Thanksgiving was calm and uneventful. Spent yesterday at Kort's Uncle Jim's ranch in the community of "Poetry", Texas (Terrell to be specific) and later that day at my first rodeo. "Poetry" is not actually a town on any map of Texas, rather known as a small community in East, Texas where in the early days, an itinerant worker would come thru town and nail his poems to trees. When this person passed on, the community adopted his passion as their namesake. What's poetic about Poetry, Texas? Hard to say, but wouldn't that make an interesting subject for a documentary? On the drive, we spied lots of cows, horses, green fields, a Baptist cemetery and church. It was my first time ever on a farm and I don't think I can quite describe the copious amounts of horse excrement that were everywhere. Good reason to wear cowboy boots and to keep fully covered. Watched Jim get ready for the rodeo by clipping his horse's hooves and filing them (his pet pitt bull devoured these clippings), buzz cutting the horse's mane. We accompanied Jim while he fed his herd of pregnant cows and one bull and drove around his 250 acres, down a grass runway which he uses for piloting a small cessna plane.

The church sponsored rodeo happened in the evening at a space that also doubles as a house of worship - the cowboy church, I think it was called. Bleachers and chairs surrounding a dirt ring where on one end, a pen for calves and on the opposite end, the entry way for the cowboys/girls. We only stayed for 3 events - cow separation, cow roping and faux cow branding. Those little calves sure did look scared and it was hard to watch the whole thing - in the first event, the goal of the cowboy is to break up the herd and get certain cows down field. Not such a bad event, but the cows were mistrustful, suspicious and at certain points, formed a wall, gazing warily out at the humans. Event #2, cow roping, more traumatic. A team of 4 takes on a little calf, one rider ropes the calf (sometimes too tightly) and the rest of the group tackles the calf while one of the team grabs a ribbon off of the calf's ankle and runs it over to the judge. Similar action in the fake cow branding event. I should add that in these two events, the calves were made to wear fake headgear with horns (blunted on the tips) so that the ropers would have something to get their rope around. The smells were terrible.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers!

Heading to Kort's uncle David's house for a gathering of the Bergman clan. Dinner starts at 12 noon (isn't that extraordinarily early?), to be followed by professional sports.

Things that I am grateful for:

- Kort
- my family
- my friends
- my community
- this residency program
- opportunities to transform

The folks on the Buffalo List have been circulating emails about the NEA results for poetry grants. Apparently rejection letters have been mailed (oy - a second ago I typed "failed", instead of "mailed"). This was my first year applying for one, and like everyone else who applied, I am sitting back anxiously awaiting the results, and extra anxious, because of my screwy mail situation which has resulted from mail/identity theft and which makes me question everything about the U.S. postal service. Anyways, after reading about the NEA thread on Buffalo I went to bed last night and promptly had a nightmare. Boy was it terrible. I dreamed I got a big fat rejection PACKAGE which included handwritten notes from the 4 jurors who read and evaluated my application. Several of them commented on the unprofessional job I had done on assembling my package, laughing at what I had put a lot of hard work and thought into. The clincher was that as my eye ran down the list of jurors it fell upon the name and handwriting of a young poet from Ohio who I met at MacDowell in 2003 who embodied self-interest, deception, sharkiness, gossip and contentiousness. And this poet had left me some rather mean and dismissive notes on my work. Hey - I thought the process was supposed to be anonymous! I woke up quite distraught and didn't remember the dream until I was reading the new comments on the NEA thread at Buffalo and thought, wow, this is really familiar. The Buffalo group have some interesting thoughts on the NEA process, prize winners, sensibilities and also touch on the Guggenheim process - all illuminating stuff.

