badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books

rainbow

This morning in the preschool parking lot. Moomin remarked to me in the car on a girl's mismatched socks and I complimented her on them as we got out... (pink striped + rainbow striped)

the mom got sort of weird and bristly and said "Well! I guess you're really a RAINBOW FAMILY." it was weirdly hostile the way she said it. and I realized I had rainbow striped arm-warmers, rainbow shoelaces, and Moomin was wearing his rainbow turtleneck. Uh. that was not on purpose... or anything...

Somehow the school itself has a nicer feel to it than it has in the last few weeks. I think the regular teachers were out or something. And now are back and things are on track again.

it's a day when i can just tell i'm not going to get any fucking work done. i keep doing 2 lines of work and then an interruption. and not like, nice interruptions where people suddenly throw money at me or say they want to publish me or demand to see me naked.

what a day!

omg too much to blog, too too much and what a long day.

Fabulous morning with R. and his wife who was super fun and charming and a good poker of things in tidepools. I like the sort of person who can sit and watch a crab for 15 minutes waiting to see what it will do. Unsurprising as that is the sort of person you need to be to go out with R. *snort*
gorgeous hike down to mavericks, birds, rocks, conversation, catching-up, etc. I could just squeeze him to death, it was so nice to see him! Weird how our lines of research and thinking have developed actually fairly similarly!

anyway that was lovely and I did not see enough of R. and want to go to dinner on Friday with them all...

foppetry plash: I got there and gave them my stuff. I am a little worried that they are not going to deal with my edits correctly or that the italics or accents will be messed up. i could offer to go in and do some editing of it myself. surely not? surely they can handle it? Talked with Sillyberg for a bit about criticism and how to do it, making enemies unless you only praise what is good but actually that does not save you from enemies; what is good; who is good; badness; working to bring neglected poets to people's attention; etc. I liked him and he kept saying how he liked my writing and it was punchy etc. He knew who Antzen was and agreed with me that he is a neglected genius. (well, then, why neglect him, dorkwad?) JJ was in a giant fluster as they were gearing up for the North Califa book awards thing which is a huge fucking deal. And everyone superfamous and interesting was going to be there. I really really really wanted to go but instead I wqent to the awful bad class.. FUCK. fuck fuck. Oh well. There will be other times. And Sillyberg invited me to come hang out anytime at their office. Which was enticing as it was jam packed full of poetry books everywhere.

The off to class. Which I had been thinking about Pu1g madly in the car all the way from half moon bay and had scribbled them in my lap while driving. And said these thoughts in like the 1st 10 minutes of class. Prof. F. i think... well it was like, me and her and Vaio and marya were on the same page. and i think also a couple of other people who are just quieter in class but sometimes talked. But then I started having massive multiple epiphanies. I will have to write all that in a separate post.

the bad class was beyond awful. i started getting a serious headache from it. at some point i just went "Yeah, but SO WHAT" rather rudely to this one guy whose experiments in pointlessness just piss me off. I really do hate the people who are like, "Well! nothing really means anything and all communication is essentially impossible because the signifier can't ever be the referent! So, I can just translate this howEVER I want and there is no right way!" How fucking bogus! I mean I made that zine with the 12 different transl4tions of one poem on purpose to show there is no one right way, but on the other hand that does not mean there are not 12 million WRONG WAYS. which my classmates seem determined to explore.

did I mention that the a0l-t1me-warner project girl actually had done it to be sarcastic and nasty? And everyone took it seriously? I was completely fooled. I thought she was just the biggest asshole in the universe! but no . she was doing it as a gigantic 'fuck you" to the program. I love her! hilarious! and today she did this whole totally evil deconstruction of deconstruction that was like the silliest fuck-you ever to academic poet wankery! in which she made everything a solemn dichotomy and then started fucking babbling about the meaning of art and how her name was william shatner! i almost died laughing. tears were rolling..... I wonder what her real writing looks like, or is she stuck in just reacting to their bogusness?

the 2nd half of class was better. an actual translator did actual really hard work on a super cool poem. I was so excited! It was fun! I"m impressed and spurred on to do better work on my project too... that's how it should be!

sounds and their meaning

That thing where you put your head on someone's chest and hear their heart beating and you just can't bear it and you want to scream at them not to be mortal or fragile...

strange dreams

In my sleep, was overwhelmed with love and gratitude for all the amazing people I know and suddenly they all seemed larger than life...

