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.

poem for the week

Daybreak in Alabama

When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall tress in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

--Langston Hughes

for obvious reaons, this poem reminded me of devon :-)

early sunday thoughts on chuck norris....

i cannot claim this bit of genius for myself...it comes from my friend courteney.

Chuck Norris Facts:

When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.

Outer space exists because it's afraid to be on the same planet with Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.

Chuck Norris is the reason why Waldo is hiding.

Chuck Norris counted to infinity - twice.

There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.

When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.

Chuck Norris is so fast, he can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head.

Chuck Norris’ hand is the only hand that can beat a Royal Flush. (side note: i don't get this one...)

There is no such thing as global warming. Chuck Norris was cold, so he turned the sun up.

Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink.

Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch, HE decides what time it is.

Chuck Norris gave Mona Lisa that smile. (another side note...ewww)

Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

Chuck Norris does not get frostbite. Chuck Norris bites frost.

Remember the Soviet Union? They decided to quit after watching a DeltaForce marathon on Satellite TV.

Contrary to popular belief, America is not a democracy, it is a Chucktatorship.

cold, snow, rain, hail, sleet, wind...

i am really starting to hate february

i have a new crush....

on a cultural geographer by the name of Yi-Fu Tuan. Thanks to Devon and Dr. Justice, I am now reading about cultural geography and the intersections that this concept shares with space, place, time, and narrative/narrativity. it is interesting for me to see the ways in which queerness is negotiated through shifting territories and the relationship that this theoretical position, in turn, discursively shares with temporality, space, place(ment), the role, or work, of boundaries, and the complex choreography that these concepts share not only with a process of bodily inscription but of embodiment. this all started with dr. kim's newberry library lecture series that i am taking this semester. in this seminar i am looking at the concepts of strange territories and monstrosity (read queer[ness]) and how they are constructed and (con)textualized within an anonymous anglo saxon text: the wonders of the east. not only is dr. kim letting me write about that text but i am analyzing it against (or with) the more contemporary novel lolita by nabokov. it seems like an over the top project for a short ten page paper but maybe i can get a good working outline going in hopes of a diss chapter....one can only hope (or pray).

gender outlaw is gender trouble

i had my gender in the humanities class read kate bornstein's gender outlaw this week and i'm kind of stumped. on one hand i really like this text because it is the first major text written by a transsexual person and she really does go into great detail about what transsexual and transgender issues really involve. i like this text because it assertively puts on the table issues of naming and the male/female binary...the emotional and psychological investments that we have in this binary and the consequences of transgressing the codes of identity that this said binary deploys. however, maybe it's too much of one thing....what i mean by this is that she really focuses on the transgender body as a site of queerness and silence in such a concerted way that other connections that could be made are not even addressed. i'm thinking here of issues involving race and socioeconomic positions. Bornstein is white and she was a male. she really does go into deep discussion over the problem of male privilege but does not identify its relationship to white male privilege. she discusses the implications and the issues of the ways in which the lesbian and gay communities oppresses transgendered/transsexual bodies but again intersections of race and socioeconomic positions are not really addressed. or if they are it is minimal. her discussion of male/female power relationship conflates this dynamic with class conflict....and i find this extremely un-nuanced and problematic. my class also had some trouble with this text as well. however, i must admit their criticisms were all very constructive and i didn't get closed-minded polemical garbage but i fear that my own trepidation regarding the text seeped into my teaching of the text and i am paranoid that my students went away with a somewhat skewed notion of what this text was really about (of course, can we ever determine what any text is ever about?). which is to say, i think that i might have been misread by my students. now nothing happened in class to give me this idea...i guess i'm just a little paranoid...which is something for me to look at a little bit more closely now that i think about it.

poem for the week

Asking for a Heart Attack

Aretha. Deep buter dipt, burnt pot liquor, twisted sugar cane,
Vaselined knock knees clacking extraordinary gospel.
hustling toward the promised land in 4/4 time, Aretha.
Greased and glowing awash in limelight, satisfied moan
'neath the spotlight, turning ample ass toward midnight,
she the it's-all-good goddess of warm cornbread
and bumped buttermilk, know jesus by his first name.
carried his gospel low and democratic in rollicking brownships,
sang His drooping corpse down from that ragged wooden T,
dressed Him up in something shiny, conked that Holy head of hair,
then Aretha rustled up bus fare and took the deity downtown.
They coaxed the DJ and slid electric untill the lights slammed on,
she taught Him dirty nicknames for His father's handiwork.
She was young then, thin and aching, her heartbox shut tight.
So Jesus blessed her, He opened her throat and taught her
to wail that way she do, she do wail that way don't she
do that wail the way she do wail that way, don't she?
Now every time 'retha unreel that screech, sang Delta
cut through hurting to glimpse been-done-wrong bone,
a born-again brother called the Holy Ghost creeps through that.
and that, for all you still lookin', is religion.

Dare you question her several shoulders, the soft stairsteps
of flesh leading to her shaking chins, the steel bones
of a corseted frock eating into bubbling sides,zipper track etched into skin,
all those faint scars,
those lovesore battle wounds?
Ain't your mama never told you
how black women collect the world,
build other bodies onto their own?
No earthly man knows the solution to our hips,
asses urgent as sirens,
titties familiar as everybody's mama
crisscrossed with pulled roads of blood.
Ask us why we pray with our dancin' shoes on, why we
grow fat away from everyone and toward each other.

© Patricia Smith. Online Source

This is also an insteresting websource

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets.htm

ok...kind of creepy

so my mother is really into genealogy...which is cool and sometimes i will do research on the computer to help her out. well, slow night and not feeling like doing a ton of work for school i decided to "look" around as it were. now my family is from the columbus, ohio area and many of my deceased relatives are buried in one graveyard...which makes it kind of easy when one is trying to locate names but also kind of creepy as well because you are literally surrounded by dead loved ones. the cemetery where many of my relatives are buried is called "silent home" which i guess is an appropriate name since the occupants no longer talk...or move...or whatever. well i came across a website that #1) lets the reader know that it is not associated with the cemetery and #2) documents the occupants of this said cemetery by taking pictures of their gravestones. well my grandfather's gravestone is among the group of pictures and since i share his name...well let's just say it's kind of creepy to see your name on a gravestone.....





so yeah, like i said...kind of creepy

boston bound

well, dev and i are going to boston to read our respective papers for the national convention for the american culture/pop culture association. i have never been to boston before so i'm excited more for the new city experience than the reading of a paper. i actually have to go back to boston a month later to read another paper for the american literature association as well so i'm really going to get to see this town. but for now aca/pca is first...the plane tickets have been purchased and the hotel room has been reserved...now about that paper...

two excerpts from Kushner's _Angels' in America: Part Two Perestroika_

HANNAH (speaking to Harper): At first it can be very difficult to accept how disappointing life is, Harper, because that's what it is and you have to accept it. With faith and time and hard work you reach a point...where the disappointment doesn't hurt so much, and then it gets actually easy to live with. Quite easy. Which is in its own way a disappointment. But. There.

Act III; Scene I

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

HARPER: [....] Was it a hard thing crossing the prairies?

MORMON MOTHER: You ain't stupid. So don't ask stupid. Ask something for real.

