(courtyard piece)

where light chimes at the strike of each hour

where sharpness shifts into stillness

where crescent moon burns into view

where night-blown cactus breaks into bloom

where an overheated pup enters the stream of infinity pool

where atoms of dissolving ice cascade across a warm windshield

where visitors top out void & refill foramen under shelter of steel

where intervals of space & light draw sudden apertures of awning

After "Dividing the Light"

altar / alter / alma
mater / matter /
mutter moonward / murmur /
muster / movement
muscle / muse / mute

What else is new in 2010:

Kort is reopening Longevity Acupuncture at the Austin Longevity Center in South Austin. He'll practice on Wednesdays and Fridays beginning on January 6. Congrats, bunny!

These were my resolutions last year. They were more like aspirations then resolutions, I suppose - though I did learn to cook 10 new recipes, finish school, went back to Port Townsend, and a few other items on the list. And some of last year's aspirations will reach fruition this year (i.e. revisiting Colorado and publishing Adamantine).

But for this year, here are renewed aspirations:

- cook more
- run more
- revisit Seattle
- be passionate about my work
- pay off debt
- write more
- keep in touch better
- think big
- more yoga

I went to see my parents in Riverside for a few days and we spent an afternoon at the Palm Springs Art Museum out in the desert. Steve Nash, who ran the Nasher Center in Dallas, has taken over as the Director in Palm Springs. On display was an exhibition of gifts and promised works from the collection of Donna and Cargill "Mac" MacMillan, Jr. The MacMillans played a big role in wooing Nash away from Dallas and their gift to the Palm Springs Art Museum effectively transforms the Museum from a western/regional collection to an exciting collection of cutting-edge contemporary art. Their collection include the work of Nam June Paik, Yoshitomo Nara, Anselm Kiefer, Louise Bourgeois, and other major international art stars. Elsewhere in the galleries was an exhibition of glasswork including a solo show by an Italian artist who'd spent a lot of his time making work in Tacoma, where I took my parents this summer.

My parents do not love contemporary art so I planned a trip with Zeitgist Spam to check out the LA MOCA, which I hadn't been to see in probably 20 years. Here is one of my favorite installations at the MOCA - a room wallpapered in sheets of paper dipped in chocolate by Ed Ruscha. Needless to say, the room is fragrant and sweet-smelling.



I was delighted to find that the MOCA has several of the early works of artist Robert Irwin - his early line painting, one from his dots period, and his transition into sculptural work with light and space. All of these works are covered in Seeing is the Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and reflect the young Irwin's growth and thought process.

The Geffen site was less interesting to me - ideal for large-scale installations and video work, but a lot of what I think of as ugly, grotesque, and poorly fabricated work by artists like Thomas Hirschorn and Paul McCarthy. But the walk down to the Geffen site if you go down First Street takes you thru Little Tokyo which is a wonderful walk thru history.


Outside several storefronts, the history of each business is chronologically cataloged.

And one gets the sense walking down the sidewalk and reading bronze quotes embossed into the sidewalk that oral history interviews with former residents were used to interpret the neighborhood.



This quote read something like "Every day they would deliver the Rampo Shimbun [newspaper].. and each evening my father would check the obituaries."

There was another powerful quote about kids playing on First Street and every family knowing one another. You wouldn't want to let your kids play today on First Street.

From MOCA, John and I went to pick up his wife Kathy and we drove over to the Claremont-McKenna Colleges campus to view the James Turrell installation which was built in 2007.



It is an uttlerly unique skyspace in that it is not an enclosed room or space, but an open courtyard with cutaways of the sky that surround the viewing space. The open nature of the installation invites people into it - while we were there children and families came by to sit on the benches, a pair of girls walking their dogs - the dogs drinking out of the infinity fountain. There are two viewing times for "Dividing the Light" - sunrise and sunset. We made the sunset show.


And stayed for about 45 minutes, watching the changing hues.


There was a tiny slice of new moon that filled the oculus/aperture and it was a perfect night for a skyviewing.

Happy Festivus.

Forthcoming posts on going home, catching up with Asian American friends, the retrospective show at L.A. MOCA, the Geffen extension space, Little Tokyo, and visiting the Pomona College skypspace with Zeitgist Spam, and various assorted thoughts and pictures now that I am on winter break thru Jan. 4. Also hoping to finish a review of Sherwin Bitsui's wonderful book Flood Song for an upcoming issue of Southwestern American Literature.

Currently, baking cookies, making rum balls and preparing for a white Xmas in Tex.

The new "Bamiyan" broadside printed by Sara Parkel has just arrived hot off the presses. Letterpressed using a photo-polymer plate at the University of Alabama.

Cinematheque Press is making progress on the production of structure of the inner ear and hope to see that tome out by April/AWP.

I can't believe it will be 2010 soon - the start of a new decade. Somehow this feels more monumental to me then a typical changeover in years.

The Book of What Remains by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2010. 126 pp. $16.00 paperback.

The Book of What Remains is the fifth volume of poetry by El Paso-based writer and artist Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Best known for his work as an accomplished author of young adult books and novels, Sáenz returns to his redoubtable roots as an inimitable poet in his latest collection. In The Book of What Remains, Sáenz, a former Catholic priest, explores the aftermath of both private and public tragedies, border violence, and the casualties of war, to consider the Christian apostle Saint Paul’s dictum on what remains, namely faith, hope, and love. (115)

Sáenz divides his book into three major sections. Long narrative poems are intercut with a series of eighteen meditations on living in the desert, inserted throughout the first and third sections of the collection. The poet characterizes the harsh and unforgiving qualities of the desert: “your dreams will not save you from the sun” (18), but also points to the ways in which “human history is even crueler than the desert” (184), in recording the history of nuclear testing in Alamogordo, New Mexico. These short contemplative poems illuminate the disharmonious relationship between mankind and the land; Meditation No. 2 satirizes a poetic speaker who endlessly consumes natural resources. His lack of concern for the future of the land culminates with a tongue-in-cheek statement “When all the trees have disappeared, we can all read Robert Frost poems / and feel sad.” (8) There are no traces of “Imperialist Nostalgia” in Sáenz’s poems, which are intense political reflections on a personal ecopoetics rooted firmly in the life and culture of the border experience.

Tragedy, simultaneously pedestrian and life altering, is a major theme throughout Sáenz’s collection. “The
Comforts of the Neighborhood” tells the tale of nineteen-year-old Juan Patricio Peraza, an unarmed and undocumented migrant worker that is mercilessly gunned down by Border Patrol agents in the poet’s hometown. Elsewhere, the poet writes of the breakdown of a marriage that results in the loss of his home and a beloved pet in the divorce settlement. But it is the capacity for deep feeling that bestows truth and beauty upon the poet and gives him the gift of song throughout The Book of What Remains.

At the heart of Sáenz’s collection are the long poems “The Ruined Cities of My Broken, Broken Heart” and “What I Have to Sing About.” In “The Ruined Cities…” the poet addresses himself:

You have been wandering
in the desert for forty years
searching for water
and a politics
and a theology
and a city you call home (55)

Seeking reconciliation in a life filled with ruin, the poet only arrives in “What I Have to Sing About” at the truth that “the road to happiness is a long fucking road trip” (108). There is no performative lament that encumbers Sáenz’s poetic searching, only a gesture towards the transfigurative act of redefining one’s own terms. Through a belief in certainty, goodness, and compassion, the poet arrives at an emancipatory poetics that rejects the “logic of slavery” (5) to realize the poignant epigram that opens the third section of The Book of What Remains: “You are what you remember.” (67)

Ground-breaking took place today for the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

The new issue of Art in America has a great article on Wolfgang Laib's recent art-making activities, including a write-up by the curator (who organized Laib's last retrospective) on Laib's recent project to bring brahmins to the Mertz Foundation in Italy to stage authentic Vedic fire-making ceremonies as part of his art-making ritual.

