printed. Here are the mistakes Anna found:

P 22, second graph: "according the situation" should be "according to the situation"

P 27 second graph "Los Angles" misspelled

P 32 second graph. Add comma between "say" and "David Buuck"?

P 49 bottom of first graph "different than" should technically be "different from" but that's up to you

P 124 you have "lech" and I think earlier you had "letch" -- maybe do a search? I think the former is correct

It feels like Anna should get an award for being our first reader, a special gold lamé cover, or maybe a set of Buddhist protection cords.

Woman who looks vaguely like Anna receiving a Buddhist protection cord.

Now that I'm back, all I want to do is sleep and write in my journal; I wrote 14 pages with my fountain pen, over a 2-day period. Yesterday I had tea with artist Linda Geary, and a mani-pedi and dinner with poet Donna de la Perriere. I now have opalescent teal blue toe nails. At dinner, instead of dessert, Donna and I played with dolls I bought for us at the bookstore in Japantown.

Each box contains a naked doll with a mystery animal headdress.

Here's Donna's cow and my white bear.

This afternoon I went into Sephora and put on make up. I'm wearing Dior azure blue mascara, which makes my blonde eyelashes a bright violet blue. I must be entering my 3rd or 4th childhood.

Publication Studio's Matthew Stadler's Speech on Publication

2011-03-17T20:05:00.000-07:00

Here is the philosophy behind Publication Studio, the press that is publishing (verb choice on purpose as publishing in this realm is an ongoing process) the buddhist. Matthew's brilliant. I get goosebumps when I listen to this talk.

What is Publication? A talk by Matthew Stadler from Publication Studio on Vimeo.

Calm Between the Storms

2011-03-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

the buddhist is finished! The pdf of it looks beautiful. I'm stopping by SF Camerawork this afternoon to pick up 10 copies to take to my readings in NYC and Philadelphia this weekend (see sidebar for details). These book are handmade, printed and bound by my publisher Colter Jacobsen, one at a time, the title stamped on the cover. I doubt if any of these first 10 will be sold, there are so many people in New York I adore and can't wait to see. Team buddhist—Colter, designer Wayne Smith, and I—worked so hard the past couple of weeks, with increasing detailed attention—there was no detail too picky to inspire a lively 3-way email conversation. I'm going to miss the constant contact with them.

I'm resting a few minutes before going on to the next part of the day. Had an appointment with a physical therapist at Kaiser this morning. It appears that I don't actually have a sprained ankle, but an inflamed Achilles tendon—which I got, of course, by going to see a yoga therapist. Supposedly this should only take 6 weeks to heal if I do all the good things the physical therapist tells me to do. Bad news is that I can't fit my figure-8-wrapped foot into the adorable Fluevogs I bought for my trip. I'll have to wear hiking shoes! They gave me a cane at Kaiser so I wouldn't limp and mess up the other leg—the cane, fashionwise, will at least make the hiking shoes make sense.

I feel such a sense of release, having this project done, and the thrill of holding copies in my hand in a couple of hours. The final long piece in the book was finished like 10 days ago. It's wonderful to have a sense of space in my life again. I whined in an email to Bhanu that I felt like a child who had been grounded, too much work to hardly even leave the house, except for appointments and teaching commitments. Last night I allowed myself the luxury of having drinks at the W hotel with Kevin and artists Scott Treleaven and Paul P., who were visiting from Toronto, in town for Scott's show at Silverman Gallery. Last June when in LA, Kevin and I went to see Scott's show at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, and I fell in love. Scott's a loyal reader of this blog. So the sparks were flying at our table. Here's a picture I snapped of them with Kevin's camera:

Scott Treleavn and Paul P.

How am I feeling about the buddhist now that the project is complete? Sad. Don't know if I should send him a copy of the book or not. Any advice on that?