HARPER (a beat, then): In your experience of the world. How do people change?

MORMON MOTHER: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges as filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.

HARPER: And then get up. And walk around.

MORMON MOTHER: Just mangled guts pretending.

HARPER: That's how people change.

ACT III; Scene VI

"No love.....or the other thing" a poem....for (anti)valentine's day

excerpt from Mina Loy's poem "Love Songs to Joannes"

Spawn of Fantasies
Sitting the appraisable
Pig Cupid
His rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed
White star-topped
Among the wild oats
Sown in mucous-membrane

I would
An eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a skyrocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva

There are..........suspect places

I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal........to the bellows
Of experience

................Coloured glass

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

The skin-sack
In which a wanton duality
Packed
All the completions
Of my infructuous impulses
Something the shape of a man
To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant
More of a clock-work mechanism
Running down against time
To which I am not paced

My fingertips are numb
from fretting your hair
A God's doormat
On the threshold of your mind

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

We might have coupled
In the bedridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings

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

...

And Time would be set back


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

The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching---

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

I am the jealous storehouse of the candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning

Behind God's eyes
There might
Be other lights

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

Dear one..........at your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colourless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
........remaining
A disheartening odor
About your nervy hands

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

Today
Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible
To you
I bring the nascent virginity of
--Myself--for the moment

No love......or the other thing
Only the impact of lighted bodies
Knocking sparks off each other
In chaos

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

Seldom......Trying for love
Fantasy dealt them out gods
Two or three men......looked only human
But you alone
Superhuman......apparently
I had to be caught in the weak eddy
Of your drivelling humanity
...............To love you most

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

We might have lived together
In the lights of the Arno
Or gone apple stealing under the sea
Or played
Hide and seek in love and cobwebs
And a lullaby on a tin pan

An talked till there were no more tongues
To talk with
And never have known any better

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

I don't care
Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to
Or What is hidden in the shadows they stride
Or what would look at me
If the shutters were not shut

Red.....a warm colour on the battlefield
Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
Count counter
I counted......the fringe of the the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away
From a round vacuum
Dilating with my breath

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

Let Joy solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern

********************
Green things grow
Salads

For the cerebral
Forager's revival

Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
And flowered flummery
Breaks
To my silly shoes

In ways without you
I go
Gracelessly
As things go

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

Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes
We sidle up
To Nature
.........that irate pornographist

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

The prig of passion
To your professorial paucity

Protoplasm was raving mad
Evolving us

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

Love----the preeminent litterateur

grade inflation?

i recently came across a syllabus by a phd student instructor who put a clause in his/her syllabus regarding "grade inflation". basically this person was telling her/his students that because there is a "problem" within the academy today regarding the easiness of getting an "a" in a course s/he will be grading the class "strictly", i.e. don't expect an "a" in this course. i find this disturbing because it seems as if these students are being punished because of a systemic problem within the academy that has nothing to do with them...a problem that i personally don't see as concrete or material but more or less self congratulatory on the behalf of the instructor for teaching a "tough" class...but that's just me. in no way am i saying that we should just give out "a"s to students just for showing up or for any other such reason that maybe considered "non rigorous" by current traditional standards but why is grade inflation these students' problem? why does this instructor feel the need to couch her/his terms in this manner in order to justify their own strict approach to grading and thus shoring up the already problematic issue of static abstractions?....just grade them...isn't that a power dynamic enough to deal with without adding to the ethos of an already existing position? it's hard enough getting the students to actually read and engage with the learning process. i find useless power plays regarding strict grading as somehow more academically rigorous than an "easy" class absurd. it also takes away from actual teaching (which may be the point). as you can tell i hate grading in general...it is a commodity that the students expect to get (because they have issues of entitlement which are extremely problematic) but it is also a commodity that instructor's tend to think that they can possess and distribute through insane power plays that surface in language that, in turn, attaches itself to academic performance and, inevitably, intelligence. i read such rhetoric as an instructor assuming the gatekeeper position not only in the classroom but also in the academy (a position that is also a static abstraction) and thus telling the students from the very beginning of the term that they actually are 1) assuming that they are getting an "a" (which many are not) and 2) because of that assumption or presumption they will not get the desired "a" because they're not serious students anyway and that they don't belong in the academy. i guess i'm more concerned with my students actually learning something rather than trying to figure out how they need to manipulate a power dynamic in which they will get an "a". it all becomes about getting SOMETHING from the instructor and this "SOMETHING" has nothing to do with learning at all but rather getting the first letter of the alphabet and its corresponding points tallied and printed on their transcript.

PS: don't even get me started on plagarism statements!

snow day

wow, what a winter...the snow is coming down really fast and isu is closed again...the second time this new year....hmmmm what to do with the time that i have? procrastinate with yahoo crossword puzzles of course!!!

the best day so far in 2007

when i woke up on sunday morning and was contemplating my day over cigs, coffee, writing a blog post, and a yahoo crossword puzzle i had no idea my day would end the way that it did. after my morning rituals of procrastination i gathered up my various stuff and proceeded to the brand new coffee hound in downtown normal to study and read with stefanie. when i first walked in i saw dr. tolson and lauren reading and working. getting my coffee and setting my various bags and coats down i went over to where dr t. and lauren were sitting. it was at that point when dr. t. asked me if i was going to go hear angela davis' talk at iwu later on in the evening. it was as if i was struck over the head by a 2x4....what did she mean angela davis' talk? sure enough angela davis was in town....i did not even know...i felt my heart beating really fast and my palms immediately became sweaty. it was at this point lauren looks up at me and says that she not only has an extra ticket for the talk but also the ticked involved dinner as well...with angela davis...and she asked me if i wanted to go. i just looked at her for a couple of seconds and said "hmmmm...let me think about that YES" so two hours later i was sitting at a table between lauren and dr. t. looking directly at the gloriousness that is angela davis.
angela davis is the quintessential scholar for me...not only is she an icon for everything that i believe in but she is also history that walks and talks...a history that we are living and breathing...a history that is stunningly profound and yet is still alive and doing important work. for me angela davis demonstrates the important intersection between theory and practice. she is also a teacher...i am looking at a woman who influences todays innovative thinkers...chela sandoval and laura hun ye kang...i don't only look to her but i also look to her students.
her talk was phenomenal. she briefly talked about her reseach and intellectual investments in various critiques of the prison system in the united states but she spent a lot of time talking about the discursive formation of racism in united states culture. she spent time talking about meaning and language....what does "racial justice" mean...let's rhetorically analyze the construction of the emancipation proclamation and the 13th amendment...what are these documents actually saying and how have they inscribed themselves upon the consciousness of the culture in the united states. just how was (and is) the institution of slavery conceptualized....as the abolishment of compulsory labor? racism and xenophobia? or have we become blind to the work of racism through this language...how is race lived? where does racism discursively live and do its work? critiques on and the movement to rid the legal system of affirmative action as one way to illuminate the ways in which racism is still living today and doing its work was talked about by davis. the disappearance of affirmative action is no less a perpetuation of civil death...the work of affirmative action to empower subjugated communities has been superseded to focus on the individual and, indeed, propagate a civil death...to silence...to stop history...to make it conform to white male supremacy. it is all done with certainty...the discursive relationship between racism and certainty, davis reminded us, creates a logic that "ceases to announce itself" and that "hides in the grammar" that forms our very subjectivity negotiations between us (or our selves) and the world/culture.