Walking to work this morning and looking at all the new leaf piles, I thought about the trees in my neighborhood and began thinking again of the art book project of Gaylord Schanilec and began to wonder if anyone has yet created a children's book/abecadarian devoted to trees - A is for alder, B is for birch...L is for Linden and P is for Ponderosa. And I am thinking of ponderosas in general because I just discovered from reading about DH Lawrence in Mexico that the famous Lawrence Tree immortalized by O'Keefe is in fact a ponderosa pine. I can imagine an abecadarian book that would be both aesthetic and educational for both adults and children. Trees also come to mind because living in Texas everyone here is all about the BBQ and how you smoke your meat with what wood and such - you would think it is like drinking wine or sake or the like, but not to me!

Orhan Pamuk is opening a museum next year based on his new book, The Museum of Innocence. There will be 83 displays for 83 chapters, and the admission ticket for the museum will be printed in the book!

Spiegelman on Writing

"Don Marquis once observed that writing a book of poetry and waiting for the reviews is like throwing rose petals into the Grand Canyon and then listening for the echo."

"You must always write fan letters, especially to poets, because they have no chance of making money, and more important, they have no idea whether anyone in the world is reading and responding to their work. Your letter will be like a lifeline."

I am finishing up reading Willard Spiegelman's Seven Pleasures. I have known Spiegelman in the capacity of a bow-tied academic, the editor of Southwest Review based out of SMU. The times that I have encountered him in public, he has usually been rocking a seersucker or tweed suit with a distinctly E. Coast flavor in contrast to Dallas fashion. He is a snappy dresser and a professorial type who reminds me of my favorite lit professor at BU - Charles Rzepka - also a specialist in Romantic poetry - Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, and Byron. Seven Pleasures is a terrific book of essays, reminiscent of Montaigne's elevated art of nonfiction. Spiegelman is unapologetically academic and himself in these essays - shuttling from one scholarly conference to another, hanging out in London and Italy, taking a retreat at Bogliasco - but he pulls in pop culture/contemporary references from primetime dance shows to the relationship between Richard Long's art and walking to poor urban planning in Dallas, Texas. The limberness of his mind and his ability to trace a literary and aesthetic geneology go beyond exercise, to revealing and reflecting something of how the author perceives and experiences the world. Spiegelman even starts out his wonderful essay on swimming with an exploration of Byron's famous poem on crossing the Hellespont and contracting 'ague. While all of essays in this book are meditations upon activities that bring pleasure, I think the strongest pieces in the book are the ones that explore extremely physical activities such as dancing and swimming - they are not extreme sport experiences, but the experience of physicality for an individual who lives mostly in the world of the visual and auditory senses and the intellect. In this way, they balance and round out a strong and cohesive, slightly biographical, and certainly insightful collection on discovering and experiencing joyfulness.

Daily Candy just repped these products. I love the idea of a necktie or scarf woven out of recycled magnetic cassette tape - I wonder if these designers would take old mixed tapes with sentimental value and use them to fabricate a special commission or order. I like that there scarf is woven of tape that recorded ambient noise and collaged audio in NYC. They claim that if you run the audible fabric up against a tape head that you can actually hear the sound.

Approved today to go to AWP in Denver!

Forthcoming from Filter Press

This is a broadside with two poems on the Bamiyan Buddhas - one by my dear friend Rick Benjamin, and one by me.

Leave me a message in the comments field if you would like one of these.

I ordered this book for the Wittliff Collections, after discovering the work of Anita Brenner this fall - author of Idols Behind Altars, an art historical/anthropological text published in 1929 that commissioned Edward Weston to make photo illustrations to accompany the project. Marie Brenner is Anita Brenner's niece and a journalist for publications like Vanity Fair. She touches upon her family history in San Antonio and Mexico in Apples & Oranges, but the memoir is really a recollection and partial homage to Marie's brother, Carl Brenner.

Brenner explores her relationship with her sibling jumping across time, place, and memory; the book is disjunctive, out of sequence - composed of correspondence, emails, and memories of conversations; the reader comes away with little sense of who Carl is as a fully fleshed person. But Brenner admits that she struggles to see her brother in the light that his girlfriends and community do - that to her, he presents rage and guardedness which goes back to their childhood together.

We get a sense of Brenner's writing and research process - the endless questions and audio recordings, the archival research. Her struggle to find generosity and calm through her yoga practice, which are dropped into the narrative at trying moments and seem empty - a grasping at loose straws. The most interesting parts of the narrative are Brenner's attempts to understand Carl's work as an apple grower in Eastern Washington - a career that he picked up after leaving a successful law practice. Brenner's desperate efforts to come to terms with Carl's cancer and failing health also compel - the grief and helplessness with which she is faced when her brother commits suicide rather than die a slow death from cancer.

Recent Reading

Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is a brilliant narrative of the Asian American experience which skillfully integrates myth into the author's storytelling style to reflect upon the experience difference. Instead of beginning with Jin Wang's story - the young male protagonist who struggles with fitting in, Yang starts his book with the story of the monkey king who is rejected at a gathering given by the other gods, because he is monkey. Filled with self-loathing and pain, the monkey king puts on a pair of shoes, masters intellectual and physical powers that defeat the most intimidating of enemies, and arms himself with the tools that will protect him from never being hurt again. He even makes his monkey disciples wear shoes.

Like the monkey king, Jin Wang experiences deep shame and alienation for being marked as different. He works hard to fit in - shunning at first the only other Chinese child, Wei-Chen, who suddenly enrolls at his school. Jin perms his hair to fit in, falls in love with a cute Caucasian girl... while the two narratives of Jin Wang and the monkey king seem like separate metaphors for one another - Yang beautifully weaves together the two strands by fully bringing the monkey king into Jin's narrative by exploring the character of Wei-Chen, who is the monkey king's son who has been sent to earth as a test of virtue.

After living on earth, being befriended by Jin, lying to Jin's mother to provide Jin with an alibi to go out with a white girl, and subsequently being rejected by Jin, Wei-Chen foresakes the path of virtue and his true identity and estranges himself from his former identity and family. As Jin's character comes to accept who he is and reconciles his identity with being Chinese American, the boy seeks out reconciliation with his former friend Wei-Chen, bringing transformation and healing to their relationship through the ability to see each other for who they truly are as individuals beyond their physical traits.

Recent Morning rituals:

Getting on and off the bathroom scale
Inviting clarity
Reading the NY Times
Reading a book of poems
Reading Rumi quotes
A slice of toast, a hard-boiled egg
Journaling
Listening to the Fleet Foxes

My university is retrofitting several elliptical workout machines to harness and generate electricity to power the facilities. If exercisers are being used as laborers, I think they should be compensated by having their membership fees waived!

The Wittliff Collections is looking for a new Director. Apply here.

Yayoi Kusama makes her return to Italy.

Due to an opening in White Pine Press' publications schedule, Adamantine will be out in Fall 2010. I am excited that Peter Levitt and Mike O'Connor have both agreed to blurb, two exceptionally fine writers with Buddhist sympathies who's work have both meant a great deal to me. Also, a few feelers out to other possible blurbists of the female persuasion.

I will be brushing up on my Spanish or else it will be trial by fuego when it comes to working with many of the living Mexican photographers in the Wittliff Collections. With my boss, who is fluent in Spanish, set to retire in January, it will be an interesting time.

I'm working on an AAM MAP application for the Collections and also just finished a personal application to the Macondo Workshop.

I would like to go on a yoga or Ayurvedic retreat next year to do some detox. Where do you like to go to practice yoga? Mexico or Costa Rica? Or should we go hardcore with ghee shots and herbal enemas at the Ayurvedic Institute?

I'm excited to see Twilight tomorrow. I haven't seen a head of hair like Robert Pattinson's since James Dean.

Yesterday, I was watching a rerun of the original 90210 and realized that Brandon's former boss at the country club is the same actor who plays Chief Weber in Grey's Anatomy. A long career in soaps - speaking of which, I am tempted to start watching General Hospital now that James "Pineapple Express" Franco has signed on as GH character "Franco."