Industrial Chic

2011-03-11T18:37:00.000-08:00

I was copying some stuff for my New Narrative class at CCA this afternoon, and afterwards as I sat on a bench, I felt compelled to take a photo of the copy room. I'm intrigued by the upsidedown stool and the fluorescent lights in cages. The lights remind me of the caged lights in Raymond Pettibon's studio. Raymond's wire cages are homemade. He, or someone else hanging around in the studio, told Kevin and me the lights were caged because Raymond likes to play ball in the studio—basketball I think it was—and this kept the lights from getting broken. But why cage the lights at CCA? Some attempt at making them student-proof I'm sure, but what would art students do with fluorescent lights in a copy room?

Then I ran some errands, including braving REI, where the worst people in San Francisco shop. The sporty entitled are even worse than, say, the organic food entitled. I looked through the camping food prep items, and was amused by these metal wine glasses. The urban concept of roughing it.

I'm insanely busy. the buddhist is the proofing the galleys phase. It looks gorgeous. I wasn't happy with my Unposted ending, so I wrote an additional one, 4600-words, as improper as I could manage, and that's pretty improper. I was inspired by Ariana Reines; I wrote the piece through her, channeling her brazenness and vulnerability. I was reminded of The Letters of Mina Harker, which was also written through various writers—Dennis Cooper and Gail Scott, for instance. Tribute and fusion—a way to use my desire to merge with those I love (in an unhealthy way) and make it work for my writing.

On another note, the cataloque essay I wrote for Tariq Alvi's show at [2nd Floor Projects] has been reprinted online at Bomb.

List Poem

2011-03-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

Here's a preview of the buddhist—a list of typos Colter found when reading the manuscript:

pg. 6, 2nd paragraph. "I asked her how she handLed it..." L in handled.

pg. 7, 1st paragraph "multiple" instead of multiples

pg. 17 2nd paragraph of Oppositional... "phrase" instead of phase

pg. 18, 1st paragraph "has made me want to puke in my mouth" take out the was

pg. 19, second sentence of first paragraph, OK as a fragment? "These comments were a source of shame ..."

pg. 20, first sentence in second paragraph, "...I'm happy that i can do,..." ?

pg. 22 2nd paragraph, sentence that begins with "THursday night..." many commas but maybe that's what you're going for. Also on the next page, 23, second paragraph, "I'm wearing..." lot's of commas.

pg. 28, second paragraph, "I was LIKE fuck this" add like, right? Or maybe you can just say i was Fuck this. kinda funny, ha.

pg 33 last line of first paragraph, "as passing' or "at passing." either work i suppose.

pg. 39, third paragraph, "plenty of loving" would it be "pletny loving" instead?

pg 40, first paragraph in Just Like That "to at the very least piss him off" should that get a comma? Are there too many commas already here?

pg 42, last paragraph, Last night throughout the evening I complained..." add the I

pg 43, middle of page second paragraph, "that one of THE zombies" add the

pg. 46, here's a good typo: "In fact, the skewedness of getting things wrong can be more stimulating THAN accuracy." than rather than that.

pg. 50, first paragraph of Double Trouble, "...fragile interpersonal..." wonder if that should be interpersonalness instead?

pg. 51, 2nd paragraph into It Stares Back, confused by the line "The sam eBuddhist values Chodron so tenderly evokes, he hurled at me.

pg. 56, 1st paragraph into For Closure, last line, "Whenever those roses get..." not gets

pg 57, second paragraph, Izzo runs in some outdoors environment..." should it be outdoor environment?

pg. 62, 2nd paragraph, "I talk to Kevin for AN hour" an rather than a

pg. 68, 1st paragraph in Hotel Retreat Day 8, "their legs in THE air" not their

pg. 70 second paragraph, Anthropologie needs an R

pg. 72, first paragraph, "it felt like he WAS slowly drawing bruises-" add was

pg. 72, second paragraph, "About half an hour..." take out a

pg. 79, 1st paragraph in Yello New Year, "Thus far, other than edits, I've combined..." add the D

and for the unposted

second paragraph into Walk a Mile in My Shoes, "This afternoon, standing there AT the park’s entrance..." at, not are

The 2011 Minna Street Oscars Party

2011-02-28T10:47:00.000-08:00

It's a school day, so no time to be doing this. But check out Kevin's fabu article at Fanzine about the Oscars and our little party we had watching it. Not enough in the article about the party, for my taste. These are cupcakes Ron Palmer bought, with little orange-flavored Oscars on top of each.

