Recent Reading

Unnecessary Talking is poet and translator Mike O'Connor's chronicle of a boyhood spent in Montesano, WA, small-town USA. Stand By Me meets Great Brain meets Little Rascals/Our Gang. Written in short linked prosed sections from a young Mike O'Connor's perspective. Quite a contrast to the lyric voice of O'Connor's Taiwan poems in The Basin, yet equally impressive - the tone of this collection is a wide-eyed innocence and a boyish sense of humor. Buy it from Pleasure Boat Studios here.


Born in Viet Nam and raised in the Midwest, Bich Minh Nguyen writes of assimilation through food in her memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner. As a thematic motif, food attempts to tie the narratives together, but the most compelling aspects of the book are the relationships and the characters shaped by the author - Nguyen's Mexican-American social activist stepmother, the forgotten mother left behind in Viet Nam when Nguyen's father, uncles, and siblings evacuated Saigon. My favorite section was the chapter on literature that left its impression on the author's young sensibilities, with a lengthy section devoted to a discussion of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series and Nguyen's longing for Ma Ingalls' salt pork and biscuits. I myself had no longing for prairie life, but having had a childhood crush on Michael Landon as idealized father and/or lover (yes, I know he was a devout Christian) , this chapter struck a chord. And if you've enjoyed David Sedaris' latest book which has a piece on "Ma Hamrick", his partner Hugh's mother, Nguyen's writing ties nicely to the theme of frontier romance and heroism.

I don't like institutional violence, and in the future, I will do everything possible to avoid it. The concept of fairness is a fairly relative one.

It's spring break at UW, and I've spent a lot of time this week sleeping and reflecting. And since I will not be going to AAM in April, I decided to spend some time at the OAH Conference that's been here in Seattle this week at the Washington Convention Center downtown. The conference has featured a number of sessions on food scholarship and oral history which have helped me to rethink the chop suey project I'm documenting for the Wing Luke Museum.

There have been a number of ongoing challenges to the project, but I think something that has finally become clear is that there hasn't necessarily been an overarching master narrative that the project is seeking to subvert or complicate - or if there is a master narrative, it may be a perception of authenticity, vs. adaptation in Chinese American foodways. So there's something to be clarified here along the lines of what is the major research question. And while Team Chew identified a guiding set of questions that focused on labor relations and families, the more accessible angle to a greater public may well be that of food consumption and foodways, both in terms of publication and exhibition, due to the explosion of interest in the last twenty some years in food consumption (vs. agricultural production), nutritional science, and an academic interest in food that has led to the establishing of food-oriented academic programs at UC Davis, NYU, and the University of Minnesota. Think the popularity of a writer like Michael Pollan or celebrity chef programs on primetime television. Which is not to say that the chop suey project won't explore issues of local history, labor, immigration and pop culture, but that the entry point for researchers and audiences may be the food one, and more time and attention might be spent on opening up that theme, from which the others will radiate.

This reframing of the project helps me to have hope that I could finish the project by June, or late summer at the latest, with a final defense in August, or wrapping up the City of Seattle grant at least. Recruitment has been a problem as its been purely word of mouth. I interview the children of chop suey restaurant owners to get to their parents, the elder generation who's stories are at risk of being lost. This is by no means ideal, it slows the process, but one connection leads to another.

I may also have to rethink my thesis committee. It's become my feeling that it's a potential conflict of interest to have the project advisor/owner on the committee, as that lends itself to my surrendering my ownership of the research and perhaps not taking as critical an approach to the challenges of the project.

overheard at H&R
Block: “I used to own a home”
lives now in her car

*

back from Canada
to snow & the tent city
changed back to parking lot

*
Dalai Lama barred
from Johannesburg taking the
focus away from peace

Not a great weekend to read of this news.