I am reading Lawrence Weschler's biography of Robert Irwin which was written over 30 years of gathering interview material. Irwin talks about how his ambition eventually turned to a much deeper and healthier sense of curiosity and abiding interest in perception. He became less concerned with taking risks and reinventing his work, then with pursuing his interest in human perception. And as a result, his work grew in complexity and evolved greatly from painting to light works and abstract sculptural forms cutting the landscape. I remember seeing his steel sculpture on the lawn of the Rachofsky House in Dallas; and then there is his installation on the campus of the University of Washington which I'd walk by almost everyday on the way to work in Seattle. I bought Irwin's biography, not on the merits of his work, which I knew little about, but because I loved Weschler's book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, a terrific collection on the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Venice Beach. On my upcoming visit to SoCal, I must find a way to visit.

After a night's rain, I decided today to wear the Moov Boots I ordered from Australia. They are fleece-lined and weigh about 10 pounds (each?!), and this weight is noticeable when walking down the street to the university. Also, this Australian sizing thing leaves a lot of extra room at the toe which makes these shoes to me like driving a car - having a lot of extra material around the body. Consequently, my spatial awareness is somewhat skewed and I keep bumping my toes.

Studio Program, ACC Galerie Weimar, Germany

16th International Studio Program of the ACC Galerie Weimar and the City of Weimar
Deadline: 7th December, 2009

Beyond Desire
http://www.acc-weimar.de/

The non-profit organization ACC (Autonomous Cultural Center) originated in 1987, before the fall of the Berlin wall, when students occupied a derelict Renaissance building in the center of the town where Goethe (inevitably) had had his first residence in Weimar (1776/77). Shortly before the reunification, ACC protagonists were able to secure the house with the aid of private sponsors. The institution now consists of a gallery and a café and offers a cultural program that includes theater, literature, and lecture series.

The studio is located in the historical Städtisches Atelierhaus (Municipal studio building), about ten minutes walk to the ACC Galerie Weimar in the town center. In addition to the visiting international artists, the well-lit studio building accommodates ten other Weimar artists.

ROOM AND BOARD: Rent-free furnished apartment in the Weimar Atelierhaus with telephone/answering machine and DSL internet; meals are available at ACC Café-Restaurant at reduced prices (70%).

PARTICIPATION: Artists who would like to produce works of art in accordance with the outlined theme can apply.

The jury will select three artists, each of whom will spend four months living and working in Weimar. Student’s applications cannot be accepted.

DISPLAY AND EXHIBITION: The ACC Galerie Weimar employs a curator who develops a conception and a publication together with the artists. During the residency the curator will decide together with the artists whether and how the selected work(s) will be presented at the ACC Galerie Weimar in 2010. Where appropriate, works of art will be displayed in public spaces in Weimar for time periods to be agreed upon with the artists. In case of a group exhibition of all Studio Program participants a small catalogue will be produced. It is intended that the artists are present during the preparation and for the opening of the exhibition.

ACC COLLECTION: The former participants of the program left one or two important works of art completed during their stay in Weimar to become part of the ACC Galerie Collection. It is up to the future participants to follow this tradition. The gallery and the artist(s) will select the works together.

WORK PERIODS: February 1st – May 31st, 2010; June 1st – September 30th, 2010; October 1st, 2009 – January 31st, 2011

STIPEND: The selected artists will receive a monthly stipend of 1.000€. In order to receive the stipend the artists have to live in Weimar during the work period. The artists are also expected to hold a lecture/talk at the ACC Galerie Weimar at the end of his/her stay in Weimar. In addition we offer free entry to public municipal institutions, such as the Museum of the History of Weimar, and to the museums of the Weimar Classic Foundation, such as the Weimar Art Collection, the Goethe National Museum, the Bauhaus Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Dutchess Anna Amalia Library. Participants are responsible for their own telephone bills and have to arrange for their own medical insurance.

LANGUAGES: English and German are official languages of the International Studio Program. Participants should have a solid grasp of either English or German.

TRAVEL: The participants must cover their own travel costs, although the program attempts to find additional funding in cooperation with the artists.

The application rules are enclosed in the entry form.
http://www.acc-weimar.de/16-iap-2010-application.pdf

Homage to Basho on a November morning

grown child
leaf pile
*crunch*

Book Lab, San Marcos

Yesterday, I went and visited Craig Jensen at his studio in San Marcos. Craig runs Book Lab II - a business that specializes in innovative bookbindings, special editions, conservation, and box-making. Portfolio boxes are the bread and butter of Book Lab's business - and Craig and his partner Gary make archival, cloth-covered boxes for the Getty, the Blanton, and many museum clients. We ended up in Craig's library, looking over past editions and projects that he's worked on. The one piece that absolutely blew my mind was Gaylord Schanilec's Sylvae project. I'm not even sure how quite to explain it, but here goes.

Schanilec lives in rural Wisconsin and got interested in the trees on his property. He surveyed his land and found over 24 species. He then took samples of each tree species and made wood block prints directly from the specimens. He made prints of the interior rings (end grains), as well as of the cross-section of the long grain. Here are the 24 wood samples that come with each book. Each sample is numbered and corresponds to a section/print in the book.



Schanilec was careful to closely match the ink color with the actual hue of the wood. I think this one was ash.



This amazing book also includes a map of Schanilec's land.


The hand-bound book is protected inside a cloth-covered box that also has a niche where the tray of wood blocks rests. The box set must weigh close to 40 pounds!

I found many things compelling about this project - the integration of wood into the design of the book covers and the documentation of the process through the wood blocks. The texts which encompass natural history, poetry, recipes, weird bits of trivia. But I think what moved me most about this project was that the materials came directly from the land where Schanilec lives and works. It reminded me in ways of the project that I wanted to do in my father's home town, using native plants from Ching Shui to make paper that would form the basis of a memory book/family history. Seeing Schanilec's book reminded me of what is possible.

Oh, Morrissey, you were totally in the right.

Friday morning, I was notified that the galleries would have a group of school kids visit that afternoon, so I am over my art tour hump, as I had to improvise very quickly a tour of Fireflies with a small group of 1st-5th graders. For not loving kids or hanging out with children on a regular basis, all things said, it went pretty well.

Went to Bill and Kate's opening at the Stephen L. Clark Gallery on Saturday night. Bill's also got a show up at the Witte Museum in San Antonio at the moment, and so he's definitely having a good year. But these were his Mexico photographs - more spiritual, painterly, and pictorialist-influenced than the Lonesome Dove stills. I wasn't however excited at all about how the show was hung. The Clark gallery has a very limited amount of wall space, and so photos were hung stacked in columns of two on top of one another, with very little actually eye level, which made looking closely at the images, and their details, a challenge. Kate showed new work photographed at the botanical gardens in Mexico - wild, highly textured landscapes, some of which evoked the density of Jackson Pollock painting surfaces and others that spoke to Harry Callahan's abstracted images of plants in snow, though in Kate's photo, water plants became abstract markings within a field of water, vs. winter.

Finally, heard Kate Greenstreet read at Possum headquarters in Austin last night. Kate read poems from her new book which seems infused with spirituality. Liked her follow up work to Case Sensitive and am glad to have caught her as she continues her cross-country promotional tour for the book. I don't know why, but being at last night's reading made me miss the solstice parties at the Wedgewood Coop in Seattle - the people we'd meet, the conversations we'd have. It's been raining a lot in San Marcos, but I still miss Seattle. Sigh.

I am scheduled to give my first school tour in eight years to elementary school children in a few weeks. I will be touring them through our new acquisitions exhibition and our Keith Carter shows. We have a big elephant in the room that I need to get my head around talking about - because JP Witkin's photo from his Mexico Morgue series is displayed so prominently, that there is simply no ignoring it. It's a picture of a young man's head on a platter. JP Witkin did NOT borrow a severed head from a morgue and stage that photo, but he did do an elaborate set up with a corpse in order to arrange the tableaux and create the illusion of disembodiment, a la John the Baptist's head. We have some catalogs with preliminary sketches for the photo which might be useful to duplicate and show, to illuminate the photographer's process and hopefully remove some of the aversion, repulsion, shock or horror of seeing that image. And then there are art historical images of artist's who've taken up the Salome and John the Baptist theme - like Odilon Redon. These are the questions I'm thinking of asking the 5th graders...

How does the picture of the JP Witkin's head make you feel?

How do you think the photograph was made?