i have three pages of notes...this was the best day of 2007 yet.

i never knew 21 degrees to feel SO WARM

your eyes are not deceiving you....a cheerleader lamp that you can buy on justtoocute.com! supplies are limited so get it while it's available.


it is really kind of crazy in a psychotic kind of way...but it's 21 degrees outside now and i can feel it. there is a big difference between say 3 degrees (with a wind chill of about -20) and 21 degrees above zero....i have become a cheerleader...jumping up and down with my arms and legs frantically moving and pompoms dangling from my wrists..."come on weather...you can do it...this cold is getting really old"

i'm going to start writing again...i promise...well maybe

ok so here i go again...took a little hiatus but now i'm back...well sort of.
i'm in the last year of my 30s and it's kind of freaking me out...i don't feel like i'm going to have a midlife crisis but one never knows. i do know that things start changing...the landscape becomes some how wider in scope i can look behind me and see somewhat of a trail...littered with bits and pieces of memories and of selves that i have either purposefully discarded or have accidentally lost along the way. landscapes are funny...they shift now more than ever or perhaps they always have but i was just unable to see or not able to notice...time also constructs itself differently...more fluid perhaps or maybe it is horizontal instead of vertical...a change in linearity...changes that i have never noticed before but now i'm noticing. i can't believe that i'm starting a new phase in my studies...i'm teaching my internship and i'm trying to figure things out. at the same time things that i thought were important seem trite and weary now....visions of significant others are losing their contours and shapes...becoming phantoms that lurk somewhere in the dark corner of my mind... do i want them to materialize or not? the flesh is willing but my mind tells me otherwise. i don't feel connected...arms outstretched in a kind of suspended animation...akimbo. friendships define and redefine themselves daily...subjectivity negotiation is difficult...nothing and i do mean nothing is stable...but then again has it ever been? maybe i'm waking up to myself or maybe i'm drifting closer to some psychic coma or psychic comma...being only half of a semicolon...and i don't realize it...maybe realization is impossible.

grumpy not so much....

modesty forbids me from elaborating anymore than this....

still grumpy but feeling a little better

well, i was walking around stv with, i'm sure, a very sour look on my face....some would even call it a smirk or scowl....until one of my former students ran up to me with a camera and took my picture. of course i had to fake a smile but nevertheless i played along. well i got an e-mail from her today...i've been added to her facebook? as a friend. it's kind of a nice feeling, kind of disconcerting...my face on someone's web page...but oh well...struggle on. i haven't seen this because i don't have an account...don't know if i really want one...this blogs hard enough to keep up with.

what a day

well, i must say that this is turning out to be one hell of a day for various reasons.
1) sick most of the weekend
2) really, really, really, not feeling comfortable with my body or image
3) my class (that i teach) seemed more than quiet today...and for some reason their silence bugged me to no end...trying to tell myself that this is not a reflection of me but that conversation with myself isn't getting anywhere
4) talked to my mother...she has a case of the shingles ON HER HEAD
5) my father's pissed that he didn't get my card i sent him for his birthday
6) both my mother and father are not very happy with me right now because i haven't been home since xmas 2005
7) feeling terrible about myself because I DONOT particularly want to go home right now and that really bugs me...no sense of place whatsoever (this can probably be related back to the body image thing...i don't feel comfortable in any place)
8) i have wonderful people around me up here who care deeply and i am lucky to have them in my life (you know who you are) and i would be in very sad shape without them but i still feel incredibly sad. btw: the random "christian" reader who stumbles upon this blog entry...please don't comment about how jesus is the way, blah, blah, blah...because HE isn't any way and i hold his church responsible for alot of this rant...so don't waste your time with a comment cuz i'll just delete it without reading past the first sentence (wow can that sentence be any longer?)
9) feeling kind of guilty about crying in my beer but sometimes the violins make the most excellent music and for anyone who thinks they are above this kind of self talk...well what can i say, i guess i'm not strong enough and you are...congratulations.
10) my apartment is still a mess and i'm sick of living in my own abjectness but i just can't seem to do anything about it right now...i'm not the person that i once was...not that that was an improvement but it was better than what i'm living now.
11) today i just want to disappear

poem for the week: on voice or the lack thereof

The Little Mute Boy

by Federico García Lorca
Translated by W. S. Merwin


The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger

In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice, far away,
put on a cricket's clothes.)




From The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, by Federico García Lorca, translated by W.S. Merwin, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1955 by W.S. Merwin.

poem for the week

For the young who want to

by Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

william cook...whoever you are...you rock!

so, in my never ending quest to find new ways to procrastinate i found myself going through customer reviews of products on amazon.com. this adventure, as it were, led me to reviews of tony kushner's play made into an hbo movie: "angles in america." many of the reviews were really good and a lot of the criticisms seemed to me resonable. however, there are some insane people out there who wrote some pretty scary stuff. how can you rent (or worse, buy) a movie simply based on the cover...watch it over and over and then write a review saying that you wanted to puke? or complain the you were fooled by the cover and thought that it was about "angels"? the depth of humanity's utter stupidity amazes me sometimes (strike that..all of the time).
However, i did fine one comment in particular so great that i had to post it.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

It's Just a Title, June 8, 2006
Reviewer: William Cook (Cleveland, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews

Reading these reviews, I was surprised by a number of the comments but most of all by those that rented/bought this movie believing it was somehow about "angels" and then had the nerve to complain that they didn't know what it was about or that there were no angels in the movie.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer some advice to those that may inadvertently rent/buy other movies:

There are no Cuckoo birds and no nests in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
There is no obvious wind in Gone With the Wind and what there was didn't blow anything away
There are few, if any, good fellas in Goodfellas
There are no lambs in Silence of the Lambs
Chinatown isn't set in a town in China
There is neither $1,000,000 nor a baby in Million Dollar Baby
You guessed it, no bulls in Raging Bull
The coats are made of denim or some such material in Full Metal Jacket
Paul Newman's body temperature is about 98.6 degrees just like the rest of us in Cool Hand Luke
There is little, if any, sleeping in The Big Sleep
The prison hallway is only a few feet long in The Green Mile
The African Queen is not about a gay black man
No waterfowl were hurt in the making of Duck Soup
The earth rotated as usual on the Day the Earth Stood Still
There are actually multiple conversations in The Conversation
The raunchy men's magazine does not appear in The Hustler
Nobody inherited the wind in Inherit the Wind. It still belongs to all of us
There is no discernible odor while watching The Sweet Smell of Success
All the President's Men is only about *some* of the president's men

I hope that some will find these simple reminders useful. If not, you may want to consider looking at the back of a DVD case, visiting your local library or going to one of the thousands of web sites that talk about every movie ever made.

As for this film, if you're not frightened by things that might be different than what you've experienced or that perhaps strike too close to home, and don't spend your time judging how everyone else lives, then there is much to love about this work. It may not be perfect, and there can be many legitimate gripes about it, but overall it's very, very good. Scan through the positive reviews here and you'll get a good sense of it. No need for me to repeat it all here. Unfortunately, most (but not all) of the negative reviews are just those with some sort of political/religious agenda to put forth instead of commenting on the film.

william cook...you rock!

