Preview Screening of The Road

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

I want to go to here.

Free-write in Iowa

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

Burking*

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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

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

Final Products

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kort passed his jurisprudence exam for relicensure.

I miss Whiting Tennis shows.

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

Poem rewrite

E X P O S I T I O N


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


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

working-class laborers in China’s hospitality industry,

pleasure-boat tours of Old China catering to Westerners

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

***

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

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

trainees choose names like costume jewelry


Gwyneth & Eli; Emu & Stella

girls that cut curl & color

in the mirror I watch a woman

pluck a cell phone & cash

from her cleavage

***

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

Men in suits & pencil-skirted women

greet guests Good evening! Good morning!


Breakfast is on the roof.


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

***

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


winter melon, new year’s lanterns, ripened pineapple





Banners touting Olympic tourism canvas streets.

***

Holidays, war, & packaged events produce Kong Ming candles

hand-scripted with prayers


wishes on display, I watch
witnesses disengage:

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


***

the true & the staged

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

***

in a stand for relics
at Yonghegong Lamasery

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

miniature shrine boxes
small enough to palm

gold and silver structures

house the spirits
visual displays of religious
election


strung upon a silver chain: a prayer locket


***

love locked wedlock

young couples fastening commitment
the Great Wall shackling

miles of golden padlocks
bought from cultural management

keys tossed off
the birth of tourism
in the town of

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

***

this is adaptation:
traditions that comprise
a personal inheritance

what I want to understand:

that stainless banner on
the neighbor’s patio

stars & bars
the confederate flag

paired with deep blue
Asian lanterns, decorative hangings

emblazoned with the word “welcome”
hostility cloaked in politesse

the mind turning
to raise the banner
of windhorse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


colonia

single-celled structures shape
evolutionary origins
phylum phloem
exerting turgor

It sucked and then I cried

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

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

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

Flag debacle update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My neighbor hung a confederate flag

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