For Bhanu and the buddhist

2011-02-24T10:37:00.000-08:00

New Heights

2011-02-23T20:08:00.000-08:00

Here's a birthday image Ariana Reines sent me. I love the bent corner of the card, the objectness of it. Another 7, like the Route 66 card that Bett sent me. Ariana writes: "your card, la escalera, makes me think of the scala amoris, the ladder of love, which i remember from i think peter bembo back in my renaissance days."

According to Shakespeare's Life and Times, the ladder of love can be found in The Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529):

In The Courtier, there is an impassioned discussion of the nature of love, in which one of the characters, Peter Bembo, describes the way that earthly love can become elevated to heavenly love through a platonic process of stages, or steps on a ladder, beginning with the love of an unattainable, virtuous woman, and leading to love of God and all humanity.

In typical Renaissance fashion, Bembo associates these steps with the hierarchy of created nature:

And here after they had laughed a while, M. Peter proceeded. I say therefore that according as it is defined of the wise men of old time, Love is nothing else but a certain coveting to enjoy beauty. . . And because in our soul there be three manner ways to know [perceive], namely, by sense, reason, and understanding; of sense there ariseth appetite or longing, which is common to us with brute beasts; of reason ariseth election or choice, which is proper [appropriate] to man; of understanding, by the which man may be partner with Angels, ariseth will. . . .  Man, of nature endowed with reason, placed (as it were) in the middle between these two extremities, may through his choice--inclining to sense, or reaching to understanding—come nigh to the coveting sometime of the one, sometime of the other part. . .

I wish Ariana would have sent me this card a year ago, as a warning to squelch my brute beast side. I met with graphic designer (and visual artist) Wayne Smith today and handed over the text and image files for the buddhist. When I was going through the manuscript, pointing out some sections that are anomalies, as far as design would go, Wayne got distracted, reading my entries. That it could grab him was a good sign, as I'm still unsure how interesting this material is as a book.

My advice to the lovelorn: write a book-length rambling manuscript about the object of your desire, then edit the shit out of it, over and over—and you too will be convinced that instead of fucking him you should have climbed a ladder.

One More

2011-02-20T11:42:00.000-08:00

Here's another birthday scanable I forgot—a gorgeous handmade card from Anne McGuire. I love how simple and retro it is, and how it's impossible to tell if that black smear in the middle is accidental or planned, which is a metaphor for so many things—I could go crazy tripping out on that one.

I'm in 40-days-in-the-desert mode, meaning I'm being very alone. I was horribly depressed until I accepted this is what I need to be doing, and once I gave myself permission to spend as much time as possible alone, it switched into this really good space. I feel protected, fortressed. Just about done with the first round of editing the buddhist. Will then print it out and, for the first time, read any of it off the screen. A gradual manifestation from cyber abstraction to book. Went to see William E. Jones at SFMOMA last Thursday and he bemoaned porn's switch from tape and DVD to the internet, said he liked to hold the object in his hand. I loved Jones' focus on the marginal and the discarded. I'm thinking of writing one last blog post, that will only be in the book. The opposite trajectory of my first book The Letters of Mina Harker, where the first letter is the only one that wasn't mailed. In the buddhist the final post will have never been posted. This may or may not happen. I spent hours yesterday sitting up in bed, taking notes for it in my journal, and working in my reactions to one of Jones' "movies"—that's what he called what he showed at SFMOMA. Part of the time, Kevin was taking a nap, lying beside me under a blanket as red as the red on Anne's card, sleep breathing, and Ted and Sylvia were lying at my feet, and I felt like I had so much.

Scandalous

2011-02-16T23:02:00.000-08:00

I finally hooked up our new scanner.

The first thing I scanned was the sensuous mermaid card Bhanu sent me for my birthday.

And the second thing I scanned was the sexy Route 66 playing card that Bett sent me for my birthday.

I heart such sweet friends—and the US mail—and Donna, who went out with me to a divine dinner at Millennium. I would scan her too, if she were here.

