program assitant no longer...

well, i resigned my position of program assistant (pa) for next year. feel kind of happy about it but i also hate change...i guess i'll just see how this all plays out.

political points to ponder....

i have been re-reading some really great texts lately in my preparation for preparing for comps...i have also been reading alot of blogs that deal primarily on politics and i ran across a couple of quotes that really resonate with me and that i think are extremely important.

Politcized identity formation(s)

An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences it would also not exist in its distinctness and solidarity [….] Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.(64)

William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

The tension between particularistic “I’s” and a universal “we” in liberalism is sustainable as long as the constituent terms of the “I” remain unpolicitized:indeed, as long as the “I” itself remains unpoliticized on one hand, and the state (as the expression of the ideal of political universality) remains
unpolicitized on the other. Thus, the latent conflict in liberalism between universal representation and individualism remains latent, remains unpoliticized, as long as differential powers in civil society remain naturalized, as long as the “I” remains politically unarticulated, as long as it is willing to have its freedom represented abstractly—in effect, subordinating its “I-ness” to the abstract “we” represented by the universal community of the state. This subordination is achieved by the “I” either abstracting from itself in its political representation, thus trivializing its “difference” so as to remain part of the “we” (as in homosexuals who are “just like everyone else except for who we sleep with”), or accepting its construction as supplement,complement, or partial outsider to the “we” (as in homosexuals who are just“different,” or Jews whose communal affiliations lie partly or wholly outside their national identity). The history of liberalism’s management of
its inherited and constructed others could be read as a history of variations on and vacillations between these two strategies. (56)

What if it were possible to incite a slight shift in the character of political expression and political claims common to much politicized identity? What if we sought to supplant the language of “I am”—with it defensive closure on identity,its insistence on the fixity of position, its equations of social and moral positioning—with the language of “I want this for us”? (75)

Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

the reading...

well, the reading is over....and i don't know how i feel about it. i mean, i think that i did ok, speaking-wise except for the fact that my upper lip kept twitching which was annoying. i know now why i changed my major from piano performance in undergrad (which seems like a lifetime ago) because i hated the attention and the assessing eyes sitting in their chairs, listening to your words and deeming them something (either of worth or not or something in between). it's kind of funny because i don't feel this way when i'm teaching. i don't get nervous and i don't preoccupy myself with what i imagine people are thinking about me. oh well, needless to say, it's a bit of a downer this type of performing. it is also kind of fake. a lot of pretention and a lot of big ideas and let me see how "creative" i can be by saying words like "bitch," "cunt" or "dick." now mind you, i am the last person to criticize the use of language as a site of transgression and disruption but when the overall discourse uses words like the ones mentioned previously they cease being transgressive and start setting off boundaries of normalcy. these are words that we must use now in order for a piece to effectively and affectively participate within a "creative" project. it seems contrived to me but what do i know...i am not a poet nor am i a creative writer so needless to say i am stumped. i even asked for help from my creative writing friends who remained strangely silent...perhaps they were trying to spare my feelings, who knows but i was a little disappointed in them to say the least...oh well. if it were not for noah and beth being there to support me (and for marie and anj's helpful comments) i would be in sad shape...thanks guys :)

poem for the week

painting: Deconstructing the Ballerina by Paula Rego

Movement

__

I want to see a ballerina

with hairy legs

and underarms;

a fat ballerina

with huge breasts;

a ballerina who wears dreadlocks

one who's old and grey

in ordinary clothes

I want to watch

a ballerina stumble

and laugh or pirhouette

in a wheelchair;

I want to see her

clasp another woman

and lift her high.

Then I will be

moved.

