I heard Lee read from her memoir last October when we did an event together at Reed College in Portland. From the passage that she read, as well as the way in which the book is marketed, I had anticipated that the book would be about her childhood and family dynamics growing up in a New England family. The memoir is primarily about her relationship with her father who was dying of terminal cancer during the two-year period that is covered in the book, with flashbacks into the past. What becomes interesting then is that a glamor shot of the author's mother is published on the book cover. According to the book's end matter, in earlier drafts of the book, there were few/no passages on the mother - certain sections were added at the request of agents and editors to make the book more marketable. In the current book, the mother floats in and out of the background in an alcoholic haze. It is her lack of engagement that generally characterizes her participation in the family dynamic, and of course, this would impact the other dynamics and bonds within the family, but it seemed discordant to me to market the book to an audience that might expect a mother-daughter tale, which this was definitely not.

Winter break and I've been staying away from heavy intellectual reading - just finished Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and really see this book, which was marketed as fiction in its day, as a frontrunner to poetic projects like Bellocq's Ophelia or documentary-style poetry like what A Van Jordan did with M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A. Ondaatje traces the life of New Orleans jazz player Buddy Bolden - his lovers, his music, his barber shop, his life in the House of D. On now to Nell Freudenberger's short story collection Lucky Girls. Nell came to town last September when Ben Fountain read at Elliott Bay. It was a smart move on the part of their publisher to pair them together, as both authors write eloquently of Americans abroad.

Wrapping up an interview for HOW2 that will launch in 08. I was asked about whether or not a male poet/mentor can ever truly know what a woman poet goes through. I think the background of the question was related to theories of the Gurlesque and perhaps something to do with the Chicago Review article about women in poetry/publishing (which I did not read, do not care to). The question didn't resonate for me at all, because I do not identify as a feminist - I identify as a humanist - and it was also this attitude that got be a "B" in Barbara Gottlieb's Women's Studies class at BU. While I am thinking about grades, since I just finished first quarter - they are really *so* arbitrary and should just be eliminated. They are not really a true motivator but a mechanism for classroom management and artificial measures of the acquisition of knowledge. That said, I was very happy to rock a 3.9. Back in high school, however, under my parents' watch, 3.9 would have been sub-par and grounds for more studying.

I just finished a book on snobbery by Joseph Epstein that made me think deeply about the ways in which I and others express snobbism and pedigree - namedropping, affiliations, capacity for creativity, schooling, fashion, food, affectation towards celebrity. When I came back from reading at RISD, a classmate enthusiastically regaled me with the personal detail that her graduate school mentor had taught at RISD - and so by extension and affiliation that *must* make her "in." The best part of RISD was seeing my friend Rick and sharing my work with highly gifted creative-thinking Asian and Asian-American students - that has been a rarity for me in academia. That is was RISD was icing on the cake. Am I a downward-looking snob or an upward-looking snob? Epstein's book is brilliantly blurbed as part of the design concept by the long-deceased Oscar Wilde, one of my all-time favorite snobs. It makes me rethink the blog as a purveyor of snobbism - not the real me or real life but a *performance* for others.

Which leads me to think about a conversation with my friend the poet Carol Levin yesterday about my father's recent visit and his propensity for story-telling. I've encouraged my father for many years to write his story, to record his story on a digital recorder, to document his life - all things he has professed to desire for himself - but Carol pointed out that the writing practice is at heart a solitary effort. And my father's need to tell stories is about connecting with others, having an audience, so a more appropriate venue for that might be if he moved to town to have a house-salon series where in a structured format he could tell his stories and cultivate a community over a sustained period of time amongst a safe audience of friends where a genuine exchange of energy could contribute to healing and transformation.

Farewell Oscar Peterson. I came to know your music through Woody Allen movies and will miss you.

I'm working on organizing an anthology reading for the WOMPO book at the UW Women's Center. If you are a Seattle-based contributor to this collection and want to read and haven't yet been contacted by the group, email me.

The quarter's officially over. One more day at the office tomorrow and then I get a week of break before the madness starts all over again.

I've been reading books on anti-racist pedagogy which seems to be the big shift in the classroom. When I got out of SAIC in '99, my peers' teaching philosophies cribbed liberally from the Brazilian Paolo Freire's ideas of student-centered education. But radical pedagogies of discomfort and the decentering of professorial authority seem to be the new buzz words of this generation.

Race in the Classroom brings together essays by college faculty, many of them people of color. The book talks about how in many of the predominantly white colleges an classrooms, faculty of color get poorer evals and are challenged by students who perceive that professorial authority should come from white males. Several of the authors also write about that for some of these students, college is the FIRST time that they are experiencing being around people of color, let alone people of color in positions of power. Many of the students in these case studies resisted and resented being exposed to issues of race and inequality and were enraged by the classes, felt guilty, and struggled with looking at their own privilege.

So the new pedagogy is very much one about deconstructing whiteness, creating multiple centers of experience and authority, not allowing whiteness to be a liability. While the professors of sociology and social science seemed to fare best in this collection of essays, it seems to be that literature professors have a great potential to transform the classroom through objective analysis of creative writing and literature. By introducing writers of color into their curriculum and broadening the scope of material taught.