Follow Through

2011-02-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

Almonds soaking for tomorrow's batch of almond milk, sitting atop my newly oiled cutting board. Why is domesticity so embarrassing? Perhaps because I fought against it since I was a child—don't want to be like mom, if you're anything like mom all fun and creativity will go down the drain of tedium—but now that mom's gone, I fetishize hominess, even though I'm awful at it. I think of Bhanu with her son, fixing lunches. How does she do it? I want Bhanu to fix me lunch, want to nudge my snotty nose against her warm arm. Domesticity has always been associated with mind-numbing to me, so depressing Tillie Olsen. Thinking of Olsen's Silences, where she blames housework for her writer's block—all my feminist poet friends memorized this book in the early 80s—and how I met someone who knew Tillie Olsen back in the day, who told me that Olsen had the dirtiest house she'd ever seen. And then recently, Kevin read in Panthea Reid's biography of Olsen, that Olsen was depressed and delusional. Surprise. From the Publisher's Weekly review of Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles:

Olsen (1912–2007), born in Omaha, Neb., to poor Russian Jewish immigrants, displayed early on a magnetic personality, verbal prowess, and what would become a lifelong habit of lying. A Communist during the 1930s, Olsen was thrust into the limelight after being jailed during a San Francisco dockworkers' strike. Putting the Party before personal loyalties, she neglected her daughter, was unfaithful to her husband, and took an advance from Random House without delivering a novel.

Rather than my mother, Olsen sounds more like Kathy Acker. Or me. Kevin's review of Reid's book, "Could She Really Have Been This Awful?" appears on Amazon.com: "Panthea Reid performed extraordinary feats of research and detection to write her life of feminist writer Tillie Olsen, but she could have stopped at the corner store to pick up half a pint of compassion."

Belly Laugh

2011-02-12T13:20:00.000-08:00

One of those dailiness days, where I don't really want to have an intellect, just want to move through the thick and thin of existence. Began by looking at my cutting board and realizing it was in serious need of oiling, so I cleaned it first, with Kosher salt and a lemon half, I love doing that, grinding the lemon into the salt and creating a paste. It's such a simple old-fashioned remedy, I feel like one of the original colonists, freshening her chopping block after hacking off a turkey's head on that first Thanksgiving morning, though it doesn't seem likely that colonial women would have lemons, does it? I just checked and found an article on how to grow lemons in New Jersey: "Most lemon tree varieties can grow outdoors in USDA Zones 8 through 11, which means they're hardy down to only 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit at the lowest. Because New Jersey is located in Zone 6, with average minimum temperatures dipping down to -10 degrees Fahrenheit, you'll need to grow your lemon trees in containers and bring them indoors during the cold winter months." So, I'd give it a pretty definite no on the colonial women/lemon question. My cutting board is end grain, an extravagant present to myself a couple of years ago, and it's astonishing how much oil it will suck up, compared to a regular cutting board, like you slather it and the oil disappears, and you have to do this over and over again. The board is endlessly thirsty, alive with need. Sound familiar? Digging around under the kitchen sink, I discover I'm out of board oil, so now I have a goal for my daily day, to get some cutting board oil.

Yesterday I went to my naturopath, who I love. She has an old country doctor feel to her. Her office is in a little cottage behind her house, and she loves Obama so much, she named her big black dog Barack. Barack sat on the floor during my visit yesterday. He's very laidback. Even though I went to Kaiser OBGYN on Wednesday and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, but suggested I take Flagyl suppositories for the hell of it, my naturopath figured out in like one minute I had a yeast infection. Meaning if I'd taken the antibiotics, it would have been like throwing kerosene on a raging fire. One dose of Monistat last night and I feel like a new woman. Life is hopeful again. Funny how these minor irritations can throw a pall on everything. My neighbor is cooking something and it smells just like the veggie burgers I frequently bake in my toaster oven, which is confusing, like I'm smelling into the past or the future. I'm also taking a homeopathic remedy, kreosotum.

