badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books

font hell

There was a chance that everything would go smoothly but it didn't. I have to go and buy a different font and re-layout some stuff. I'm hoping not the whole damn thing. I used some random font called Big Caslon as I didn't have real caslon but it didn't do the italics right, even when i embedded the font in the pdf. And the printer was super nice - a hilarious old guy who is semi-retired but has a huge print shop. "If I didn't flirt with you, you would think I'm dead. I'm 70 but I'm not dead. Don't they ever feed you, honey?" actually very funny and uncreepy. We had problems making his computer see mine until I remembered you can start up while holding down T.... But he works in os9... and his version of quark was old... and version of acrobat old... He patiently tried different things but to no avail.

So that means I need to buy real Caslon font family, change all the things in italics to that, but i think the rest of it can stay in embedded big caslon. PLEASE LET THAT BE TRUE. Yarrrgh! Also i need to have Toast to burn a CD and avoid all those file transfer hassles and having to go in and out of OS9 and OSX. Pain in ass!

On my tape player in the car (random ancient audio tape picked up off moldy floor of the truck) the song "Everybody Loves Me, Baby" came on and I sang it with both glee and bitterness. Don McLean sings it with an ironic bitter self awareness and sense of humor but also total serious pompous smugness. (The version on iTunes is not the right one.) I am trying to listen hard to current criticisms of me without my usual immediate reaction of fear and defensiveness. It strikes me that this song might express what is annoying about me. But it's also what is good about me. What can I do about that, I am not sure.

jobs

Moomin suddenly obsessed with "jobs". He told me the other day that he was going to grow up to be a "book reader". Yes, my child...!

After our 7:30 am reading of "busy busy world" this morning he was cracking many jokes. "I'm an Ice Cream Eater for my work!" "How about _I_ make the peanut butter sandwich and YOU go on the couch and I'll bring it to you! Hahahah! That would be SILLY!" "I'm a Couch Sitter!"

this morning:

- kid squeezed. cat procured for his lap. kid dressed. kid fed. lunch made. books read. must remember to brush my own hair.

***
- call printer. do they have the fonts? do they have network?
- make the pdf. upload it.
- go to bank for cash for clandestine paying of printer under table
- go to kinkos and put all the crap on a zip disk if printer doesn't have net and i can't download it
- meet pastiche and s. at printer. bring ALL THE BOOK CRAP
- dont forget to put A.'s cd-making friend's name in the credits for the track we used from that cd
- put the godamned hacek in there. i could not find a free mac czech/croatian font to make an hacek.
- will the printer let us test print it?
- at printer, FIDDLE AROUND ENDLESSLY. as i predict everything will be fucked up and will need fiddling because of paper or printers or fonts or something

yarrrr... please let this not take all day long.

a little fretty

I am fretting a little because the book is not Perfect.

Pastiche was just over and was very helpful for making me get everything together. We looked at it all page by page twice, fixing page breaks. Once you twiddle one, everything else fucks up. BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW CRAP about layout. But it looks pretty good anyway.

There will be Mistakes. There will be places where if I had put in more effort i could have laid out a poem - especially the ones with really long lines - better on the page, or more consistently in line with the others.

Someone will be offended by some of these mistakes... I will have fucked up their work and disappointed them...

It is also only by turning off my own brain that I am able to cope with laying out my own stuff on the page or putting it on the CD. The ability to disassociate is sometimes quite valuable.

The other people who are vaguely ambitious or active - the givers of workshops, etc. - will want to kill me and pastiche. For not including them - for doing something that they hadn't thought of - etc. - for the revelation that we were sort of a secret cabal of people meeting w/out inviting other people on purpose... what? you were having these secret private readings and didn't ask ME? and then i guess me making recordings, and now us making the book, makes that secret private cabal seem more important than it really was/is. I swear to god. People around here complain that no one will publish them, or that there is no way to crack into some kind of a market for poetry, but then.. why don't they make something beyond some dreary little books of their own work? or sitting around taking each other's back-patting workshops and wishing upon a star and feeling inferior? I swear to fucking god it's like I'm about to be slapped for not also feeling all inferior. Why should i go around feeling worthless and like unless i suck ferl3nghetti's or dana gi0ia's dick nothing i do is worth anything? I wish people would get a little confidence. do they think the pope is going to come down from heaven, give them an MFA, and declare they are Real Poets now?

what i am hoping is that the bomb will explode, the dust will settle, and someone will realize "hey. we have these readings every month and they are often fantastic. why don't we do something other than xerox them and pass them around once in a while. Why don't we publish a huge collection of W@verley Writers? If they would do this it would be fantastic. Truly (besides ennobling the stuff i really want to go together because i think it is great) this is what i want to happen. More people should do stuff and take themselves seriously. Because then better things happen and ideas fly around and more people see it and can respond and IN THEORY everything gets better. right? evolution? why is this not obvious?

I am really afraid of the merciless backbiting and nasty criticisms i am about to experience. I haven't even really gotten any yet, though, sort of. but I am shaking in my shoes. and a little resentful as I feel like it will be criticism for successfully imagining something and then carrying it out or like punishment for trying.

On the good side, Pastiche described A.'s reaction to the manuscript (A. being one of my favorite 2 poets in it) "FUCK. FUCK!....... FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! THIS IS FUCKING GREAT!" very gratifying. I wish I'd seen it. you know what. i don't think it's actually all THAT great. but hey. it's better than usual. what i love is pocket poets, black sparrow, etc. and the world of zines. And two lines also very great. DOES THE WORLD REALLY NEED ANOTHER PALE, CHINTZY IMITATION OF THIS? Or This? Or this thing (run by first class assholes in power suits)?

Anyway all that will really happen is we will sell maybe half of them and then it will be forgotten. But there will be a small ripple effect.

I am also fretting because I do not own one of these. I mean really. Have you read those "testimoanials"? I remember seeing some early version of this thing in old issues of on our backs from like 1989. It looks even more interesting now. I always kind of wanted to ride the bull at Gilley's - this looks MUCH BETTER doesn't it?

impossible

I have put down book 4 somewhere in the house and lost it. Where? Where? Where?

I find myself thinking of some things from the past. As I am senile enough to lose a book that I just bought this afternoon that I was dying to read, I am also senile enough that I don't remember if I've told this story on here before. And these days I am a very happy person as anyone who reads this and knows me would know. But as I'm thinking about it, here goes nothing on a long and painful story.

After the unspeakable hell that was my high school experience (yes I know everyone says that, but trust me) and a year of chaos and many, many boyfriends and girlfriends - 2 months or even a two-night stand sometimes being so intense and interesting that I am still lifelong friends with those people - but really Too much chaos, and then the super psycho stalker boyfriend who went insane and broke into my house and ended up with pneumonia in the hospital and then in a mental hospital. Let's not forget Kirsten and her (our?) girlfriend who stabbed her with the giant butcher knife (non fatally but scarily). The Other stalker boy who kept sneaking around and i caught in my room spying on me. Oh just too many incidents to mention. Being deep in love with Raquela but strangely tonguetied and ending up in those situations where she would want to seduce some boy and she'd make me come along for the fun and we'd pounce on the boy and tie him up - gosh sounds fun and wild and weird so why not except that it tormented me because I just wanted to be with her w/out intervening boy including, horribly, once, the guy who had raped me but i could not seem to get it across to her and i think she was really high/on speed and i ended up leaving her and him in my room. Oh, ugh! Okay that was horrible too. I slowly realized she was speeding kind of a lot and boy somehow that just hit me hard that i had not realized it and it undermined everything.

why were things this way? I was 17, cute, no inhibitions, vague yet strong philosophic belief in Women's Liberation and Free Love, had only even got my period for the first time 2 years before, ran around in no underwear and no bra all the time looking rather nubile, and if it seemed like someone wanted to fuck me, I mostly figured it was harmless and why not make them happy? Also, sleeping around functioned well to prevent people from getting too attached or possessive or nasty, a lot of the time. This, obviously, not the way to be an Ethical Slut. Oh, far from it.

None of that is the story.

One of the random guys, Dr. Dicke, who slept with me stuck around and then a room opened up next door to him and I moved in. It got very cozy. He got more and more jealous but in a gradual slow way so that I didn't realize he was fucking NUTS until somewhere in there I knew that I had to explain myself if I were going to leave my room just to walk out for 10 minutes and get the mail. By then I was firmly ensconced into a lot of cozy domesticity, cooking a lot, watering my houseplants, laying around with him reading in my pajamas while he massaged my feet, drank a beer, petted the cat and listened to "George Abdo's Flames of Araby Orchestra" or "Funky Kingston" or some Wire album. Hey you know he drank KIND OF A LOT OF BEER but somehow i also didn't notice that part. He woudl also listen endlessly to my neurotic, 10,000 word midnight tailspins - a valuable quality! Too bad I didn't notice the part that he never had anything interesting to say back. Okay... you know I was only 18... what did I know... also he was much older (I think 26 to my 18.) He got me to give up seeing Raquela. He got me to agree to be monogamous. etc.

It was kind of nice to have everyone else lay off me, because they knew I was Dr. Dicke's girlfriend, and seemed to automatically respect that. I took a job as a co-op officer and for the next 2 years became sort of a stable earth-mama figure always appearing with huge trays of warm brownies or making lasagna for 100 people. (Yes, 100.) The domesticity made me really happy. I would go around humming gently and smiling as I watered the plants and read books, leaving piles of books and papers everywhere and writing poetry about being all happy. (I'm still like this.) I had the keys to everything. All the rings of power obeyed me and the land did flourish. Walls were built, railings painted, gardens dug. I felt like the chatelaine of a castle. I had a social function to play in things and was well-liked for a while.

