Renewed reading interests

I've resolved to read more poetry, within my specific field of interest - in part to renew my own commitments and to imagine a more emancipatory poetic project. Finished reading this week Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave (TinFish, 2010). This is a thoughtful and reflective collection that contemplatives the invisible and forgotten histories of Portland, Oregon - via the histories of its minority populations which experienced unspeakable violence - the internment of Japanese-Americans and the deaths of African American laborers caused by poor urban planning and flooding.

Sand includes in the collection an interesting meditation on POD structures, wooden shipping containers, that post-Katrina have developed into temporary/emergency housing structures. When Kort and I left Dallas for Boston in 2001, we shipped our belongings to Brookline in a standard POD that was deposited in front of our apartment building on Beacon Street. We unloaded it and it sat on the street for a week before it was removed. I don't know if it was removed by the city, or the POD people - but in that week that it sat occupying prime parking, we heard people slam in and out of the structure, found trash and other debris, and the space took on quite a social life of its own. Sand's book caused me to think quite a bit and I have picked up her guerrilla poetics book with her husband Jules Boykoff who's research in politics interests me.

Over the years, my reading interests have seemed to focus more on prose, unless I'm in the process of reviewing a poetry collection. I'm reading poetry much more selectively now and hope to read a book of poems every week. A reasonable goal.

Last Sunday, we got together for brunch with friends and talked about individual new year's resolutions. Our friends Jim and Pamela approach the idea of making resolutions for the new year in terms of giving up 3 things and inviting or welcoming 3 new things into their life. Makes sense - to make room for the new, we must clear out some of the old. Jim is giving up frustration - a good quality to renounce.

Three things I aspire to give up:
- grudges
- over-attachment
- sloth

Three things I welcome:
- renewed health
- joy
- new life, in whatever form

I was featured this past week on the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day website.

The poem is also available through the Poem Flow i-phone app.

Please help the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival

At the end of the year, pre-tax season, my inbox is filled with capital requests from presses, nonprofits, and organizations whom I don't remember signing up for. These are hard economic times. And so, I repost a worthwhile request from friends at the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival. Please support the festival and/or the publication of the Forget the Words anthology.

Subject: Support for the poetry festival at year's end!

A short note at the end of 2010 to ask you to consider a contribution to the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival, the next to be held this coming March 10-13.

Enpuku-ji/Centre Zen de la Main organizes the festival and, as a registered charity, is able to issue tax receipts for Canadian gifts.

You can contribute via CanadaHelps by following this link, choosing "Donate Now", and choosing the "Zen Poetry Festival Fund". CanadaHelps will provide your downloadable 2010 tax receipt.

You can also contribute to the publishing of our festival collection, forget the words!, and receive copies of our past collection, broadsides, tickets to the upcoming festival and more, by following this link to our on-line Indiegogo page.

For our American and European friends of the festival, we would like to send you either a lovely broadside or a book of poems of past or future invitees for a contribution of $100 or more.

Thank you for taking a moment to read this on the last day of the year. Really, any day is a fine one for supporting this unusual niche festival and we appreciate the support we have received in the past and that which will come.

Warmest wishes for the new year,
Myokyo

It's the last day of 2010 and the last day of vacation. I resolve to reclaim this space in 2011 and say more, or to say less more, etc.

After 7 years of booking my own readings, I've decided to reach out to a few speaker bureaus and a solidify a partnership in the new year so that I no longer negotiate my own reading contracts. Promoting a book is time-consuming work - I'd just as soon spend that energy on writing, cooking, or doing nothing. Think less about the writing business and get on with life.

I did not get any writing done over winter break. There were good reasons for it. I read Norman Schaefer's new book and wished that I could write poems like Norman. Today, Lisa Gill's Dark Enough arrived. I revisited several White Pine titles to help a friend develop a container garden display for the Northwest Garden and Flower show and had the delightful occasion to contemplate the microcosm and space of a container garden as a field of elegance and refinement, akin to a bonsai tree or Japanese rock garden. I hope to build some poetry gardens in the future - branch out into living environments, much like a hero, Robert Irwin.

Planning two trips in the spring to Boulder - to attend two 1-week residencies for the Naropa authentic leadership program. Short trip in early February to DC for AWP, and to Seattle in March for 8 days. My criteria for a vacation used to be the proximity to a beach. But there is nothing I'd like better than to chill in the PNW. And technically there are beaches.

This time of year, I get reflective and often compile elaborate lists of goals and resolutions for the impending year. This year, on the heels of a visit with my parents who visited last week - my thoughts turn to the following: that a purpose in life might be framed around removing suffering and making life better for others.

That said, there are unwritten lists and the childhood BF in Austin and I unhatch plans that our husbands would likely balk at or question if they knew the nature of such plannings. Perhaps we will resume our blog swapping.