__

--Amy Edgington

an experiment in narrative because i am not a poet

ok, at illinois state there is a journal called euphemism that is entirely run by the undergraduate students within the english department. most, if not all, of these students are english majors who are concentrating their studies on the field of publishing. the faculty advisor for this journal is a brilliant writer and scholar who i will refer to as dr. h. well, i received an e-mail from dr. h. requesting that i "read" something for this event. apparently they would like to have more men reading in the program.

problem no. 1: i do not fancy myself a creative writer...although i have written some poetry and short stories...i don't think that i have ever shown them to anyone.

problem no 2: i have five minutes to read something. now, five minutes may not seem like a long time but you would be surprised by how slowly the minutes drag by when one is reading written work. over five years of writing conference papers has taught me this much.

problem no 3: the event is next thursday...

problem no 4: did i mention that i am not a creative writer? oh yeah, i guess i did.

at first, i had a couple of poems from other people that i was thinking about reading and then i thought i should at least try to create something of my own. i mean i am a compositionist, in part at least, and i can look at this event as an "assignment." i can look at it as something that i would ask my writing students to do. so i have been working on a piece of narrative. it isn't a poem and the best i could describe it as is a fragment, an observation. i see it as an object that is reflected in the broken pieces of a mirror....disconnected and yet symbiotic and somewhere "out there" beyond the reach of an instantaneous signification these narrative pieces will meld. writing is exhausting...creative writing even more so....i would never call myself a poet but i can call myself someone who tried. finally, any suggestions or helpful comments would be greatly, GREATLY appreciated. here it goes...


"Always in the long corridors of the psyche
doors are opening and doors are slamming shut"

Marge Piercy from "Song of the Fucked Duck"

doors: five narrative fragments

i

reading derrida on a friday evening i found myself hungry and restless.
i was caught up in a psychic paradox between my bodily desire to leave because of a hunger to fill up an emptiness and my longing to stay where i was...because of this same hunger.

i went out...the desire fueled by my physical hunger won...trumped, as it were, the excuses to stay put...to eat the words of the book that i was reading at that moment.

actually, both desires drew a compromise that involved take-out.

ii

waiting, waiting for my food i noticed a woman sitting in a darkened corner.
i know this woman, not by name but by recognition.
she walks.
she walks around town most of the time.
i have only ever seen her walking so it took me a while to place her in the restaurant because she was temporarily rooted,
stationary.
i heard her get up.
i heard her ask the server about time: she wanted to know what time darkness settles in.
i tried to answer the question in my mind...to myself and i didn't even know the answer. the server told her something...i think she said 8 but i'm not sure,
i was still calculating.

what time does it get dark?

iii

my food came up...handed over to me like a precious thing wrapped in styrofoam and plastic.
i paid.
i turned to leave and was faced with the unfamiliar-now-familiar woman standing next to me.
she followed me outside
our movements were cadenced yet displaced
like awkward choreography
she said she knew me.
she has seen me around town with other people.
i was placed, a stationary point on a map.
she wanted to know something so she asked me a question...a question that i could not answer for her...a question that required walking for its response...perhaps even walking in circles.
i stood, anchored upon the sidewalk in my own absence
shrugging my shoulders and smiling into a void
she thanked me for my time and inability to answer.
we whispered antiphonic goodbyes.
i went to my car, with very heavy feet and my plastic bag of food, cell phone, and cigs absurdly hanging off of my body--useless ornaments, swinging.
i stopped and turned as she kept walking the other way,
a vanishing point that expanded the muted territory between us.
i felt like saying something more than what my goodbye could offer her.
i wanted to tell her that i understood.
goodbye is easier though because this other understanding is beyond words...it only recognizes the grammar of movement.

iii

some say that this woman is a poet...a remarkable poet, a tragic poet.
i say that she is a walking poet.
others say that she has a psychiatric condition...i say that that assumption is relative...it depends on who is doing the diagnosing and it's usually a doctor that is sitting down, rooted in a place without movement
in some shadowed corner of some dingy restaurant, and who has no idea...no idea at all.