I didn't mind that Dr. Dicke often went out and stayed out really late as he loved the local music scene and who was I to stop him from going to clubs and shows just because I was underage and couldn't go too? He would crawl into bed reeking of that weird stale acidic sweat smell that you get when you have had too much beer and he'd nuzzle up to me and I'd maternally pet his head - he had really nice long straight hair kept nicely washed and brushed like a princess or one's childhood fantasy shetland pony - and bring him toast and juice the next morning at 11am for his hangover. To this day I recoil from that smell.

My main actual social life was with the queers of the co-op I suppose, who gently pitied me and flirted mercilessly. I felt that I was missing out on a lot and the jealousy was really horrible but I fought it as best I could and was always fighting to assert my perfect right to go hang out in the living room across the way and drink tea and talk with people, or something else equally innocent. Once when he was on vacation I made out with this girl Kari but I was chicken to do anything else with her though she was right there in my bed - as I didn't want to have to lie about it to Dr. Dicke later. So I backed off and made some nervous excuse. There was also always someone around with a giant painful "platonic friend" crush on me and I'd take their back rubs and presents and help in the co-op kitchen so that they would end up being my best friend. But yeah I knew all along what was going on with them. And yes I feel bad about this. (Nada was the last of those, and she got me on the rebound from Dr. Dicke.)

At some point he pressured me really hard to marry him secretly. He said that it would make people act weird and stuff, my age, my parents, his parents, our friends would treat us differently, but he wanted to marry me and just not tell anyone. THANK GOD I REFUSED. Not that it was really any better what happened I guess.

The punchline of this story is that one day 2 years later I was at work at the Geo library and one of the grad students who looked vaguely familiar got very chatty with me. I don't remember how the conversation started but somehow all of a sudden (in the very deserted library) we were talking about bisexuality and the place where i lived and she said she knew some other people there. She then offered to come back later and bring me dinner as I had the night shift alone.

A while later Dr. Dicke appeared in a giant panic and got me to take a break and go outside with him. There, he broke it to me that the Ruby, the friendly grad student, was his fiancee. They had been engaged since high school, stayed engaged all through college and she followed him from their home state out to TX. I remember the way he kept holding my hand and nervously twisting it and his voice kept breaking as he continued confessing this whole story. I swear it was like I had just fallen off a cliff. I really felt the sensations of vertigo and I think I may have gone and thrown up in the bathroom afterwards. She realized talking with me that I was Dr. Dicke's next door neighbor, magically divined that I was bisexual somehow and got me to talk about that, and her big plan - which she then called him up and told him about - was that she would procure me as a sort of kinky present to her fiancee, for a threesome. He rushed right over to the library to do some damage control. "Don't talk to her. Please don't tell her. Let me handle this. You don't understand. Don't tell her we are going out." He begged me in desperation.

I think, when she showed up with my dinner, later (me having to work and keep sneaking off to cry every five seconds) I tried to maintain some sort of front, out of a misguided sense of gallantry or loyalty, but failed completely. "He's my BOYFRIEND. I've LIVED WITH HIM for 2 years. I've never HEARD of you." She exhibited her engagement ring and began talking about "when we had Our Abortion" and other pathetic confessions were made until the 2 of us were covered with snot and tears and hugging each other in terrible sympathy. For years he had told her that in order to finish his PhD she had to respect his work time and that he had to work all the time, so she shouldn't visit him where he lived. He had this whole life with me, and every day at lunch, would go meet her and have sex in her room in a different co-op. It was at least comforting to think that I hadn't been as much of an idiot as SHE had been to believe all that.

Why? What the FUCK? Did he just get off on the idea of bigamy? What was going on? A pathological liar?

There is even more to this story. And I'm not proud of it. It involved what must have been several months of back and forth screaming fights, breaking up, me believing his desperate apologies and sudden impassioned declarations of how important i was to him, but then more and more lies revealed, then him forcing me to move out finally as he wouldn't move out, so that i was cut off from my whole community.

Worse, years later I found out that SEVERAL, nay MANY, of my so-called friends actually knew about Ruby the Fiancee, and about, apparently, countless other girls. But they didn't tell me. "We all figured you knew and were okay with it." "I didn't want to get involved, it was none of my business really and I didn't want to upset you." Thanks, "friends".

Don't forget, I was 20. WTF. Which to me now looks like "young enough to have been my daughter." I'm sorry, newly nubile young Badger. If only I could travel back in time and straighten you out about a few things.

Oh yeah I forgot the part where I got pelvic inflammatory disease from him so bad I was in the hospital for a week and a half and could barely walk and was in incredible pain and it scarred up my fallopian tubes so that in 1999 I had a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, major surgery and a lost baby. "Try not to wipe backwards next time, dear," I believe one helpful hospital nurse said to me when I protested that my boyfriend was totally faithful to me and I couldn't have possibly got it from him. THANKS DR. DICKE. Still can't feel anything when you wear a condom you fucking jerk? I hope your dick has rotted and fallen off by now you sick, sick, lying asshole...

*deep breath*

A year and a half later I ran into Ruby on the streeet. She was married and had a toddler and a newborn baby. Quick work!

---

Anyway if I get a little bit prissy, a little uptight sometimes about honesty, that is why.

I think everyone has these ghosts, who drift in and out of real life and real relationships. The ghosts can't really be completely dispelled or exorcised. Dr. Dicke's ghost is with me for life and has plenty of company. So when i feel the ectoplasmic chill wash over me it is good to take a hard look at the ghost and stare it down. "Oh yeah. It's YOU again. For a minute I was almost scared. "

best 100

J. of Blogosity has challenged me to list my favorite 100 books. -- Not "the best books of all time" but merely my favorite. I have NOT yet read his list as I don't want to be influenced by it before I make mine.

Difficult! But I am going to make a stab at it. Huge things like Remembrance of Things Past or all the Patrick O'Brian books count as one.

I have so much work to do right now. But I can't concentrate at all today so will think of favorite books and then start book 4 of proust. I am pretty sure this is where we get to the good parts as it this is the volume named "Sodom and Gomorrah" (or "cities of the plain" depending on the translation) Come on, Proust! don't disappoint me now! After that freaking boring ending of the 3rd book with the duchess and duke drivelling on about their ancestors for 50 pages while Marcel is freaking out that Swann is going to die and they don't care.

I've been sitting around eating bananas dipped in melted chocolate chips, which is nice, but I'm also feeling a little bit more sober than I was earlier.

readings

3 readings coming up:

I will be reading something here in SF May 13 at around 7pm and there will be food and wine I'm pretty sure.

May 14 at 7:30 here in Palo Alto I'm not reading but it will be fantastic and also the book release for the Cuts book I've been talking about for 6 months. Really fun jazz musicians and sort of beat poet-y at times.

May 17 bilingual sp/eng reading at Will0w Glen Books. (San Jose/Will0w Glen area) Will be selling books at this too.

There will be a big thing sometime in june or july for the book, too - I'm not sure where it will be.

***

writing on the train

I'd been wanting to ride the train so actually the 2 hour commute back home from Berkeley was a lot of fun. I like to write and look out the window or look at the other people and think about where they are going. It is a great feeling to think that I could just get off at the next stop, too, and walk around exploring, open to random chance... I didn't get off the train but I liked knowing that I could.

Date was incredibly fun but I feel like writing much about it here would cross so many people's boundaries that I just should not do it at least not right now. even if things don't work out as i am hoping or imagining, it is still great. i wish so hard for it not to hurt anyone or be bad for anyone...

I am spending this weekend with Doss... looking forward to that too... reconnecting with her and going to this odd women's rite of spring million names of the goddess festival.

And yet it is not at all as if my sort of normal life and Rook are less interesting and in fact i feel extra appreciative of him, looking forward to spending a quiet evening with him, extra good about everything and extra loving towards everyone, a little as if I were drunk or had achieved some sort of enlightenment. i feel more like myself than usual, if that makes any sense. Surely this must be a good thing, and the universe will not punish me for being happy.

sorry if that is oversharing for some people, maybe it will help if, while reading, you stick your fingers in your ears and go "lalalala i can't hear you, lalala, don't gross me out with your affairs..."

invented memory meme

From whump, an invented memory meme.

Invent a memory of me and post it in the comments. It can be anything you want, so long as it's something that's never happened. Then post this in your journal so that people can invent memories for you.

happiness

I was just driving home thinking of my feeling of nearly pure happiness looking around on campus this afternoon in the sun... and the feeling that though I have a lot of work to do, I can do it and will do it.

When I was little I seriously thought that happiness was a dumb idea. And that only really stupid people were happy, because they were too blind and stupid and sheeplike to see that happiness was an impossible myth, probably invented especially to jack people around, trick them, fool them, mindfuck them, dazzle them and then WHAM, fuck them up 50 times more than they would be otherwise. Since obviously we were all going to die. And I probably wouldn't' even get to grow up anyway because of nuclear bombs.

I had this sort of paranoia that would paralyze me. If I were still like this today, life would suck. Because I was often in a state of absolute panic. For example sitting the back seat of my parents' station wagon chewing on the ends of my pigtails and eating a lollipop from the drive-in bank I would be thinking in a sort of quiet repetitive mental scream, "If I sit on THIS side of the car what if there is an accident and i am all mutilated or killed so maybe i should sit on the OTHER side but what if THAT is the side that will be smashed up in the accident and OH MY GOD THERE IS NO CONTROL AND I COULD JUST DIE AT ANY MINUTE and it doesn't matter what in hell I ever choose to do and what if I sat on the RIGHT side to not die but because I did, little MINNIE DIED and I would feel forever guilty and it would be my fault."

"Or what if, if a butterfly could stamp its foot in china and make a hurricane in the atlantic, and you can't ever know what is going to happen, what if my just moving my hand right now to scratch my nose made something bad happen at some later time or I decide to do something and that means a million people die in some new Holocaust?"