This after earlier in the night, waking up from nightmares where I realized how idiotic I am, the weirdness of the way I want to trust people, how it looks to the suspicious who don't like me when I don't even realize they don't like me and don't want to be actual friends. Suddenly I felt very suspicious right back. At 3 or 4 in the morning, this feeling is especially grim.

Eventually I went back to sleep and then had the nicest dreams or thoughts about everyone. It's hard to explain but a relief after the 3 am angst. Rook, Chula, Jo, everyone, the thought of their creativity and hard work and cheerfulness!

And there is coffee, all is peaceful, Moomin still asleep, tidepools waiting, my office -- my office! window frosted with sparkly dew in the sunlight making the outside traffic mist up like a dream!

too much to expect

Alas that my working today was completely derailed by Foppetry Plash editor calling up and freaking that no one out of 10 people in the office has ever seen an rtf file before. chaos! fire! pain! the amputation of limbs and application of drastic life-saving measures! And the scans are all grey and too tiny, no one can read them! Emergency right now! jeez.

A couple of months? ago when they called me up to say that i needed to send them copies of everything I quoted from xeroxed from the books... it took me a whole day to find the books and do the scans.. and I just had to re-find all those same books which were in way different illogical places by now. Oh the pain. I must drive it all over to them. I also had to email the whole thing pasted in the message body but this will fuck all the italics and accents... wrrrrrrrrrgh. I hope it comes out okay.

Of course all this makes me hate the article about 1 million times more than I hated it in the first place. I know everything takes longer than you think it will, but almost a year plus days of extra work... Next time I will know how to do things their way, though, and will bring them hard copies of everything and all documents converted into whatever version of w0rd they use.

Sustaining me now is Chula's giant mix CD of Motivational Funky Music. Without Billy Preston, all this slow xeroxing and looking at the article which is so insignificant and makes me wince... well, Billy Preston made it much better. Tower of Power! Mavis Staples! Graham Central Station! My musical education continues. I will have to make her a cheerful technocumbia cd in return...

tonight is Pokemon night at the game store - I wonder if rook and Moomin will want to go?

sustained

I'm so excited to see my old friend richard! OMG! I'm too excited to make up a pseudonym for him though I'm sure I've used one to talk about him before. I wish I'd known in advance he was coming to town. On the other hand it was way cool to get a phone call out of nowhere "I'm here! La!" So I'm going to try to haul ass on my homework and housework, and go meet Richard and his wife for some early morning tide-pooling!

I have my binoculars and 'pacific intertidal life" and bird book all a-quiver!

Why don't I make more effort to be in touch with Richard? He's so lovely and goofy! We have a weird history going way back. Suddenly, we're middle aged!

Last time I saw him, I think I wrote that smelling his scalp was like the fountain of youth - he smelled exactly the same, which made me strangely happy. And he talks in that same sententious way. All his strange, heavy, mysterious Theories about love and friendship! His wack-ass sense of humor! Suddenly I miss him, and I also miss G. like crazy and his mad writings. why do we let things pull us apart? Are we really apart? I still think of R. and of G. all the time as sort of intellectual reference points but this is actually silly as their real existence has diverged so far from when we used to know each other.

peeved

Upon contemplating my homework for the Bad Class I am suddenly thinking with great annoyance of something said in class last week...or was it the week before? The class was agreeing that some languages just had more words than others and were "richer". Guess which language everyone thought was particularly rich?

I protested in vain. Fuckwits. "But English is made up of this coming together of cultures, of latin and anglo saxon and french..." "But this is true of other languages as well. You just know the history of your own language better." "Yes, but.... look at this Gr33k dictionary, and then think of the OED." .... That does not prove anything. I snarled something about the Oxford Gr33k dictionary but then realized everyone in the class was laughing their heads off, as the (small) dictionary the girl was holding up was actually titled "The Oxford Gr33k Dictionary." But that is not my point! You know what I mean! They kept laughing, as if my pants had just fallen off!

My point is more that cultures coming together, or trade dominance, or war, or imperialism, or willingness to incorporate neologisms... aaaaa! What about Japan, think of china, and don't even languages like French that have strict academies and don't want neologisms, have spoken langauges that are different, and regional variations, etc... A non productive conversation since none of us had any hard facts or had thought about it, but since when does that stop that class from being secure in its Knowing? "And it stands to reason that one of t hose, um, languages where things stick, together?" said the prof. "Agglutinative?" "Yeah, that. That they would have less words." "No, the opposite!" I squawk in vain, i swear to god. How I wished for the phallus of reasonable discourse to appear like magic in my brain and whisper the Persuasive Arguments to me... I wished hard for the Master's Tools for a few minutes there.