Yesterday I met a poet who may be residing here at Southside while she completes another residency in the area in February. She was lovely and somewhat jetlagged having just flown in from Tokyo and I liked her quite a bit but our conversation went something like this:

Poet: How did you get your book published? Did you win a prize?
SP: No prize. No...
Poet: But you won a prize?
SP: No, no prize.
Poet: So are you working on your MFA here?
SP: No, I already have one.
Poet: Really, from where?

and than

Poet: So how do you know your next book is getting published? And did you win a prize? Do you have a contract?
SP: No, no contract.
Poet: Well how do you know...

ARGGGGGGHHHHHHH....

The airline prices to Hartford finally dropped and I managed to purchase a ticket to Connecticut for the America Zen reading next week. Here are the details if you are in the New York or Connecticut areas:

America Zen: A Gathering of Poets reading with

Chase Twichell
Stanford Forrester
Margaret Gibson
Shin Yu Pai

at the University of Connecticut's William Benton Museum of Art. December 1 at 7 p.m. Visit the Museum's website for directions at:

http://www.benton.uconn.edu/visitor.htm

Thanks to Margaret for organizing this reading!

My main project this week is to finish working on a children's story concept that has been sitting on my desk since October for which I will at some point be looking for test readers. If you have kids in the 7-10 range who would be interested in reading a story about chickens, please contact me... in the course of thinking about literature for children, I've recently rediscovered a few old favorites including Lon Po Po. Amanda has been reading the Moomin books - I had almost forgotten about these delightful books - the local branch of the library in Highgrove carried Finn Family Moomintroll and maybe one another of Tove Jansson's books which are filled with wonderful drawings of fantastic creatures like the Snork Maiden and the Hattifatteners.

What do elevators and art galleries have in common? This is the question Candida Alvarez' Subcity Projects poses. Housed in non-functioning elevator space on the 8th floor of the Fine Arts Building on Lower Michigan Ave., Alvarez invites a variety of artists to install work in this peculiar space. I am supposed to be installing a work in this space next year and while I had some serious resistance initially around the idea of the space in general, I am now growing to be very excited about the possibilities. I see the elevator as a metaphor for the high culture of art, likening this space to a pedestal or vitrine under which objects are displayed. Works are literally suspended on the 8th floor of a non-functional elevator and the doors of the elevator are padlocked for security, keeping the viewer from full engagement with the work. The elevator is an interesting vehicle in that it literally transports people/objects to higher levels, but at the same time, occupies such a daily/mundane function of human life/our everyday environment. High vs. low culture.

Robert Downey, Jr. crosses over into music and the Best American Poetry reviewed at the New York Times website.

On blog comments - initially I had my blog set to accept comments from registered users only. Then people started emailing me comments about the Asian American anthology post and telling me that they were unable to post their comments. So than I changed the settings to accept comments from all users. So now there is a high number of comments from anonymous folks. I understand wanting to protect one's anonymity for various reasons- but I just changed my settings again to only accept comments from registered users. There have been a lot of passionate things said on the subject of the Asian American anthology/community and I think we would all like to know who's participating in the real dialogue in all fairness to those involved. If you are unable to post comments and would like to be - email me your comments and I will post them on your behalf.

Talk about fucked up - my dear friend Catherine has also been going thru her Saturn return and has been in the middle of trying to move out of her apartment for the past 3 months - the date keeps get moved back and her landlord is absolutely psychotic, won't even give Catherine her mail. Catherine was about to move all of her things into her storage facility when a body was found.

Quote of the day by Karen X:

"Hitler was a vegetarian. It takes a lot more than pushing away a plate of burgers to be a compassionate person."