I would also lie in bed at night and, during the moments when there weren't potentially nuclear-bomb-dropping-planes flying overhead, I was still paranoid about meteors, aliens, or just some unspecified Badness happening. I would make up things on purpose to have an illusion of control. "I know this isn't true, but maybe it will work. If I go under the covers and don't look and count to 1000 really fast, Nothing Bad Will Happen." Repeat as necessary. (Often.)

I don't know how it is that I didn't become totally obsessive-compulsive. It was very helpful to read all the time so as to shut up my screaming, panicked, angsty brain.

The key there seeming to be recognizing mortality, and recognizing that control over my fate was somewhat illusory. As I was driving just now I thought, "Yeah, I could still die in the next few minutes same as always. Aliens could land, meteors couldl strike, or I might crash the car because I'm absentmindedly thinking about my neurotic life as a little girl. But unlike when I was little, that uncertainty does not undermine my happiness. Why is that?"

My last couple of months of high school and freshman year in college i had this odd realization that I surrounded myself with unhappy things. I think maybe some boyfriend (Richard?) mentioned to me that I only listened to depressing music. So I started trying to seek out happy sort of music and think "maybe with an effort of will and without being a complete lobotomized moron, it would be possible to figure out what happiness is." All that acid and ecstasy was helpful too -- either by giving me glimpses of happiness or beauty or by killing off enough brain cells to make me stupid enough to be happy, I'm never quite sure.

The question also makes me think of the buddhist parable of the person hanging off the cliff on the vine reaching for the strawberry, "How sweet it tasted!"

"SCUM is too impatient to hope and wait for the debrainwashing of millions of assholes. SCUM wants to grab some thrilling living for itself."

barely on earth

good meeting with advisor. Though i have not many concrete results he seems perfectly happy with what I have done and how I'm thinking about this stuff. I said I would write 2 reviews and send them out to be published somewhere. one is half written. i think i can do this... I am vastly encouraged...

it is all sunny and summery... everyone on campus looks like nice people... all jolly and enjoying the sun as it isn't 100+ degrees up here in the city like it is on the peninsula.

there is just this general exuberance

la!

Rights

I am so relieved. The german literary agent finally wrote me back right in the nick of time so my translation can go here. And she just said "go ahead with it" without mentioning any cost. I hope that means it is free! But if not I will have to suck up whatever the cost is.

I made an odd decision on the translation to change the format of the poem a little - from lines and stanzas to free-flowing short paragraphs like a prose poem. I swear to god it just looks better that way and gives the right impression. I also could swear I saw it that way in spanish on the net the first time - but now I can't find that version; only the version with stanzas. Oh, wait. I just found it again! At least that is some justification for my arrogation of the right to mess with the form... Oh for fuck's sake. Here it is in a whole different way.

This poem sounded SO GREAT read out loud passionately by Mercedes last night. I must practice doing it that way.

unsung genius

Win a date with Smoove B.
These are still funny! Read them! But only if you know who Smoove B is. We still want more people to contribute. There seems to be infinite room for variation on the theme.

***

List for tomorrow:
write something. omfg i have not done anything for this project. omg. arrrgh.
get together: poem, translation, write bios. put on pc disk at kinkos.

meet prof. m. at 1pm leave here at 12 don't forget to eat lunch

then what?? cuts book i guess.

busy busy busy

i am off to go meet poet Y. and her friend who can't speak english but writes poetry apparently. I need to record Y. again for the book. then off to sunnyvale to record poet S. for the book.

Have not written anything for tomorrow's meeting. Oh, help!

the book is a million times more work than i thought it would be.

*****

Oh wow we just had a GREAT time. It was like my fantasy of chaotic fabulous multilingual womanly fabulousness. Y. speaks english and hebrew. S. came to meet us too and speaks english and serbian and a little spanish. E. the documentary film maker speaks spanish and english. E's mom, M., spoke only spanish. so there were a lot of languages flying around. We all read poetry and I recorded it. E. and I translated one of Y.'s poems from English to spanish while Y. was filming it with E.'s video camera - so that M. could understand the poem. Somewhere on video is me attempting to explain one of Y.'s wild explanations of her poetry. "The Aleph is the primordial light of God, the emerald, that is sown like a seed or a kernel of wheat and that makes the SECOND light in the kabalah which is blah blah blah..." this, in my bad spanglish. M. declaimed some ibarb0rou from memory for us. SO GOOD!

poly

A good essay: Why Polyamory? that brought up every issue I have been thinking over lately.

nada's response

how cool, if you recall my earlier angsting about that long poem I wrote, I finally sent it and just got this reply from Nada... I am vastly relieved. Sabra is her wife.

The irony is that I am reading this fantastic synopsis of my life while
sitting on a kibbutz in Israel. It has been a good dozen years since I
have been here and it is bringing back many memories of who I was at the
time that I met you and fell in love with you. Thankyou for sharing
this with me. I am also going to share it with Sabra.

This might be my only chance for infamy. No need to change anything. It
is both truth and also your interpritation. I am not embarassed by
either.

She's so much cooler than i could ever express in the poem. I mean, what nice things to say and she says them so frankly.

the usual

It was just... you know.. .the usual sort of TRANSVESTITE QUEER NAZI WAR MOVIE. Nothing special... just like all the others...

All the Queen's Men was very odd movie. It was just constant "WTF?!". The cool part was that I started out just rolling my eyes and expecting it to be very stupid, and criticizing the sexism and silly anachronisms and american stereotypes of brits, but then the movie's "heartwarming moments" were convincing and the goofy assortment of guys all bonded and loved each other in classic soldier movie fashion. By the end I actually cared what would happen to all the characters. The air raid and bombing scene was also really good. Every once in a while near the end I'd be like "Yeah! Shoot him! Go, hunky guy!" and the hunky guy was all muscley in a tight shirt and sort of smudged and shooting a huge gun with one hand like chow yun fat and then suddenly the camera would pull back and I'd remember that the bottom half of him was wearing a skirt. I loved it!

Yaaaaaarrrrrgh!

The book comes out to 147 pages. I have to go clean up a few things and print and check it and then go over all of Pastiche and S.'s edits. And write a brief introduction. And get 2 more short intros from people who didn't give me one (but if they don't, it will just be a blank page with their name)

yay! it's looking good!

i put a bunch of funny emails between me and Pastiche at the end where we talk about the book and ramble idiotically about Poetry.

***
Remember a few weeks or months ago when I said that making this book was surprisingly just like making any little magazine or book that I have been publishing since age 16? That's still true, but also rmeember last year when I bitched about making e.k.'s 44 page book and swore only to do tiny booklets with 3 to 5 poems in each one so it would just be less work?

So much for those insights because this book is nearly 150 pages and it was a crazy amount of work. I kind of forgot what it is like to do the ticky little layout things for a bazillion poems all of different styles and making them fit nicely on the pages (sometimes impossible).

A myth perpetuated

Poets die early. Well. It all seems like perfect common sense to me.

Based on his analysis of studies of creativity and death rates, Mr. Kaufman argues that the earlier death rate among poets is probably due to the very nature of the poetic endeavor. Researchers have found that being in a subjective, emotive field is associated with mental instability, he writes. Compared with fiction and nonfiction, poetry is often more introspective and expressive. This has led him to conclude that poets' higher death rates are probably related to their higher rates of mental illness.

As the title of the journal Death Studies indicates, a large body of research is devoted to death rates among different professions as well as to links between creativity and mental instability. A towering figure in this field is Arnold M. Ludwig, a retired professor of psychiatry at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington. In his 1995 book "The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy" (Guilford Press), Dr. Ludwig looked at more than 1,000 prominent people in eight creative-arts professions and 10 other professions. He concluded that psychiatric disturbances were much more common among the artists. Dr. Ludwig found that roughly 20 percent of eminent poets had committed suicide, compared with a suicide rate of 4 percent for all the professions he examined. The suicide rate in the general United States population is around 1 percent, he said.
***
...among poets, it suggested a smaller gap in average age of death between men and women than is found in the general population. The point being that female poets are especially more likely to have shorter lives.
***

On the other hand it all seems rather silly and if you looked at the studies of what professions have the highest and lowest life expectancies it's probably just tied to social class pretty firmly across the board.

Also the article doesn't mention that the having committed suicide might contribute to one being considered an "eminent poet". If you looked instead at all the poets including old ladies happily writing sonnets to birds and songwriters and the creators of hallmark card poetry, probably you'd get something quite different out of your statistics. "Eminent" my ass.

Excuse me while I go act moody and angsty for a while on t his nice sunny day so that I can feel that I might stand a chance of eminence.

i'm four and a half. No, I'M four and a half!

S: I have a red popsicle.
M: I have a red popsicle too!
S: Oh yeah? Well my popsicle is red. and it's delicious!
M: My popsicle is red too! I like it!
S: I'm going to dip my popsicle in my JUICE!
M: Hahahahhaa!
S: Hahahahah!
M: It's yummy!
S: I'm going to dip MY popsicle in my juice TOO!
M: Hahahaha!
S: Hahahaha!
M: You're dipping your popsicle in the juice!
S: Yeah I am!
M: That's SILLY!
S: Yeah that's so silly! It's really really good!
M: Me too!
S: Mine is red. and I'm eating it and I can have another one too!
M: No, _I_ can have another one.
S: Well I have a strawberry one.
M: I have a raspberry one. It's red.
S: No, MINE is red!
M: Well mine is red too! We BOTH have a red popsicle!
S: Yeah! Hahahah!
M: I like popsicles!
S: Me too!

that wasn't it...

I meant to log in and say something or other about proust as i am right at the end of The Guermantes Way. But I have forgotten my blinding 7am flash of insight. Oh well! It was something to do with aristocracy, europe, america, names, and making fun of the americans who strut around go "actually i am related to whatever obscure civil war hero..."