It's officially spring break, and officially spring. Things to do this week:

• home cooking
• yoga
• reading: Peter Levitt's poetry books
• re-reading: Mike O'Connor's The Basin
• studying up on Western China
• journaling
• writing
• maybe a ferry ride to Bainbridge
• acupuncture
• handwritten letters to friends
• chop suey interviews for thesis project
• sleeping
• listening to Ned S' CD
• rollerskating around Green Lake
• the gym
• the track
• procure a birthday gift for Linh
• this show and this show and this show

From our friends at the Wedgewood Coop

New: A Spring Festival of Balance and Healing

•How can we deal with the global recession and diminishing natural resources?
•How can we best use our collective resources for positive social change in our community?
•How can we we model the ancient human tradition of gathering and celebration?

Come Celebrate Spring and Change with us.

Re. Kindle: Meet new people and share community
Re. Joice: Dance to the Samba/Klezmer grooves of Sasson and many late night DJs
Re. Skill: Sign up to participate or lead a skillshare in the community
Re. Vive: Enjoy tasty local brews and wood fired pizza
Re. Build: Enjoy the brand new bamboo and steel structure and learn about sustainable building
Re. Groove: Participate in acoustic rhythm in the jamspace
Re. Member: Share memories of community
Re. Mind: Share your tools for sustainable and positive living
Re. Cline: Relax in a chill zone with your friends
Re. Ignite: Sit by a warm fire
Re. Search: Share positive information about the world we can use
Re. Dedicate Celebrate a Spring Ritual of Balance
Re. Flect: How have the forces of nature changed the NW Landscape?
Re. Summon: Create and Share a Springtime Haiku

We are asking for your participation. As we move to the next place in the journey of the world, we will once again witness the awakening of the world.

Let that awakening inspire us all.

Please DO bring: Your good friends and family, ideas for sustainable and positive living, skillshare concepts, your creative mind, music, food to share and love

Saturday March 21st

Feast at 7
Live Folk by Mucho Mejor at 8
Participatory Ritual of Spring at 9
Dance Party with the Klezmer/Samba grooves of Sasson at 10
Live DJs from the Burner Collective into the night.

A snowflake on the blazing stove

Here is a model of conflict resolution that resonates for me, via T.B., a long-time devotee and practitioner of kendo:



Takeda Shingen vs. Uesugi Kenshin at the Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima on September 10, 1561.

They were the rival generals of the two armies which were fighting. Kenshin was a Buddhist monk, and Shingen a lay practitioner of Zen.

Kenshin was frustrated because Shingen wouldn't come forth to do individual one-on-one combat with him, but was rather sitting to the rear, fanning a charcoal stove to boil water for tea.

Kenshin charged his horse straight up to Shingen, drew his sword ready to strike Shingen, and said: "What would you say at this moment?!?"

Shingen continued to serenely sit on the camp stool, and replied "A snowflake on the blazing stove!" then calmly parried off the cut using his fan - which was made of iron.

Kenshin rode away...

The print is by Chikanobu Yosho (1836-1912).

I've lost the desire to fight. There is nothing humane about human resources - their representatives agents of institutional violence skilled at silencing and doling out discipline. Five months from now, I may or may not look back on this moment with anger, sadness, indifference, acceptance, detachment. I may or may not look back, I may instead look forward.

The last 24 hours or "It's a squid's life"

Take Collections final.

Phone consult with union reps.

Consult with friend who is a former HR professional.

Consult with professor.

Make salmon for dinner. Eat with Kort.

Watch "What Would You Do" on TV with Kort. Feel deeply disturbed by the lack of good citizenship and basic common sense.

Cry until nauseous. Hit threshhold at about 5 minutes.

Counsel girlfriend who's boyfriend just broke up with her.

Give Kort the green light to go on his New York Zen Monastery/chado trip in June. It overlaps with UW graduation, but at this point, I don't know what's happening. Coconut Diaries will be in Seattle during that week.

Sleep.

Call financial aid office to find out how much loan money is available to me for spring quarter. Plenty of it - a good chunk of it subsidized.

Go to see preceptor for Japanese acupuncture for help with grounding. Body hums on the treatment table. Remember that wholeness and power is within me, not outside of me. Text husband that I love Stephen Brown.