iv

i read the other day that dreams about houses are pictures of the psyche...i believe in that premise because i believe in basements.
i also believe in basements under basements as well.
imagine that you are dreaming….you are in a house that is webbed in the gauzy reassembled pieces of memory and nostalgia in which you find yourself walking.
vision invites you to drift downstairs through an open door that announces itself as a materialized binary marked by its two knobs.
you accept the invitation…you walk through and down into darkness.
you realize (through intuition and touch) that at some point these stairs stop or cease to exist in another, deeper room.
this room under the house is dark, a little cool and there are no windows.
most who get this far don't linger long enough to see the passageway that leads to still a deeper room, as vast as it is profound.
but some do...i did (or, rather, still do, I know it’s there) the walking poet did so as well
but even if the dreamer does get further than most and follows that corridor down to this other room...still, most don't see the door in this basement's basement.
it beckons anyway.
in a certain kind of silence, you can hear it...like the gentle static sound of snow falling. not only have i seen it, i have had my hand on the doorknob a couple of times, i have even turned it.
but unlike the woman who walks, something tells me, however, that once this door is opened and i cross over its threshold there is no coming back.
because the inside of that door has no knob.
i simply do not posses that courage.

v

so i know the temptation.
i know what her walking means.
i know this woman and she is brave,
to walk between two worlds and yet refuse to distinguish a line between them.
to only be recognized by the vision and grammar of others who have either been at the door or who have themselves trampled through.
or the ones that stare, that refuse to understand what her movement means
by hiding behind their own carefully selected rubrics of denial that thinly disguise their own basements with their own doors quietly singing like static snow
perhaps her walking makes it better.
perhaps it eases the pain of the door with no knob
slamming shut.

--oaw

spring has arrived

i saw my first robin today at 11:20 a.m.

i am smiling from ear to ear

poem for the week

from An Atlas of the Difficult World by Adrienne Rich

II

Here is a map of our country:
here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt
This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin
we dare not taste its water
This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms
This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms
This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy
This is the cemetery of the poor
who died for democracy........This is a battlefield
from a nineteenth-century war......the shrine is famous
This is the sea-town of myth and story........when the fishing fleets
went bankrupt....here is where the jobs were........on the pier
processing frozen fishsticks.....hourly wages and no shares
These are other battlefields...Centralia....Detroit
here are the forests primeval...the copper....the silver loads
These are the suburbs of acquaintance.....silence rising fumelike from the streets
This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires
flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling
whose children are drifting blind alleys pent
between coiled rolls of razor wire
I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural
then yes let it be....these are small distinctions
where do we see it from is the question

"a million miles away from home, fifteen from a payphone."


redhouse painters

the day keeps getting more interesting as the hours slip by

well, i took max to the vet today and he has to go on insulin...yay...me and needles...how did they know that's EXACTLY want i wanted for me and my cat this year! it actually isn't that bad...they taught me how to give the shot and i practiced with some saline solution (sorry max). the doctor said that the insulin combined with the extremely expensive food may....MAY regulate his diabetes so that he can go off of the shots...but that is something that will be way down the road. well, we're used to routines around here so this is just another one to add to the list. on another note, i don't know if it is partly because i have just gotten over the flu or i haven't eaten yet today or the huge vet bill that i had to pay or a combination of all three but as i was getting max and his carrier out of the car i fainted. now i haven't fainted in years but i went down fast. i fell directly on my knees tearing the skin on my left knee through my jeans (so i must have fallen pretty hard) and my face crashed into the top of max's carrier. the carrier has a metal top so the noise more than the pain woke me up. i am just glad that i didn't bloody my nose or anything like that. max was terrified...i felt so bad for him but the carrier protected him so the fall didn't do anything other than scare him. my brain still feels all tingly but i really can't sleep so i decided to blog about this an make it apart of some record or something. well, i'm just glad that i snapped out of it immediately so i didn't look like a whack job sprawled outside of my garage on the concrete pavement for the neighbors to see. fun times.

now that spring break is almost over....