I also spent some time reading about the effects of ghb addiction and ketamine and other rave-ish drugs. Am feeling actually kind of glad that I missed that whole scene. i have never been to "a rave" nor have i taken any fancy new drug past doing some X in high school and early college.

getting ahead

I worked hard on the book last night and am on about p. 95 of the layout. I got to the middle of my own poems and tailspinned... which to keep? which to cut? Can I really put both long poems?

I have not yet shown the long love poem to Nada and as it is about her, I wanted to show her before ever publishing it since it mentions personal things like her past of getting busted for dealing, her extended family having died in the holocaust, my having wondered secretly what her deal is with israel... I have read this poem out several times and people REALLY like it and get all excited. it was a kick for me when a poet i respect asked me specially to read it and then jumped up and doing squeaking "oh goody she's going to read THAT one!" uh... yeah... as if it were difficult? twist my arm. But. What about one's homophobic parents etc? They don't have to see the book but it's kind of a bummer not to be able to show it off. I probably will end up showing it off anyway and just telling them, "don't read it if it will upset you and if you do and it does, freaking deal with it already". Can hear mom going "Oh Badger, MUST YOU? Must you always? Why?" in the same despairing tone as if i had written it just to offend her personally and embarrass "the family". Well.... must I? It will end up being published somewhere, won't it?

Okay though. I will RIGHT NOW email that damned poem to Nada and ask her if it is okay with her. You know, it is also damned odd ecause people hearing it assume a) she was the great love of my life b) she's dead or has aids or something and it's an elegy. Now. The whole point being that it was not actually the great love affair of my life but that the intensity of feeling is no less just because the relationship was brief. Also it is an elegy of sorts in that it is an elegy to memory and the progress of time and the ways that certain moments are enveloped in a golden haze. I remember one moment in early high school when I was kissing a boy in his parents' driveway after our date. My head was turned to the side as we were kissing and the moon was visible over the boy's shoulder and I was just staring at the moon as it appeared over the graceful curve of this boy's smooth cheek. I felt quite swept away by love and exhilaration but knowing that I sort of didn't love this particular boy properly or in any lasting way but that it was still all meaningful somehow. That feeling.

I guess I was thinking in this poem of admiring Nada and knowing she was so worthy of love and yes loving her but knowing I wasn't staying with her for very long somehow. Again like in high school having a perfectly good boyfriend but being so, so very incapable of communicating to the boyfriend why I wasn't going to marry him the second we got out of high school and he would support us by becoming the manager of the shoe store in the mall where he worked. I would say things like "I can't do that, i want to go off and have some sort of wild Life, and have Experiences..." It was the same with Nada, only 5 years later at age 21 I had still not had enough Experiences to satisfy my roving nature... OR SOMETHING. But was trying in the poem to think of her as a whole person - NOT as the mysterious boy kissed in the driveway as I was staring at the moon and thinking of the beauty of the moon. Was trying to love her now in retrospect better than I did then and understand her as a person. more like an apologia or appreciation of the ways a brief love affair was important to me and knowing her then is actually still important to me now. If I did this for all my lovers it would be kind of interesting to see. I don't like to write "love poems" and in fact deliberately stopped doing it because of theoretical problems i have with the whole genre and what it means. Lord. who the fuck will read all this babbling? then there is the whole odyssey thing as the plan was (is) to do that "ex lovers laundry list" in poetry as my journey as I find myself measuring time through lovers and through books that were Important at various periods of life.

and now into the texas thunderlight under the massy anvil, the cloud-wind anvil
casting its mossy penumbra over the Austin hills, my kibbutznik, my beloved and me
filled up with light incredible happiness from the rain-ocean;
I sent up a buoy to mark the spot for my own future grief already contained in my happiness
the way girls are born already containing all their ovaries' eggs fully developed
and the light blessing us until I saw every molecule
of our love in the moment
that was temporary beyond the nature of time
because you loved me forever
but as a wanderer alone
I could only look forward
to the moment of coming home
so I loved only forever

The core of the poem is that there is a moment that stands out in crystal clarity to me as one of life's intensely normal and wonderful moments. If you have ever been coming down off acid and after staying up all night travelling to some other universe you go in the bathroom and brush your teeth and it seems ODDLY MEANINGFUL as if the sink were the platonic form of Sink and the act of toothbrushing intensely comforting and connecting one to all other moments of normalcy and routine of self-maintenance in life... well... the time I came home in the rain and we kissed in her doorway was like that but about a million times better and more "meaningful". I wonder if to her it also was, but I would doubt it and probably it was just a nice moment that passed as so many do and are forgotten or blend together into normal reality.

The funny thing is AFTER I wrote the poem someone, I think it was Paola, mentioned "once seeing you and nada kissing on the sidewalk outside her room as i was coming down the stairwell and you looked so happy" apparently she was struck by the moment as well... movie violins must have been playing...

Will shut up now and send her the (embarrassingly intense) poem. Aaaaagh! it all being a thousand times worse yet better because she is moving here with her wife and their little kid in a month or so. So, that makes it more likely as well that a) she will encounter the book b) someone who has read the poem or heard me read it will actually MEET her and believe me, after reading it if you met her you would know because of her very odd deep voice and distinctive accent.

Because I am so scared to put the poem in, I think I SHOULD. No cowardice is allowed here.

***

ayyyyyyyyyyy! poem sent to Nada. What will she say? Something off the wall I'm sure. am hoping not "How could you say something so uncool about me and the Israeli army, you freaking bitch?"

big school

Moomin had a great time at the big kids' school fair. Given his usual hanging back it was just very cool to watch him run in there on the playground with the hulking 3rd graders and mix it up.

"Some people are nice and some people are mean. Some people are nice sometimes and mean sometimes. " What to say to this? I am never sure.

I did some face painting for a while. "Are you a boy or a girl? Why is your hair that way? How come in behind it is like a boy and in front it is like a girl? Were you born with it like that? Can you paint me like a native american, but so it means something? Can I be a mummy? " Very amusing.

When we were coming home it was 6:30 but still 90 degrees. I have a sloggy lazy feeling from the afternoon of sun.

Tomorrow morning I must work like a maniac on something to show for bilingual project and on the Cuts book. Afternoon: play with Moomin and Sophie. (gardening - they can plant some seeds... if it's too hot, do something with water - pots and pans of water outside with hose for the doing of Scientific Experiments? fall back on muppet episodes on tv if this fails)

Sunday I have to get something more done on the book and then there is a game in the evening... Monday Must finalize and print whatever i write for the bilingual class. also should do a little on wittig essay
Tues. Meet with advisor. then RELAX A LITTLE and maybe have that train ride?
Wed. work on book VERY HARD. must be at printer apr. 30 must meet with pastiche and s. today
Thurs. work on book again.
Fri. book to printer (with pastiche? can we do it may 1 saturday? ask him)

short version

Last night - abbot and c0stello, 3 stooges, still extremely funny. long routine about them as icemen and then them cooking a fancy dinner with disastrous consequences...turkey-stuffing...oh hahaha. they were achieving a perfect kung fu, using every possible available object for the violent hilarity...

This is a very cool place!

L@urel and Hardy (western theme, with mule) started out not very funny and had some remarkably unfunny moments but also some great geniuslike moments. When Hardy finally lit his own thumb on fire i really lost it. I liked the corny musical numbers as well. They made me want to watch a Nelson Eddy and Jeanette mcdonald movie where they are always bursting into soft-focus and song, in ridiculous costumes.

Saw about a dozen black-crested night herons (or at least some sort of night heron) last night. they are my favorite bird. They're so grumpy and offended looking. I was incredibly close to them and saw many immature ones or maybe female ones that were brown and speckly. But it was getting dark so I couldn't see the color of their heads too well.

I'm stuck, unstick me

A cry for help. Gentle readers, if you would like to be a translator for a few minutes, help me with my problem. I am cool with this whole poem except for the last word, "destapadas". The poem's about how it's easier to swear or say filthy things in English than in Spanish (for this woman from Mexico) "in English words are far away, / disguised, and yet, at the very same time, so destapadas!"

Destapada can mean that you just uncovered your head or took off your hat but mostly it seems to mean unclogging a toilet drain, or that one just obtained relief from constipation. "so unconstipated" "so unstoppered" um. what? Talk about untranslatable. I totally get the idea. almost want to say "at the very same time, so 'diarrhea of the mouth'! " that would be perfect for the jokiness of it and sense of it, that it IS freeing and yet A BIT TOO FREE SOMETIMES in a nasty way. I dont' think it would be too nasty or jarring for a poem that has "fuck" and "asshole" all over it in both languages. However, it is a bit of a "liberal translation". Anyone have any better ideas?

yay!

I am bouncing off the walls...

First of all I DID work hard on the bilingual project and I also nerved myself, had to psyche myself up to fever pitch of arrogant confidence, to write to this one poet whose work I like. I saw her small booklets at the tr@nslation conference and she does the same thing I do - publish them as quarter size (quarter of a sheet of regular office paper) xeroxed as n icely as possible on nicer than usual paper, staple and fold and sell for 2 dollars. Yeah! that made me like her instantly. Plus, bilingual poems that are feminist, with lots of swearing in two languages. Now whatever else I think of the poems, I'm all over that. Feminist. Lots of swears. Sex. Goody! Anyway the point is she immediately wrote me back a spastic enthusiastic email and said I could translate her and etc. and collaboration is fun and good and let's go for it and here's her preliminary attempt at translating some of the mono-lingual sp@nish poems if that will be useful for me. Hell yes. How nice! How little attitude! I think a great person to work with. I said if she is ever up in this area i will organize a reading for her somewhere ie find a bookstore or cafe to host it and will advertise it.

whoop! go me! ask and I shall receive!