Walk to farmers market and buy vegetables, make soup for lunch, stew for dinner.

Check mail - goodie package from White Pine Press.

Sit down with bowl of lavender ice cream. Read poems of Rengetsu and oppressed Bengali women. Contemplate becoming an ascetic. Contemplate the intersections of poetry and politics and publishing.

Write in journal.

Contemplate the Asian woman on the sidewalk outside of East West Bookstore this morning with a cardboard sign that read "Homeless/Broke/Hungry."

Contemplate what it is to be "broke" and/or "broken" and/or "broken-hearted" and/or "beat."

Massage press balls on ear points.

Inhale/exhale.

Prep for meeting with union rep.

She Said/She Said: Baby Crazy

This is Coconut Diaries' two cents on the subject:

I have a serious impulse control problem. For serious. I actually jumped off a bus to stare at a man who was running shirtless downtown. Today. He was Ralf Moeller whipped with Michael Jai White emulsified with Rick Rossovich and drizzled with Gregg Butler. (If you’re gonna Google them, have your ciggy at the ready.) And there I was with my gym bag- staring as his appropriately squared man boobs boinged past me- before reality stuck it’s boot in my bum to remind me that I signed myself up for a 15 minute wait for another bus. Oh, and there’s the whole husband thing.

My point?

My point is that a married woman who would voluntarily extract herself from her sole transportation to ogle a man she has no intention of interacting with is not prepared to have children. I lack the restraint required to not leave a kid in a vehicle while I run inside for the Clinque Moisture Surge lotion my esthetician said my dehydrated skin screams for. (What? I’d leave on the AC and a Kidz Bop CD. I’m not a total monster.)

There’s nothing about being pregnant that looks fun to me. At all. The BFF swears pregnancy was the 9-month time of her life. Only it wasn’t because I was there. She remembers great skin and presents. I remember uninvited strangers groping her poked out belly and itchy bellies. And I don’t get babies. In a word? Episiotomy. If I’m getting stitches in my nether region, that kid better come out clutching some jewelry. Or mortgage payments. Babies are Benjamin Button in tiny, overpriced, primary-colored gear. They poop, they cry, occasionally they giggle but only before something putrid and wrong falls out of an orifice. Then you gotta freak out about their lumpy little heads. Was is black and white shapes that stimulate brain function or plush tactile toys? If I choose to play tunes from Grease instead of Brahms will baby’s first word be ‘pussy wagon’? Pre-school, kindergarten, parent/teacher conferences, school pictures, recitals, electronic family newsletters, Sears quality Christmas photos, braces, zits, periods, pubic hair, SATs, end of the year banquets, graduations. Ack! Plus, I don’t know if I can endure 1.5 Hubster’s in my home. Forever.

But those are my safety answers.

My defense against the knee-jerk reassurances fairy dusted on women who announce their birthing reservations. What I say to combat the comforting notions that it will be different when said child loafs around in my uterus and takes a red carpet walk from my lady bits into a poorly lit,yet, sterile room. The naked truth is that I don’t think I am capable of being a parent. The altruism that mothers express, in my world, is not in the amniotic fluid. It’s an intention. It’s learned. It’s a choice. A choice my mother, as my primary caregiver, chose not to make. I wasn’t potential, clay to be molded, or a personification of possibility. I was of value because I was collateral, a plastic token to cash in at will. Children, like monkeys, thrive better on actualization, love, and affirmation than sustenance. I had days and weeks where the freezer was stocked with microwaveable foods but I had to go outside the home for connections. And my desperation for connection cultivated in fucked up sexual, relationships stunted friendships clouded by jealousy and fear, and the one-night stand where I left him a note and my sweatshirt as parting gifts. Because I thought Emily Post would approve. My decisions, all decisions, are rooted in the need to fill that void created by persistent neglect. Mine first. And my degrees are in Psychology and Counseling. I can identify the when, where and how. But I’m still here. Wrapped in a blanket of selfish self soothing. Putting me first because I know that I will be with me always.