Out of the tiger year and into the rabbit. The year of my birth totem. May 2011 and the rabbit bring balance, renewed energy, and deep connection to our best and brightest being.

New Poem

meow meow kitty kitty death rattle

we don’t know
why you died –
that morning

Kort saw you
steal into the yard
meow meow kitty cat –

death rattle buzz
of flies swarming
around your corpse

when we came home
that day gaseous spasms
jerking a life

force, I stood over
your body watching
nerves refire, remembering

how sound is the last
sense to go
before passing

After All This Time

I had to take a break from this blog to reconsider what I wanted this space to be. I will continue to make posts on a limited basis. Thank you for dropping by.

Some recent news:

Adamantine reviewed by Stephen Sohn for the Lantern Review.

Rigoberto Gonzalez engages with Adamantine on the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass here.

Poet and blogger Djelloul Marbrook offers his reading of Adamantine here.

Trailer for ADAMANTINE

Coming soon:

after helping the giant
spider back outside, I lock
the kitchen door

discards

(after viewing Deborah Luster’s unpublished tintypes from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana)

a question of sentence:
events marked w/
occasioned images
happy holiday
happy Mardi Gras
happy Easter
happy Samhain

a question of locution:
OG Bump
Lone Outlaw
Thug Life
In Memory of Mom
a question of surface:
tattoo-scrawled torso
torched surfaces
dodging & burn
seared cicatrix

a question of constitution:
St. Andrew’s cross modeled
after hoe & rake, art historical
sigils to civil wars
Christ’s Last Supper
his final meal

a question of value:
dull blacks, faded whites
flattened tiers of grey

This blog was silent for a few months and now that I am out of Texas, I feel that I can put the last few months behind me. In March, I received a death threat email at my inbox at the Wittliff Collections. Though it was sent anonymously, the content of the message aligned itself with our confederate neighbors in our apartment complex, with the stars and bars on their balcony next door. The message was sent to make sure that we would move out at the end of May when our lease term expired.

We were out of town traveling when the threat came in and returned to Texas to file a police report. An investigation ensued which tracked the offending email down to a public computer terminal at UCLA, in the School of Management. The trail went cold there and our local dick, "Poorboy," announced to me via voice mail message that he was closing the case. The details of the email revealed too much to be just a random threat - it knew too much about the specifics of the situation and created a tenuous living situation where I wasn't sure if I was being cyberstalked or followed to work. I took down this blog temporarily and started thinking much more carefully about my own personal privacy and safety.

So when what appears to be a fantastic job opportunity came open in Arkansas and we had a chance to leave Texas - we accepted. I am spending June and July writing and traveling and start work in August.

Adamantine is moving along with production. Ran into some trouble with the art work I'd originally chosen for the cover - a Keith Carter image which he graciously agreed to have reproduced for the book. Unfortunately, Christian Wiman published a Copper Canyon book of essays in 2008 which used the same image, which I discovered while walking around the AWP bookfair in Denver last month. So I hunted around for alternatives and discovered the work of Chinese-Canadian photographer Elaine Ling and felt myself drawn to her photograph of the Atacama stone - the same subject that Carter photographed, but with a different spin. The presence of the graffiti on the desert sculpture makes the piece feel less ancient, more modern... which brings an interesting and perhaps more accurate framing of the poems within the book.

unused condom
litters LBJ - aborted
assault or un-"lucky"?

thinking about how
over generations an artery
changes its name

from Nathan Forrest to MLK

"coming Fall 09"
Concho Commons Spring 2010:
still an overgrown lot

choose your battles

the half hour it took
the peasant-skirted protestor
to chalk a hundred library
stairs with missives
re: atrocities in Gaza,
this morning's major
clean-up task for minimum-
wage earners, sweepers
from groundskeeping
& maintenance

Earth day in Seattle:
make a papier-mache piñata
in the shape of a globe

use recycled copies of
The Stranger
& club it to a pulp

Earth day: TxState –
Ride your bike to work & get
a free bottle of water

"some people have difficulty getting numb"

off of SSRIs for one week
Dr. Dean tells me
how the oral health
of a mother affects
the weight of an unborn
child, why treating
an abscessed tooth
can lead to complications
when novocaine must be
traded for lidocaine

"sometimes it is not enough"

to take the metal probe
to recognize what hurts

Some notes on vulgarity:

"In Victorian fiction, to show excessive distaste for vulgarity is to betray a fatal character flaw: a concern for style and class at the expense of ethics.... to value social distinction over moral discrimination- is to prove onself not just a bad reader but effectively illiterate, father beneath the community of fellow-feeling that every Victorian novel summons into being than a monkey is beneath a margrave." - Joseph Litvak in "Vulgarity, Stupidity, and Worldliness in Middlemarch"

"The quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity lest we die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence" - Middlemarch

after she announces
the break-up, I think twice about
her third dislocated shoulder

country mouse: neck deep
a cow eating its way through
five-foot tall haystack

New educational Isabella Rossellini videos at the Sundance Channel!