Lex pointed out to me that procrastination is often largely due to fear and I agree. Because immediately after the rush of exhilaration of the thought of this project, I felt absolutely terrified. that means I have to ACTUALLY DO IT since I said I would. And it means if I get stuck I must ask her questions etc. and expose my often abysmal ignorance. And then it means everyone can criticize it once it's done. Aaagh!

Then about 10 minutes later my advisor on the bilingual proj. called me back finally to say he can't meet tomorrow and so how about next Tuesday? Oh yeah that is perfect!!!! Because I need more time. And then the journal he works on with the students etc. wants one of my translations and so i must quickly by tuesday clean it up, get it to him, get the permission from author/agent etc, write short bio of poet and of me (my most unfavorite part is this cheesy bio-writing).

Anyway that jazzes me up! (though again - I am nearly certain I have made some mistakes and I know for absolute certain there are some really awkward bits in the long poem translation where it is okay translation but awful poetry/phrasing because I couldn't think of anything better or decide what else to do. Again maybe i can ask someone else for help before next tuesday.

Anyway it's the collaboration with the TX poet that has me excited really because she seems good to work with and to share the way I do things (rather than being a freaking pain in the butt like E.K. who made me nearly quit publishing she was such a fusspot and so paranoid)

again... yay!

In other news, I found no boots at the mall. Must go to the Haight. Apparently at malls no one buys boot in summer - because there aren't any boots there.

I feel more than usually grateful that the giant zit on my nose has gone away.

these boots were made for...

Can I have some new sexy go go boots AND the knee high converse that I have wanted for so long? Is it fair?

***

2 cups of coffee later:
Yes.

In fact I can go get myself either the boots or the converse or both, later today, if right now I write something for the bilingual project and print it out ready for tomorrow AND I then go break down all the cardboard boxes and bring them to the recycling center. H1llsdale mall and your lovely squalor, here I come.

awake

The glass of wine seemed to make me pass out. I went to sleep at 11pm. Maybe it was not such a good idea with the over the counter ant1histamines. And now it's 3:30 and I am awake and was lying in bed for...half an hour maybe... just now, just thinking and trying to take deep slow breaths and relax and stop thinking so much.

All i could think about was how i wanted to get up and work. Maybe it will help to have gotten up and at least written something down.

tomorrow:

MUST exercise first thing even if it is just by doing yardwork, bike riding
bilingual project. no excuses. work on it.
(though the Z.M. translation project seems way more tempting)
Cuts book - take a break from it. My arms and neck hurt too much.
Get a massage, maybe? i just want a head and neck and shoulder massage...
buy some sexy new boots to replace the lost ones?

fucked!!!

I just worked on the Cuts book at high speed, a very productive mood but gradually started hating the poetry itself more and more in the way you hate writing when you work on something too much. But I laid out 30 pages or so and got to my own stuff right at the peak of self-loathing and loathing of the book. Minnie was perking me up and making me feel better about it and I was maybe even getting my supergenius powers back, slowly, but then... QUARK CRASHED and I lost all that work. having somehow not saved for the last hour or 2. But not just ANY hour or 2, a really hard working time...

Why? I can't face it. I am off to the bath to read Proust with candles, chocolate and wine to try to soothe my extreme grumpiness. I need a massage and I need some exercise like either swimming or trampolining. My asthma is out of control again unfortunately so exercising is not feeling like a fabulous idea.

Just got to the bit in the 3rd book where his grandmother dies and it's described very gruesomely for like 50 pages. Thank god she has just had her final death throe but he will obviously brood about it for ages to come. I can't wait to get to the homo action and the whores, have about had it with dinner parties and dying people and Dreyfus and making fun of intellectual aging bluestockings who hold salons.

Most brilliant invention yet!

I am up early again but not horribly early. I was working. But then I had this great idea for a ridiculous invention - it came out of nowhere.

I was thinking of those ugly nursing shirts with the sort of flap and slit for you to nurse through. They're like a double thickness t-shirt. Hard to explain. It is much the same principle as men's underwear. (I've never in my life seen any guy wrangle his dick out of the tight flap in jockey shorts, though I know they must... boxers, yes. jockeys, no.) But the nursing shirts are made of much thicker material. (Why not just wear a button down shirt and unbutton it? I think people are afraid of the cleavage effect making the nursing look sexy - in addition to their paranoia about having anyone see any part of their boob.)

I could go on about the special nursing shirts. It's not an awful idea and some of them look classy. But they are expensive and cumbersome and often nasty-looking and sweaty (like wearing 2 or three shirts).

The invention is to apply the "nursing slit" concept to the idea of "crotchless panties". These comfortable underwear would be cotton and maybe silk for the outsides of the flap/slit. (The more I think of the words "flap" and "slit"... um... haha). That way, you could wear the underwear under pants or a skirt. It would even be good for under miniskirts when you are wearing a skirt so short that your ass is hanging out (or as I do, jeans that have giant gaping holes in the crotch). If the underwear is made right the (fabric) slit will not gape open (ahem!). In theory the hemmed folded part could even be made thick enough so you could (if you're nuts, and wear them) stick a maxipad to it like regular underwear.

But of course the point is that you can disappear behind a corner with someone, hike up your skirt, and have quick sex. I assume this is part of the point of a thong. But... ouch. How many times have you tried having sex while leaving your underwear on and just yanking it aside, like when you have to pee in a wet bathing suit? If you are me, then the edge of the underwear can be VERY CHAFING in such situations. Thus, the non-elasticized and possibly silk hemmed folds of fabric. (Or consider the situation where someone is feeling you up, say in a car or somewhere. You can unzip your pants and they can cram their hand past the underwear or through the slit in the boxer shorts, but if that slit were LOWER DOWN how much more useful it would be!)

If you think about regular "crotchless panties" a la Fr3dericks of Hollywood they always seem to be hideously lacy and scratchy - plus, they do not function as underwear to hide the goods when you're wearing ridiculously revealing clothes. And on me they look stupid, as I am not a lean-hipped greyhound of a woman, so I'm not wearing them. Not having a dick, I don't know what it's like on that end to be rubbing against that scratchy lace - I guess it could be okay - or if you're screwing that chick in the photo I just linked to, more than okay, she could be wearing underwear made of brillo the way she's built and photoshopped - but silk sound nicer for actual (and, we hope, frequent) use.

I am going to make ONE MILLION DOLLARS from this invention.

Clearly they have to be called something like "Slits".

Let's hear the feedback!

insomnia

this morning early... Awake and hearing in my head this Gl@ss Eye or K@thy McCarty song:

The early morning
the grey and cold
the first sun lighting
the sleeping world...
this is the way it is
and this is the way it goes
this is the way it is
and this is what I chose
and it's almost like Christmas
or like the end of time
to be so alone
and feel so alive...

If only there were a link I could add for Gl@ss Eye - a great band.

Rather upsettingly though most of my favorite songs of theirs were written by K.McC either for my ex-husband or for the guy who raped me. (I won't even dignify it with the name of "date rape" as I used to. I mean I said no about 500 times and wrestled till dawn to get him off me. (However, somehow, it did not even remotely occur to me to scream, and believe me, I have beat myself up about that a million times).

Errrgh. Please let me sleep peacefully tonight... why do beautiful things (like the song and its lyrics) for me always have to be mixed up with ugly things (like random memories that still bother me?).

today

Today, school and my study group.

I made good progress on the feminary this weekend and on the Cuts book. Absolutely no progress on the bilingual project and I'm beginning to panic about it a little. I also need to do the Z.M. translation! Ack!

I worked on a poem while sitting in the brake-fixing place which had great hydraulic noises and loud spanish TV so that i was surrounded by sound but still effectively alone...the one about the statue of Ashurbanipal in the u.n. plaza. I don't have the golden feeling that it will be a great poem, but I like it anyway.

tues. or wed. I want to just get on the train and ride for a while to some random place and work and write. Isolated from Usual Life and yet moving around the world...

huge wave!

Oh wow! You know, me on a boogie board and a 7 foot wave is all that ever happens in my own surfing career... but I still like to look at things like this - world record broken on 70 foot wave. I can picture, say, the waterfall at Hamilton Pool in Texas, and that is only 45 feet. But it seems amazingly high. 70 feet! Aaaaaagh!

best

I am in the best of moods as if ready to sink my teeth into the day and savor all of it.

To look at I am just a frumpy person in pajamas with a fleece jacket tied around my waist to hide the hole in the ass of the pajama pants. And enormous fur mukluks. So far in my day I have savored a fresh king brontosaurus in a forest drawing, several books about sea turtles and my pretty ponies, some of yesterday's corn muffins, some coffee, warm blankets, a little poetry reading, and some practicing of bach invention no. 1.

I need a nice metronome, the pendulum kind. I was thinking about the faults of my piano playing and thinking they are also my general qualities. I can hear in my head what the music will or should sound like and I want it to sound like that so bad, and I have the emotional ability and the technical knowledge. I start to play and for a few moments it is flowing like magic. I get excited and speed up beyond my ability to handle and then come to a difficult bit, lose the fingering, and stumble. Pianos are forgiving, no one is listening, and I can go back in time and start that difficult bit over. Life is not so forgiving.

What I should do, and do do at the times when I am practicing correctly, is to play very slowly and with discipline - with a metronome is most useful as it is a stern implacable taskmistress - and not think so much about the phrasing and the feeling and the dynamics, until I get all the fingering and placement to be automatic. Then, add the feeling and the dynamics. Then add the speed. The problem is, I can imagine the end result - the glorious rush when I am playing fast and everything falls into place like beautiful clockwork - way, way before I have mastered the technical ability to make it into reality. I want the end - the buildup and the crash - without having to have done the disciplined work. "Oh, just this once, I want to jump in and play it fast to hear how it will sound." Well, maybe just this once - but then I must do the real work and build the actual bones of the piece.