Might one assume, as I do, that Russian has a similar discourse about why it's a superior language for Art in all its richness than any of the languages in the countries it sucked up into its empire, and ditto for china? And who knows what Japan says? In fluffy U.S. magazine articles about the rapid rate of change and fluidity of japanese I always read an anxiety about this same idea of "cultural superiority" and economics.

But even then I am not assuming at all that English or Russian or Chinese has "more words" or is "richer" or more fluid and adapatable than some patagonian language that went extinct last century. How is it that people find this a comfortable assumption, a common sense assumption?

Meh.

Along with this I was suddenly pondering people's idea about "fluency" and the surprise of some "native spanish speaker" when confronted with my having translated a poem full of obscure words. "Oh. I don't know that word" they say as if surprised and suspicious that there would be a word in "their" language that they don't know. And "native english" speakers assuming that some Other language has this finite set of words in it that all its speakers know.

somehow it's just that the "which language has 'more' words" question or discussion seems pointless and questionable. What does that mean? Why are people talking about it?

In this case, it was because someone had the idea that translating stuff into English was somehow more interesting than into some unspecified other language, because in the source language (i think in this case, greek, which I don't know a damn thing about) you had one word for some concept, and in English you could translate it with about 20 other possible words. Since she didn't know the source language either, and was basing her statement off looking stuff up in a dictionary meant for english speakers, I don't see how she could claim this!!!!! But it led to this general head-nodding around the classroom that English was somehow a better literary language than others and aren't we lucky!

I'm about to log into the class BB and see what people have to say about that one chapter of "H3teroglossia in the Novel". Oh boy, can't WAIT. *gritting teeth*

even sadder

"She was writing a book with the working title "Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation," when she died, Stoltenberg said."

Dammit! I would have liked to have read that book.

palabras palabras palabras! Palavers!

The dictionary that Norad told me about... it's swept me off my feet! I tore off the plastic and tenderly riffled its pages... and it was hot to trot. What a dictionary! I've longed for it all my life! It has all the slang and what country and all the dirty words and respectably long lists of idiomatic expressions... JOY. And then it began to lick me all over!

Y'all have no idea what this means! Do you know I have to look things up in 4, 5, 6 dictionaries, and online ones, and, and, and! I'm sure I'll still have to, and will still go and get with the regional dictionaries in Stafffnord library... and my faithful Velazquez, I won't abandon it - surely it will be better for archaic words -- but this sexy tomato of a 3rd edition is going to make my life easier!

!!!!!!

she shocks shell-shock by the.. um... something.

Well, little baby Mali, squid's smallest, is out of the hospital. She had some quiet, happy moments and I got to see her sleeping and nursing, in between wheezing, bubbling, coughing, and sounding like a baby with pneumonia. Actually it was kind of cool how while she was nursing, she'd stop for a second and it sounded like she was taking a bong hit....

Iz: her usual self, desperate for attention, glib, weaselly, and charming. Leelo -- greeted me by name, spontaneously! and sort of discussed Mali's breathing asthma-mask thing... his observations were something like, "white in the nose mouth, in out the nose mouth, in out in (demonstrating how you put the mask on your face) mouth on the mouth.....orange...." etc. He seemed delighted with the inhaler mask and I guess I'd never seen him get excited about a thing and talk about it quite like that -- while looking at me as if he wanted to talk with me. It was nice and I tried to talk back about it all but am not sure if I did it right. It was like this massive honor -- Leelo really talked to me! I can't tell if he likes it when I hug him, or not.

Seymour clearly in hell from severe ear pain. His and Squid's methods of enduring are different than mine, and seem to involve brightly keeping a stiff upper lip interspersed with slight hysteria. There is smiling, and chirping, and everything seems slightly unreal. Is this a canadian thing?

My methods of enduring the situation would be... grim, sullen retreat into reading, demanding that everyone serve me, and an inner dialogue that goes like, "Just 10 more minutes of this day, and then another 10, and so on, and then I can be unconscious for a while, if there is any mercy in the universe..." interspersed with desperate sobbing and extreme self-pity. Then there would be the drugs and whiskey. And I would want everyone to go away. And small children would be terrified and would not dare disturb me.

Seymour took off to go to the urgent care clinic.