White Pine Press has updated their 2010 titles to now reflect Adamantine. Preorder the book here!

The Chinati Foundation is looking for a new director, as is the Dallas Contemporary. And Jeff Koons is curating at the New Museum.

This weekend, I am travelling to Little Rock.

Where can I see these Gonzales-Torres billboards?

Photo essay on our old 'hood in Seattle. But where is India Palace and Whole Foods and SIOM and Dream Clinic?

Filmmaker Jonathan Yi is making a mini-doc about Asian American stories. This is my submission for the casting call:

I'm teaching a class for Gemini Ink in late July. Here's the course description:

The Exquisite Eye: A Poetry Workshop, Saturday, July 24, 2010, 9 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Poet and assistant curator at the Wittliff Collections Shin Yu Pai will lead a workshop on ekphrastic poetry. We will look at various poetic models that deploy a range of strategies including descriptive illustration, the poem as interpretive occasion, and ekphrasis as a critical meditation, through reading poets with ties to the Southwest including Carol Moldaw, Arthur Sze, and Miriam Sagan. Participants will sharpen their visual thinking skills and experiment with writing poems based on photographic images from the Wittliff Collections’ Southwestern and Mexican Photography Collection. In keeping with the theme of environment and landscape for the Summer Festival, this workshop will contemplate images of place, drawing inspiration from images composed by children from Mineral de Pozos, Guanajuato, to anonymous photographers documenting la zone de tolerancia in the red light districts of Mexican bordertowns to Graciela Iturbide’s images of quotidian life in Juchitan, Oaxaca. (Maximum enrollment: 10-12)

Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2009. 69 pp. $15.00 paperback.

In Korean culture, the solo pansori singer vocally and physically transforms herself through performing every character in a story, in addition to vocally mirroring the sounds of nature within the span of a single recital. A traditional performance lasts between three to eight hours, and requires not only musical talent, but intense focus and fortitude. “In pansori, the voice that narrates is more than a message-bearer…Pansori thrives much less on improvisation or new composition than on the confirmation of its past. Still, its performance is a reconstruction of not merely the past, but the continuing past. In the process of unquestioning emulation emerges an individual voice expressive simultaneously of the tradition and of the performer’s own interpretive aesthetics.”*

It is through this metaphor of the pansori tradition, that a reader might consider Sherwin Bitsui’s Flood Song. Composed of muscular lines that “stomp across the living room ceiling” refusing to be silenced, Bitsui’s contemporary lyric is one that is characterized by visceral language, urgent rhythms, and the abstraction of archetypal and cultural images and symbols that “speak a double helix.”

Major themes in Bitsui’s dazzling second collection include the loss of language, agency, and cultural symbols, that explore “some piece of the idea of now/ before it becomes was.” (26) Throughout this extended poem, the author calls attention to linguistic erosion:

What happened when gunfire blew into their speech
and left one language hanging by a nail
at the entrance of mouths (21)

A song falls flat when it cannot be understood, “what what what – is how the song chimed in wilderness” (13) and “how na ho kos feels/ under the weight of all that loss.” (11) Colonial intervention into the native language creates an impenetrable wall where “…there is no tongue to smooth away the hairline fracture between us and them.” (24 )

An unwavering consciousness of indigenous subjectivity runs throughout Flood Song: “… we have become bodies for the first time/… our language stabs the fork with the spoon.” (29) "Bodies pile up on the lawns, “…landlocked inside the naming of: / them, those, not like us…” (51), while others rest on surgical tables “waiting for the surgeons to carve us back into shape.” (66)

The making of subjects is addressed elsewhere in Flood Song through the recurring imagery of televisions, commercials, and media that manufacture images and depict native subjects.

A whip’s leather scent flairs camera shutters
open to the softened teeth of masked dancers…
pressing a handful of chipped house paint
against their smeared faces
you say
‘We need this color of wings blood’ (42)

Elsewhere, a figure is “photographed on a horse facing west,” and later a spectator watches “a boat fizzle and flake.” Viewed through the static of television, the mediated image becomes another kind of manmade conundrum akin to “locked doors” and a paper crane unfolding “into a square cage.”

Flood Song is filled with stunning visual images that loop and repeat throughout the poem. The recurring image of eyes and seeing are significant – the poet “breathe[s] through my eyelids/glimpsing the thawing of our flat world.” (64) Keyholes and doors evoke the imagery of Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film Le sang d'un poète: While Cocteau’s artist smashes a sculpture with a hammer, here, the poet downs a tree with an axe.

Turning full circle back to the idea of pansori, it takes about ten years for a performer to learn the basic vocal techniques of the form; the singer must develop a complete command of the lyrics, as there are no scores to aid the artist throughout his performance. As a follow-up collection to Shapeshift, Bitsui’s Flood Song demonstrates the mature development of one of our generation’s most gifted and promising poets.