omg...i have been so sick during this spring break...but i'm finally feeling better today. this "flu" or whatever it was, was strange. although i had a slight fever my throat was really, really, sore. it hurt so bad that i couldn't even sleep...blaahhh. i was lying in bed thinking "omg, i have throat cancer...i think that i'm going to die." i kept checking to see if i had an infection or strep but my throat was only red not really swollen. see i can diagnos myself :-) that online medical degree i have really paid off. true, i probably should have gone to the dr's but i really, really don't like doing that. maybe it reminds me too much of my own mortality...who knows...we all have our issues.

poem for the week

image of stevie smith

coffee, cigs, and a great poetic mind...is there anything better?

i am so sick.....the flu finally caught up with me blah! but i must carry on...the poem of the week waits for no one!








Not Waving But Drowning



Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.


--stevie smith

why do i do this to myself?

instead of studying for a translation test in old english tomorrow (or i should say later on today since it is 2 a.m.) i listened to the awful ramblings of the minister fred phelps from the westboro babtist church and another dude argue about god, love, and hate and of course why homosexuals are going to hell regardless of whether they "repent" or not. well i don't really care because even if phelps in some alternate universe does go to heaven i certainly don't want to be there because THAT would be my hell. besides, if we are going to hell why are you preaching then....just let us go to hell and call it a day ...that still doesn't negate the fact that i have comprehensive examinations near the end of summer....in any event the rhetoric that this old man was spewing was terrible and violent but yet i listened to it like some masochist...when i should be doing way more productive (and, in turn masochistic) things with my life, like studying for a test or writing a comp synthesis. it has been a week of ann coulter, rush limbaugh, and other nut jobs spewing hateful things without even thinking of the consequences of what they are saying. right now i am thanking the goddess for john stewart....he's at lest helping me keep it all in perspective. he is my own personal jesus.

but i can be kind of bitchy....

You Are 48% Bitchy

Generally, you're an average woman, with average moods. But sometimes... well, watch out! Sometimes, you let your mean side get the better of you. And you enjoy every minute of it.

How Bitchy Are You?

i am jennifer aniston

well, i took this test and apparently i am jennifer aniston and NOT angelina jolie. i think i can live with that...although i am not so sure about the "upbeat" part however.

You Are Jennifer Aniston

Girl next door with a free spirit.You're low key and naturally sexy.Sweet and approachable, people are attracted to your upbeat attitude.And even when life doesn't go your way, you always eventually turn things around.

http://ynr.blogthings.com/areyoumorelikejenniferorangelinaquiz/">Are You More Like Jennifer or Angelina?

poem for the week

War and Peace by Pablo Picasso

********************



The Novel

All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and
Peace
Prince Andrei's cold eyes taking in the sky from the battlefield
were your eyes, you went walking wrapped in his wound
like a padded coat against the winds from the two rivers
You went walking in the streets as if you were ordinary
as if you hadn't been pulling with your raw mittened hand
on the slight strand that held your tattered mind
blown like an old stocking from a wire
on the wind between two rivers.
All winter you asked nothing
of that book though it lay heavy on your knees
you asked only for a shed skin, many skins in which to walk
you were old woman, child, commander
you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing
you felt the pages thickening to the left and on the right-
hand growing few, you knew the end was coming
you knew beyond the ending lay
your own, unwritten life

1986

--Adrienne Rich , Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988

snowing, again

BELIZE: [....] Oh cheer up Louis. Look at that heavy sky out there.

LOUIS: Purple.

BELIZE: Purple? Boy, what kind of homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is (Very grand) mauve. All day it's felt like Thanksgiving. Soon, this...ruination will be blanketed white. You can smell it--can you smell it?

LOUIS: Smell what?

BELIZE: Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.

LOUIS: No...