My naturopath told me that recent studies have shown that regular mammograms have caused breast cancer in a certain percentage of women, and I laughed out loud—an explosive outburst at the fucked-up-ness of Western culture, like it never ends. My Kaiser gynecologist kept pushing a whooping cough vaccination on me, and then a flu shot. No, no, I said to her. Trolling around online this morning I read that not only is the whooping cough vaccination ineffective, it's caused brain damage in children, and the flu shot has caused seizures. Of course of course of course. Better to laugh than to bang your head against a wall.

Had a good meeting with Colter and Wayne Smith yesterday about the buddhist book. We decided some basic design parameters and came up with a production schedule. If all goes well, I may have some advance copies for my readings in NYC and Philadelphia. When I was director of Small Press Traffic, I frequently worked with Wayne, as he did all the graphics for us, designed the logo even. He also designed my book Cunt-Ups, which is one of the loveliest little books ever. It was fun to just hang out with Colter and Wayne—we met at a bakery/cafe called Thorough Bread, a pun that excited Colter. Colter won an SFMOMA SECA award this year, and he told us how during the selection process, two busloads of wealthy collectors trudged up the stairs of his funky Mission area apartment and crammed into his bedroom to look at his art. Some of his roommates freaked out and fled.

When I look at my resistance to finishing my editing of the book, I realize it's because I don't want to think about the buddhist. But, oddly I have been thinking of his sort of wife. Here's what I fantasize saying to her: I'm not your enemy. I'm not even personal. I'm just a spoke in a larger cycle of secrecy and deception that the buddhist has been playing out over and over again. It's humiliating to accept that. I want to ask her, what kinds of agreements have you made that you could stay with him so long? How can you look at things as they are with a partner who throws up blinders at every turn? I was talking with a friend lately about the open relationship he has with his boyfriend, how they have very specific agreements. They tell each other whenever they sleep with someone else, but not with whom—unless it's someone they both know, then the name is revealed. My friend said, on a very basic level, if your partner's engaging in risky behavior, you need to know. When I was having my female symptoms earlier this week, I joked with my friend Donna, "The buddhist gave me VD!" Another round of sick laughter. But seriously, I want to say to the sort of wife, you should get tested regularly because with him you don't know what you're getting.

Cupid in taqueria window.

Newing

2011-02-08T11:33:00.000-08:00

Now that the generating of the buddhist project is finished, I'm not having a lot of energy for embarrassing dailiness. I have that book to finish editing and will be much involved in its production, so that's a primary focus. Plus I find myself when writing in my journal to be taking notes for TV Sutras, the book I was supposed to be writing when I got sidetracked on the buddhist. Another calling. This space seems like it's going to be more episodic for now.

In the meantime, I will be posting regularly on another blog, Newing the Narrative, which I'm doing with students in my New Narrative workshop at CCA. The blog is a way of exploring community, which was so important to the New Narrative movement. I'm not convinced that New Narrative still exists, or has existed since the late 80s, but I'm using it in the class as a lens to explore a new relationship to writing, and to teaching. Such a class invites the personal, so I'm trying that out, teaching an institutional class in a way that allows more of my own personal, more of the collaborative non-hierarchical tone of my private workshops.

The Sound of One Wing Flapping

2011-02-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, I managed to put on Matt Gordon's dish drainer/shower curtain angel costume and play Continency in David Brazil and Evan Kennedy's stage adaptation of the Confessions of St. Augustine. The costume also included a blue terrycloth turban and the largest T-shirt I've ever seen, like longer than mid-thigh; it was white with a huge red cross on the chest, LIFE GUARD printed above it in big red block letters. Rather than messing with clothing changes, I just wore the huge LIFE GUARD shirt with a long charcoal gray nubby cashmere cardigan, a brown flared wool maxi-skirt, and rustic brown boots. I got many, like at least five, compliments on my outfit. And I'm all, no no no, this isn't an outfit, this is part of a costume. I was appalled that people would think I'd dress like that on purpose. Then I was thinking maybe I should dress more outlandishly, I'm privileged with a lifestyle where I could totally go outlandish, like I could become a super-sized lowbudget Kathy Acker and nobody would blink an eye.