Why do you think Witkin chose his particular subject matter over anything found? (probably needs rephrasing)

This last question sets the stage to talk about the staging and performative elements of photographs which could lead into a discussion of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison's photograph The Clearing which is in close proximity to the head.

We could then cruise over to Marco Antonio Cruz's image of ciegos with a Mexican wrestler, or Lizeth Velasco's images of little people working as matadors in Mexico. Find a way to talk about unconventional, surprising subject matter and inspiration.

From there, we could head to Keith Carter's ethereal images and his pictures of children from Fireflies his new book and talk about how Keith got started as a photographer taking children's portraits - and how that practice evolved for him over time to be a very collaborative process. I could ask:

If Keith Carter were to ask to take a picture of you, what item would you want to be photographed with?

And since the Carter show also has some beautiful photograms, I think I could work in some conversation about process and the difference between the making of specific images.

And perhaps opening or closing the tour could be a question about "What would you collect?" if given the opportunity to curate your own gallery.

Up next weekend - a new show of Kate Breakey and Bill Wittliff photos at the Stephen L. Clark Gallery in Austin. Opening on Saturday from 6:30 to 9.

A busy weekend of extracurricular outings and multiple events at the Texas Book Festival. Poetry is not big on the TBF's programming agenda, but there were plenty of strong fiction and nonfiction events.

Started out on Saturday morning with Dave Cullen's talk on his new book Columbine. Cullen is widely regarded as an expert on Columbine and his book looks at the overlapping narratives of nine individuals involved in Columbine, including the school principal, a teacher, students, and police officers. To research his book, Cullen obtained the journals of the shooters, Smith and Kliebold, and analyzed both personal documents. What was most surprising about Kliebold's journals were his repetitive drawings of hearts and the tone of his writing - not filled with hate, but laced with depression and a futile kind of love. In this light, Cullen read Kliebold's participation in the massacre as an act of suicide - a very different motive than that of his counterpart. In the Q&A, Cullen did a great job with not placing blame on the parents of Eric Harris for not seeing the massacre coming. Cullen also did a fine job of critiquing the media, and himself as a former journalist covering the story, for contributing to some of the stereotypes and misperceptions created by the press in their rush to speculate about the shooters to create a master narrative of what transpired at Columbine. Also some good reflections about working boundaries around true crime - Cullen can no longer read about victims' lives when covering crime stories - it takes him into too dark a place; he spoke candidly of having a severe bout of depression following writing one of the toughest chapters in his book.

We went from Cullen's event to a talk on race by Colson Whitehead and ZZ Packer. Whitehead's humor and range of cadence and tone were very much offset by Packer's dry and academic approach. I tried to read John Henry Days several months ago and had to give it up, but I think that Whitehead's new book, Sag Harbor may be more to my tastes. Ran into Ben Fountain and his wife, got caught up in catching up and ended up missing Amanda Eyre Ward.

Later, ended up at Steve's panel on J. Frank Dobie and Bill Minutaglio's Molly Ivins' biographies. Steve bravely faced down dismissals and criticisms of Dobie as being a rambling and anecdotal writer - situating him squarely within the oral folkloric tradition.

From there, on to Keith Carter's talk on his newest monograph at the Austin Museum of Art. Ran into Bill who introduced me to Michael, who's portraits of Tom Waits and Bud Shrake are currently hanging in our Nueva Luz show at the gallery.

Highlight of Sunday's programming was Jeanette Walls' speaking on her memoir of surviving childhood with an alcoholic father and homeless mother. The food panel with Jonathan Safran Foer and others was not what I expected. All about factory farming, where to buy/source your food, ethical slaughter and going veg for the environment.

It was great to see so many of the events filled to capacity with readers and audience members who'd clearly read the books and cared about the issues, characters, and narratives presented within them. Austin ain't Seattle, but clearly, there's a strong literary audience. This was reflected in my mind in some of the representation at the bookfair - Dave Egger's McSweeney's even booked a table.

The Capitol seemed like a good-sized venue to hold the festival, though it needed more signage to direct traffic from gallery to gallery. Given the high number of security guards throughout the building, I was stunned to walk into a bathroom in the basement to find a homeless woman sponging herself clean with damp paper towels and brushing out her hair while talking to herself. The image of this woman stayed with me throughout the day as I thought of the work that happens in the senate and house chambers and the festival happening around me.

Preview Screening of The Road

Went last night to an advance screening of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I hadn't read the book so had nothing to compare it to. Basically, I saw the film as a metaphor for McCarthy's own relationship with his young son. (He's now in his 70s and has a son in his adolescent years). Perhaps the fear that he won't be around to protect and guide his child into adulthood and what is gained from the father-son relationship. I.e. in the film, the father speaks of being a "good guy" but has lost connection to some of that compassion as the survival instinct kicks in to protect himself and his kid from cannibals. It is the boy that represents god and purity, who reminds the father to share valuable resources with others and to show mercy to those also suffering. This movie was two hours long. Two hours through ashen landscapes. Women had a tiny and unsympathetic role in the film. Casting did a great job with finding an Australian child actor who looked quite a bit like South African Charlize Theron.

I want to go to here.

Free-write in Iowa

Chris Merrill asked the LOD participants last week to write for 20 minutes using the following words: silk, carriage, and window. Here's what I wrote:

Burking*

the silken-haired, porcelain-
skinned subjects of anatomical
examination, not the victims of
hit-and-run drive-buys
by carriage just prey to
death by alcohol-enhanced
suffocation and "burk"
method, blackmarket trading of bodies
to surgical students
birth a window into
reproductive imagination

*a method of murdering victims without scarring or damaging the body so that the corpse could be sold for surgical dissection and educative purposes; female specimens were particularly prized

(I had just finished reading a book on human remains and Joel Peter-Witkin's photographs have been too fresh in my mind from work.)

The last remnants of two years in Seattle arrived today - my UW diploma, rainsoaked and mangled by the postal service. I removed it from its mailer and thought about disaster planning in collections management, as I used my hairdryer to dry out the top edge of the certificate.

Iowa City is a fairly charming place as far as small liberal arts college towns go.


The campus of the University of Iowa includes three museums - the Old Capitol Building, which is at this moment featuring an exhibition of Phillipino Village artifacts from the St. Louis World Fair.


There is also the natural history museum in the anthropology building, which looks truly as if nothing has changed in at least 50-70 years.


Many of the taxidermied specimens were posed in unnatural postures, to enhance cute or human factor. The informational text cites place of collection/capture, as well as a name which I can only presume to be the donor or the captor.


And while the general displays struck me as odd, I did like the robin's egg blue of the backdrops.


My trip to Iowa was for the second part of my IWP/Life of Discovery Fellowship and not anything related to the Iowa Writers Workshop, which has at best, a contentious relationship with its neighbor on the other side of Clinton Street. Very little dialogue going on across writing organizations, though both were founded by writer Paul Engle. I got to tour the new Glen Schaeffer library and archive which was built through a financial donation from a Las Vegas casino mogul who's also invested quite a bit of money in UNLV. This is the "new" workshop, where students now sit around the table talking about their work.


And this is a library that collects only the work of Iowa Workshop Grads. When I checked out the main older building, I noticed postings from agents scheduled to visit campus. One can understand how students still in the program secure book contracts. It's a small and insular program and back when I applied for creative writing programs, Iowa was nowhere on my mental map. Chicago, the nearest city, is about 3 hours away.

Very little anonymity in this town that identifies itself as a city. While lunching in an Italian-themed cafe, I recognized a prematurely graying Matthew K from Buffalo, who seems to have relocated to Iowa City for some grad program no doubt. It brought back memories of young Cambridge poets and insidious literary associations.


As one can picture, Iowa City is interesting from Western China in a very different way. We went on a tour of the book arts center where the U of Iowa's resident MacArthur Genius gave a simple Western papermaking demo - emphasizing that papermaking came from the Occident.


Another trip highlight was the journey to the Iowa-Wisconsin border and the Mississippi River where we viewed Ho'chunk effigy mounds.


While it's not at all obvious from the ground, from the sky it's possible to see how centuries ago, the land's inhabitants created reliquary and effigy mounds in the shapes of birds, bears, and other organic shapes that contained funerary and sacred objects. This is an image of the little bear mound. One can see the form with the imagination.