Lately I have been thinking a lot about a relationship to place. I meet new people, they say where are you from. Depending on my mood, I answer different things. For instance, a few weeks ago when I felt like I had to be assertive and bitchy with my banking institution around issues of having had identity theft, when asked where I had come from, I said Boston. Not too far from the truth, of all the places I've lived, I've spent the most time in Southern California and second to that, Boston where we recently moved from. And living now in Texas, when I'm on the road and people say where are you from, it seems awkward to volunteer Texas considering what a shocked response this usually solicits. For many years, I identified myself only with the West Coast, and when Nato was here, I remembered why. The vibe. I have never known anyone (myself included) who uses the word "dude" unless they are from California, Southern California specifically. Back in college at B.U., I could identity a Californian immediately by clothes, demeanor and lingo. Lately, I guess I've felt a little out of touch with my West Coast roots which is worth closer examination. This train of thought leads me to something I had thought about when I was back in the collections of the Art Institute two weeks ago in the modern art gallery - when does a culture/place claim us as artists? I found myself looking at the work of French surrealists who found a career in America in their later years - the wall labels would go on for quite a bit - born in Belgium, lived in France, worked in New York, etc. So who do these artists "belong" to? I liken this a bit to schools trying to make a claim about their grads and proteges. Whether or not you graduate from an institution, you are considered an alumni (for fundraising purposes among other things) - for instance, Georgia O'Keefe never finished at the Art Institute, but her name is thrown around as one of their most famous alumnae. A couple of years ago I was at a poetry event at Harvard organized by a former professor at SAIC, she introduced me to her colleagues as one of her "students" despite the fact that I had not been a student for a few years. In the end, perhaps this post is more about questions of ownership and claims, and how can we go about resisting these labels as artists, resist our own commodification by the culture around us.

Got books ordered for my poetry class at SMU this Spring. I will be teaching among other things:

Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
The Haiku Year by Tom Gilroy, et al
Handwriting by Michael Ondaatje
Rise by A Van Jordan
Red as a Lotus by Lisa gill
Words for Images: A Gallery of Poems, edited by John Hollander & Joanna Weber

Nato Thompson of MassMOCA delivered a great talk on "The Interventionists" to the artists in residence at Southside and the general public last night. Nato talked about the many artists who he is showcasing in his exhibition which runs until the end of March. Here are some notes on Nato's talk from my journal..

Culture is the #1 export/production of this country - we are in a current state of visual exhaustion in an age where the Taco Bell chihuahua poses as Che Guevara in television ads and Gandhi sells Mac computers - it's a new hip consumerism or age of "MacDeath", where we experience a nostalgia for neocapitalism in an age of neofascism.

Foregoing the term "political" art in place of the term RELEVANT art.

- art as a culture of resistance
- "the Situationists" - interest in the visual trespassing of signatures, hatred of art, love of meaning
- art not as a castle that you live in (most artists are living in the dungeon)
- art not as Foucault type "discourse" but art as a set of tools to rework expectations
- these particular artists are not concerned with "retaining the integrity of the ambiguity"

THE INTERVENTIONISTS is organized into 4 themes:
Nomads
Ready 2 Wear
Reclaim the street
Experimental universities

The nomads section of the show included many interesting pieces addressing the issue of homelessness. Tents for sleeping, bathing, birthing and dying (a la "death bivouac"). Exploration of the refugee as a global condition. Interesting installation pieces on top of taxi cabs driving around North Adams programmed to display certain messages when passing certain locations - when passing thru a MacDonald's drive thru the message "To work in MacDonald's, you must wear MacDonald's pants". And when driving thru downtown, "Whey are there no benches?" Artists as facilitators of conversation with the town of North Adams (population 12,000).

Brilliance of William Pope L's "The Black Factory". A UPS like vehicle delivers the black factory to a neighborhood, a mall, where the "friendliest black artist in America" collects articles donated by the public which embody "blackness". The artist than pulverizes and demolishes "blackness" and reconstitutes it into recyclable product which is recirculated to the public in some other form - i.e. water. Some articles collected/donated to this project include dominoes, nike shoes, and diet coke.

Yo Mango = "I steal" - a Barcelona art collective who produce shopping bags resembling monk bags and shoplift items (clothing typically) from major corporate enterprises and return these objects to the poor, a la Robin Hood, after tearing out the labels and replacing them with "yo mango".