Yesterday I walked from my home to CCA, 27 minutes from door to door, and afterwards I walked from CCA to SF Camerawork to meet Colter, 42 minutes. It was a beautiful day, and even though neither walk is particularly attractive, I enjoyed the blueness of the sky and the freshness. Given the weird topography of South of Market (topped only by Culver City, Culver City is the king of weird street layouts), the quickest way to get to CCA is to take a counter-intuitive route that only someone who lives in the neighborhood could possibly manage. I was reminded of being a kid, the meandering "shortcuts" I would take on my way to school, the intimacy I had with the landscape, my delight yesterday encountering hedges of bamboo in the Design District, their spiky stalks both fragile and imposing. I walked past the courthouse on Bryant and 7th, with its neighboring bail bondsmen and fastfood places, and I thought of Cecil Giscombe's essay on the TV series The Fugitive, which was published in the 1994 anthology A Poetics of Criticism (eds. Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevallet, Pam Rehm)—how Cecil presents in trouble as a state of being/a state of mind. Entering Yerba Buena Gardens I was hit with a flush of pink flowering trees. Here's Colter standing in front of one of them; he thinks they're plum blossoms.

Colter and I were meeting about the buddhist book. Last week he (Colter) emailed me a passage from Proust:

Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp. . . Well, now that I'm a little too weary to live with other people, these old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me—it's the mania of all collectors—very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing. And of this collection to which I'm now much more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.

Colter added:

I thought of you when i read this. . . . I hope I wasn't insensitive when i said that i like the constant return in the blog of the buddhist. It was also meant to be an observation that while you are editing the buddhist blog, it also seems to be growing. A blog can go on forever (scrolling scrolling scrolling) but a book ENDS. I know you are IN the thick of it. It being your feelings in negotiating this thing called buddhist. I think it brave and vulnerable. I feel that you are making the reasons graspable (see second line of quote above). I think people appreciate this because we can so relate to it; there's always someone in our life whose relationship was left unresolved and complicated and so much time is spent weighing what happened . . . till it becomes almost an abstraction.

Colter signed his email "much love," such a contrast to the buddhist's final insipid valediction, "with warmest regards." Let's pause here for a moment of sadness. Writing about the buddhist has done much to release my anger towards him. Words transform him from person to character. Still, as Colter notes, like the blog he goes on and on, and yes, we all have so many of these incessant flows of psychic charge. Thus the appeal of the narrative arc, its seductive fantasy of resolution, termination. The narrative arc fuels our longing for a meaningful death. The narrative arc doesn't just slam into a wall and end. It ends in a way that makes sense. Thus my attempts over and over to write an ending to the buddhist—the blog, the book, the person. When he read in my last post, "This rant is the final rant about the buddhist, it has to be," Kevin rolled his eyes. "How many times have you said this is the last one? Four? Five?" "People like that," I replied, defensively. "It's a trope."

The night I played the angel, I was so sick I was worried I couldn't leave the house, or if I even had the energy to stand up in the shower long enough to wash my hair—but I pulled it together because I had a mission, my role gave me strength. I think of stories of people who should have been long dead, but they keep hanging on because they have a compelling purpose. People used to say that Bob Flanagan, year after year, was the oldest living person with cystic fibrosis because his art gave him a reason to live.

I can no longer hang on to the buddhist—the book, the person, or the blog. May I be wiped clean of all griping, abandonment, desire, melancholy, and rage. In this ending I hear the voice of an Angel commanding, Let not your heart be overcharged with anger and desire. But remember that we are dust, and that of dust the buddhist was lost and is found. And I reply, Yes, mine Angel, he whom I so loved, saying this through the inbreathing of thine inspiration, is of the same dust as my dust. I can do all things through him that strengtheneth me. Strengthen me, mine Angelic life guard, that I can give what thou enjoinest, and enjoin what thou wilt. Thou knowest on this matter the groans of my heart, and the floods of mine eyes. O Angel of Continency! All my hope is no where but in thine exceeding great mercy. Verily are we bound up and brought back into one, whence we were dissipated into many. For too little doth the buddhist love me, who loves any thing but me, which he loveth not for me. O love, who ever burnest and never consumest! O charity, mine Angel! kindle me. Thou wilt increase thy gifts more and more in me, that my soul may follow me to thee, disentangled from the bird-lime of rage. Thou shalt slay my emptiness with a wonderful fullness, and clothe this corruptible with an eternal incorruption. By thy abundant grace to quench the impure motions of my mind, I despiseth the buddhist no longer, and thus I cry unto him, in all the fullness of my heart, "With warmest regards!"