Being in Iowa meant that I missed the grand reopening of the Wittliff Collections which was difficult for me. Especially, when I learned that Sam Shepard came out to the opening. But I will say that I was grateful for the time with my Chinese friends and colleagues, to have another opportunity to talk about writing, to write together, and to talk about how politics can inform one's practice. And given how well the American delegates were hosted and welcomed in China, I have no regrets about keeping my commitment to my colleagues. I will miss these beautiful friends, for many of which, Iowa was their first trip to the U.S.

Kort and I went to see Where the Wild Things Are today. I missed opening weekend in Iowa City but had been following the reviews of the film which has been criticized for being dark, overly adult, violent, and inappropriate for children. None of this deterred me at all - childhood is not unicorns and puppies. Spike Jonze did a wonderful job with adapting Sendak's work. The opening scene is predatory and feral, as a young Max hunts down his dog and tackles it violently. We next see Max playing by himself in the snow in his frontyard, alone, dismissed by his teenage sister. He ambushes her friend with snowballs and they attack his igloo fort, smashing it under the weight of their bodies. And within a second, Max's exuberance turns to inconsolable sorrow which changes minutes later to unrestrained rage, as he attacks his sister's vacant bedroom, ruining her carpet and bed with his snow-soaked boots and destroying the valentine that he had made her. Max is a kid without the language, life skills, or coping mechanisms to express his needs and emotions and in our world, would be diagnosed as behaviorally unstable - in need of medication. Eavesdropping on our fellow viewers in the theatre and their families, I could see and hear this reaction in their reactions. Their horror at the "bad" child and the inability to see the root cause of Max's suffering. It is through Max's empathy and identification with the wild monsters and Carroll, in particular, that Max is able to move beyond the destructive nature of his unrestrained emotion to a place where forgiveness and love are possible. This change also happens in Carrol's character who races to the beach to say goodbye to the departing friend who had loved him - not necessarily in the way that he needed to be loved, but in the way that he knew how to love. Visually, this is a stunning film with landscapes of sand dunes, beaches, cliffs and rock faces. Henson's puppets do great justice to Sendak's original drawings and the indie rock score greatly enhances the emotional tone of the film. I related a great deal to Max and can remember concrete moments in my own childhood where disappointment, sorrow and rage all seemed inconsolable, the difficulty of communication and expression and the vastness of my own loneliness and need to stay together while things fell apart. Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are is a coming of age story - Max's journey out of childhood into the beginning of awareness and compassion for others.

Final Products

A lovely interview with Hualing Nieh Engle, founder and patron of the IWP, just went live at Full Tilt.

Leaving for Iowa City on Wednesday at about 4:30 in the morning. I read that snow was expected in Des Moines and the temps in IA City are hovering in the 50s during the day and the 30s at night. Haven't been in such cold temps since leaving Boston in 2004 and am not sure if I am looking forward to it or not.

Just finished reading Nell Freudenberg's The Dissident, which is partially based on the performance art scene in the East Village of Beijing in the 1990s. Followers of Chinese avant garde art will read resemblances to the work of Zhang Huan and Rong Rong. Nell did a reading tour with a Dallas friend and the two came through Seattle in 2007. Though she was promoting the novel at the time, I decided to get to know her work by first reading her short story collection, which was quite good. The novel also did not disappoint. Complicated, if not sometime naive characters, with whom the reader is drawn to empathize with.

I finished a revised draft of Adamantine and sent it off to my publisher in Buffalo. I'm relieved to be writing poems again and thinking through poetry - and I think that reading more poetry for archives research has definitely helped to kick start the creativity again.

Worked on didactic text for the Keith Carter exhibitions last week and got to contemplate a series of photograms by Carter called "Talbot's Shadow." One piece in the series is the light-drawn image of a night-blooming cereus - a flower that blooms only at night in darkness - in Carter's image blotted out into a luminous form by its exposure to light. In looking at Kate Breakey's photographs and her "Small Deaths" series, I remember being a student at SAIC, and a colleague who picked dead birds off of the Noguchi fountain on Columbus Ave and used them in her compositions. I found Ellen's experimentations in form with animal corpses grotesque and forced at the time - a very different relationship to her subject then Breakey. Back in Chicago is where I first encountered Keith Carter's work, at Catherine Edelman's river north gallery. I had never seen anything like Fireflies and I couldn't believe that someone in Texas was making such exquisite work. And then I came across his Mojo photos of the Mississippi region. Come to find out ten years later that working out of Texas and a sense of place has been really key to Carter's work.

I'm sad to miss the Wittliff's grad re-opening on Saturday. I think the official head count is over 100 at this point - will be curious to hear who comes in from where for the ribbon cutting and debut of our new galleries which are increible.

Kort passed his jurisprudence exam for relicensure.

I miss Whiting Tennis shows.

The online T+L has a feature on the "world's ugliest buildings." Building(s) no. 11 are listed as the Sanjih capsule community on the N. coast of Taiwan, which seems very unjustified, given that the Sanjih development is a modern "ruin" whereas all of the other buildings in the running for "ugliest" are functional architectural buildings, i.e. the EMP in Seattle (which I agree with being ugly). But the Sanjih development has been the subject of many photo essays and much interest and seems completely miscategorized here.

Poem rewrite

E X P O S I T I O N


In a documentary on the Yellow River, the filmmaker charts progress, mapping changes shaped by Three Gorges Dam


follows “Jerry” Bo Yu Chen & “Cindy” Yu Shui

working-class laborers in China’s hospitality industry,

pleasure-boat tours of Old China catering to Westerners

Jerry & Cindy parroting, “It’s my pleasure.”

***

To prep for Beijing, I vaccinate, pack host gifts, check garments for holes & tears,

book a date at the beauty school where a fresh class of

trainees choose names like costume jewelry


Gwyneth & Eli; Emu & Stella

girls that cut curl & color

in the mirror I watch a woman

pluck a cell phone & cash

from her cleavage

***

In the desert far from water, a hotel rises out of the Gobi

Men in suits & pencil-skirted women

greet guests Good evening! Good morning!


Breakfast is on the roof.


The view of the Taklamakan as surreal as painted stage sets.

***

What’s not stocked at markets, off-season in May:


winter melon, new year’s lanterns, ripened pineapple





Banners touting Olympic tourism canvas streets.

***

Holidays, war, & packaged events produce Kong Ming candles

hand-scripted with prayers


wishes on display, I watch
witnesses disengage:

BBQ chefs tending cook-fires,
wait-staff lighting fuel cells
launch heart-shaped lamps – let go


***

the true & the staged

At midnight a white peony explodes in the sky
cascading waterfalls of magnesium and aluminum light
mark a marriage on the dunes

***

in a stand for relics
at Yonghegong Lamasery

glass cases brimming with sandalwood
beads, gemstone rosaries, peach pit coffers
open to reveal buddhas

miniature shrine boxes
small enough to palm

gold and silver structures

house the spirits
visual displays of religious
election


strung upon a silver chain: a prayer locket


***

love locked wedlock

young couples fastening commitment
the Great Wall shackling

miles of golden padlocks
bought from cultural management

keys tossed off
the birth of tourism
in the town of

Lovelock, Nevada
where old women & men
clasp to pets,
small children

***

this is adaptation:
traditions that comprise
a personal inheritance

what I want to understand:

that stainless banner on
the neighbor’s patio

stars & bars
the confederate flag

paired with deep blue
Asian lanterns, decorative hangings

emblazoned with the word “welcome”
hostility cloaked in politesse

the mind turning
to raise the banner
of windhorse

Went last night to the Sarah Bird reading in Austin to celebrate her naming as a Dobie Paisano fellow. Packed house at the ACE auditorium at UT Austin. The introduction for the event struck me as a bit odd - a Powerpoint was set up with slide images of Bird's book covers along side critical praise from various book reviewers which went on for several minutes, on a timer. The longer quotes were hard to catch before the transitions. And some books had multiple slides of praise. The soundtrack was instrumental flamenco music, which corresponded with Bird's book on flamenco. It was a very passive way to receive information, akin to going to a movie preview. The slide show was followed by a long verbal introduction by the director of Dobie Paisano which attempted to play on Bird's trademark humor.