Reverend Billy - a performance artist who delivers sermons against shopping at Starbuck's. Billy has been so successful that the Starbuck's chain has issued a training manual/brochure instructing employees what to do if Reverend Billy shows up at your store.

And than of course there are the YES MEN, the subject of a wonderful new documentary which we saw a few weeks ago at the Angelika. These guys, who posed at the WTO, are the ultimate interventionists.

Tomorrow at Southside on Lamar Nato Thompson, Assistant Curator at MassMoca, will deliver a talk on his exhibition "The Interventionists" at 7 p.m. in the Janette Kennedy Gallery.

November 26 is both the busiest shopping day of the year and official "Buy Nothing Day". Participate!

I had a nice catch-up session with a friend involved in Boston poetry this morning who's seen many an ugly blog war erupt between contemporary poets in the last year involving cafeshop.com g-strings, attacks at one's maculinity/sexuality, etc. Blog conflicts have been going on much longer then the current dispute regarding the Asian American anthology.

I think an appropriately absurdist analogy for all of this mayhem is the movie I HEART HUCKABEES. Maybe some of you have seen it. And if you have not - go see it for its comic relief. It provides a strong living reenactment of parallel issues in our present reality. Yours truly is played by Jason Schwartzman aka Albert, Bino is played by Marky Mark aka Tommy, and Victoria is played by Jude Law aka Brad. Note the importance of poetry in the plot line which actually opens the film ("you rock"), and the ridiculousness and futility of the poetry presented in the story. When you torch someone's jetskis you deal with the karmic repercussions, but did Brad have it coming. It's good to have an other on the journey.

This post has been removed due to THREAT OF LEGAL ACTION at the request of Victoria Chang.

Big news just in: I am very very very pleased to announce that Tupelo Press will be publishing my collaboration with David Lukowski Nutritional Feed in Fall 2005! Our manuscript will be Tupelo's first publication of a book that includes both poetry and art.

In other news, I just applied for a job in New Zealand!

The School has undergone some major restructuring in the last few years since I was a student. Chicago has lost one of its finest photographers and teachers to the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. Right before the Art Institute headed south with its finances, the school published a report of salary for all faculty - full-time, adjunct, etc. The numbers reflected that male instructurs with less teaching experience than their female counterparts were getting paid twice as much for the same positions, regardless of experience, seniority, etc. This is of course no surprise, but still outrageous. How lucky New Mexico is!

What if everyone went around wearing little yellow ribbons over their hearts which said "Please be patient with me, I'm in training"? I was at OfficeMax on Monday night picking up a portfolio book when I noticed the cashier wearing one of these tags. I think it was important that it was on his shirt, close to his heart, vs. on a hat. I noticed that my manner with him entirely shifted and it created this spaciousness in which we could both engage as human beings. My new practice is to visualize everyone I come into contact with wearing one of these ribbons, especially with Kort anytime I am feeling snippy....

While in Chicago, I circumambulated the Art Institute - went around the backside - over by the Betty Rymer Gallery and the photo studio spaces over to the Noguchi fountain which had been drained for winter. Seeing the fountain brought back many memories, including a flashback to one of my earliest ekphrastic poems about art school which I had almost forgotten about- how I remember my outrage still so palpable. Here it is:

Another bird dead on the Noguchi

A long weekend and
the yellow plumage of
another dead bird
camouflaged against
the autumn leaves floating
in the reflecting pool.

In the facade
of the building
the passing pedestrian
is implicated along side
the vinyl owls burnished upon
the exterior of the mirrored complex
at the arts college.

A young photographer's burgeoning
collection of found objects
a green and black body unbagged
a hummingbird in the palm of the hand

reminiscent of Audubon's
taxidermied models.
Paint on canvas.

Her images, projected through
the bodies of dead birds
beneath the darkroom enlarger.

An outraged naturalist
will threaten to net the building
- we'll call it art.

Someone will write a poem.