Then there’s my experience with race. My experience is constantly challenged as being less than. I didn’t learn the Black Anthem until I was in college. And my kid will be half of that. My kid will be the one who has to identify and choose and have their accomplishments be attributed to exception and outlying. And I’ll need to console, support, and empower; things I may have to fake.

One day I may.

Until then, my uterus is in tact. My shoes collection grows. And I get fulfillment in making strange children on a bus smile.

China details

The IWP delegates for China are Edward Carey (playwright), Leslie Jamison (fiction writer), David Marshall Chan (fiction writer), Kiki Petrosino (poet), and Anne E. Wilson (sculptor). Filmmaker Steve Delahoyde will also be documenting the trip and the 2009 exchange as a whole.

Arrival in Beijing on 5/12. Then three days in Beijing, seven days in Dunhuang, three days in Xi’an, and a final stop in Beijing, before leaving China on 5/26. We will be visiting four of the top five UNESCO world heritage sites in China, the Great Wall and the Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasties in Beijing, the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, and the Mausoleum of the First Emperor in Xi’an.

The Me Said of the She Said

The BF and me have been slow with our March installment of She Said/She Said. We mutually agreed this month to write about our thoughts on babies, pregnancy and mothering - a meditation prompted by the recent pregnancy of one third of our friendship triumvirate. Coconut Diaries will be posting her write-up soon, in the mean time, here is mine:

Baby crazy

I ain’t, and will probably never be. Call it my own variety of sociocultural conditioning, or what have you, but the drive to give birth for me up to this moment has always translated into the writing of poems and the initiation of artistic projects. I do not spend a lot of time with babies and/or small children. I am disturbed by the young mothers I see zipping around Green Lake and through the lanes of the Whole Foods market in my neighborhood during the middle of the day, as if everyone else is invisible. When I lived in Taiwan, I was appalled at how spoiled my cousins’ babies were – my cousin Cong-hui’s 3 y.o. still sucking on a pacifier, 20 pounds overweight, eating everything in sight with a nil vocabulary (in any language). The world revolves around mothers and the cult of motherhood in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Might these views derive from my own conflicted relationship with my absentee mother? Probably.

One of the women who was a bridesmaid at my wedding was recently outed on facebook as expecting. She didn’t post her sonagram, which is how I have found out about other friends’ pregnancies – the news leaked out through the indiscretion of one of her facebook friends. I have known this friend since I was 12, and know that for a long time she had quit birth control and was “not trying to not try to get pregnant.” Of the triumvirate of friendships that we shared, R was the first to have sex, get married, own a house and get pregnant. But she postponed the last for a long time, and now that it’s here, it’s given me something to reflect upon. [I do not envy her.] The male friends from our childhood started having children in their early 20s, but many of the women decided to wait, for whatever reasons.

I have been co-worker to new moms and women on the verge of giving birth. The limited range of conversation has often made me want to do injury to myself – think Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler” when a fan recognizes Randy the Ram behind the deli meat counter and won’t let it go. The Ram fakes an accident on the meat cutter and slices open his hand, quits his shitty, job and walks out of the society where he doesn’t belong.

What is to be done to bring us back into the present and to intervene upon the baby babble related to feedings, sleeping, pumping breast milk, poo consistency and color, teething, socialization, etc. Is my aversion to babies perhaps the sense that once women cross over into motherhood, that there ceases to be a sense of how conversation excludes women who 1) choose not to have children, 2) can’t have children biologically. Maybe it is the privileging of motherhood in a way to me that seems completely alienating and severely limiting. The greater divide and disconnect between my experience of being a woman and women who choose to have children.