Colter dreaming of a giant Costa Rican butterfly.

Turn Of

2011-02-02T12:26:00.000-08:00

I have notes for an(other) over-the-top ending for the buddhist vein/book, but this late-ish morning isn't, as he would say, an "auspicious" time to finish it off. Planning and designing an entry rather than writing it off the top of my head—the bookishness of the project is steering it towards Real Writing; then it begins to sound like work and thus something to be put off. Plus the enormous energy output the beginning of the semester requires, leaves me uncommunicative. I just want to lie in bed and read and write embarrassing thoughts in my journal. Rather than embarrassing thoughts in public. When people tell me they read my blog, I sometimes wince in embarrassment. Saturday night, when Cecil Giscombe told me he read what I wrote about him here, I winced. When I think of students or colleagues reading it, I wince. But then I remember Bett and Bhanu and Ariana and Donna and Marcus and Colter, and a big handful of others both known and unknown, who I feel I'm making a heart connection with, and then I don't wince.

I'm touched whenever Bhanu interacts with the unknown people around the world who show up on her blog's sitemeter:

I was thinking yesterday that I am not a very good blogger (I blogged about OWLS) and that maybe I have just become addicted to the two readers in Mongolia tuning in every day. Plus the one in Croatia, and the consistent fifteen who check in from the Netherlands. The five in Pakistan. Tristram Perry, is that you, logging on in the Islamabad embassy? I visualize yurts and clunky mobile phones, but it's probably an exchange student in an internet cafe in Ulan Batur, checking in twice, before and after lunch. Goat's milk and roast beef. So, taking a break due to addiction to Mongolian readership checks, though will resume . . .

One thing this project has made me realize is that my need to love is even stronger than my need to be loved. That's why I cannot stop loving the buddhist; that's why I keep repeating these futile gestures. It doesn't matter that the buddhist no longer reciprocates my love, or wants it—or at this point would even believe it—my love is there, burning orange-red, like an ember in the core of my rage. The futility of my love. The futility of this blog. I hope the buddhist (the book) will be interesting, but I have no illusions it will be great literature. Which is fine—so many people I know are writing against the notion of greatness—I talk against it myself. But still the concept of Masterpiece is branded into my mind; thus the spectre of failure arises; thus my excitement when at Naropa's summer writing program, Anna Moschovakis taught her seminar/workshop on failure. Seize the tenderness by the balls. Throughout the course of my Boomer education, the canon was firmly in place. The Great Books of the Western World. I was not even aware of the canon being questioned until I was an undergrad. (Let's all bow down and say a prayer to Kate Millett's Sexual Politics.) It's exhausting—and I'm sure I'm not alone in this—to continue to think and feel so many things I know better than. Sometimes I feel so struggling Turn of the Century, like Colette's Léa in the Chéri books, an aging courtesan who finds herself in a world where she's becoming an anachronism. How much change can anyone stand in a lifetime?

Insubstantial Rant

2011-01-28T19:03:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angel of Continency

2011-01-27T11:26:00.000-08:00

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

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

Narco-Imaginings

2011-01-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Song from a Dangerous World

2011-01-23T09:55:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touched

2011-01-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

Organization

2011-01-21T12:21:00.000-08:00

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

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

Polenta and Spicer

2011-01-20T21:50:00.000-08:00

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

(from "Imaginary Elegies")

Polenta and Plath

2011-01-20T12:41:00.000-08:00

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

(from "Berck-Plage")

This and That

2011-01-20T11:01:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

Apsara DiQuinzio, Rebecca Quaytman, Kevin Killian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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