Happy 67th birthday to my father.

Is it just me or is the new movie Bolt a contemporary variation on The Incredible Journey story?

Entering the last week of the fall quarter at UW. The university declared two weeks ago that it has a severe budget deficit and will be making university-wide budget cuts. Twenty percent across the board. This will mean the elimination of staff, faculty, and programs, and a continuation of the hiring freeze.

I here it's bad in California too. The axe will fall at CSUSB tomorrow.

There is no wi-fi at the Centrum Center in Port Townsend. That could be really good for my writing.

I managed to spend nothing on Black Friday. I don't think I will be replacing my digicam by the time I leave for retreat.

I am seeing a new healer who practices Ayurvedic medicine and trained under David Frawley. His intuition, languaging and general abilities are pretty uncanny. My work is to reconcile the unreconcileable - i.e. the blessing and curse of being a writer and of being Asian American.

I should be done with school by June. In the mean time, I'm practicing living in the here and now, and the reality that is not my imaginative writing life, but my everyday life.

K and I looked at a beautiful practice space that just opened at SPA(CE) down the street from us. We really liked the owner of the space and I am keeping my fingers crossed that K elects to rent a treatment room in the spa for 1 day a week and start his practice here in Seattle. I have committed to splitting the rent on the space as an incentive.

Items I am taking on retreat with me:

CS Perez's Unincorporated Territory
Bachelard's Poetics of Space
Sontag On Photography
Shiva Rea Yoga DVD
nagchampa incense
makeshift shrine
books to sell at Northwinds reading
yoga mat
a film-based camera

I am now able to achieve an unassisted headstand against any wall.

This is a lecture-heavy week for me - going to presentations at/around the college. On Monday, I went to a Tak Fujitani lecture. He used the word "hegemony" about three times in one minute. Such is academia. Sigh. He talked about racism and its subtler forms. That the Japanese American internment was framed in terms of military necessity/national security, but that really, it was a disguised racism. And he warned the audience to be vigilant of the evolution of racism in a post-Obama moment and then made an empassioned argument against area studies.

Left that lecture and went to hear Cynthea Bogel talk about the import and evolution of mandala painting in ancient Japan. She talked about the esoteric, tantric path of Shingon/Mikkyo Buddhism popularized by Kukai, and the ritual tools that he brought back from China - they included portraits of his tantric masters, as well as mandalas/visualization tools, sacred texts, and objects - all purchased with the funding of a government grant that sponsored his travel abroad. Cynthea's got a book due out from UW Press next year on Mikkyo - I confess that I hadn't learned about this particular Zen Buddhist sect, which seems to have strong parallels to Tibetan Buddhism - mantra (sound/chanting), mudra (gesture), and mandala (contemplation/visualization).

Went to hear and see Annie Leibovitz talk last nite at SAL. She was completely unpretentious, funny, and very much herself - highly personable. She talked about her new book and how it was a project in finding her own voice, post-Sontag. That voice is clean and spare in its prose, to the point, but also heartfelt and honest. Her introducer talked about Leibovitz as pragmatic (would rather do than theorize the work), and connected that pragmatism with an "American" tradition. I'm not sure what's particularly pragmatic about American-ness, but I wonder if she was attempting to draw some kind of connection between Leibovitz's work and one of her influences/idols, Robert Frank, who of course, produced "The Americans." What I loved about Annie's talk - she shoots celebrities and famous people, but reframed the conversation in terms of how iconic-ness is born in each of us in being who we most are.

K and I found our way over to the Seattle Shambhala Center on Monday for their regular open sitting practice. The center is in a residential neighborhood in Fremont, not far from the Japanese Gardens, and is basically a converted residence, with two meditation rooms - one downstairs for classes and one upstairs (a large open hall-type space) for group sitting. Coming up the stair to the meditation room, I was reminded of climbing the stairs of the Lincoln Building at Naropa - the walls adorned with Trungpa's calligraphy. I had a good vibe about this place - the sangha here seemed mostly male, and white. Not a whole lot of cultural diversity, but that seems fairly consistent with Tibetan Buddhism in the west. We met a guy who had just moved to Seattle in June and connected with the Shambhala Center right away. It took over a year for K and I to find our way to this group and I wonder if any of the upheaval and transition might have been eased by joining the community sooner. We sat for 45 minutes, and it reminded me of the days when we would practice yoga together at exhale. Looking over to see my partner - a good feeling to have a shared practice. I'm also very interested in the Nalanda West Center here that is the seat of Ponlop Rinpoche's N. American presence and hope to spend some time exploring it in the near future...

Wow, CU Boulder received 190 applications to their opening for a creative writing faculty member, poetry specialty. Tough job market...

Upcoming readings

Cornish College
Seattle, WA
November 19, 4:30 pm

Northwinds Gallery
Port Townsend, WA
December 18

crossing the floating bridge, remembering Bellevue's ruined strawberry fields

seattle, not boston, and still we both wear our don't-fuck-with-me faces

thick carpet of leaves covering the sidewalk deadens my footfalls

Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth: You owe me. Look what happens with a love like that: It brightens up the whole sky.