"Nothing is lost forever"

Harper Pitt: I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.

Angels in America
Tony Kushner

thoughts while in my composition seminar.....

I had to read these articles for class and "journal" them...what a better place to work all of this information out than right here on this blog...for better or for worse.

Janice M. Lauer, “Graduate Students as Active Members of the Profession”
Robert Boice, “Work Habits of Productive Scholarly Writers”
Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin, “Gatekeeping at an Academic Convention”
Deborah Mutnick, “Time and Space in Composition Studies: ‘Through the Gates of the Chronotope’”

I read the articles in the order that they are listed above. The first three worked well together while I conceptualized the Mutnick piece as an elaboration or discursive outgrowth of the Berkenkotter and Huckin article. The tenor of the first three articles centered on writing and its various processes in regard to publishing while the fourth articles proved to be an effective, if not extremely compelling, example. I definitely felt that I was the audience for these readings. As such, I also became keenly aware of that old and familiar tension creeping up into my chest. I have a tenuous relationship with writing because whether it is “academic” or personal it reflects part or parts of my subjectivity/subjectivities. In short, I am always writing myself into any text that I am working on/with.
I thought that Lauer's article pointed to the crux of the problem when she describes the notional space of being a student and attempting to publish. She disrupts the “publish or perish” claim that haunts many graduate students' nightmares by positing other ways to conceptualize what constitutes our developing professionalism and the extrinsic and intrinsic pressures that accompany this rhetorical situation. I myself have been told on countless occasions to fashion my scholarship to fit a particular academic discourse community. I have been told to “be a player” and to “network.” I have found that this does not necessarily work well for me or for friendships. Indeed, I understand the value of dialogue and of the valuable work that can be accomplished in contributing to a conversation and “being” part of a community. But the question that I ask is to what cost? To be more specific, how much does one have to tailor or, better yet, camouflage particular aspects of how her/his personality, clothes, academic work, etcetera in order to survive? I would like to know just how “necessary” this is and what are the costs?
Lauer gives no answers, she simply posits more questions. I can appreciate this because I don't think that there are any concrete answers to gravitate toward when it comes to how one negotiates her/his self as an aspiring scholar and professor. To be a player and to network raises red flags for me that point out the potentiality of a rhetorical violence. This violence, while on the level of language, is extremely damaging, indeed. I have seen too many graduate students involve themselves in this “proactive” behavior that fosters a competitive spirit which inhibits supportive and collaborative networks. Consequently, to be a player and to network means to isolate yourself as a struggling academic while at the same time comparing your successes to others' failures. It is for this reason that I found Lauer's discussion on an “ethics of care” (234) to be comforting and, at the same time, challenging. I like this concept because it disrupts a negative environment that stultifies collaborative work at the expense of individual achievement. Lauer asks “[i]s an ethics of care possible, probable, practical, especially for our students who strain to position themselves in the field?” (235). I do not know the answer to this question and, I suspect, no one else does either.
Although I have some methodological issues with Robert Boice's article I found his psychological research on scholarly writers interesting if not compelling nonetheless. I was heavily trained during my undergraduate training as a music therapist in the area of behavioral psychology. The field of behavioral psychology is useful and in many academic circles valuable in the acquisition of monies for various programs. However, the work of behavioral science, like almost all other sciences, establishes a self imposed importance through empiric observation. When being trained as a counselor at Florida State University, I was always told: “If you didn't see it [meaning a certain type of behavior] and document it then it didn't happen.” This practice ossified in my young mind the privileging of materiality and its relationship to writing and its processes. This is not to say that I disagree with Boice's research or his approach per se but I do wonder if writers and writing processes for that matter can be observed and categorized so easily.
My writing process is always changing that is why it was hard for me to “place” myself under the various rubrics in Boice's article. For the most part writing, is excruciatingly difficult but not in the sense of a writer's block. Rather, I have all of these ideas swimming around in my head like little fishes and when I attempt to grab them they just slip out of my grasp...schooling in some dark corner of my mind. I'm also completely astounded at the amount of knowledge that I do not know and that I probably, when all is said and done, cannot know. Consequently, I become overwhelmed. I read texts and I ask myself: “what can I possibly contribute to any conversation?” Nevertheless, I have a few questions about Boice's article: Why is passive always negative? Why is active seen as the exemplar? I do appreciate Boice's attempt to disrupt the binary between passive and active by distinguishing active and passive waiting. I see this as an attempt to make a conceptual change on the level of language (217-18). However, this type of approach still creates binaries. I find myself occupying all and, paradoxically, none of the categories that Boice outlines in his article.
One of the more compelling pieces to Boice's argument is his approach to emotion and writing. It is at this point in the article where he combines behavioral and cognitive approaches in his research (212). Boice tells “blocked” writers to start writing before she/he “feels” like writing or “before feeling ready to write” (220). He suggests that we make writing a habit. “The most reliable motivation comes in the wake of regular involvement in writing, not in advance of it” (220). I think that this point of entry is most important. For me, writing as habit detours the other concepts of waiting that enfold active or passive approaches. I also found his concept of “stopping” to be most valuable indeed. I remember when I was writing my master's thesis. I was working forty hours a week and I was taking a night class. I would get up at 5:00 a.m. and write until 7:30 a.m. In the evenings, I would read and prepare. In essence, I established a writing habit that Boice describes and I found it highly productive. However, I have changed since enrolling in a Ph.D. program full time. I have found myself caught between active and passive approaches to writing and my sense of self has been disrupted to the extent that I cannot find a “writerly” self to engage with in the actual process of writing. Hence, this is what I mean earlier when I stated that I could not find myself in Boice's article.
Berkenkotter's and Huckin's article reminded me of the arbitrariness of the academy. I thought that it was insightful because what counts as an “excellent” CCCC's paper presentation abstract depends upon who is in power. This is where Mutnick's article became most compelling for me, since her article was, in it's earlier stages, a CCCC's presentation paper. I just kept coming back to the same conclusion as I read these last articles. The academy through a language system can be tenuous and rhetorically violent. Bodies that move within the academy's purview are constantly under pressure to fulfill the terms of what it means to be not only a scholar but a viable contributor to the conversations that shape the emerging field of rhetoric and composition. Must then writing and, more specifically, subjectivity formation through writing (and publishing) be dialectical and seemingly violent? I think that each of the authors of the articles that are represented here are grappling with how to detour the inscribed ways in which current traditional ideologies have come to define the academy. I would hope that the current will change.

poem for the week

Coping

by Audre Lorde

It has rained for five days
running
the world is
a round puddle
of sunless water
where small islands
are only beginning
to cope
a young boy
in my garden
is bailing out water
from his flower patch
when I ask him why
he tells me
young seeds that have not seen sun
forget
and drown easily.

poem for the week

The Weakness
by Toi Derricotte


That time my grandmother dragged me
through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up
by my arm, hissing, "Stand up,"
through clenched teeth, her eyes
bright as a dog's
cornered in the light.
She said it over and over,
as if she were Jesus,
and I were dead. She had been
solid as a tree,
a fur around her neck, a
light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked
on swirling
marble and passed through
brass openings--in 1945.
There was not even a black
elevator operator at Saks.
The saleswoman had brought velvet
leggings to lace me in, and cooed,
as if in service of all grandmothers.
My grandmother had smiled, but not
hungrily, not like my mother
who hated them, but wanted to please,
and they had smiled back, as if
they were wearing wooden collars.
When my legs gave out, my grandmother
dragged me up and held me like God
holds saints by the
roots of the hair. I begged her
to believe I couldn't help it. Stumbling,
her face white
with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing
away from those eyes
that saw through
her clothes, under
her skin, all the way down
to the transparent
genes confessing.