I know that sounds a little overanalytical for just playing a bach invention meant to teach phrasing and cantabile to 10 year olds... but... there it is. And it is exactly like I approach everything in life and has been since I was a little kid. It is the center of what I wrestle with in my personality and always try to improve. The imagined "piece" is rushed to the end and then ... instead of "just this once" and then working later - finishing the novel or project or whatever - I move on to a new exciting project that I can imagine.

Part of how I have addressed this is by telling other people that I will finish a project - I'll have that book out for the reading at such and such a date. Then I have to do it. I did a lot of this with building MUD areas, which for me functioned as artistic discipline and exercises in "practice" and "finishing" as every detail had to be perfect for it to work. My zines and small books published have NOT been perfect, but are pretty good, and then they are done, they are in the world and that's that.

Okay, onward to savor perhaps an hour of working on the Cuts book - then more playing with Moomin.

charged up!

Before I left I was feeling a little down that I had not attempted to be part of this giant poetry event in any way and like a big loser and that i would be so overcome with envy that it woudl be a torment.

However. Yes I had moments of embarrassing envy. But it was a fantastic event! I really enjoyed D1ane Di Prima's poems and got very excited writing down all these things she was saying. "The Poetry Deal" was fantastic. "Nothing to hold back now & nothing to offer." (now that her kids were grown etc. and nothing was competing with the Devil Poetry and her bargain or relationship "Remember to marry the world."

I liked how they mixed up the older famous poets with the younger energetic wackier poets with the recordings of the even older dead poets. That was PERFECT. Because usually they will put all the unknown people at the end or in another room and then no one hears them.

A quite young woman reading a poem that I was not sure was going to be very good but then it was. (A lot of people esp. the younger poets would be bad or pedestrian for a stanza or two and then suddenly explode into shining blinding brilliance. This, always worth hearing.) Anyway this poet was Anaia Gilliam and her poem was great and in it she would sometimes start singing. The refrain of "I'm afraid... " "Don't be..." Well, who can describe poetry or music - not me. But it was chilling how she sang it.

the jazz room also great. that was where i belonged.

I read my long recent "leave my country" poem at the open mic. i realize it is FUN to read and i feel very spastic and tourettey and dynamic as I hop around reading it. People like it, too, and laugh a lot at the right places. A long poem is very hard for people to hear and retain what is going on throughout. but they seem to manage it okay so I think it is a good poem. I felt the intersting power when writing it of slipping into and out of cliches and expectations of what the poem would be expected to be (but then isn't.) This is part of what Gr3g Hall does that I admire - he goes on like a hallmark card for 3 lines and then WHAMMY you are on some other planet. There is something about the cliche lines that sucks you in and lulls you and hits some visceral level of emotion that wise abstractions or pretty images can't do.

Anyway. Yes I felt plenty of envy. But mostly resolve that maybe being in the Big Pond woudl be fun after all. A few years ago when I decided to go out and find some other poets and what they were doing I was kind of afraid to go to things in SF because everyoen woudl just be way too hip and groovy for me and I would be a big dork, and woudl see that I sucked. Now I actually feel a pleasant sense of mastery on some level and that I might be a big dork, but it would be fun anyway and I would meet somem people whose poetry I like and they might like mine also. Contact with good poets here on the peninsula has meant the world to me. Just getting a weird spaced out poetic email from Pastiche where he rambles on about how he is divided between following the mushroom cloud or "the solar vagina" or something really makes my week sometimes. It is just being around and reading people who do weird things with words. my goal is to be absolutely free and be able to say anything and also to say something that has not been said in that way before and that is worth saying.

But the words as playthings and artistic units... i just love it... I know that barely anyone cares about the "high culture" world of poetry, and if you don't, that is fine, but whenever something is beautifully written that counts too, or if a song lyric sticks in your head or expresses some emotion otherwise inexpressible... it's the same thing... Often painting amazes me in this way. there was nothing there, and then someone did something and WHAM there is something there and it is so fantastic that you can't imagine a world where it didn't exist and it seems almost obvious andn effortless that it should exist, but at the same time, impossibly intricate like a cathedral and you wonder how it ever got made or painted. A good poem to me is like that and is very exciting... there was nothing and then some word and the various meanings seem so amazing and wonderful and infinite...

I have had lovely moments where someone tells me "you made it seem like they were somehow completely new, fresh words" or like that... a good and useful compliment for any neurotic artist. I'm sure Monet got off on someone telling him "Oh Claude your haystack was just too great. I felt like I had been blind all my life and could now suddenly see. It was like The Haystack, the primordial haystack, the only haystack in the world, and somehow it made everything else I looked at for an entire day seem fresh and new." You just can't lay it on too thick. (I don't even remember if it was that guy that painted haystacks all the time... but whatever...) At the same time it seems very clear to me that needing compliments is bad on the scale somewhere near feeling Envy, but both seem unavoidable. The envy, I try just to feel and look at and think "huh. envy. why? " etc. I like what I'm doing... I like my life... etc.... "what is it that I want, really, and if i don't have it, how to get it?" Plus, once I actually meet someone or know them a little bit, any residual envy just disappears as I am either admiring, or happy for them, or just don't think their position is that enviable.

I had a good time talking with K3ssler whose anthologies or magazines I greatly, greatly admire and love him for even if sometimes I get a sort of funky vibe off him on some level, etc. Also suddenly realized as I was shaking hands with this tall wacky looking woman that I was being introduced to W@nda C0leman and I nearly pissed my pants and fainted. I may have stammered something inarticulate about liking her work... Oh, smooth, Badger! But i really do like her work! what else to say? "Your haystacks make me pee my pants, Wanda." heh heh heh.

Meanwhile in the basement there was a studenty event going on with multimedia silliness and the co-writing of poems on various typewriters. They always seem a bit cliquey. (The people, not the typewriters, which are of course clicky.) also meanwhile there was another room with All Neruda, All the Time, and another room with vietnamese something or other which I only stayed in for just a minute. I chased one woman out of the room after she read something to some jazz becasue i liked it so much and thought maybe she was an unknown person who would talk to me and that maybe I could record - she was so fantastic - but she turned out to be "the up and coming young poet" of SF. I mean so famous that she was surprised I didn't know who she was. Doh! Well at least I can pick them. I looked at many, many books and I picked up some interesting little xerox zines. I think for the rest of my life I will buy the somewhat crappy xeroxed zines of 17 year olds because I like something about their "energy" and it will encourage that person to keep being proactive and DIY. most certainly they can use the 2 bucks more than I can.

So, it was a good event, a GREAT event, thank you P0etry center SF. I should be working with them and not with those people in Sanjo.

and me with no brakes!

I have to go get my truck brakes fixed as they are oddly squeaky. But first I have more thoughts that long to be blogged. This is what 2 cups of coffee and a pseudafed do to me. BRAIN ON MAXIMUM but not necessarily in a solving mathematical proofs, charge ahead, enlightenment and work way, but in a labyrinthical byzantine fractal self-involved way.

Crushes on friends. My susceptibility to them so that it is v. likely I will have them at one point or another with any friend and it being only a matter of degree.

Screw being discreet because i know people read this -- as Iris points out it is so much more interesting to look right into people's guts, hearts and brains. The vivisection of the Badger shall proceed for your entertainment and edification. There is so much in there and so much to say that I can go quite far and still keep plenty of things partially hidden.

I was thinking of last year when Paola, who I like, came to visit the area and by some random chance (?) we spent nearly a whole day and evening together and talked a lot. Her asking me about 8 million questions about our mutual ex boyfriend Severin, what it was like to have sex with him as I had and she hadn't, what is the deal with his marriage, life, etc, in every detail. I love this sort of talk, obviously, but I had a very hard time trying like hell to be discreet and respectful, yet still honest. I did my best. As we wandered about the world to various places talking about everything about people we know, her life and my life there was just some moment where I was like "I want to kiss her" and actually it was the feeling that actually I "should" kiss her on some level as if maybe she expected it and if I didn't it would be disappointing or show her that I am a total wuss. But I really had no idea and frankly was chicken to ask.

There was a moment earlier when she said something so strange and charming that a little lightbulb went off in my head *bing* where I was like "Oh. I could actually fall in love with this woman. I'm not, but it would be possible." And then I went "Whoooooa!" . Around 1 am or something there was some awkward yet seemingly sincere parting where she was all "oh i really want to see you again soon and hang around with just the two of us and talk some more because I really like you..." and again I was like "whooooaaaaa!" and said something similar. Then all night I felt very foolish and like I had a sudden crush and I could barely sleep with a sort of floating feeling. "Paola likes me! Huh what do you know about that! I could probly have kissed her! My knee touched hers as we sat next to each other! " sort of thoughts and also a shit-eating foolish grin. I think I even told Rook "Uhhh! suddenly i kind of like Paola! But I am not sure what that means?" just so he would know, in case i started like, dating her or something.

But then what happened was that she was in town for only 4 or 5 more days and did not return any of my calls or emails. My heart was not broken, but there might have been a small nick made in its outer surface and that was distracting enough to distract me completely for a week or so as I thought it over. I inferred (being the same sort of person in some ways) that she had been (loose cannon) sort of exploring "who might i have an affair with" and was also exploring that with some other people and that some or one of them was far more interesting and lively than me and so she was having some sort of mad affair or flirtation with someone who perhaps would not hesitate to kiss her at 1am during some "i really like you" sort of conversation. And while I understood that this might be the case, (or might not have) and instantly "forgave" it, (though there was nothing to forgive) it still was a letdown and killed my crush right in the bud. I felt much more like her real crush was on Severin and maybe I had been a little used in order to be pumped for information though i also think on some level she was totally sincere. Such things are often complex like that.

Also, i know that i have done it a million times like the cruel bitch i was (am? no... when i was 17 or so...) Stalk, hook, conquer, go away knowing you can, all in one mind-fucking evening. It being kind of a funny joke on me that i am hookable. Also as I over interpret and over analyze this sort of thing, probably it was not even a blip on Paola's radar and she would not even remember it or know what I am talking about if I brought it up, which I wouldn't, because it is really very trivial.