For the Chicago Public Radio piece on "Recipe for Paper" choreographed by Mei-Kuang Chen go to this link:

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/audio_library/848_ranov04.asp

Scroll down to the November 5 programming and select "Poetry of Dance". You will need Real Audio Player to listen to this piece. Mei speaks on her process of interpreting the piece and on the relationship between poetry and modern dance. Who is that voice reading "Recipe for Paper" you say? Well - it was me, with the voice track majorly slowed down to insert silences and space for the purposes of the dance. Music by Gao Ping.

Thanks to Judy Valente for reporting on this piece! As a result of this piece airing, at least 2 audience members on Saturday night came out to see the show!

A future project before any new installations in the 103 gallery can happen - I must sand the walls down and remove the textured paint that covers them to have a smooth surface for the transfer of any kind of text or image. The plus side of these renovations - I could leave the gallery unlocked for people to wander - seeing as the work would be an integrated part of the walls - there would be no risk of anything getting removed from the gallery.

Categories that are questionable- by the academy's standards one is defined as an "emerging artist" until having a major museum show. After 10 years of solo exhibitions, you might progress to a "mid-career" artist but still be "emerging". Who makes up these definitions? And what would be the equivalent for a word artist? When a visual artist is up for their 5 year tenure review, they need to have had a major museum show to be approved for tenure. Who helps the artist in getting that show? Certainly not the gallery that represents them - this is all the extracurricular work of the artist. But who teaches them these skills in graduate school? If museums plan their calendars 1-2 years out, that means that if you are in your 2nd year of teaching, you need to send out proposals to museums, most likely university and regional collections, marketing your work well in advance of your 4th/5th year. This to me sounds like an extraordinary amount of stress that combined with teaching, would make the production of new work almost prohibitive.

Recent review of American Zen: A Gathering of Poets

American Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press, 2004) features the work of thirty Zen-inspired poets, from veterans Seido Ray Ronci, Jane Hirshfield and Andrew Schelling to newer faces on the scene, such as Shin Yu Pai and Paul Skyrm. Editors Larry Smith and Ray McNiece include a selection of four or five poems by each contributor, a biographical sketch and a personal statement from the author about his or her relationship to Zen Practice. The poems, with tiles like “on the galloping cusp of the new now” and “Old Monks Drinking” are evocative and witty, often filled with a sense of the poignancy and sensuality of the present moment. The introduction provides a brief overview of Zen Buddhism in America and describes the American Zen poetry as a movement of poets—beginning with the Beats—who experimented with a Japanese aesthetic and were inspired by Buddhist truths.
– Holly Gayley, in Buddhadharma (winter 2004)

(footnote - Holly Gayley is an amazing dharma teacher who works closely with the Shambhala community in Boston and is a PhD student in religious studies at Harvard U.)

A former classmate, Vishal Khanna has a new website that he'd like you to be aware of:

There's a new website that lets anybody rate their doctor, and look up the ratings of other doctors, all for free.

It's called DrScore.com and it's just getting started. The idea is that when doctors are able to get anonymous feedback from their patients - and when that information is publicly available - we'll all get better medical care.

This will only work if a lot of people rate their doctor to build up the database. Please follow the link on this page to rate your doctor. It takes less than 3 minutes. Then forward this message to at least 10 other people in your address book.

Here's the link: www.drscore.com.

You'll find lots of other links to health-care resources from the site, too.

Having had many bad experiences with Western Medicine and Western docs (including a botched wisdom tooth surgery, doctors who prescribe meds without doublechecking for allergies or culturing for certain illnesses) this is one concept that I FULLY endorse!

Back in the big D, and what a whirlwind of a week it was in the Windy City. Home to piles of mail with a goodie or 2 buried in my stack of credit reports including a few new titles for reading:

Denis Mair: Man Cut in Wood
Anne Valley-Fox: Point of No Return (La Alameda title!)
Jane Sprague: Port of Los Angeles
Juliana Spahr: things of each possible relation hashing against one another

Read last night at Myopic Books in Wicker Park and met Ray B. and Mark T., local Chicago poets who I never had the chance to know as a student in the city. The chair of my old writing department came out as well as Aimee, my former photography teacher, who brought along her very nice new boyfriend, Stephen.