From Captivity by Toi Derricotte, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Copyright © 1989 Toi Derricotte.

poem for the week

it seems that i am always attempting to "clean" up my life...cluttered and disorganized...i sometimes imagine what it would be like if i were "together." in any event, this is an ongoing process with me and one that i will probably never master...or want to for that matter. however, in this latest spurt to organize i have been attempting to file away papers, etc. in the really nice filing cabinet that i have. until now, it has stood next to my desk, empty. this leads me to the poem of the week. i found my poetry books and i was reading through them. i used to write poetry and short fiction all of the time but since i have been in graduate school i just haven't felt the interest...not that i think my poetry/writing is any good...quite the opposite but for nostalgic reasons i think that i will put up a poem that i wrote way back in 1993...wow, at the tender age of 25. here it goes...

applying for heterosexual status

"when the applicant comes in

make sure that he is properly dressed
absolutely no purple or pink...anywhere.

make sure he understands that
picking flowers is no longer an option
anymore and neither is holding or hugging
anyone except for the occasional girlfriend
or wife (and even then use discretion).

make sure he deepens his voice...
facial hair would be nice and advise
him to rape a woman (mentally or
physically) if he is certain that he can get
away with it.

make sure that he holds a job that
requires him to wear a suite,
construction clothes, or at least
a tie.

make sure that he does not lisp.

make sure he understands that truly
caring for anything should be avoided at all costs
and if, by chance, he does, order him
to kill it. Speaking of death, encourage
him to join the military or the NRA...it's manly
enough and very patriotic.

make sure he eats a lot of meat.
hunting and killing defenseless
life-forms should also be considered
an appropriate hobby to pursue...and/or golf.
populate, populate, populate, populate
this world and by all means express
to him the importance of setting an
example for future generations."

oaw (12/29/93)

i should've added something about church or religion...i think the populate, populate sentence does this but i can't remember what i had in mind. i don't know what prompted me to write this...i think i was fed up with "straight acting" white gay men.
also, if i were to revise this i would add something to the effect:
"make sure he incorporates the conjunction 'but'
it's a useful word because he will be able to qualify any
misogynist, racist, and/or homophobic utterance that he wants
to relay...for example:'let me say that i am a pro-feminist male but...blah blah blah." or
'i'm all for letting people live and let live but...blah, blah, blah."
'i've written and edited books on sexism and homophobia but...blah, blah, blah."

poem for the week: abjectness or something like it

A Reason for Moving
by Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving
I move to keep things whole.

re: the gay games

ok, i know that the gay games are over in chicago but i'm thinking next year....i am really, really, really good at "beetle bomp" on yahoo games and i'm wondering if i should start a letter writing campaign to see if i could get this "sport" listed on the agenda because, quite honestly, i could get the gold.

meme

dev tagged me to do this meme, so here it is:


1. One book that changed your life:
Toni Morrison's Beloved

2. One book that you've read more than once:
Toni Morrison's Beloved

3. One book you'd want on a desert island:
Harry Potter books! and Beloved

4. One book that made you laugh:
compilations of Gary Larson's The Far Side cartoons

5. One book that made you cry:
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

6. One book that you wish had been written:
one more book by Audre Lorde

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
Adolf Hitler's Mien Kampf

8. One book you're currently reading:
Moby Dick

9. One book you've been meaning to read:
Julia Kristeva's Black Sun

10. People you are tagging to do this meme.
Anyone else who wants to do this.

a compliment to dev's poem of the week :-)

You Begin
by Margaret Atwood

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

song/poem/lyrics for the week

this is an attempt to define my stance on religion as per a recent post and comment earlier today (please see below) that lead me to listen to some xtc. here's the lyrics to "dear god"; very apt words in today's world...

Dear god,
Hope you got the letter,
And I pray you can make it better down here.
I dont mean a big reduction in the price of beer,
But all the people that you made in your image,
See them starving on their feet,
cause they dont get enough to eat

From god,
I cant believe in you.

Dear god,
Sorry to disturb you,
But I feel that I should be heard loud and clear.
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears,
And all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street,
cause they cant make opinions meet,
About god,
I cant believe in you.

Did you make disease, and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too!

Dear god,
Dont know if you noticed,
But your name is on a lot of quotes in this book.
Us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look,
And all the people that you made in your image,
Still believing that junk is true.
Well I know it aint and so do you,
Dear god,
I cant believe in,
I dont believe in,

I wont believe in heaven and hell.
No saints, no sinners,
No devil as well.
No pearly gates, no thorny crown.
Youre always letting us humans down.
The wars you bring, the babes you drown.
Those lost at sea and never found,
And its the same the whole world round.
The hurt I see helps to compound,
That the father, son and holy ghost,
Is just somebodys unholy hoax,
And if youre up there youll perceive,
That my hearts here upon my sleeve.
If theres one thing I dont believe in...

Its you,
Dear god.




now, what are we critiquing here? the notion of god that we have constructed in language and deployed through ideology or something else, beyond language. my guess is that it's the first and not the second.

how does one write one's life?

"Every three years I discover again
that No I knew nothing before.
Everthing must be dragged out,
looked over again, The unexamined life
is the lie, but still
must I every time deny
everything I knew before?"

Dorothy Allison, "The Women Who Hate Me."