The reading itself was strong. Bird opened with a piece that she wrote for Texas Monthly on getting rejected for the Paisano fellowship as a young emerging author, and how her perspective has changed now that she is receiving it at this point in her life. She followed that piece with a short story about a mother estranged from her teenage daughter and finished with a piece on high society, Texas style, replete with plastic surgery, haute couture, and McMansions.

A large audience came out to support Bird (though all of it mono-ethnic) - both readers and authors, TIL folk, former Paisano fellows, including several authors whose work we archive at the Wittliff - Gary Cartwright and Steve Harrigan.

Kort ended up at a back table with a bunch of Sarah's reading public who all had random ties to Asia - a woman who had taught in Taipei, a Navy Seal who was stationed in Japan and married a Japanese woman. They all had a strong sense of what can only be called "Austin pride" - proselytizing about how much they love Austin and all the things they love to do in Austin. I had to laugh when Kort told me about it later - our friends in Seattle loved Seattle, and we loved Seattle A LOT - but we never sat around and waxed long about it.

Traveling to Iowa City next week for the end of my fellowship. What is a must-see/do?

Had to research yesterday what sort of morgue Joel-Peter Witkin used to stage his Mexico City series in 1990. It was a forensic hospital morgue specifically. Witkin apparently received a poetry fellowship from Columbia concurrent with his art studies. I'd be curious to see some of that writing. I have a lot of aversion to looking at Witkin's photos of decapitation and dismemberment. They are smart and art historical for sure, but the mortification of the body, is well, mortifying.

The neighbors: I am going to have to reframe my conception of them as "racists" to "friendly but ignorant racists." We called local management and then I called corporate headquarters management in the Big D and spoke to a community relations/PR person specifically about issues of safety, racism, history, oppression, and hostility towards people of color and what comprises a community. After the local management intervened, the flag moved back about 3 feet - from the balcony to cover the outer window. After corporate's intervention, the flag stayed where it was, but the neighbors hung two dark blue Asian lanterns from their balcony and put up outside their door a tacky decorative pumpkin hanging emblazoned with "welcome!" The BF asked, "Why Asian lanterns?" The issue has gone beyond what is absurd and it's hard to not laugh, while also crying at the senselessness.

Kort's got a job interview on Thursday in Austin. So maybe we move to Austin and be done with country living.

Where's a fucking windhorse banner when you need it?!

Sara Parkel asked me to write a short poem to accompany one of her illustrations which she will be printing as a broadside this month at University of Alabama. I will get about 10 copies - leave a message in the comments box if you'd like to receive a copy.


colonia

single-celled structures shape
evolutionary origins
phylum phloem
exerting turgor

It sucked and then I cried

I got this book for my birthday last week. Dig the subversive cross-stitching on the cover. It is the story of a blogger turned novelist who parlays her popularity on the internet into a book project (the age of which seems to have passed). The author blogs about getting pregnant, the trials and tribulations of pregnancy and giving birth, breastfeeding, going thru post-partum, institutionalizing herself for her depression, and coming out at the other end. On the whole, I think that the book could have been edited a lot more and greatly improved upon. I was not a reader of the original dooce.com blog, but the writing style here waxes long (lengthy passages on poo, constipation, and breast hardness) and every other page or so the author writes her inner thoughts in ALL CAPPED LETTERS to give emphasis and oomph to her tone, which doesn't necessarily substitute for strong writing. I also could not appreciate the letters written from mother to daughter that ended each section after the author gave birth. They just seemed too cutesy or contrived - a built-in audience of one which let the author off the hook for addressing a larger audience.

The book only scratched the surface of one woman's experience with pregnancy and post-partum. There is a very short chapter on Armstrong's checking herself into the mental hospital - and it seems that the rich potential of this topic could have really been pushed deeper. There might have been more self-reflection - throughout the book, versus the one-woman comedy monologue which comes across as cliched and topical.

This is the first non-fiction book that I've ever read about anyone's pregnancy experience. I'm not planning on kids anytime in the near future and reading this as an intro of what may or may not happen was not the greatest confidence booster. I think I will have to balance reading this book with oral histories of doulas and midwives or something along those lines...

Flag debacle update

I called my apartment management company, and I was apparently the 2nd person to call and complain about the confederate flag on my neighbor's balcony, not the first. The manager expressed the inability to do much about it as the community guidelines/rules don't expressly prohibit from flag decorations (though they hand you a 20-page manual upon signing your lease which expressly tells you that they can tell you whenever they want to pull down your patio furniture or decorations if they are deemed inappropriate by management) - i.e. "if someone wanted to hang a U.S. flag, would they be infringing on the rights of a foreigner was her logic." She then acted sympathetic - i.e. as a mother with a young child, she said that she was upset by the flag and had in fact talked to our neighbors, but they balked and refused to take it down and so her hands were tied (hello, are you or are you not management?). So manager told me that if she got a 3rd complaint, she could issue a written request/violation that would facilitate the neighbor taking it down. I rallied a 3rd caller - he didn't get the manager, but left a message. Yesterday, the flag was moved off of the immediate balcony, deeper into the balcony, so that now it covers the window on the balcony, but is STILL completely visible.

My husband says, "It's a process, these things take time."

I have found the corporate management headquarters for the apartment complex. They are located in Dallas but they have a PR and Marketing division, etc. I am thinking about giving them a call. Leave a comment if you have an opinion.

In order to write didactic text for press prints for Anita Brenner's Idols Behind Altars by Tina Modotti/Edward Weston, I ended up spending the last few days reading Weston's Mexico and California daybooks, Tina Conger's study of Weston's Mexico years, and Anita Brenner's biography, written by her daughter. What I learned: Brenner studied at Columbia with Franz Boas and was a contemporary of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Brenner wrote her first book (the one for which she is best known) before she entered anthropology studies in NY. Idols Behind Altars was an amalgamation of two book projects which were rewritten into one book - one of the original sections was on the decorative arts of Mexico, which Brenner wrote at the age of 21. It was for this project that she contracted with Edward Weston to provide 400 images in 4 months. Copyright for the negs was owned by the project's funder - a university in Mexico. Weston worked like a mad man during those 4 months and worked past the deadline, traveling with his teenage son Brett Weston and his lover Tina Modotti who is also attributed to the photos that illustrate Brenner's text. Weston felt exploited and earned 1,000 pesos (about $500 U.S. dollars) for his efforts, barely breaking even. Brenner cropped and edited his photos liberally, but Weston remained gracious, even after publication of the project. Working intensely on the commission changed Weston's style of photo-making when he returned to California and paved the way for his experimental serial work with still lifes and nudes.

Map of the Lost by Miriam Sagan. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. 136 pp. $24.95 paperback.

Miriam Sagan’s most recent poetry collection, Map of the Lost, traces the migratory history of the poet, while meditating upon what is irrecoverable. The poems explore various expressions of loss encompassing disassociation of childhood, youth, and memory, to a larger contemplation of how history and culture are forgotten. Composed of eighty-seven poems divided into four sections, the strongest poems in Map of the Lost are rooted in the landscape and histories of the Southwest where Sagan has made her home for over twenty years. And though the poet gives herself away as a stranger in “City of Sacred Faith,” the narrator gradually transforms from outsider to insider by living in the same place long enough to register change. Sagan documents urban development and the upscaling of retail businesses in the Plaza, pollution in her neighborhood, the rise of homelessness, forests decimated by fire, “pointing to what has sprung up/what has been torn down.” (5)

One of the strongest themes throughout Sagan’s book is the poet’s engagement with the mother-daughter relationship. In poems like “Demeter in Winter” and “Kore,” Sagan traces her shifting relationship to the feminine. Once a “wild, heedless” Persephone, the poet becomes Demeter to her teenage daughter who threatens the mother-daughter bond with her awakening sexuality. Sagan’s biographical poems of her own life as a young woman, provide an interesting counterpoint to her poems on mothering, with poems like “Diana Doll” and “Séance” expressing a deeper sense of self-reflection and initiation through a contemplation of the loss of girlhood innocence.