- Hafez, courtesy of Norbu

Benefit Party hosted by the Friends of the NW Chocolate Festival

Hi Friends of Winter, Chocolate and Great Parties,

You're invited to Winter Warming in the House! featuring mojitos, lots of delicious chocolate, and Mystery Micro-brews.

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 8pm-1am
257 NW 42nd Street [the Fremont House]

You're most taste-fully invited to:

Celebrate the election!
Welcome winter!
Bid farewell to the summer, (on that note,we'll feature a classic summer cocktail, the Mojito).,
Share a local beer with friends!
Win a cool prize in the raffle!
and Co-create the indoor winter party culture in our community!

Along with your splendid self, BRING CASH!** (no need to BYOB, we got that covered!)
$5 donation at the door = your first drink/beer and a ticket for our hourly raffle of excellent party prizes!

WHAT'S THE $ FOR?
This is a Benefit Party hosted by the Friends of the NW Chocolate Festival. The NW Chocolate Festival is a community-centered event that incurred huge debt to bring the first-ever chocolate festival to the Northwest in September. We Friends have decided to host kickin winter parties to make sure there can be another chocolate festival very soon. In that spirit, we will be providing some serious chocolate and special treats for you to nibble, chocolate!

This is a fundraiser party, please bring cash for the bar with Rum Mojitos for $5 per drink and micro-brews for $3 per drink.

Mark your calendar now, and yes bring friends!!

November 22nd, 2008
Saturday 8pm

We are super-excited to launch the Winter Warming Party series for our awesome local community. Come meet people, dance your booty off, and drink indoors at the best house-party in town.

Much Love!

See you on the 22nd,

love,
The Friends of the NW Chocolate Festival

Merwin redux

I went to the W.S. Merwin reading at SAL last week. The program started with a 20-minute Q&A conversation between the poetry series curator and the poet on stage. I guess typically the format is reverse - a reading followed by talk. Merwin read for about 30-40 minutes from his new Copper Canyon book. The new collection is split into three sections - I am blanking on what the first and the third were, but section two was a collection of elegies for the poet's dead dogs. I found the lyric poem Lullabye particularly beautiful and hope that someone (i.e. GP) sets it to music (preferably for alto). Merwin talked a little bit before every poem that he read and read at a glacial pace. These were good lessons, to slow it down and to have a conversation with the audience. His new book includes just one translation - a short fragment by Hadrian.

Homes in ABQ appears to be a lot more affordable than property in Seattle. Add to this that Vasant Lad's Institute is based in the Land of Enchantment, and I think Kort and I may have a post-UW plan.

The Stranger and several other newspapers have published a few details on the death of man who commit suicide on campus two weeks ago, by dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself on fire. His name was In Soo Chun and he was a 61 y.o. Korean immigrant employed by the custodial department at UW for a full year, before he was terminated from his position.

"The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation." Helen & Scott Nearing, The Good Life

What interests me now

is not poetry, but living some version of the good life.

Lesson of the week:

The only thing guaranteed in life is death. Friendships, love, vegetable gardens, contracts, and promises go awry and things go from good to bad to good to bad again. We live unresolved lives. Relationships are born. Relationships die. We all get sick. We are all suffering and heading towards an undeniable death. Fame, poetry, money, recognition, publication, exhibition, and certain forms of education, etc. do little to stave off this reality. I look you in the eye, Death, and will make you my friend.

decaying bundles of flowers in red
square mark where he doused himself
in gas, set himself aflame

There are certain things that I believe that every human being must learn to say from the heart and hear with an open mind, over the course of their lifetime. They include:

- Please
- Thank you
- No thank you
- No
- Yes
- Give me some time to think about it
- I am wrong
- You were right
- It's not about who's wrong or right
- I'm sorry
- Please forgive me
- I forgive you

Everyone, including myself, is a work-in-progress sometimes where these finer points of communication are concerned.

I cast my vote at Greenlake this morning where the community center was handing out old-style paper ballots. The volunteers were perky and enthusiastic people which helped to lift my mood. I was offered the option of having a paper ballot in Chinese. Apparently, Greenlake is a bilingual polling station. I declined and then the poll worker promptly apologized to me saying it was part of their training to at least offer. It made me wonder if bilingual voting is available at all in my parents' area of Southern California. When we talked on the phone a couple of weeks ago, my dad made the statement after offering several negative opinions about one candidate in particular (the one I endorse) that it was "none of OUR business" - plural. My dad's been a U.S. citizen for what must be decades at this point, but his ethnic and political identification is still with his motherland to the extent that he doesn't see a responsibility or connection to the politics in this country which inform his social security, taxes, healthcare, etc. If he knew that he could have a Chinese ballot, I wonder if that would make any sort of difference, though he is fluent/bilingual - if that gesture at inclusion would mean anything to him. My parents' attitude towards politics in the U.S. had a large impact in my own sense of agency. The first time I voted was in the last election four years ago. I made Kort go with me to the polling station and I voted blanket Democrat on the electronic ballot. In Texas, our minority votes didn't really carry any weight one way or another, but here in Seattle, I found myself really caring about the propositions on the ballot. I'm glad to have logged my vote and am relieved too to move on.