Kort flew in on Thursday night for the premier of "Recipe for Paper" which went exceptionally well. Mei reinterpreted the piece in 3 sections (new section added by her for continuity) and in this particular version, I think the notion of the loss of tradition was highlighted, vs. a focus on the honoring of tradition, which put a new and interesting spin on things. Mei's husband Paul edited together video footage from several cooking programs (Emeril, Martha, etc) which were projected on screen while part I of Recipe for Paper was read and Mei stood on stage in apron and with cooking cart, taking notes on the making of paper. Shift to part II - 3 dancers move across the stage draped with white paper hung from the ceiling. 1 dancer is wrapped in a white fabric which moves as a metaphor for the Silk Road. There were many wonderful moments of synchronicity between the dance and the text - when "scents are released into the air" - a dancer is lifted on stage as another dancer tosses fabric into the air. As the "interwoven fibers" of the paper take shape, the 3 dancers converged together in one formation. As the text and music end, the 3 dancer slowly exited the stage with the care of monks walking in Buddhist meditation. Part III, shift back to Mei on stage, holding a sheet of handmade paper and engaging with her husband (an actor in the audience) yakking it up on his cell phone/palm pilot device telling her paper is going the way of dinosaurs. As the lights begin to fade, Mei is left on stage contemplating tradition as she tears the paper into tiny pieces.

Other pieces in the dance perf included 2 words by Wild Space from Wisconsin, 1 piece by Jan Bartoszek, artistic director of Hedwig and 1 piece by a Cuban choreographer who set a poem about a young florist to dance. NPR did run a 5 minute piece on the performance, but sadly I missed the report!

Spent time with an old friend and collaborator, Larry Lee and had many good conversations on the School, academia, teaching, and the arts which have inspired some deep introspection. Likewise with Aimee... more thoughts to come as I slow down enough to breathe.

For now, feeling happy, healthy and invigorated and optimistic about the future. Getting ready now for Nato's visit to Dallas and an open studio next week and planning with Jack for next semester's poetry class.

Thanks to Larry, Yuchia, Aimee, Luba, and Anna Marie and to Jan & Hedwig, Tony & Columbia, and Chuck and Myopic for making my visit back to Chicago like a homecoming.

Started yesterday with a walk thru Millenium Park on Michigan Avenue adjoining the museum. This is an incredible space that was completed in July which includes a Frank Gehry designed pavilion for performance and a fantastic and monumental kidney bean sculpture by the artist Anish Kapoor which has a mirrored surface and reflects the skyline of Chicago. Tourists were gathered around the bean taking snapshots of themselves and the city.

Then on to the Art Institute's collections when the building opened at 10:30 - first stop - Gallery 109 - Tadao Ando's special room. I beat the school crowds and docent tours and had a solid five minutes or so alone in this room and than a crowd of kids came in with a tour guide. It gave me an idea to write "The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion" part II, 6 years after my first poem - this experience was very different - the docent was asking questions to get the teens to think about the space and consider its qualities and the artwork in the room had been rotated, so that now, in winter, a screen with calligraphed poetry occupied the main viewing area. Maybe it would be fun to write a series of Orchid Pavilion poems, one every season, 4 every year, capturing the seasons of the artwork rotating thru and of the reactions of viewers to this sacred space. Broke the spell and went upstairs to the contemporary collections and the Cornell boxes which have not rotated or changed at all. Remembered writing my first ekphrastic poem before Orchid Pavilion which is about a Noguchi fountain on Columbus Drive at the back of the building - the poem is called "Another bird dead on the Noguchi". I will have to dig that gem out when I get home and look at it again. The Noguchi fountain is reflected in a mirrored wall of windows which claims the lives of many small birds which end up floating on the fountain or on the surface of sculpture itself. Back in grad school, there was a student who was taking these birds, taxidermying them and then photographing them for her projects. Ugh.