Ekphrastic responses to visual artists are scattered throughout the collection; largely descriptive and occasional poems upon the work of Shirin Neshat, Robert Rauschenberg, Morris Louis, Jennifer Bartlett, and lesser-known luminaries such as Santa-Fe based installation artist Erika Wanenmacher. The more interesting of Sagan’s ekphrastic texts are pieces like “Jizo Statue, Art Institute” and “Miniature Rooms,” two poems about visits to the Art Institute of Chicago which engage the poet’s memory. Also compelling are Sagan’s explorations into the lives of female artists like outsider Czech artist Anna Zemankova, Rebecca Salsbury James – ex-wife to Paul Strand and a close associate of Georgia O’Keefe, and performance artist and murder victim Ana Mendieta – former wife of Carl Andre.

The richest poems in Map of the Lost are the texts that attempt to recover a missing history, a private narrative, or individual truth. In “Clovis,” the first human inhabitants of the New World are alluded to through archaeological evidence left behind. Within the text, Sagan calls attention to the interrupted narrative of the Clovis people, by interrupting the poem itself, questioning what destroyed and eradicated the narrative. “Diner” documents the life of a restaurant that is the site of a murder precipitated by a lover’s quarrel. Dramatic enough on its own, the diner is only one small stop along the Santa Fe Trail to the Ludlow Massacre site where memorial statues have been vandalized and relegated to “headless miners/ and everything lost in the story.” (78)

Sagan resists the “sense of souvenir” throughout her mapping of history, which is perhaps best executed in “Mission.” Tracing the background of San Francisco’s Mission Dolores, the poet comments upon how “California schoolchildren/ Must build models of / In cardboard, or with sugar cubes” (111) an urban monument with a legacy of spiritual and cultural subjugation. Drawing parallels to the cultural legacy of the church (San Esteban del Rey) at Acoma Pueblo/Sky City, New Mexico, the poet is haunted by the “desire for what is lost.” It is this recurring theme of loss in Sagan’s collection that ties together the poems in Map of the Lost to form a cohesive and compelling body of work.

My neighbor hung a confederate flag

up on his balcony two days after Kort and I moved in. This disturbed both of us, but we never talked about it. We thought perhaps that we live next to young college kids who have some sort of Southern pride complex and don't understand the weight of symbols that they deploy. I did find the timing of the hanging strange, to coincide with our move-in, but dismissed it as best I could. Last night, Coconut Diaries came over to meet us at our apartment before we went to dinner at Kobe Steaks. I watched at the way that she stared at the flag in horror and thought about what that symbol means to other ethnic groups and how they have experienced oppression and violence throughout history. When she came over after dinner and then left within a few minutes, I wondered if it was that she had to work early in the morning, or if there was an underlying feeling of dis-ease or lack of safety. And I wondered too how many steps away is Dixie from the Nazi swastika - Aryan nation being a reality and all. And do I live next door to a cracker or just a kid who believes in his "freedom of expression" and what kind of conversation am I going to have with the management company who condones inappropriate patio decorations but doesn't police it and no matter how I talk about it, will it be reduced on the other end to "what are you talking about - we have a black president, there's no such thing as racism!"

Home Improvement, part 2

Before


After


Instructions at DesignSponge. The plastic seat went a lot faster than yesterdays wooden-seat upgrade.

Home Improvement

Before



After



Budget: Chair (free/inherited), fabric (Hobby Lobby, 3/4 yard for $9), staple gun ($10), extra staples ($2) + 3 hours of labor

Extracting staples is like pulling cactus needles or eyebrow hairs.

We used the old fabric on the chair as a template/measure for cutting new fabric.

Kort did the stapling.

One more chair to reupholster with an orange pattern... but the seat is plastic. Will staples go into plastic? We may have to use glue.

It was an interesting week at work - Monday morning, staff arrived to find graffiti on the wall of the Special Collections area that had also been spray-painted in stairwells throughout the library. The perps emblazoned the phrase "420" in front of the new expanded gallery. The two young male suspects were caught on videotape at the library, and after they left the Alkek, they went over to another building with a sledgehammer and busted some glass doors. I can't help but think of my museum classes at UW and how useful that knowledge really was - learning and role playing about all the travails administrators must deal with, fundraising aside - security, safety, facilities, pest control, etc.

There is a cash reward for information leading to the capture of the vandals.

A few weeks before Monday's event, staff discovered graffiti on some tilework in the entry area tagged with a fraternity symbol. But it's impossible to tell if it was truly a fraternity stunt, an anti-fraternity stunt, non-college related hooliganism, or what. What's to say at all that the perps even attend the university?

The project for the weekend is to DIY reupholster two of our home desk chairs. First upholstery fabric shopping and to acquire a staple gun. We will take before and after photos. This is my birthday gift to myself this year - recycle, reuse, and reimagine what we already have.

My friend Molly has started her own boutique design shop on Etsy. Buy here. Molly has been sending me handmade cards and letters for years and is terrifically talented. With our friend Nicole, she took a pattern-making class over the summer. I'm looking forward to seeing all sorts of cute clothing and purse-type designs...

I had a big setback earlier in the week. While texting and walking, I fell face first on concrete, re-injured my left ankle, banged up both knees, and split my right hand open. Kort has recommended an Ayurvedic turmeric paste remedy to reduce bruising, but I've been wary of turning my skin yellow. But maybe over the weekend.

This is the review I wrote of Santee Frazier's Dark Thirty for an upcoming issue of Southwestern American Literature.

Dark Thirty by Santee Frazier. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2009. 96 pp. $15.95 paperback.

The title of Santee Frazier’s debut collection of poetry, Dark Thirty, refers to the time of day after the sun has gone down, when fading rays illuminate part of a quickening dark landscape. Shining the light on the marginalized citizens of Dry Creek, a community located within Cherokee County, Oklahoma, Santee Frazier has crafted an astonishing collection of poems that bring the varied voices and intimate narratives of a community afflicted by crime, violence, substance abuse, and poverty into stark relief.

Dark Thirty is organized into six sections; the book’s first section, “Dry Creek” introduces the mood, voice, and central themes that recur throughout the collection. In a poem entitled “Chauncey,” narrated by a plainspoken character of the same name, Chauncey gives the reader glimpses into a private life while effortlessly gossiping about the locals in his native vernacular:

Dang near had tah pluck my yard bird
other day, we had done ate all are fatback
Meely over tah tha Teller’s Liquor got caught
round back drankin listo, huffin on some gold. (8)

Frazier compresses and layers complex subjects into short couplet stanzas that reveal an intricate portrait of an individual and the people in his community. Elsewhere, poetic personas like “Joe Bunch” reflect upon a life of hard living and a body regulated by “nitro pills.” Another character, “Nick Cheater,” details overhauling the transmission on his Trans Am, while brokering a deal to buy a neighbor’s Buick that includes one of Nick’s dogs in the bargain.

The reader is also introduced in this first section to the dominant voice that narrates poems throughout the collection. In “Mama’s Work,” the poetic speaker recalls a mother who turned tricks to feed the family, “her work/ in the quiet corners of barns on the hay.” (7) The unsheltered childhood of the same speaker is explored later in “Bluetop,” a poem where the underage child, (his “legs too short to work/the brakes,”) drives his Mama and her Buick home on gas fumes. (13) Fraught with the uncertainty of running out of fuel on gravel roads deep within the countryside, Frazier ends his poem on a note that hovers on the edge of danger and quiet beauty. Numerous poems that reflect upon family and domestic life also make up the third section of the book.

The second and fourth sections of Dark Thirty, “Baptism of the Knife” and “Skillet Face” follow the life story of Mangled Creekbed, an outsider figure whose experience is traced throughout the collection from his stint in a circus as a knife-thrower to his incarceration for cutting a man in a bar fight to his confinement to a wheelchair, after suffering from a stroke. The most tender poems in this sequence are the pieces that touch upon Mangled’s companionship with Lulu, the circus’ Target Girl, who writes letters for the illiterate Mangled, reads him stories, and sings Baptist hymns with him in church.

