A Vision of Students Today

This is a great video and there are a lot of possibilities for some really, really good critique.

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.

now that spring break is almost over....

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

poem for the week

image of stevie smith

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

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








Not Waving But Drowning



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

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

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


--stevie smith

why do i do this to myself?

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

but i can be kind of bitchy....

You Are 48% Bitchy

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

How Bitchy Are You?

i am jennifer aniston

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

You Are Jennifer Aniston

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

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

poem for the week

War and Peace by Pablo Picasso

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



The Novel

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

1986

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

snowing, again

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

LOUIS: Purple.

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

LOUIS: Smell what?

BELIZE: Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.

LOUIS: No...

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

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

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

in heaven, i'm in heaven

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

the persistence of narration

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

--Annie Lennox




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

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.