Met Anna Marie and Luba, 2 former classmates, down at Columbia and had lunch at Thai Spoon. Anna Marie informs me that someone I once indulged in dating for a very very brief spell (2 weeks?) before breaking it off moved back to Chicago to enroll in her PhD program. That would have been a shock if he had shown up at my reading on Monday!

Then to the dress rehearsal of WORD/DANCE. Liked very much the coming together of language and movement - but had some notes for part III which was added into the piece to create a continuity.

Kort decided to surprise me and is flying into Chicago for the weekend to be here for the performances and to hang out together in the city where we fell in love again after he went away to Japan. What could be better?

In 2005 Red Hand Press begins publishing 3 new literary annuals--Clara Venus, fulva flava, and Defect Cult--in print and on-line versions-- ( 3 annual titles rather than one quarterly). Writers & artists receive payment in contributors copies. One year subscription $15. Single issue: $5. Small Press poets, writers and artists may submit their work now for consideration for the inaugural issues. One submission opens you to consideration for all three publications--unless your (optional) cover letter indicates a preference.

SUBMIT:
Poetry: all forms and styles, prose poems
Prose: flash (500 words or less) fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction
Artwork: Send your high contrast color and b&w graphics, drawings, prints, collages, paintings and photographs for consideration. By mail: submit clear clean photocopies of original images. Via e-mail: send JPEGs. Keep in mind the openness of these publications and the stated themes when
submitting artwork.

Clara Venus http://ClaraVenus.blogspot.com
The name of this publication taken from Rimbaud's poetry--his description of a lady emerging from her bath --*her buttocks engraved with the words Clara Venus ... hideously beautiful...The focus of Clara Venus literary annual--the female outside roles and beyond descriptions she's commonly been written into. Let's eradicate the last vestiges of those hackneyed stereotypes. You tell us in your words what they are/were and go beyond... The theme(s) of the first issue: POSE, euphemism & images of the past fulva flava

http://fulvaflava.blogspot.com
Fulva Flava purportedly means *the woman of fire* in Latin-- as stated in Honore de BalzacÂ∂s The Girl With The Golden Eyes. Flava and Fulva are both associated with lilies & horticulture. fulva flava the name chosen for the second Red Hand Press literary annual as evocative of ripply lively female aspects--where the hush-hush, not to be spoken-- will be...pages for putting the indecent to question...
So froth forth and submit any very short prose and/or poetry and cover art for, by & about the sexual intellectual exploring the wet spots...of the unembarrassed female...

DEFECT CULT --- the fear and freedom issue
Defect Cult, the name for the 3rd Red Hand Press literary annual, derived from a phrase within Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ...a poor woman devoted to the cult of her defects. The first issue of Defect Cult calling the *fear* issue--seeking writing on *fear and the
social facade* *female fears* *origins of fear(s)* *overcoming fear(s)* *fear as control* *recognizing origins/breaking free* send submissions to:
Red Hand Press
PO BOX 422344
San Francisco CA 94142-2344
RedHandPress@hotmail.com