*Park, Chan. “Korean p'ansori Narrative” in Oral Tradition 18(2), 2003, pp. 241-243.

One is walking
one is standing

who is more entitled
to the path

*

To distribute material possessions
is to divide them
to distribute spiritual possessions
is to multiply them

      - Josef Albers

Coming this Fall...

I just finished reading Alex Lemon’s new memoir Happy. The library copy is a bright yellow – evocative of lemons and 1970s happy faces/acid trips. Slightly modified from the mainstream trade edition which splits the cover design into yellow and black color fields, with the title text designed to create a bleeding effect into the black color field.

Lemon’s memoir focuses on the diagnosis, treatment and recovery of a brain malformation which is discovered while the author is a young athlete at a tight-knit mid-Western liberal arts college. Lemon chronicles a hyper-masculine existence of drunken parties, substance abuse, male bonding, locker-room talk, and promiscuity and a substantial amount of the book’s dialogue is comprised of one expletive after another. The author indulges in a fair amount of physical abuse and self-mutilation of his own body, which can be connected in part back to his earlier childhood experiences of incest which is touched upon briefly in a flashback sequence in the book.

While this is a fairly straight-laced vs. experimental prose narrative, Lemon uses a certain amount of poetic liberty and device, which too often interrupts the narrative by refocusing the reader’s attention on strange turns of phrase and quirky metaphors. The primary device deployed is the use of nouns transformed into verbs:

“I shotgun the beer”
“Blood curtains my teeth”
“Knuckling my groin”
“the party cords around the basement”
“I pyramid the rocks”
“I smoke up and mummy myself”
“she slowly napkins her mouth”
“I want to puddle into the floor”
“shipping tankers domino the hem of the water”
“anesthesia zippers me up”
“noise carousels above me”
“my lips are peeling again, swollen and strawberried”
“I Zorro the cane”
“I gimp into Snelling”
“brightness porcupining my face”
“siphoning out of our clothes”

Scattered throughout the book, these phrases are inconsistent with the rest of the narrative language, which shifts between high and low vernacular, though extracted and taken out of the whole, are interesting fragments of language.

Lemon also uses unusual metaphors:

“my heart flops up and down like a Ziploc bag of ground beef”
“when the neurologist turns the lights own, it’s a charred jar dropped over me”
“rain splatting the windshield like chum”
“a spray of birds is flapping madly, like puppets hanging from the sky”

The ground meat metaphor doesn’t work for me at all, but the rain likened to chum is evocative of a heavy downpour.

This book was a challenging to stay with and finish out. At times, I found myself disliking the young narrator who post-op, "flicks the scabby crumbs [of his surgical wound] at strangers' food and cups." But juxtaposed with more complex scenes such as the narrator's recollection of the first bed that his mother ever made him "egg foam and a salt of cardboard, raised off of the floor by bricks" and the narrator's discovery of a frozen dead mouse beneath that bed, Lemon begins to create more complexity to his narrator's history and character. Yet the author writes of his fear of being seen as weak (after the surgery) or vulnerable - and while I think this admission and self-disclosure is quite revealing, I'm not sure that as a project, Happy dug beneath the surface of physical suffering. I've been reading Ben Saenz's work a lot lately, another poet, who works within prose writing and think that Saenz more skillfully addresses themes of shame, incest, family violence, and psychological trauma.

Because I love my husband, and my best friend, and realize that whenever we eat out I tend to vote Asian, I've consented to go here for Valentine's Day - which also happens to be Chinese New Year's. Sigh.

Second weekend in a row that Kort and I drove up to Dallas. Yesterday in town for a reading at Paperbacks Plus with Jerry Kelley. I read work written primarily while we lived in Seattle and Jerry read new short prose excerpts from a long short-story that he's been working on based on his experiences of living in the Canadian bush. It was great to see Renee Rossi and old WordSpace friend Martha Heimberg and DMA friends. Karen X has also returned from her exile in Santa Fe and is back to hosting the P+ series. Met poet Peter Gurnis, a thoughtful and observant listener and reader of poems, who commented to me that my poems are "moral." This reminded me of Xi Chuan's comments in China that my poems reflect a certain "value." My hope is that I am not clubbing anyone over the head with this sense of morality or value, but for me the interest in social justice and poetry are inseparable. Peter was the only person in the audience that I didn't already know from my days in Dallas - which is to say that the turnout was pretty thin, but reading for friends is a good audience to try out new material. Kort insists that I stop talking about Turrell's Roden Crater as an extinct volcano, as supposedly according to science, volcanos never truly go extinct. I can't wait to visit the Crater someday - and for that matter the James Turrell Museum in Buenos Aires that is on the grounds of a vineyard...