Dark Thirty is rounded out by poems set in inner-city environments that make up the book’s remaining two sections, “Jack Move” and “Aerosol.” The poems in these later sections of the collection focus on first-person narratives and shift from a native vernacular to a more urban sensibility. A narrator remembers discharging a gun for the first time in “Firing a .38 at Age Sixteen,” while the image of a murdered teenager found dead in a dumpster appears in “Crosstown.” “10th Street Anthem” sketches the cityscape of Oklahoma City, “boys sprinting in the streetlight”; a kid with “a blade in his tube sock”; asphalt smelling of “hot rocks and tar”; a “flattened mutt in the gutter.” (69)

The final section of Dark Thirty concerns itself with the theme of recognition. In “Solitude,” the poet chronicles aspects of an unnamed singer’s life (Billie Holiday) that resonate with the sensual and “ruined” women who appear throughout Dark Thirty. A sense of exile and poverty are awakened in the speaker of “Eating Against a Wall,” when the poet is able to identify with the experience of the refugee-like figures who improvise a simple meal on the street –– eating noodles slurped from a Cool Whip Bowl, while squatting on an unrolled bamboo mat. This impression connects easily to the images of “One Room Apartment,” a poem that occurs much earlier in Dark Thirty, in which a young narrator scavenges a meal from “A-1 and stale saltines…pickle juice from the jar.” (33) The closing poem of Dark Thirty, “An Aerosoled Representation of the Maya and Moche” is the longest piece within the collection and reflects most directly upon the theme of recognition through the eyes of a poetic narrator who is kept for years from knowing the existence of his infant daughter. Upon their reunion, he recognizes “a face half my own.” (82)

Frazier’s debut collection displays affinities with a documentary poetic tradition that includes projects like Kwame Dawe’s Wisteria, a poem collection based on oral histories collected from a community of black female elders in Sumter, South Carolina. Connections also seem evident with Natasha Trethewey’s poetics, which are largely concerned with restoring subaltern voices to mainstream historical narratives. For Frazier, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation, no direct mention is made of his characters’ Native identity, nor is the gesture necessary, as the language, spirit, and tenacity of the protagonists who inhabit Dark Thirty shine through.

Sad to learn of Lucien Wulsin's passing.

If we ever need to move again, we will not use Atlas/Ace Moving in Austin. Nor would I recommend them for transport of art or archives. Our goods finally arrived on September 8, with several broken items and fees doubled what were estimated for a shuttle truck. Our belongings were held hostage until we authorized those charges. There was also that moving crew member who I found sorting through my belongings in the Atlas truck in Seattle without cause. And that driver with the broken hand? Who broke down in Colorado and then elsewhere on the road because of bad brakes and parts? We will definitely be filing a complaint with the BBB.

I saw the commercial for a new romantic comedy out soon with Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart. I am not a fan of either. But the last shot in the preview was the Space Needle which gave me sharp pangs of longing. Yes, that's right. Heartsickness for a city. Which means that I will probably go and see cheezy movie so that I can reminisce about the PNW. And yes, I will be seeing Twilight part two, as well...

But in the mean time, we live in the present. San Marcos appears at first impression to be an economically depressed city of 50,000 residents with little integration between the university and the town. One might say, it has a lot of potential for development and investment. We are nestled in the heart of Texas Hill Country, which, while not the Puget Sound to the eye, does provide vistas of rolling green hills. And now that the drought has slightly broken and the grass has rebounded, I am struck at times at how much areas like the adjoining town of Wemberley resemble the hills of Taos, NM. But Wemberley is a small town where everybody knows your business, and maybe we are city mice at heart, better suited for South Austin.

I grow to love my work more every day. Today, several of the curators met to arrange photographs for the upcoming Nueva Luz show that opens officially on October 17. It includes work by Bill Wittliff, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Marco Antonio Cruz, Graciela Iturbide, Kate Breakey, Robb Kendrick, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Joel-Peter Witkin, and more. Any of these artists on their own are complete and total powerhouses.

I help with collections development on both photographic collections and literary archives, as well as general collections development for books and various materials related to the collections' artists. The website for the Collections will relaunch sometime later this year. The mock-ups for the site reflect the quality of the collections and we are all hopeful that it will come to completion sooner than later. Construction, renovation, and expansion continue and hopefully the galleries will be re-installed by early October. Friday, I travel to Austin with a co-worker to pick up archives from Mike Cox.

Tentative plans to be at AWP 2010 in Denver.

For those of you who know the poet Jack Myers of Dallas - he's been very ill. Write to him and send him and Thea some good cheer. He's waiting for a liver transplant.

RISD is going to be hiring for a new creative writing position. Someone who can teach theory as well as writing. If the E. Coast is your thing, then you should apply.

Thanks to Coconut Diaries for putting us up while we were in transition and for putting up with us while we continue to transit as mercury sits in retrograde.

Next month: Iowa City trip to the U of Iowa, the famous Workshop, and the IWP. All the writers that were on the China trip - Eni Mushisijia, Guo Wenbin, Wang Hua, Jin Renshun, Nie Le, and Cao Youyun - will be with us again. Riding camels in the Taklamaklan seems so very far now. And Edward will be there too, who is moving to Austin with his wife Elizabeth at the end of the year.

Tentative plans for a Dallas reading in Feb. 2010 with Jerry Kelley.

The season premier of Biggest Loser made me cry. Well, every episode of that show elicits tears - people doing the hard work of recovering through addiction and years of self-abuse and stuffing one's feelings. There's one contestant on the show that we were smitten with - Abby - who lost her husband and two children in a car accident two years ago. She lost 15 pounds this first week/weigh in. We find ourselves rooting for everyone on the show. And I find myself wondering if on my worst days, I would make a stellar personal trainer. All that yelling and such.

We have been separated from our belongings for about 3 weeks and Atlas Van Lines has for the second time, delayed delivery of the goods, citing a truck breakdown. Get with it, Atlas!

Kort broke the news to me last night. He had gone to some care to soften the news.

I walked in the apartment to find a burgundy pillow case elegantly improvising as a table cloth over a plastic storage tub. (The linens are in the moving van). A lit candle and hand-made sandwiches (bread toasted) and corn chips (all of our cookware is in the moving van). He also bought me a bottle of tamari soy sauce at the organic store. (The salt and soy are in the moving van. When I asked if he had spoken to the driver of the moving van today, he said no. But then about 10 minutes later, he introduced that he had spoken to the move agent who alerted him that our goods would not show today. We have been sleeping on the floor for about 2 weeks now and I am ready for the transition to be over. Argggh.

Typo of the day spotted on MSN.com:

"body-sliming sheath dress"

To pass the time until we can move into our rental, Kort surprised me today and took me out to Inner Space Caverns in Georgetown - a privately owned series of caves in the Austin area. Kort was last there when he was a few years old with his parents, and the caves occupy a special place in his memory. He remembers being in the gift shop, riding atop his father's shoulders and reaching out to try and grab a forgotten item on display. In the process, he knocked over a bunch of Mexican jumping beans that made a mess, spilling onto the slatted wood floor. Mexican jumping beans jump because there is a larva inside the bean that is alive. So people do not actually eat the beans. And actually the "beans" are not beans at all, but seeds.

There were no beans today at the gift shop, but all else remained essentially the same. We took a guided tour that took us about a mile into the caves which run directly under Interstate 35 and open up to a major fault line.



This is the original excavation hole that was made to explore the sink hole, when drillbits used in excavating the roads continually broke off and disappeared into the caverns.

Leaving Seattle

Kort and I packed up and left Seattle last Tuesday. One of the last things that we did was to take the Tibetan prayer flags down from the back porch.


And to take down the windchimes that made music outside our bathroom window.


We spent our last night in Seattle at Carol and Geo's. I insisted that we leave the blind up, so that every time I woke up in the middle of the night, I could look out onto the Puget Sound and let the beauty fill me. I am sad to leave Seattle. This is no small transition.


We drove through Washington, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, covering 12 hours of driving a day. The first night we stayed in Ogden, Utah, a town west of Moab. We found decent sushi in the town square. Visited Zenshin and JB in ABQ, had one night in Dallas, and then headed here to Austin, where we are until we move into rental housing on Thursday.