i have been proofing a narrative project for dev and it's really stunning. she does a really good job in attempting to capture the essence or shall i say essences of her life. how we come to know ourselves as subjects is an enigma to me. as i was reading dev's narrative i was putting myself in the place of the author. how would i write my life...to me it seems like a psychic version of cleaning my apartment...overwhelming. hopefully one day, i will have the chance to try but right now i wouldn't know where to begin.
i know from experience that many gay/lesbian/queer/transgender/transsexual persons start with coming to terms with identity. to be sure, coming out stories are a really good place to begin because it seems that seeing at least through what appears to be dissonance is key to rooting oneself in "place" even if this "place" is extremely mobile or transient.
i thought to myself, where would i begin. would i begin at the coming out intersection. by comparison, my coming out was not so much surrounded by dissonance than by complicity. i never felt compelled to jump out of the closet...i just opened the door and sat down in the open. my mother pats me on the shoulder and kisses my cheek while my father tells me that there were a lot of "gay" guys in the marines and it is no big deal. i guess i feel fortunate...can one begin a story from a point of consonance? i don't know...so i look, i look for dissonance to begin a story.
i do remember when i knew that i was "different" from the other kids in my school. 7th grade for me was the kicker. i had a crush on john miller...i was also attending a very strict, fundamentalist, bob jones university supporting "christian" school. my social science teacher, mr. laws (i'm not joking that is/was his name) brought out an article where two men were "gay bashed" in our town by a group of sexually repressed skin heads. mr. laws told us that god didn't like violence per se, but he could understand why someone would want to bash in a gay person's head...and he balled up his fist as he said this and i felt as if i were a sheet of paper being crumbled up in a hand. as he went on about the job of rationalizing his feelings to make it fit with his christianity, i thought to myself, "wow, i better keep my mouth shut or else i will either get seriously hurt or killed." i can remember that moment as truly feeling what it meant to be afraid.
i never told my mom or dad. i graduated from this school, so it wasn't like this was the first time i would have to endure homophobic tirades or calls for violence upon difference. but i remained silent.
i grew up methodist and my parents were not religious fanatics. they put me in this school because they somehow knew that i probably wouldn't make it in public school...not intellectually but physically. this christian school was also known for its academics...and to be fair, i did receive a good education. by the time i graduated i had the equivalent of an a.a. degree from a community college. academically, my education helped me advance in the university setting. but the silence that i learned was and is most profound. the most valuable lesson that i learned in life was invisibility and silence...to walk into a room and not be noticed, to be gentle, to be kind but most of all be ready to run if i needed to. which, come to think about it, was why i probably liked track in high school...especially cross country...i could out distance most if not all of the jocks, i knew i could run for a long way and not stop...sometimes i feel as if i haven't stopped yet.
so maybe if i am to write about my life i need to write from a location of silence... or, perhaps, maybe that is why i can't.

poem for the week: contemplation

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay


What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

poem for the week

When a friend dies
by Marge Piercy

When a friend dies
the salmon run no fatter.
The wheat harvest will feed no more bellies.
Nothing is won by endurance
but endurance.
A hunger sucks at the mind
for gone color after the last bronze
chrysanthemum is withered by frost.
A hunger drains the day,
a homely sore gap
after a tooth is pulled,
a red giant gone nova,
an empty place in the sky
sliding down the arch
after Orion in night as wide
as a sleepless eye.
When pain and fatigue wrestle
fatigue wins. The eye shuts.
Then the pain rises again at dawn.
At first you can stare at it.
Then it blinds you.

to be or not to be...that IS the question

on my friend will's blog (http://www.rhetboi.net/sordid/)he wrote:

But the way I see it is this: I can go to Target at 10:00 a.m. when there are no lines, and that, to me, is a great thing. I can choose to work at 8:00 a.m. or 11:00 p.m., and I can choose to teach summer school or not (well, not really, since I need the money, but it's still technically a choice); I can do much of my work in this hotel room or at the local coffee shop and am not bound to my window-less office. I ain't got it bad, and that's good. But it could alway be better . . .

i don't think that i need to be reminded of this at a better time. it's near the end of the summer and it's that time where you're in between student loans and starting the teaching work load. i hate the concept of money. i quess i could fool myself by saying that it's a "marxist" thing but really its a "i don't like to so i won't manage my money" kind of thing. very frustrating, not only for me but for my family cuz the no money thing prohibits me from going home very often...which, to be quite honest, i don't loose too much sleep over cuz the family really stresses me out anyway.
but, back to the topic at hand. i have often found myself wondering "what in the hell am i doing?" i quit a really good job (that i was getting burned out on but that's neither here nor there) to pursue a career in the academy. upon further reflection, i don't even think it's that. i think this was a way for me to get back to chicago. i mean, when the opportunity presented itself i thought "wow, this is great." what i didn't consider was the drastic change in life style. i'm entering my third year in this program and i still haven't gotten used to the life of a fulltime grad student (money issues aside). i mean, i can't even seem to manage my time. writing, for the most part, is excruciatingly difficult...not in the sense of a writer's block but in that i have all of these ideas swimming around in my head like little fishes and when i go to grap them they just slip out of my grasp...schooling in some dark corner of my mind. i'm also completely astounded at the amount of knowledge that i do not know that i probably, when all is said and done, cannot know and i become overwhelmed. i read texts and i think to myself what can i possibly contribute to any conversation.
i don't know what kind of ideal i had coming into this but, at this point, i can't see myself in the academic field....i can't see myself in anything at the moment. my therapist told me the other day..."it's ok to run away from something just as long as you have another something to run to." i think that's my problem, i don't think i have had anything in my life that i honestly wanted to run to.
but will's post did help me see that i could, at least if not temporarily, see the incredible amount of freedom that i will have in sculpting a niche in the academy that i would not otherwise have. perhaps, i need to create something to run to instead of looking for something to run to. i just hope that i will be able to do it.

poem of the week...the work of nostalgia

Michael Lassell's (circa 1985)

How to Watch Your Brother Die

When the call comes, be calm
Say to your wife, "My brother is dying. I have to fly
to California."
Try not to be shocked that he already looks like
a cadaver.
Say to the young man sitting by your brother's side,
"I'm his brother."
Try not to be shocked when the young man says,
"I'm his lover. Thanks for coming."

Listen to the doctor with a steel face on.
Sign the necessary forms.
Tell the doctor you will take care of everything.
Wonder why doctors are so remote.

Watch the lover's eyes as they stare into
your brother's eyes as they stare into
space.
Wonder what they see there.
Remember the time he was jealous and
opended your eyebrow with a sharp stick.
Forgive him out loud
even if he can't understand you.
Realize the scar will be
all that's left of him.

Over coffee in the hopsital cafeteria
say to the lover, "You're an extremely good-looking
young man."
Hear him say,
"I never thought I was good enough looking to
deserve your brother."
Watch the tears well up in his eyes. Say,
"I'm sorry. I don't know what it means to be
the lover of another man."
Hear him say,
"It's just like a wife, only the commitment is
deeper because the odds against you are so much
greater."
Say nothing, but
take his hand like a brother's.

Drive to Mexico for unproven drugs that might
help him live longer.
Explain what they are to the border guard.
Fill with rage when he informs you,
"You can't bring those across."
Begin to grow loud.
Feel the lover's hand on your arm,
restraining you. See in the guard's eye
how much a man can hate another man.
Say to the lover, "How can you stand it?"
Hear him say, "You get used to it."
Think of one of your children getting used to
another man's hatred.

Call your wife on the telephone. Tell her,
"He hasn't much time.
I'll be home soon." Before you hang up say,
"How can anyone's commitment be deeper than
a husband and wife?" Hear her say,
"Please, I don't want to know all the details."

When he slips into an irrevocable coma,
hold his lover in your arms while he sobs,
no longer strong. Wonder how much longer
you will be able to be strong.
Feel how it feels to hold a man in your arms.
Offer God anything to bring your brother back.
Know you have nothing God could possibly want.
Curse God, but do not
abandon Him.

Stare at the face of the funeral director
when he tells you he will not
embalm the body for fear of
contamination. Let him see in your eyes
how much a man can hate another man.
Stand beside a casket covered in flowers,
white flowers. Say,
"Thank you for coming" to each of several hundred men
who file past in tears. Some of them
holding hands. Know that your borther's life
was not what you imagined. Overhear two mourners say
"I wonder who will be next."