I spent this morning working with Ben Fountain, who has a new op-ed piece in the NY Times, inventorying the archives of Robert Trammell, the founder of WordSpace. There was a treasure trove of correspondence that included materials from Robert Creeley, Gerald Burns, Jeff Davis,Naomi Shihab Nye, and Susan Smith Nash. Manuscript materials from David Searcy and Gerald Burns, and of course, Trammell himself, who was quite prolific, both as poet and prose writer. Also, a great poster collection that included promo pieces for the New Arts Festival in Dallas that Trammell organized, long before he started up WordSpace and began organizing events through the nonprofit. I never realized what a community organizer and social activist that Trammell was and seeing his programming notes and ideas for conferences and events really gave some wonderful insight into his aesthetic and intellectual values. I learned too that not all of Bob's books were self-published under his Barnburner imprint, but that at least two of his books were published by Salt Lick Press.

I have finished reading Last Night I Sang to the Monster and am now on to reading Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood and He Forgot to Say Goodbye. Saenz's Last Night... reminded me in ways of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - similar themes, similar scenarios, but oh so different writing. The fact that Saenz is a poet, really comes through in the craft and language of this young adult novel for adults. You will not find unending run-on sentences or vertical pages of text where there is a confusion about who is speaking, and pages of texts that could be trimmed - I am thinking of Frey's work. The teenage protagonist, Zach, finds himself in a detox/rehabilitation facility and has blacked out and forgotten how he got there. Throughout his healing journey, he makes connections to others in his therapy group who model certain behaviors and attitudes which help to push Zach towards working through his wounding. Zach finds himself connecting particularly with an older male father figure (like Frey's friend Leonard) who helps him to both love and allow himself to be loved. The monster is a metaphor for the wounded child inside all of us - in Frey's book it was the green-eyed monster that he could never look in the eye in the mirror. This is so much a better book than Frey's, in that although it is a work of fiction, it deals completely with emotional truth and the process of uncovering and working through one's pain from the perspective of a victimized young person who is trapped by circumstances. Zach is not the overprivileged white protagonist of Frey's pseudo-memoir, but a poor kid who is the son of an alcoholic father and a manic depressive mother and the brother to a rager who murders his parents in cold blood and then commits suicide in front of Zach, leaving him the sole survivor of family dysfunction. The sorts of violence that happen in Saenz's books are real, true-to-life, and severely damaging. I found myself in tears at least 5 times, reading Last Night... and came away feeling that this work was a sort of gift/offering, something that I did not feel after reading Frey's memoir when it first came out.

Went yesterday afternoon to Jack Myers' memorial service in Dallas at SMU. Tony Hoagland, Brian Clements, Ralph Angel, Joe Ahearn, Gillian Connolley, and Mark Cox, all spoke on their profound friendships with Jack and his ability as a master teacher, who had so very clearly had a huge impact on each of their lives. Jack's older brother played a chorus of "Around Midnight" by Thelonious Monk (a song that he and Jack would play together as adolescents) and Jack's eldest son and wife performed an elegiac musical piece with cello and piano. The service itself lasted about an hour and then the group proceeded to the reception where Thea, Jack's widow, had organized several small exhibitions of Jack's interests - things like his favorite foods (lobster and black licorice), manuscripts, books, esoteric interests of study, etc. There was also a station with his ashes enshrined inside a beautiful wooden box that was beside an image of him in his hospital bed. Jack was never a teacher to me, nor a close associate, but someone who gave me a chance to teach at SMU, by letting me take over his class. In truth, I probably had more interactions with his wife Thea over the years, and wanted to go to the memorial to show our support for her.

Though we've been gone from Dallas for three years now, there were a lot of familiar faces, and individuals with whom I left relationships at loose ends. In the end, gatherings like yesterday's remind me of why it's important to move on and how Dallas never felt like the right fit, and probably never will.

We've been getting used to the long and regular road trip from San Marcos to Dallas and come up with conversations to entertain ourselves. We wondered yesterday for instance why no one has invented an air freshener for a car that smells like freshly baked bread. Or why no one has invented a chewing gum that tastes like chocolate chip cookies.

News from my hometown. They've been restoring the Fox since I was in high school.

Currently reading Ben Saenz's Last Night I Sang to the Monster to prepare for interviewing him for the Collections' newsletter.

Happy 39th wedding anniversary to my parents, Tsu-Chiang and Lee-Shieh, aka Paul and Noko.

Finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Kaz Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World.