So.. What was I saying? that is the story of that rather brief crush, which still retains a sort of potential but that I feel a little leery of. and maybe what I really learn from it is that i am not willing personally to put up with such things and would prefer my polyamorous love affairs to have more stability and honesty and friendship in them rather than uncertainty that some people might find exciting and fun.

Keep in mind i also come out of the somewhat weird s/m san francisco scene of the leather faeries where you can make discreet inquiries about a person in the community's relative sanity and niceness, and then go up to that person and say "i really like you, let's play" and after a brief chat and flirtation or you are chaining them to the wall and putting clothespins all over their breasts and have your hand up their coochie to the elbow. I found that often my "casual" playing was with people who were genuinely fascinating and I could easily have fallen in love with about 50% of them but i didn't as that was not the context we were relating in, but somehow, the knowledge that "you are a fabulous intelligent person who is worthy of love" made me just instantly love them on some level even without knowing all the details of their lives and personalities and thoughts. That was the way I liked it. I have not very much interest in chaining someone to the wall if I don't respect their mind.

I am thinking of a moment when my ex girlfriend Mikal wearing some sort of super dykey outfit and a giant dog collar chain around her neck brought me a muffin for breakfast as I was at work, alone in the library, with no one around, and she came in with the muffin bag in her teeth and her hands behind her back and dropped goofily to her knees to present it to me. I had a strange thrill as i realized what was thrilling was not that someone was on their knees humbly and submissively presenting me with a much-desired blueberry muffin, but that someone so fantaastic and smart and personally powerful and secure was submitting to me and also with a sense of intelligent humor. It is not like I get off automatically on standing around looking like a dominatrix or something (though that can be fun) It is the thought of the intelligent and nice person allowing me such liberties and with such trust who is maybe working through their huge fear of blood and pain to let me cut a lizard mark into their hip with a scalpel (to take another 'discreet' juicy example from real life).

But that background makes things sort of strange as I am now around people who aren't in that context and everything is different and all the rules of behaving are different.

There, I hope that was amusing and scary for everyone.

funny kids' book

I read a bazillion books with moomin this morning. My favorite snicker-worthy one is the one about a little squirrel, Woody, and his nutsack. I am not joking! Woody and his nutsack. Yes you heard me. The cover has to be seen to be believed.

what i do with my time

I also feel a little foolish tonight even as I work. "Why am I doing this? " I feel almost pathological as seen through the eyes of non-researchy people. Getting excited and much brow-wrinkling... dusty detective.. over finding a few footprints of The Matchless Orinda (1631-1664) aka Katharine Fowler and her "expressions of female friendship" and her (mostly unnamed to my sight so far) circle of women poet friends. "Why I am so excited in the lives of long dead people and poking in to the lives of ghosts?" I feel very dorky.

***

Also, I feel way better now about everything.

***

Mild trepidation...

***

I am a very impatient person.

a weird feeling

It's a weird feeling for me to feel discreet or reluctant to talk about something but now that so many people are reading this I can't talk of about things directly sometimes when it involves those people.

But I was thinking tonight about my general cluelessness about boundaries, which I know is a problem and I try to deal with. If i am around someone and they don't' want me to be there or are in a bad mood or they hate my guts, I often DON'T NOTICE. I'm just going la la la, everything's jolly, everyone's friends, we're all having a great time etc. 8-( So what I realized is that being that way I need people to be really direct with me, personally, and say to me, "don't come over" or "quit emailing me so much" or "back off". That is way less hurtful than me just suddenly getting the bucket of cold water and then never afterwards knowing if I am welcome or not. It seems like friends should be able to communicate directly about things like that.

Not that I am always totally direct and might plead "general bad mood, sorry I just don't want to hang out" when really it might be partly "You, personally, are really annoying me right now in some petty way, though I love you in general".

At least Minnie, if often rude, will just tell me to fuck off and get out of her space right away... because she can't deal with me... that is okay...

Sometimes I know I am trying to be extra nice at other unnecessary times like just doing some random good deed for someone, hoping that it will make up in part for any unintentional clueless boundarylessness on my part when I have offended them which surely, without knowing it, I have.

The point being as Rook wisely pointed out to me, that in the morning or whenever I am not mad and with hurt feelings, I should go and talk to the person and also when they are likely to be in a better mood and not totally exhausted as there are most certainly and obviously extremely extenuating circumstances. Rook says that I tend to just let such things blow over and forget about them (until the next time when something simliar happens and I connect the dots) so, that I need to not do that in this case and be mature and say directly that my feelings were hurt and ask for how to make that not happen... ie some system.. or just trying to be more clear...

I guess sometimes such things are not clear. My magic powers of forgetting beckon me seductively. My cluelessness also is tempting refuge as when you don't notice that someone has been rude or mean then your (my) feelings aren't hurt - because I haven't noticed anything at all. That seems foolish and I think Rook is right that it is better to say something. I prefer honesty if that is possible though I really have no idea sometimes whether i am "honest" or not. Is one "an honest person"? Is anything i say the truth? really I have very little faith in this sometimes on some deep level, feeling that my bravest attempts to write the unwriteable are profoundly false, lying, and fraudulent, much less saying in a few sentences in a conversation "how I feel" about something. How impossible...!

Meanwhile my "not so secret" evil plans are foiled and so I am doubly wacked out. (Judgement cloudy because of it too, I think). Regarding that: I am so, so, so hoist by my own petard - that it is funny.

I take refuge in blogging inarticulate things which hopefully are general enough and non-personal enough not to be offensive to anyone who might read it though I don't actually know if they do or not.

I also am working my way through the last half of the names in the project starting with the letter "C". Work is always good and soothing and especially researchy sort of factual work.

123, 456, 789, 10 11 12...

Ladybugs obtained. Moomin had some from school and I bought more to let loose on the aphids.

Work for McCoot worked. No heinousness while working for him today. It's a good thing because I was REALLY not in the mood for any arch comments on feminism.

I worked for about 40 minutes in the early morning on the feminary and then fiddled about with the Acrobat trying to get the wireless printer to work. No luck. We could configure it, but could not figure out how to make it be on the same network as the airport extreme. suck! I am sure it can be done.

While driving around today I noticed that albatrossity had left my old pj harvey tape in the tape player (one of those battery operated 12.99 jobs with a handle... v. oldfashioned). I had a weird picture suddenly as some song came on - I don't know the title but it has the line "I can hardly wait..." repeated a lot). Sort of a flashback (I'm sure inspired by the music) of Severin grinning insanely and I realized that Rook had the same manic grin a few weeks ago at Doss's party as I noticed that he had writhed his hands in the cuffs so that he could reach the panic snap and get loose. I don't know what to call that weird grin but it is like the smug triumph of a secret Houdini overwhelmed by their own cleverness, and it's very amusing....

no ... no....

Words have no power to express how pissed off this makes me. I thought I was going to pass out. I keep thinking the 10 year old D and D player that I was. WHAT TO TELL HER about this? What?

The slayer's guide to gamer girls

I thought of various responses including changing it all to super horrible racial humor, but it seems inadequate.

What's eerie is the stuff I was just this morning reading about the tactics of male literary critics of 1670 or so and how they used to diss the female playwrights (and there were a lot of those women.) They used the same tactics: they're fat and disgusting, or they're sleazy whores, or they're man-hating lesbians. None of them are any good and all of them are worthy of ridicule.

Perhaps if I wrote a letter to the game publisher as a fat, lesbian whore gamer girl I could cover all the bases at once.

whorish rice crispies

Met with my advisor... a good meeting... I feel like I know what I am doing and can do everything required in the time I have...

She gave me the "non-assignment" to make sure I know what I am supposed to be doing for the other independent study class when I confessed I had no idea what was going on and hadn't been working and have no real deadlines or assignments.

Everything I've done for her has been good work and sometimes actually inspired work. She is always helpful! I don't think any other person has been so helpful to my scholarly thinking. It is very useful to have someone with super high standards and good taste looming over you, if they are also quite kind and not authoritarian.

Hung with Bad Moms a little bit... Barak came with contact sheets from the photo shoot and showed me lots of other photos of very sexy and muscley naked women dancing around. Nice work if you can get it!

then I worked (somewhat slowly...I was very distracted...) on the book all day long and did a lot of test prints on the FABULOUS NEW LASER PRINTER. Holy fuck. It is very luxurious to have it. Even if we don't have the wireless part of it working yet. How much nicer to be here working than in Kinko's! Wow!

Pastiche and Red came over for dinner and then we looked at it all and talked about it. They liked everything. and they will proofread it all by next Thursday. I am going to make the layout final. I think it is a lot of work because I don't know what I am doing in Quark. As Minnie said, I should go buy a book. It looks really nice though - the 20 pages I did today and the cover and the general layout - only 130 more pages to go. Red was in favor of selling them to try to make a profit, but I think I argued her out of it. I would like to do it for 5 bucks without CD, 10 bucks with CD.

Next Thurs: final proofreading of book
April 30th: book to printer
May 7: turn in final paper on wittig
May 22: turn in printouts of all final project's online database

other class: ?????? maybe shoot for the very end of may when exams are over - may 28, with some interim deadline of May 15. I don't know what counts for the class out of what I gave him already, or what I should be doing. I can write some more essays...? I had a plan of what I was going to do. Unfortunately he seemed not to like it, but didn't give me any pointers to what he did want other than vague reassurances that he'd give me credit for the class. Ugh!

Minnie made r1ce crispie treats for us. "Surely, if you compressed this all down, it would be like an square inch of food." "No way dude. You just ate the equivalent of 6 bowls of cereal." "Urgh!" Oh they are so, so good when they're still warm.

oh, brother

Q: "In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you'd made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?"
A: "I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could've done it better this way or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet."