Took the El into Evanston this morning to meet old classmate Beth for lunch at Olive Mountain on Davis Ave. Beth is looking great these days - had 10 sessions of rolfing, has steady work and is writing and meeting with a group of our classmates at Art Institute on a semi-regular basis. Lar picked me up and we went to see the exhibition of contemporary Chinese photography and video work at the MCA Chicago. Fantastic stuff - work by Zhao Bandi, Zhang Huan, Song Dong, Wang Quigsong, Liu Tianmiao and Hong Hao in addition to across the hall a separate exhibition of Fiona Tan's work. Song Dong's piece was a photographic series documenting his performance of taking a large wooden seal and stamping the river. Zhang Huan also showed a series of photographs called "family tree" in which the artist has his face inscribed with calligraphy, until in the last frame, his face has become completely blackened by ink. Liu Tianmiao's work was a huge fabric piece printed with a photograph of the artist without hair. In the fabric are tiny knots breaking up the surface connecting to behind the surface string that gathers together into a long braided hair like piece. Several photographers in this exhibition evoked the Chinese scroll thru a horizontal landscape presentation of their photographs - taking a strip of negatives and enlarging the entire sequence. A wonderful actual scroll piece by Hong Hao - a reproduction of an ancient scroll "Spring Festival on the River" with collaged cutouts and photographs of figures inserted into the scene. Another striking image: "Night Revels of Lao Li" by Wang Qingsong who appears in his photographs - an updated interpretation of an ancient theme - a night of debauchery and revelry staged with recurring characters throughout the wall length frame.

Just back from dinner with Mei, Paul, Larry, and Yuchia and a reading at Columbia College Chicago. Thanks to Tony and Yuchia for helping to make the event hapen and to Larry for tech support. Had a good turnout for such a blustery bad weather day that turned many umbrellas inside out. A couple of faculty from the lit department showed as well as a few students from the B.A. and MFA programs in creative writing from Columbia. Susen James from my SAIC days who is now teaching at Columbia came and I ran into Luba in the hall, while waiting for Tony, who was running off to teach a composition course. Walked over to the Fine Arts building with Tony to the Rain Dog cafe and afterwards went up to the 8th floor to check out the Subcity Projects elevator. Currently deinstalled, but gave me an idea of the installation space that Ellen and I will be working with -it's not a functional elevator. There is a history in Chicago with working with challenging installation spaces - everything from living room and closet galleries to truck installations!

But the real highlight of the day was going over to the Hedwig Dances studio space on Randolph and meeting Mei and seeing her dancers interpret "Recipe for Paper". I almost cried. I only saw the second part of the piece which is set to an audio recording of me reading the poem backed by Gao Ping's beautiful musical compositions while the dancers move slowly across the floor wrapped in cloth, traveling the Silk Road and coming together at times like the interwoven fibers of handmade paper. As the dancers slowly exit, their movements are not unlike walking meditation which is the metaphor in my mind of the art-making practice - the making of paper,the writing of the poem.. 3 dancers, 2 female and 1 male, with a shaved head who evoked for me a Buddhist monk in his deliberate steps. Fantastic. My classmate Judy from SAIC put together a piece for NPR on the Hedwig program which should air on Wednesday or Thursday. When I get the live link, I will post it here. I also caught a sneak preview of another dance piece written by a Cuban poet in Spanish about a florist who is utterly commited to her oeuvre - the piece is danced by a beautiful young woman in a white dress on a stage strewn with flowers. This performance is also quite moving, ending with a recorded reading by the poet of her poem in Spanish.

Revision notes for the future... at my Pitt lecture a student asked about what it is about the artists that I am attracted to - that is, do they have anything in common? I gave a quick and abstract answer in retrospect - I like artists interested in process and who have a certain minimalist and Buddhist sensibility. Let me flesh that one out. I am attracted to works of art that have a timeless relevance. Whether they are being discovered in their day, or thousands of years after being created, the dialogue is one that is timeless and within its own context and terminologies. My interest in process is an interest in documenting the act of creation, the materiality of our mediums and the artistry, innovation and skill of the actual art-making process. The end product is only semi-relevant.

Note to self per Larry - to transfer texts on to glass or wall, print out text laid out as desired with appropriate spacing and print out. Take to Kinko's, Fast Sign or any copy shop. Explain what I need the text for (glass vs wall) and have them print/xerox the whole thing (i.e. a poem) on a sheet of vinyl with adhesive than transfer the whole thing on the surface in one solid piece. Voila! Life made easy and very soon my poems will not be suspended on the gallery wall, but will very soon become a PART of the wall. Yes!