Gladwell's book focuses on breaking down the myth of the self-made genius, analyzing a variety of case histories/stories where opportunity, privilege, access to resources, and circumstances played a large role in ensuring success and/or genius. He spends a fair amount of time analyzing why Asians are good at math (attributing abilities with math to the linguistic system and the short/compact words which form the basis of numbers in the Chinese language system, which allows even the youngest child learning how to count, to count to a higher figure than his/her Western counterparts). He talks about statistical odds, generational/historical opportunity, time investment, and the ancestral legacies that shape experience. While I didn't love this book, it did give me much to reflect upon, in terms of analyzing the privilege and resources that were available to me, and the sacrifices made by my parents to provide some of those opportunities. I would not be the person that I am, if I had stayed in Riverside at the age of 17. I would not be the person that I am now, if my my mother and I hadn't worked very hard to pay my way to studying abroad in a foreign country during my college years. I would not be the person I am, if my father had never decided to leave Taiwan, when he did. Does my dad's work ethic come from cultivating rice paddies and farming (which he literally did), as Malcolm Gladwell would suggest? And does my own work ethic stem from the transmission of these values? And would I be a very different artist/writer, if I put in 10,000 hours a year into my writing? I don't know, nor is this necessarily a practical or relevant question. We live the lives that we live and balance multiple priorities and commitments.

Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World also took me awhile to warm to. But the book really picked up speed for me when the protagonist of the novel, a famous painter who uses his talents to further the Japanese nation-making project, renounces his past activities and beliefs for the sake of marrying off his 26-year-old daughter. The whole story takes place post-War, under the American occupation, when the island is beginning to rebuild and rapidly transform. The story is told in flashbacks. Ono remembers his early days as a painter, training under various teachers, and his relationship with his major teacher who sought to reinvigorate the style and subject matter of Utamaro, using Western techniques and aesthetic approaches. But Ono tires of painting pictures of the pleasure district, geishas, and night scenes lit by lantern light, applying himself to political themes and images which estrange him from his studio. But there is much to be learned in the master's efforts, in his understanding that the floating world is ephemeral, though its pleasures and joys are no less real because of that quality of ephemerality. There is a message here too about living and practicing one's art and life with conviction - whether for political or aesthetic impulses of the heart. Did Ono and his teacher log 10,000 hours of painting time a year, qualifying themselves as savants? I think the more important question is did they practice their art deeply.

It's thrilling to me that the new LA MOCA Director Jeffrey Dietch doesn't drive, nor does he plan to necessarily learn. It's speculated that he may hire young people to drive him around L.A. and show him a window into their own city. David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, myself... who needs driving?!

I am perplexed that the Alkek's print subscription of the L.A. Times is only as current as December 30. And that edition was stamped "received January 14"!

Sad to hear that the artist also known as Rufus Wainwright's mother passed.

Things I learned in Spanish class today:

Tango was once an art form for the poor in Argentina, though today it is for the very wealthy and privileged.

Getting your pocket picked in Barcelona is practically de rigueur.

My Spanish teacher is from Ecuador and she's lived in Missouri, Buffalo, and Nueva York.

SIX PERSIMMONS
for Noko

after ruining another season’s harvest –
over-dried in the kitchen oven then
rehydrated in her home sauna
Aunt Yuki calls upon her sister,

paper sacks stuffed full of orange
fruit, twig and stalk still on
knows that my mother sprouts seedlings
from cast off avocado stones, revives

dead succulents, coaxes blooms out of orchids
a woman who has never spent a moment
of her being on the world wide web,
passes her days painting the diversity of

marshland, woodland, & shoreline;
building her own dehydrator fashioned from
my father’s work ladders, joined together
by discarded swimming pool pole perched

high to discourage the neighbor’s cats
that invade the yard scavenging for koi
“Vitamin D” she says, as she harnesses
the sun, in the backyard the drying device

mutates into painting, slow dripped
sugar spilling out of one kaki fruit
empty space where my father untethers
another persimmon, he swallows whole

Something I forgot to post - the new issue of Reconfigurations is online with a guest-edited folio by Page Starzinger. The interface of the journal's blog site is not the most user-friendly or easy on the eyes... but Page has curated an interesting group of work and written a terrific introduction to her selection.

Just finished Haruki Murakami's After the Quake which seems like very timely reading in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. I first came to Murakami's work in reading his nonfiction project Underground, a series of oral history interviews with survivors of the Tokyo subway gas attacks. I have yet to read the novels and other short story collections for which Murakami is best known, but was very impressed by the stories in After the Quake which follow the thread of several different characters living in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake - witnessing the horrors of the natural disaster through the mediated image of news broadcasts, relief workers traveling to provide on-site aid, and those removed from the situation but with ex-husbands, estranged parents based in Kobe.

It's a been a weird week for passings - my best friend lost her grandmother, and another friend from adolescence, lost her mother to complications from a leg amputation caused by diabetes. All within the same 24 hours.

At work, the lead curator of the Collections finally retired after 13 years on staff, signaling some much needed growth and change, [I hope].