Arrange to take an early flight home.
His lover will drive you to the airport.
When your flight is announced say,
awkwardly, "If I can do anything, please
let me know." Do not flinch when he says,
"Forgive yourself for not wanting to know him
after he told you. He did."
Stop and let it soak in. Say,
"He forgave me, or he knew himself?"
"Both," the lover will say, not knowing what else
to do. Hold him like a brother while he
kisses you on the cheek. Think that
you haven't been kissed by a man since
your father died. Think,

"This is no moment not to be strong." Fly
first class and drink scotch. Stroke
your split eyebrow with a finger
and think of your brother alive. Smile
at the memory and think
how your children will feel in your arms,
warm and friendly and without challenge.

metal meets cello

so this morning i go to "crooks and liars" http://www.crooksandliars.com/ political blog to catch up on the news and i noticed that for the music selection they have posted videos of Apocalypitca: a quartet of men playing metalica songs on their cellos. the first one is slow and kind of pretty

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSMXMv0noY4&eurl=


but the second one is where they let it all hang out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rej7o4x7BUg&search=Apocalypitca

i especially like the crowd surfing and the head banging from the audience members. those european kids are soooo POSTMODERN!
wow, i wasn't into metal when i was young...i find it quite interesting that metalica has given themselves a make over...cutting their hair, dressing up all gq style but still playing the same brash and edgy music that they always have. but these cellists seem to complicate this a bit...their hair is long (except for the one guy) and they look like what metal is supposed to look like (culturally speaking of course) while they play metal music in a refined, classical style. it's odd, these guys look the way metalica sounds like but play metal music the way that the metalica group members look like (aesthetically, that is). i think this is what we would call mixing up the signifier and the signified...now if only the twain should meet...or should they?

(long) poem of the week...or past weeks ;-)

Dorothy Allison


The Women Who Hate Me
Dorothy Allison

1

The women who do not know me.

The women who, not knowing me, hate me
mark my life, rise in my dreams and shake their loose hair
throw out their thin wrists, narrow their already sharp eyes
say "Who do you think you are?"

"Lazy, useless, cuntsucking, scared, stupid
What you scared of anyway?"
Their eyes, their hands, their voices
Terrifying.

The women who hate me cut me
as men can't. Men don't count.
I can handle men. Never expected better
of any man anyway.
But the women,
shallow-cheeked young girls the world was made for
safe little girls who think nothing of bravado
who never got over by playing it tough.

What do they know of my fear?

What do they know of the women in my body?
My weakening hips, sharp good teeth
angry nightmares, scarred cheeks
fat thighs, fat everything.

"Don't smile too wide, You look like a fool."
"Don't want too much You an't gonna get it."
An't gonna get it.
Goddamn.

Say Goddamn and kick somebody's ass
that I am not even half what I should be,
full of terrified angry bravado
BRAVADO.

The women who hate me
don't know
can't imagine
life-saving, precious bravado.

2

God on their right shoulder
righteousness on their left,
the women who hate me never use words
like hate, speak instead of nature
of the spirit not housed in the flesh
as if my body, a temple of sin,
didn't mirror their own.

Their measured careful words echo
earlier courser stuff, say

"What do you think you're doing?"
Who do you think you are?"

"Whitetrash
no-count
bastard
mean-eyed
garbage-mouth
cuntsucker
cuntsucker
no good to anybody, never did diddlyshit anyway."

"You figure out yet who you an't gonna be?"

The women who hate me hate
their insistent desires, their fat lusts
swallowed and hidden, disciplined to nothing
narrowed to bone and dry hot dreams.
The women who hate me deny
hunger and apppetite,
the cream delight
of a scream
that arches the thighs and fills
the mouth with singing.

3

Something hides here
a secret thing shameful and complicated.
Something hides in a tight mouth a life too easily rendered
a childhood of inappropriate longing
a girl's desire to grow into a man
a boyish desire to stretch and sweat.

Every three years I discover again
that No I knew nothing before.
Everthing must be dragged out,
looked over again, The unexamined life
is the lie, but still
must I every time deny
everything I knew before?

4

My older sister tells me flatly
she don't care who I take to my bed
what I do there. Tells me finally
she sees no difference between
her husbands, my lovers. Behind it all
we are too much the same to deny.

My little sister thinks my older crazy
thinks me sick
more shameful to be queer than crazy
as if her years hustling ass,
her pitful junky whiteboy
saved through methadone and marriage, all that
asslicking interspersed with asskicking
all those pragmatic family skills we share mean nothing
measured against the little difference
of who and what I am.

My little sister too
is one of the women who hate me.

5

I measure it differently, what's shared,
what's denied, what no one wants recognized.
my first lover's skill at mystery,
how one day she was there, the next gone;
the woman with whom I lived for eight years
but slept with less than one;
the lover who tied me to the foot of her bed
when I didn't really want that
but didn't really know
what else I could get.

What else can I get?
Must I rewrite my life
edit it down to a parable where everything
turns out for the best?

But then what would I do with the lovers
too powerful to disappear, the women
too hard to melt to soft stuff?
Now that I know that soft stuff
was never where I wanted to put my hand.

6

The women who hate me
hate too my older sister
with her many children, her weakness for
good whiskey, country music, bad men.
She says the thing "women's lib" has given her
is a sense she don't have to stay too long
though she does
still she does
much too long.

7

I am not sure anymore of the difference.
I do not believe anymore in the natural superiority
of the lesbian, the difference between my sisters and me.

Fact is, for all I tell my sisters
I turned out terrific at it myself:
sucking cunt, stroking ego, provoking
manipulating, comforting and keeping.
Plotting my life around mothering
other women's desperation
the way my sisters
build their lives
around their men.
Til I found myself sitting at the kitchen table
shattered glass, blood in my lap and her
the good one with her stern insistence
just stanidng there wanting me
to explain it to her, save her from being
alone with herself.

Or the other one
another baby-butch wounded girl
How can any of us forget how wounded
any of us have to be to get that hard?
Never to forget that working class says nothing
does not say who she was how she was
fucking me helpless. Her hand on my arm
raising lust to my throat, that lust
everyone says does not happen
through it goes on happening
all the time.

How can I speak of her, us together?
Her touch drawing heat from my crotch to my face
her face, terrifying, wonderful.
My saying, "Yeah, goddamn it, yeah,
put it to me, ease me, fuck me, anything..."
til the one thinkg I refused
then back up against a wall
her rage ugly in the muscles of her neck
her fist swinging up to make a wind,
a wind blowing back to my mama's cheek
past my stepfather's arm

I ask myself over and over how I
came to be standing in such a wind?
How I came to be held up like my mama
with my jeans, my shoes locked in a drawer
and the woman I loved breathing on me
"You bitch. You damned fool."

"You want to try it?"
"You want to walk to Brooklyn
barefooted?"
"You want to try it
mothernaked?"

Which meant, of course, I had to decide
how naked I was willing to go where.

Do I forget all that?
Deny all that?
Pretend I am not
my mama's daughter
my sisters' mirror.
Pretend I have not
at least as much lust
in my life as pain?