This quarter, I learned a lot about oppression in the classroom, by being oppressed in the classroom. I question now whether there were subtle ways as a teacher years ago that I oppressed a white student in one of my classes who insisted on writing about her sexual abuse experience in my graduate poetry workshop. Though I don't believe that I discouraged her from writing about the topic, I did encourage her to write about it from different perspectives, with objectivity, using the craft of the poet. Similarly, there was a black student in that class who had also undergone sexual abuse and had a similar narrative. I brought in different models of poets writing about physical and sexual abuse, I deconstructed the students' poems - one of them informed me of her intention to drop and followed through. Years later, I wonder about whether or not that experience was a re-wounding for that woman.

So I am heavily rethinking my "student-centered" teaching philosophy and realizing that I have to be in it - my core values must be transparent, my own feelings about the classroom as a learning environment, my biases must even be exposed - that I am a Taiwanese-American woman has always informed my writing and art-making practice - and of course it should inform my teaching practice. We cannot erase issues of race in the classroom or make things "odorless" in the way that Japanese animation creates race-less characters with a universal appeal - race is a smelly smelly thing.

Another NY reading:

January 31, 2008
11th Street Bar
7:00-9:00 p.m.
Readings by authors from:

1913 Press
Saturnalia
Failbetter
Indiana Review

I am unofficially finished with my first quarter of doctoral studies at the UW. Emailed in a 15-page take home final, gave a final group presentation in museology class on Saartjie Baartman on Thursday, attended my last anthro class, turned in my last paper and now I can rest and reflect.

Living on the W. Coast makes travel to the E. Coast a bigger challenge than it used to be. I am recovering from a cold that I caught on US Airways from Providence to Seattle. Note to self: while the emergency row has extra leg room, the window seat also has a cold draft. Never transfer through Philadelphia - it's got 2 runways and may be worse than JFK in terms of on-time departures and arrivals. I had been dragging my feet about February's Rubin Museum of Art reading in NY, but am starting to get motivated to look at plane fares and plan. The reading, which is co-sponsored by P&W, will feature Tom Morgan, Andrew Schelling, Rick Benjamin, Margaret Gibson and me reading from Buddhist-influenced work. Not planning to be at AWP, except to maybe browse the bookfair and see Texas friends. No plans to return to the E. Coast after that - except for perhaps the Simmons Chinese Poetry Conference in October, if it runs.

Tentative release date for Haiku Not Bombs has been set for late March, with a good chance that it will be out sooner than that. Cover is currently in design and will be letterpressed in 2-3 colors with the interior offset printed. The book will publish in an edition of 1,000. Booklyn is DIY on distribution, so if you own or manage a bookstore and would like to get your mitts on a consigned copy of this book, contact Booklyn directly and/or the authors.

Anthropology interests me to the degree that it has increased my awareness of my positionality in the world. The argument of whether or not there is a sociological-literary divide is one that fails to engage me. Scientists needs to learn how to write better for the public and investigative journalists should not pretend to know science. Science, is above all, science, and should not be compromised for the sake of literariness. Anthropology may well belong in the humanities, and not the social sciences. "Being there" in the field is over-rated inflated romance. What matters is having a stake in the community of study.

The kids at RISD were sharp - working on visual art installations and performances including aspects of poetry. One of Mairead Byrne's students working on a brilliant project about water in New Jersey and how there will not be enough for a certain community in the year 2020. Her project focuses on raising consciousness about this crisis. Very good public art dimensions. Speaking of public art - I saw some really great masking tape signs on brick walls. Eye-catching, temporary, and non-toxic. RISD is housed in a series of historic buildings which adjoin the Brown campus. The facilities are *NICE* and the school obviously has a lot of resources at its disposal. Interesting thing about RISD - faculty have no guarantee of tenure. Providence itself had something of a Harvard Square/Boston feel to it with Pawtuxet Village feeling very small-town New England, ala Peterborough, NH.

We redecorated the house. After my Providence trip and staying with Norbu's family, completely rearranged my office to make it more of a guest room, hung with Chinese and Japanese scrolls which would appeal to my father - the guest that we hope will visit most often. My desk is away from the window, the heating vent has been uncovered, and the lighting and temperature in the space feel much more conducive to live/work.

Staying with my friend's family was a profound experience. Waking up to the sound of children's voices, the smell of breakfast, parents getting their kids ready for school and a fierce feeling of nostalgia, not of what was ever had or experienced, but for something that never was, yet feels real on an intuitive level. The idea that the family you make can transform the experiences of family that you grew up with. That makes a lot of sense in thinking about my father's nuclear life in America and his 8 siblings in Taiwan.

Guanyin Buddha with painted eyes, RISD Museum

The RISD Tap Room

Canibala

Canibala will feature performance art and ephemera framing the "other" body of the Americas, through the metaphorical lens of cannibalism. The exhibition will feature non-object art that relies purely on the body as a site of sensorial knowledge, ritual, memory, history, labor, and a measure of time. Cannibalism has all too often been referenced when framing the "savage" indigenous body. Conversely many artists such as Aimé Césaire, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and Enrique Chagoya have used cannibal imagery in post-colonial discourse to express critical perspectives on Western culture and as a device for inverting conventional boundaries of civilization and morality. The metaphor of the cannibal has deep roots in the Americas, from the etymology of the word with Columbus' accidental translation of the word to the highly influential writing of the Cannibalist Manifesto by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade.

Canibala will open at Diaspora Vibe Gallery, Miami, Florida in October 2008. Other venues will be announced.

Artists interested should submit up to 10 images of actual work to be included in exhibition or relevant media documentation, artist statement, image list, and CV to archipelaga@gmail.com.

Deadline 1/15/08

Thanks to Rick Benjamin and the good people at RISD for hosting my visit this past week!