I finished reading Michael Ondaatje's book Anil's Ghost and wonder what it might have been like to read the book, while I was working on writing Adamantine and wonder about how my reading of that novel might now inform any revisions that are made to the collection. There are several wonderful passages in the book that include an exposition on the ritual act of netra mangala, the act of painting in the eyes of a buddha or god, as the last step of activating an idol. Stone is also a theme throughout the book - monuments and their destruction - including the blowing up of religious statuary akin to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. This novel was hauntingly beautiful, political, and deeply interdisciplinary, in its weaving together of poetry, anthropology, history, and religion and I think in some ways triumphs over English Patient.

Happy to report that we officially have cover art for Adamantine, courtesy of the great Keith Carter.

Upcoming spring readings:

WordSpace
Paperbacks Plus
Dallas, TX
February 6, 2010
8:00 p.m.

1913 Press Booksigning
Associated Writing Programs Conference
Denver, CO
April 8, 2010
2:00 p.m.

Naropa University
Boulder, CO
April 12, 2010

Women's Museum of Dallas
Dallas, TX
May 22, 2010
1:30 p.m.

New Poetics

I've been contemplating my personal poetics recently, especially after hearing Rick Benjamin's amazing interview with Chris Lydon on Open Source. Rick's a dear dharma friend and in his interview, he speaks of poetry as a wisdom tradition. And to a degree too, I think of his poetry as being a vessel for the communication of love. His new book which is out any day is called Passing Love after a Langston Hughes' poem, and speaks to the ephemerality but also the exchange between individuals, whether loved ones, reader and poet, etc.

As much as I am able to identify with the notion of poetry as a wisdom tradition, I am not able to articulate my own poetics in this way. Well, not exactly. Lately, I've been reading several books on erotic transference and countertransference in therapeutic relationships. This self-study and exploration were a way to revisit past loves, past therapists, past relationships, etc. Transference and countertransference are present in all relationships - whether with one's lover, child, parents, boss, or former acupuncturist, a friend who works as a stripper in a gentleman's club, that corny movie on the television screen - it presents a tremendous opportunity to work through past wounds and arrive at integrating archetypal symbols into one's own consciousness to become whole. The therapeutic practice is a practice of love and holding space for another, while maintaining neutrality and holding up the mirror. As the person that I am, born into the family that I was, I have had a very thin skin between myself and everything else that's out there. I am a blank canvas for the transference of others - and it is on this level too that poetry and the arts - music, painting, dance, and opera - have deeply moved and affect me. So it is in my poetry that I seek to create the experience of transference and countertransference. Poets talk about creating an immediate experience, moving a reader to identify or empathize, as a vessel to create radical change, whether social or political or personal, as a medium for healing, as a medium for wisdom. For me, I think I have grown perhaps less ambitious or idealistic, or rather that my attention is attuned now to something much finer in its sublety, more intimate, and more infinite. The poem becomes a transformational object.

From David Mann's Erotic Transference and Countertransference: Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy

"The erotic is ubiquitous and at the heart of unconscious experience. As such it is a structuring dynamic in all two-person interactions....Because the erotic is frequently the basis for the most transformational experiences in ordinary life...the therapist, because of his or her own erotic subjectivity, is outside the patient's script, and thereby, the erotic countertransference can enable the patient to experience a different reaction, a new transformational object, that facilitates change and development."

"The patient and the therapist are continuously communicating at an unconscious level. The unconscious is best seen as porous and permeable, allowing experiences and affecting their passage between individuals. In the transference and countertransference the unconscious, with its creative and pathological constituents, will be passing between both participants in the analytic encounter. The therapeutic action can be described by seeing the transference and countertransference as a mutative process whereby both participants modify their unconscious fantasies...the erotic is particularly significant in this respect: it is psychically binding, bringing each individual into a strong conscious and unconscious relationship with others. An erotic bond is forged at a deep emotional level that binds individuals into a relationship with each other at the deepest levels of fantasy. It seems that the transformational potential of the erotic goes right to the heart of the therapeutic transaction and the universality of unconscious erotic fantasy life is what connects and gives this process a good deal of its momentum."

And from Nathan Field's essay "O tell me the truth about love" -
"A four-dimensional relationship is not especially rare, but something that happens to many people at particular moments of their lives...is reached in many ways - in art, in nature, in prayer, in childbirth...just as the shift from the two dimensional to the three dimensional requires the transcending of primary fusion in order to achieve separateness, so the shift from the three dimensional to the four dimensional requires the transcending of the ego in order to achieve this paradoxical state of communion/separation. When the moment of communion happens, there is a sense that healing takes place... for long-term change to establish itself, these intense experiences need to be repeated, perhaps many times, in order to undo the massive mistrust so many patients acquire in childhood."

Hmmmm.... L.A. MOCA has announced its news hire for director who will start in June. Jeffrey Deitch is the first gallerist/entrepreneur to ever occupy the directorship of a museum. The NY Times also has a piece on the news story. And in other news, the director of the Getty has tendered his resignation.

