silence

El niño mudo

El niño busca su voz.
(La tenía el rey de los grillos.)
En una gota de agua
buscaba su voz el niño.

No la quiero para hablar:
me haré con ella un anillo
que llevará mi silencio
en su dedo pequeñito.

--federico garcia lorca





The little mute boy

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.

--federico garcia lorca

Freaks and Geeks - Jesus is just alright

along with abbie...i want to meet the writers of this show

The Dresden Dolls 'Shores of California' music video

brilliant...

yeah...about that....

no writing right now....words are the worst...especially when you have been written out of someone's life.

quote

Water won't ever accomplish the end. No matter how much you cry. Flood's not the answer, people just float.

Haper Pitt to Joe Pitt in Angles in America Part II: Perestroika

is the world coming to an end?

it snowed last night....i woke up to a dusting...this is exceptional weather.

my trip to boston

wow, what a great city. i loved the old buildings and the sense of history that seems to be embedded in everything...from the architecture to the narrow roads that weave around the skyscrapers and the brownstones. i spent some time in cambridge as well. i walked around harvard and bought a couple of books at a very cool bookstore. the only thing that i wished was different was the weather. it was very cold and damp and i wasn't prepared. i guess i could have been but i am so sick of the cold weather that i was in a very sad denial.
i also thought that my presentation went fairly well. all of the speakers on my panel brought invigorating ideas and work to the table. we didn't get a lot of questions though but i figure since it was near the end of the conference people were tired. in any event it was a great conference and i am glad that i went. i only hope that when i go back there next month the american literature association's conference will be as good. needless to say, i will remember my camera this time.

poem for the week: keeping it in perspective

There Will Come Soft Rains
by Sara Teasdale

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

From The Language of Spring, edited by Robert Atwan, published by Beacon Press, 2003.

poem for the week

since devon and i will be traveling to boston this week to read papers at the aca/pca national conference i thought this poem by rita dove (pictured above) was most appropriate. beautiful poem; beautiful mind. sigh.

Vacation
by Rita Dove

I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray vinyl seats linked like
unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall
be summoned to the gate, soon enough
there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers
and perforated stubs—but for now
I can look at these ragtag nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge.
Even the lone executive
who has wandered this far into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees—even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.

sunday afternoon lyrics

well, i am not technologically savey so at this time i cannot incorporate music on this blog...hopefully one day i will be able to. until then i'm introducing lyrics. the lyrics to the song "something that you said" is sung by one of my favorite groups of all time _the beautiful south_ from their album _0898_. for you eighties music junkies _the beautiful south_ is made up of former members of _the housemartins_ another one of my favorite groups that i like a lot (anj, i remembered the space between the "a" and the "l" this time lol). anyway, words are important...while many people privilege the music over the words i thought i would mix it up a little and do the opposite...not that the music is any less important...it's just a matter of emphasis.

Something That You Said
(heaton/rotheray)

The perfect love song it has no words it only has death threats
And you can tell a classic ballad by how threatening it gets
So if you walk into your house and she’s cutting up your mother
She’s only trying to tell you that she loves you like no other
No other, she loves you like no other.

The only emotions that I know are love and hate
And she’s chopping & she’s changing & it’s making you afraid
I said close your eyes and imagine that I’m nice
She’ll kiss you or she’ll kill you but you’ll just have to wait

Because some things that I do make you go blue
And something that you said made me go red

The perfect love has no emotions, it only harbours doubt
And if she fears your intentions she will cut you out
So do not raise your voice and do not shake your fist
Just pass her the carving knife, if that’s what she insists
Insists, if that’s what she insists

A hate tattoo on my brain and a love one on my heart
I'd love to hate you, like I love you
And just tear your dreams apart
I said close your eyes and imagine that I’m nice
Cupid’s arrow looking more like cupids poisoned dart

Because some things that I do make you go blue
And something that you said made me go red

Because some things that I do make you go blue
And something that you said made me go red

The perfect kiss is dry as sand and doesn’t take your breath
The perfect kiss is with the boy that you’ve just stabbed to death

Is with the boy that you’ve just stabbed to death
Is with the boy that you’ve just stabbed to death

politics of nothing(ness)

ok, so the question that has been on my mind lately is the relationship between politics and subjectivity. as i have been reading about politics and overt political agendas in the media lately i have really been bugged at the overt political act of separating a personal space and speech acts that aren't considered political to public spaces that are expected to be framed as a politics as such. i know it's not a new issue and at the very heart of my inquiry is "the personal is political" mantra. but isn't the "act" of separating personal and political acts in and of itself political? i grapple with "the personal is political" on an almost daily basis. i used to think that politics were very much separated from personal acts and that politics informed decisions and that the discursive relationship between personal acts and political acts were pointed and strategic. however, i don't think that this is the case anymore. especially as i teach, i find myself attempting to disengage my politics in the classroom in order for my students to reach their own conclusions. they maybe young and immature at this point in their lives and they may still be encased within the political views of their parents but they are adults and they are capable of making informed decisions. however, this is dangerous territory. i create this space in my classroom and on some level i'm expecting my students to adopt a very open-minded stance. but this does not happen in many instances. they choose ideological conclusions that i simply do not agree with. i find it extremely hard to hold back. this is why i admire compositionist and pedagogue peter elbow so much. his writing stresses the importance to let students come to their own conclusions even if those conclusions are not necessarily what we want them to settle upon. recently i have been reading some student writing assignments that i'm just absolutely floored by. i guess this is the importance of instructor commenting. i don't consciously try to change their mind on certain issues but i do question them on their assumptions and encourage them to think outside of the box...but this is difficult and dangerous...especially when it involves the privileged demographic of the typical isu undergraduate. some of them don't even know why they believe in something...they just do. many of them have never really read a newspaper or watch the news. i found myself explaining the recent firings of the us assistant attorney generals last week....many of them had no idea of the firings, most did not really care and felt that it did not pertain to them as citizens in this culture of the united states while the ones who did seem somewhat informed were extremely apathetic. hence the importance of my job...at least for an hour and fifteen minutes of their day two times a week for about 15 weeks they will at least think about these issues.

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.