Where then will I find the country
where women never wrong women
where we will sit knee to knee
finally listening
to the whole
naked truth
of our lives?

what does YOUR birthdate mean?

so i found this neat little website from a random blog that i visited...i thought it was kind of nifty. here is what my birthdate means:

Your Birthdate: January 22

You tend to be understated and under appreciated. You have a hidden force to do amazing things, doing them your own way. People may see you as strange and shy, but they know little. Your unconventional ways have more power than they (and even you) know. Your strength: Standing up for what you know is true Your weakness: You tend to be picky and rigid Your power color: Silver Your power symbol: Square Your power month: April

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

here's the link in case you're interested

http://www.blogthings.com/whatdoesyourbirthdatemeanquiz/

love is a dangerous angel

so, i am in this adolescent lit class this summer and i have to write a paper and, even more so than usual, i don't know what i'm going to write about and i have to decide quickly because it is a summer class after all so the paper is due really soon and, to put it very mildly, i'm at a loss.
luckily my instructor for this class is not only a brilliant children's lit scholar but an equally superb teacher. she recommended that i read some of the books in a series called the weetzie bat books by francesca lia block. the first one that i read was the first one in the series entitled weetzie bat
it's a fairy tale, its wonderful, its profound and i wish that i had something like this to read when i was an adolescent. anyway here is weetzie's take on love:

Weetzie's heart felt so full with love, so full, as if it could hardly fit in her chest. She knew they were all afraid. But love and disease are both like electricity, Weetzie thought. They are always there--you can't see or smell or hear, touch, or taste them, but you know they are there like a current in the air. We can choose, Weetzie thought, we can choose to plug into the love current instead. And she looked around the table at Dirk and Duck and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Cherokee and Witch Baby--all of them lit up and golden like a wreath of lights.
I don't know about happily ever after....but i know about happily, Weetzie Bat thought.


i was so overwhelmed when i read this. this short book is like one long sigh.
for anyone who is reading this and knows this book all i have to say is that buddy was my duck, i let him go and some part of me is always sad about that, always mourning. that's probably why i haven't found another duck.

oh, and dev---in the above quote that says "love and disease are both like electricity" i thought of your paper and of the work you are doing with shelley's Frankenstein

a recapitulation of father's day...

so here's how father's day sounded like. i called my parent's house on sunday to actually talk to my mom and inquire about how my father's "special day" unfolded as well as to make sure that my card arrived on time. you may be wondering why i would talk to my mother rather than my father. well, my father has hardly any hearing whatsoever and so he doesn't like to answer the phone. however, he does have hearing aids that work just fine only one of them is broken so he's waiting on the va benefit to repair it (hopefully that will take place before 2015) or get him new ones...i can't remember. anywho, i call and my father answers the phone and it goes something like this:

"HELLO? HELLO?"
"HEY DAD, IT'S ME!!"
"HELLO? HELLO"
"IT'S ME, DAD...DAD IT'S YOUR YOUNGEST CHILD"
"HELLO?" (indistinct mumbling away from the phone)"HELLO?" (mumbles away from the phone again saying something to the effect that he thinks someone's on the other end of the line but he can't find the volume control on his end)
"DAD, IT'S ME!!!!! DON'T HANG (click) up"

so i call back again (praying to whatever higher power there is to place my mother at the receiver)

"HELLO? HELLO?"
(damn, i say to myself) "DAD, IT'S ME!!"
"HEY, WHAT CHA DOING BOY?"
"I'M CALLING TO SEE HOW YOUR DAY IS GOING"
"RAINING...NO WE HAVEN'T GOT ANY RAIN YET"
"IS MOM AROUND?"
"YOUR MOTHER? YEAH, SHE'S RIGHT HERE...SHE'S BEEN SICK THOUGH...I'LL LET YOU TALK TO HER."

(thank you higher being)

"hey ma, you're sick?"
"yea, i don't know what i have but i feel terrible"
"can you tell me what's been going on?"
"well, my body hurts, i haven't been able to eat, and i just broke a fever"
"sounds like the flu to me"
"you think?, i haven't been around anybody with the flu"
"i don't think that you have to be around anybody mom, because you can pick up all sorts of stuff"
"well, i'm fixing myself some tea...i'm feeling a little bit better"
"good, you should probably try an eat some toast or something"
"well, i sent your father to walgreen's to get some pediasure to drink. i even wrote down the name for him but he came back with pepcid instead. i swear he's been bitchin about taking care of me" (i know my mother is sick because she doesn't really cuss)
"well tell him to suck it up"
"yeah, i think i will. listen honey, i better let you go, i am still really tired"
"ok ma, tell dad that i hope he had a nice father's day"
"oh, he did, he went over to your sister's house for lunch. he also got your card."

(thank you again higher power)

"great, well get some rest and i will check up on you tomorrow"
"ok honey, love you"
"love you too, talk to you later"


TADA!!!!!
welcome to my crazy family
i love them so much

poem of the week because it has been one of those days

really crappy day today and i don't know why, exactly. however, this poem by thom gunn made me giggle...sometimes a giggle is all you need....







Thom Gunn

Courage, A Tale
by Thom Gunn

There was a Child
who heard from another Child
that if you masturbate 100 times
it kills you.

This gave him pause;
he certainly slowed down quite a bit
and also
kept count.

But, till number 80,
was relatively loose about it.
There did seem plenty of time left.

The next 18
were reserved for celebrations,
like the banquet room in a hotel.

The 99th time
was simply unavoidable.

Weeks passed.

And then he thought
Fuck it
it's worth dying for,

and half an hour later
the score rose from 99 to 105.

a pattern of this blog...very floral

a cool site you should check it out

http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

poem for the week: the difference between poetry and rhetoric

Audre Lorde


Power
by Audre Lorde

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery of magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn't notice the size or nothing else
only the color.” and
there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they dragged her 4'10” black woman's frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and line her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limps and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody's mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”

doors

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

Marge Piercy from "Song of the Fucked Duck"



friday evening i was hungry and restless with worry. i was caught between my desire to leave because of hunger and my longing to stay where i was...because of this same hunger. i went out...the desire fueled by my 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.
waiting, waiting for my food i noticed a woman sitting in a dark corner of the restaurant. 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 sitting.
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?
my food came up...handed to me in styrofoam and plastic. i paid. i turned to leave and the unfamiliar-now-familiar woman was standing next to me. she knew me. she has seen me around with other people that she's noticed before. i was familiar to her. 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...perhaps even walking in circles. she thanked me for my time. she said goodbye. 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. she kept walking, the other way. i felt like saying goodbye and i also wanted to tell her that i understood. goodbye is easier but the other understanding is beyond words...it only recognizes.
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 who is sitting down in their own dark corner of some dingy restaurant, and who has no idea...no idea at all.
i heard the other day that dreams about houses are pictures of the psyche...i believe that because i believe in basements. i also believe in basements under basements as well. you are in your house you walk downstairs and you realize that the stairs stop. the room under the house is dark, a little cool and there are no windows. most don't see the elevator that leads to a deeper room, cooler and darker. some do...i did (or, rather, still do) but even if they do get further than most and ride the elevator down...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. something tells me, however, that once it is opened and i walk through there is no coming back. the inside of that door has no knob.
so i know the temptation. i know what the walking means. i know this woman and she is brave, to walk between two worlds and yet be unable to distinguish between the two. to only be recognized by the vision of others who have either been at the door or have themselves trampled through. walking makes it better. it eases the pain of the door with no knob slamming shut.