What to say? Obviously a technical glitch. If only he'd sort of wapped his head a little maybe the remote control instruction-giver would have zapped back online and the shadowy whispers would have told him how to spin it.

Poor Mr. President. He's feeling a little stressed. Don't you feel sorry for him?

I like this bit: "One thing is for certain, though, about me, and the world has learned this: When I say something, I mean it. And the credibility of the United States is incredibly important for keeping world peace and freedom." And what we have also learned is that when he doesn't say anything, which he never does, he doesn't mean it, and the credibility of the U.S. doesn't exist at all, and we are headed towards years and years of horrible war.

I respect what the reporters were trying to do and i think someone has to do it. But of course I don't buy the whole argument that "bush or whoever should have known this was going to happen and should have had better spies and a creepy Big Brother organization in place already".

How about "U.S. governments in general should quit being such giant greedy warmongering assholes so that our country is the target for everyone in the world who is dissatisfied and pissed off?" That would be helpful.

in the mix

I was thinking of the fine art of the mix tape (now updated to the mix CD) and how making a mix tape can be like making an anthology or making songs canonical but more privately canonical.

I have saved some mix tapes for many many years and sometimes after the tape breaks, save the cover so that I can remember the songs and their order and what bands they were. In addition to the decadent pleasures of memory alone I liked to think that someday I would recreate that awesome tape that St3ve M3rcer made me in 10th grade with the violent femmes and modern english and lord knows what all else but if I went and dug through a box I could probably find it and find all those songs. And if I made it and played it I would probably feel 16 years old and be shot back in time to that time. The combination of those songs and the transitions of mood make the tape - not necessarily the individual songs.

I've said it before but they also function like the poetry-quoting and elaborate letter writing codes of the Heian court just like in Tale of Genji... the letter writers can't always make up their own poetry very well, so they quote and make references, "sampling", borrowing and mixing ideas and phrases.

What they choose to borrow from also shows their status and cultural affiliations.

Here is my question to anyone reading - tell me your philosophy of mix tape making, or an anecdote about giving or receiving them, or simply list me the songs on your current favorite!

I'll go off in a little while and answer that question too. for now, a little work (for an hour or so).

aimless

a little aimless today... I worked on the book, or really on the sound files for the CD to go with the book... didn't work on school like I should be... then tried to set up the new wireless printer for a couple of hours. Yaaaaarrrrrgh!

It's like I'm still drifting in the relaxation from the weekend... despite allergies, feeling frisky and restless... yet not very intellectual... I have considered getting out my wetsuit and renting a surfboard and going to mess around in the ocean. but it will be FREEZING even with the suit. Another going out dancing night would be nice. Also some whorish flirting. Yeah, more of that!

I should be translating that Z.M. poem cycle and get it done for once and for all. It is a really hard one. The bits of it are very small, under 10 lines each, and sometimes heavily dependent on word sounds and shifts of meaning like where one word is repeated in different contexts so that it means chalk, or calla lily, or whiteness, or something else. I translated it several different ways but can't bring myself to make the final decisions on what the overall style of the poem will be. And while I like the cycle as a whole I don't always like the individual pieces or how they come out in english.

To do:

BOOK
- find isbn numbers
- work on book cover (don't forget book spine)
- twiddle poem order
- call nicanor p@rra to get rights?
- th. night meet with pastiche and finalize layout order, typeface, font size
- deadline for printer april 30

TRANSLATIONS
- z.m. project
- organize binders of work translated
- work on L.V. translations/notes

SCHOOL
- clean up w1ttig bibliography
- add more name definitions
- find godamn motherfucking mla handbook
- read l.v. more and ponder bilingual poem stuff

OTHER BOOK
- write up a better description
- put out formal call for submissions soon!
- investigate xlibr1s

OTHER
- give more essays to c. magazine
- send some translations to bitter 0leander
- call y. about her mandala cycle and cotranslation (publish it hebrew/engl?)
- don't forget 2nd issue of c0mposite (target date for next october)
- reprint some other booklets? woodbird? etc.?

comforted

I am comforted by Pastiche's email that he too is thinking about the problems of the Sanjo non profit. he is just more coherent about it on every level and has more of a long-term view on it.

explanations

"Mommy, what is that fing."
"That's the dishwasher."
"No, what IS it?"
"It's a big machine and you put the dishes in and water squirts out like in a shower and washes the dishes clean with soap."
"No, what is THAT?"
"Um, the buttons on the dishwasher?"
"No, that, coming out of the dishwasher?"
"OH! That's water vapor or steam. The water is hot and gives off steam which goes up in the air. When water is hot that's what happens."
"No, WHAT is it coming out?"
"You remember when we were looking at steam the other day and talking about how water vapor makes the clouds... "
"What does it... why...." (nervous eye rolling towards dishwasher as if it would bite)
"Four small dragons are in there going round and round."
"Oh." (placid return to toast-eating)

ossian

I just realized how much E.R. Eddison is similar to (and inspired by) the weirdness of Ossian. Duh!

Sorry, bengalis

As I was reading various goddess books last night looking for names for my Feminary project I came across this wondrous goddess:

"Shitala: 'The Cool One'. A beautiful maiden...Shitala rides to war astride a monstrous ass. "

I leave you to picture what I'm picturing.

errrrgh

Another painful meeting with the Sanjo non profit. Why? Why? why? I am so bewildered. I keep opening my mouth on various issues and once again yapped right up on the whole issue of mult1culturalism. WTF. It doesn't matter what I say on this.. I've been saying it for 1 year now since last May. "this 2000 bucks from the "mult1cultural 1nitiative action plan" grant ... It has to be used for operating and development, not for programming... but how exactly does it make sense to have a party in the director's house, or now this new one, "A national p0etry contest" (revoltingly for no purpose other than to make money off the $10 entry fees). "if it's supposed to be to help us develop diversity or multiculturalness as an organization, how does that help do that?" I suggested a possible sp/eng codeswitching poetry contest (okay, so it's my pet project. but since that's what I could be helpful for, as I now know various possible poets i'd ask to judge it, that's what I suggested.) This was not liked by anyone, apparently. "A national p0etry contest would be multicultural just automatically since we'd get lots of multicultural entries," I was told by one woman. She seems to do plenty of work and competently, but if they are going to just keep doing the same old things, why... what.... how....????????? they don't want to change or "be" in any way different or attract new people. they just want to learn how to fake it so that they "look" multicultural.

I have a lot of ugly things to say about tokenism. they keep touting the l1-young L33 reading (which, as far as I can tell, they didn't even organize anything for but just gave some money to another organization to do it) as being "our big moneymaker" somehow though no money came in from it, but it made us look good for the next grants and especially because a huge crowd was there (since it was on a campus and heavily advertised there by the other organization) How is this right?

I think every time I open my mouth in those meetings I make another enemy.

I can see that my dad was right about me in a certain way. When he would get into those yelling fights with me when I was a teenager about how I was too stupid to know when to keep my mouth shut and that I would clearly go to some country having a revolution and get involved with some sleazy maoists running guns and I'd be in way over my head and I'd die, he was so right. Except instead of maoists it's poets. I can't keep my mouth shut (as you can see on this blog, which I suppose is about a million times worse that opening my mouth at the actual meetings, hope the anonymity holds up). and it's going to get me in some kind of trouble. probably someone will block me from being in some other dumb reading or project or something.

I mean. All I would have to do is show up once a month at the board meeting and nod my head and say Aye when everyone else says Aye. Since the meetings are run like crap, people just ramble on and on until a) it's clear the vote won't go their way, in which case they table it b) it's clear everyone's so sick of it that they'll vote aye just to quit having to hear about it.

I also had the totally hideous feeling that I had done something to offend my friend Pastiche who I so love and would not offend for anything. He is so full of sense and sensibility and a great poet. was he just having a rough night, I could not tell but he was weirdly unfriendly. when we are all working on the book together?! not even to mention the book? I am/was excited about the book thing, but would (tearfully) abandon it if to do otherwise would mean pissing off the sanest person in the whole scene. I am so honored to work with him, and when d.c. approached me about a project I said that it sounded good but I would like to work with Pastiche instead. Then I pulled d.c. into our project....

Okay I volunteered to do 2 things. one, take minutes for the first few min. of the meeting. 2, write the Pand W grants again this year, a rather minor task (AS LONG as someone freakin' gives me the necessary info, so that I don't spend 3 days straight trying to contact a bunch of impossible to find poets because no one gave me their phone numbers or emails).

i need some totally straight talking person to explain what is going on in this organization. I just keep thinking, no, it can't possibly be as bad as it looks or surely the other people who i respect on there wouldn't tolerate it? Are they just biding their time and plotting a coup, after which everything will change? Are they blind? Or am I seeing things that aren't there or that are just normal for the world?

Tonight the director guy (who is starting to give me the creeps) just flat out lied a whole bunch. Just plain obvious barefaced lies that about half of the people there must have known were lies. Unless they just forgot all the last meetings we had and what happened at them.

Nekkid

Naked antiwar slogan photos taken... it is hard for me to stay still. Barak gives funny directions. "Take a deep breath. Now look down. Move your left earlobe 3 inches to the right. Think about looking up, but look down. Think about moving towards the wall. No, the other wall. Look up. Look down. Look at my thumb... just kidding... Point the right breast towards the TV. Now, be determined. Assert yourself. Think of eating soup."

All, apparently, to make my back muscles look ripply - or was that just my shoulder blades and some small rolls of fat? Because I don't think I have any visible back muscles, unless he was taking x-rays. Anyway, something ripply looking happened back there. I chose a quote from Aeschylus to be plastered across my body.

That part about the soup is made up.

B. is a good photographer and everyone should go take off their clothes in his house! It's fun!