BELIZE: I can't help you learn that. I can't help you, Louis.
You're not my business. (He exits)

Tony Kushner, Angels in America Part One: Millenium Approaches, Act III, Scene II.

well, it is snowing again today, but the flakes are fluffy and they sort of look like delicate, white butterflies or fairies flying around in some suspended animation. there is a little bit of wind but considering that it is not below 10 degrees with a windchill of -25 to -30 below zero, i am not complaining. I am re-reading tony kushner's two part play angels in america because i will be teaching it after spring break. i really like the image that the character belize uses in describing snow...soft, compliant, filled with grace and forgiveness. it falls upon the ruination of tragedy and memories...it has a static song. i love listening to the sound of snow falling. you have to be in a place that is almost entirely free of noise...even traffic rumble. if you are quiet...and i mean the type of quietness that lets you listen to gentle pumping of your heart you can hear the snow as it falls to the ground. it sounds like gentle static...like the white noise on a radio that is turned down really, really low. to hear this music you have to become contemplative...to stop moving, to control your breath. it's very calming for me, this snowy music....it coats everything in a softness that is crisp and gentle. it is like forgiveness or grace or love...softly falling whether we want it to or not. it hides tragedy but does not get rid of it...it softly changes the landscape...let's us create new meaning out of old ruins; a new territory in the same place.

in heaven, i'm in heaven

one of the most awe inspiring events to date...angela davis and me. i was so nervous that i could hardly even speak to her. thank you lauren for taking the picture and sending it to me!

the persistence of narration

I used to be lunatic
From the gracious days
I used to be woebegone
And so restless nights
My aching heart would bleed
For you to see
Oh but now...(I dont find myself bouncing home whistling Buttonhole tunes to make me cry)
No more I love yous
The language is leaving me
No more I love yous
The language is leaving me in silence
Changes are shifting outside the word

--Annie Lennox




this isn't sophistry, a plea for understanding, or even voice. recently, i have had contact with a past love. actually he was my first love. i have known him since the 8th grade. i have been narrating him for so long and hard in an attempt to write him out of my life that i have inadvertently stitched him into my being. a psychic tattoo that i try to rub off...but my efforts only seem to create and recreate more words, more narration, more dark circles of melancholy sutured to memories of the past that somehow follow me into my future... skipping ahead of me, even. and i follow like some stupidly naive puppy. i know better. i should know better. i can recognize this for what it is but still it does not stop me from continuously, somehow, loving him. my heart is rooted in this soil. my brain is somehow disconnected from the rest of my body....it tells my body one thing but my body doesn't listen. i use the tools available to me. i use anti-depressants, i use sex and other significant relationships, i use kristeva, i use butler, i use derrida, i even use foucault (although he could care less) and on occasion i have even used the/a goddess but still my heart's roots insist upon this anchoring that is terrible and mean.
i do not like this kind of love. i do not wish to narrate it anymore. it is obsessive and cruel. it clothes itself in an unrequited-ness, always incomplete yet circular and mimetic. i have always been caught within this web. it is a disappointing love that you get used to...which in its incompleteness creates a different kind of disappointment....not new, or easy but instead a disappointment of a much deeper kind. this love reflects back to me and also reflects itself within my other relationships. it is jealous and difficult; this love is dark red and it flows still. i do not want this love anymore but there is a resignation that is stained by its flowing. this love is one sided and it has really nothing to do with him and, at the same time everything to do with him. it casts a deep shadow that is mingled with nostalgia and memories that i try to name and make real so that i can exorcise them from myself, to cast them away, to abject them..but yet they still remain unnameable, solid, and insistent. a boomerang that i throw away from myself but returns, always. i see this love in my other relationships. i try to stop it but the same scenario announces itself clothed in the same nuances that i can recognize...that i am alone and waiting, in the dark, for this love to return. this love leaves me tired and broken, it sabotages my other relationships so that i am solitary; this love is not for sharing, it is "thick" and suffocating. how do you rewrite that? this isn't just an object, lost or otherwise, but the nature of the object...it's physics...how do you renarrate that? how do you rewrite a law? when the boomerang completes its circle how do i not occupy the space of its destination? i have never had the chance to start over.