So, given these deep aversions to mothering, imagine my surprise then when at a reading of zen poetry in Montreal, I hear Peter Levitt read a stunning poem about his third wife dreaming the face of their son before he was born. Something about that image and idea opened a floodgate of tears for me that wouldn’t stop. Peter tells me that when his wife was in labor for 8 hours and about to give birth, she made no sounds and went somewhere else. Afterwards, he asked her where she disappeared to – deep inside, she said. How do women know if the time is ever right, or if we feel ready to become mothers? My own pre-conditioned fear is that if I am not baby crazy in the way that so many women of my age and older are that reveals to me what I some seem to know deeply know about their own biology, how then will I know if the moment came and then passed me by? The other part of me says, you live and act based on your own knowledge and belief systems, not someone else's. This truth is to be honored.

My life will be changing a lot this week and for that I am grateful.

In the mean time, I have been studying for my collections management class which was a very useful topic that provided me with much food for thought - integrated pest management for instance - not something that I think much about. But now I can tell the difference between a wood beetle and a carpet beetle and know for instance that those little piles of powder that come out of my unfinished wooden chest of drawers in my parents home in Riverside is very likely infested, and no the best solution would be to neither freeze the piece of furniture nor to subject it to a battery of pesticides. It has been beetle food for years and is probably structurally very weak at this point and ready for retirement. Insect frass and shells, all signs of infestation. Hair, skin and dirt all bug food. I now vacuum two to three times a week! But because we live in a house in Seattle where the temperature is hardly ever above 58 degrees, we don't really have to worry about silverfish or moths which thrive in high relative humidity. The practical applications of collections management...

Concerned about your old family fotos? Listen up, "archival" is way over-used in commercial products and a photo album that is pH balanced, and acid and lignan-free is what qualifies as truly archival. If you are like me and have your family fotos in old-style adhesive photo albums with plastic sheets sandwiching the fotos to the adhesive, that glue is going to migrate eventually through the photographs, causing damage and discoloration beyond repair. Move those fotos over pronto to acid-free linen.

And that artwork hanging up in my bathroom? The photographs and drawings both have a glaze layer (plexiglass or glass) which sits directly on top of the image, with no spacer. The emulsion of that color photograph is probably stuck at this point to the glass surface from the high humidity of the shower cycle.

NAGPRA: We need more policies like this one. I hope Geronimo's grandson wins his case with Yale and Skull & Bones.

Film stocks: nitrate, acetate, and polyester plastic bases, with nitrate and acetate being the most unstable. Esp. acetate with magnetic sound tracks which are subject to vinegar syndrome. Quarantine anything off-gassing a vinegar-like smell or the rest of your collection is wrecked.

I will never erase the image of stuffed lifeless birds with what appeared to be white cotton in place of eyes in the Burke mammalogy lab, by the drawerfuls, their legs crossed and bound; taxidermied gopher-like creatures, and the mounted heads of lions with fur loss on their ears from age and exposure. The whale skull suspended from the ceiling.

Everybody's got a threshhold for the amount of soul-sucking work that they can do, and I have officially reached the tipping point.

My mother now has a gallery in Carmel representing her work here. That top painting on the linked page is I think derivative from a Herb Ritts photo of supermodels. The gallery is called Le Vernissage and is run by a Lebanese couple who have two galleries in the seaside town.

News

I am going to Western China in May through the Iowa Writers Project. An all-expenses paid trip to Dunhuang, Xian, and Beijing to collaborate with minority ethnic artists living and working in China. Dunhuang in an ancient city on the Silk Road, close to the site of the Cave of One Thousand Buddhas. In October, the Chinese artists travel to Iowa where the American artists will meet them and continue the artistic exchange.

Pinch me!

Tennis anyone?

Ca va le fun

I got back from Montreal yesterday and am still reflecting on the Zen Poetry Festival. It was a really great gathering of poets and practitioners and I was so happy to meet and spend time with Peter Levitt and Zenshin Michael Haederle.

I did not see much of Montreal or take any pictures. I stayed at the Bienvenue B&B in the Plateau Mont Royal neighborhood which feels a lot like Brooklyn, except there are bigger snowdrifts and French signs everywhere. The B&B was a 5-minute walk to the Zen Centre which is Leonard Cohen's former home. He lives in the property next door overlooking the park on Saint Dominique and is slowly reinhabiting the top floor of the Centre which was formerly the zendo. Later this spring, the Centre will relocate to a new space in the Plateau.