I just finished reading Irene Vilar's new memoir Impossible Motherhood Given the shit storm over this book, in writing and reflecting about it, it seems important to me to identify my own positionality towards the book's subject. So here's disclosure - I do not have any children nor am I presently attempting to become pregnant, I have never experienced pregnancy, and I am pro-choice.

I had some problems with the title that was ultimately arrived at to market the book - the full title is Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict. Every word in the subtitle is loaded. If this is a "testimony", I'm not sure who the audience for that testimony is - Vilar doesn't have an explicitly political message to deliver in the book. She also writes of her early identification with Anne Frank's written testimonial of life during Nazi occupation. Perhaps the word screams to much of legalese to me - a sworn statement of the author's experience, asserting credibility vs. allowing the narrative to gradually win the reader over to empathy. The "of an" are in italicized typeface on the cover, spine, and cover page of the book - this again seems deliberately conspicuous - a way to highlight and undermine a particular kind of authority - while the "testimony" establishes the veracity of the narrative, highlighting "of an" attempts to undercut the universality of the testimonial. "Abortion Addict" - abortion on its own may have been less of a red flag, but there is an undertone of clinical diagnosis and illness here with the addition of the word "addict" that seems perhaps too shocking. And it is this title which I think has created a certain amount of backlash for the author - the lay criticism that came out before the book's release reflected to me that these critics had not read the book, as the comments that they were making about abortion and abortion rights are actually addressed within Vilar's book. Namely that she knew that she abused a legal right, as did many of the doctors in the book who expressed concern and reservation about her case. But the title, I think, evokes a certain kind of resistance and aversion from a certain kind of reader, which makes it difficult to give the book a true chance.

All that said - This is a haunting and well-written memoir which I read within the course of a day. While the topic of repetitive abortion (the first abortion does not occur until about 1/4 into the book) as birth control is the organizing subject of the book - this book is really about feminine wounding and the author's journey towards awakening feminine strength within herself to be able to mother herself, extricate herself from unloving, life-depleting relationships, and to ultimately transform her own life and experiences through the act of breaking a pattern, choosing differently, and having a child after 15 successful abortions. At the age of 12, the author loses her mother when she commits suicide. Vilar then willingly goes off to American boarding school at 15 to escape this loss. From that time on, she only returns to her family in Puerto Rico sporadically. Entering college at the age of 17, she becomes embroiled in a relationship with a professor, about 30 years her senior - a man who has married and remarried and refuses to have children. He is himself a writer, and full of ego and plagued with boundary issues - particular to empowerment and money and gender roles. A man who may have never received much mothering, or fathering, in his own life. Vilar eventually marries her professor who she clings to as a sort of heroic figure, but after so many abortions and years of marriage and her growing success as a writer, the marriage breaks down completely. There are other relationships with men that the author details, but the professor is central. There are many moments in their relationship when she longs for his love and approval and he is a stand in for both an absent mother and father.

The book ends with an epilogue that breaks the structure of the narrative before it. Rather than being written in prose chapters, the final section is split into dated journal entries and gives the sense of life-in-progress, vs. history in the far past. In the last two sections of the book before the epilogue, the author begins her wind up and reflection over the project - connecting the dots between her family's various addictions to her own treatment of her body. It is in these final sections that she talks about the highs and lows of going off of birth control pills, discovering that she was pregnant and going through an abortion. It is understandable, given the long-term therapeutic process and how integration occurs slowly and layers of meaning surface piece by piece - however, I think that the narrative could have been strengthened by weaving these strands and realizations into certain sections of the book - yet realization occurs after the fact of our experiences in therapy, but I think that more reflection and insight throughout the main retelling of the story, could have deepened a connection with her reader.

Dribble

Scribble a word for each
drop of the player's ball.
Break the line when ball connects
w/ backboard. End the poem
at an interval of silence.

Pinata Piece

Stuff a covered cardboard structure
w/ your favorite language.
Document words breaking over a surface.
Let the bat be your pen.
Cork if necessary.

Bingo

carve your favorite words
on one-inch wooden rounds
toss inside a spinning
antique cage that shoots
them out a chute then
record the results

Unnecessary Objects

Nude and Bingo cage, 2010

Kort and I received an invitation to climb Enchanted Rock and eat black-eyed pea soup on New Year's Day. The combo of starting out the year at a high point and partaking in a Southern good luck ritual was irresistible. I didn't take many pictures of the main rock, but here's a photo of the Little Rock for illustrative purposes:



And here we are at the top of the rock dome at the geo marker.


Approaching the rock reminded me of climbing up the sand dunes in Dunhuang. Distant figures scrambling up the incline. But rock is a lot easier to climb then sand, though my boots slid quite a bit on this surface.


Not a lot of vegetation on the rock surface (no soil) but scatterings of prickly pear and bluestem. Factoid: there are a number of small pockets on the rock surface that fill with water when it rains. A microscopic-sized shrimp regenerates in this habitat and can be seen swimming the surface of the tiny pools.

(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.