First night in, went to a bar reading pre-festival event. The MC had been drinking all day red wine with Red Pine. Caught the last two readers of the night, David O'Meara and Erin Moure, who translates from Galician.

Next day, overslept and missed zazen and arrived late to breakfast. In the afternoon, a lecture at McGill with translator David Hinton who talked about deep ecology in Chinese and Zen poetry. Read that night with Seido Ray Ronci, who apparently studied with Bill Corbett of Pressed Wafer, back when Bill was teaching at Emerson in Boston. Seido is an intense man, ultra-direct and his poetry had something of the death-drive in it (i.e. his poem "My Skull"), though tempered at times by humor. Very accessible poems and stories, with a toughness about them.

Missed zazen the next day and facilitated a renga workshop with 8 participants who wrote 20-verse renga together. I underestimated how long it would take to write individual stanza, but in retrospect, this was an indicator that things were going right. Big thank you to Caroline, Kaidey, Jonathan, Mary, Maria Jose, Rodrigo, Frieda, and Robin for their participation. Afternoon translation panel with Red Pine, Stephen Addiss, Dennis Maloney of White Pine Press, Peter Levitt, and David Hinton; and then an evening conversation and reading with Chase Twichell and Peter again. A few poems into Peter's reading, I found myself completely overcome by emotion - more on that in a future post, but I basically wept quietly through his entire reading and then ducked out.

Sunday I missed zazen again and the festival held a nice little brunch in the financial district of Montreal, near the port and old part of the city, at Soupesoupe. Stephen Addiss talked about haiga and I talked about the visual art influence in my work. Thinking through the lens of Zen was useful to see the work as an exploration of my desire for beauty, truth and the ineffable. Afterwards, walked around the port with Peter and talked about marriage and relationships and the nature of knowing. We ended up passing the Hotel D'Ville, which was under reconstruction - about 1/3 of it under a screenprinted tarp with the image of what the hotel should look like in its glory. We ended up in Chinatown eating congee and won ton soup. More food 2 hours later with the Abbess of the Zen Center and Victor Sogen Hori, Sojun (a Zen monk), Peter, and Red Pine at a Portuguese restaurant in the Plateau.

I would describe the weekend as ichi-go ichi-e. It left a deep impression on my heart and being surrounded by so many serious practitioners, I have a sharper sense of what I am looking for in a spiritual community of dharma friends and teachers, though Salt Spring, BC and Albuquerque, NM seem far today.

Thank you to Zenshin for the foto:

Rainbow Bookfest Redux

CS Perez came and went. He was the definite highlight of the festival and Seattle must invite him back again as he only read two poems, both of which were amazing. One piece on the history and uses of the achiote plant and a long poem that incorporated many legends on horses and Guam.

I don't have much of a context for how the bookfest has been in past years, but last year Sasha Welland and Kathleen Alcala, were the local heavies to read and present their work. This year's line-up included mostly hip-hop and performance poets. The introductions to poems were lengthy and there was a lot of Q&A and audience exchange, focusing far too much, I felt, on the business of publishing and circulating one's work. While I struggled to concentrate on many of the performers, I appreciated the political dimensions of the narratives - learning about Tacoma's Hilltopia community which is slowly undergoing gentrification and how the recession is impacting people on a macrocosmic level. Met a bass player who backs poets when they read and may give him a call for my April reading at Intersection.

I missed the 1412 reading downtown, but was glad to hang out with and get to know Craig and Brandon Shimoda, the new marketing director at Wave, who came out for sushi at Maneki on Saturday.

Coconut Diaries and I are working on another edition of She Said/She Said to be posted by the end of the week.

Topic? Women, babies, and motherhood.

I'm sitting on some very big news which greeted me upon my arrival back in Seattle. It does not involve babies, books, or jobs and is going to take me a few days to work out the logistics. New directions as a poet-diplomat...