"Are you tired? Do you want some tea? You look really tired."
"Jesus Christ. No. I'm not tired. I'm tired but i'm not TIRED. Can I scrub something? Do anything? Get anything? Stop getting up. Fuck. Please let me do something. Aaaaa, stop, I will do that..." She has nerves of steel!

How. Does. Squid. Do what she does? and take care of everyone? How? She assures me it is not really so hard, but she is lying. That kind of amazing competence is never easy...

Props to the Acrobat for watching Moomin while I went off to do get the prescriptions and try to be useful. I couldn't take Moomin with me as baby Mali is not supposed to be around any other children for the next week or so. I tried not to breathe on her or touch her! And washed my hands 8 million times!

While trying to put Iz to bed, I had a complete brain freeze. Leelo was talking to himself and sort of doing his usual things. It was like, an hour past bedtime by this point. A story? "Um, once there was, um, a little girl who, um, had a spaceship, and......... was, uh, looking for the planet of... uh....the unicorns...." "What was it called?" "......" "Come on, what was the planet named?" "Uh. Planet of the Unicorns. I don't know what they called it in their own language." "oh. Then what?" *deer in headlights* "Um. I don't know. I can't tell a story right now... uh, sorry...." "But you have to tell me what happened! It's not fair! Please tell me!" *no story came to me* *complete failure of brain to function* *fleeing incoherently upstairs with lame injunction to close eyes, go to sleep, and imagine the story*

Watched 2nd episode of Battttlestar Fantastica with squid. Wow it was great! Rook is suspicious, and rightly so, for all I was able to tell him was that it had some great explosions.

Maybe that's how I should have told the unicorn planet story. "And then there was a MASSIVE EXPLOSION IN SPACE and LASERS WERE FIRING EVERYWHERE and there was a cool space battle, the end." "And then what happened?" "The planet exploded."

that article

I think I forgot to link to this or talk about it:
guardian article on parenting and gender -- kind of annoying and does not push far enough into analysis or suggestions of solutions. I'll get to this later today but for now, must work on my thesis.

sad.... Andrea Dworkin has died

Andrea Dworkin just died... Fuck! She was so brilliant and cool. Someone needs to have said all the things she said. I don't always end up agreeing with her (obviously). People dismiss her as anti-sex without having read what she says... Here's a link...a short interview with Dworkin. "Woman Hating" and "Intercourse" are amazing, challenging... almost too difficult to read. I recommend everyone pick one of her books and at least riffle through it before talking smack about her. A clear thinker and powerful writer!

It's really hard to be getting older and seeing people die. It's not like I even knew her. But still.

***

Here is something to consider. Valerie Solanas: cool. Andrea Dworkin: somehow, a figure of fun and mockery. Why is this? Discuss.

Solanas: The sort of revolutionary who becomes an assassin. Dead. Her actual words rather hard to find, though in the last 10 years this has changed and you can find The Scum Manifesto all over the net. I reprinted it myself in 1993 or so. Her play ("Up Your Ass"), unpublished. Though I think it was unearthed and performed in SF a couple of years ago.

Dworkin: A public intellectual. Until recently, alive. Her books are in print and in libraries. Excerpts from them are all over the web.

Who among you has formed an opinion about Martha Stewart, her jailing, etc.? Why her? WTF? Go read Dworkin and Wittig 8-P Focus the attention elsewhere, forcefully...

and I should say... I said shit just as extreme as Dworkin in my own manifesto. I should write a new manifesto, one that I can stand by.

***

D.N. points out this amazing link:
Susie Bright, thoughts on Dworkin

I agree with a lot of what Bright says but just because Dworkin would have yelled at me if she had been aware of me does not mean that the other things she said were "stuck" or crazy. She attacked feminist pornographers and sex workers, but she also continued attacking military death culture, haranguing the men's movement, and analyzing all of cultural production from a committed stance. Like I said, what she said is necessary to say, necessary to postulate. And it is actually difficult to argue against if you bother to read it. I can't lay my hands on either Woman/Hating or Intercourse as my books are disorganized but when I scare them up, I'll do some extended quoting and analyzing and write something up about "Why We Need Extremists To Speak."

***
What did Dworkin actually say about transwomen or transmen? I don't know... does anyone out there know?

the party of doooooooom!

I forgot to blog about little Spam's birthday party. We were among the first guests to arrive at the mansion. Spam's mom Jilly ran around with a look of grave concern, not finding anything. As always, there was her, the dad, and their 3 servants (I'm serious!) and yet nothing could be done, nothing found, and I had to rescue Dina, the 2 year old from where she was crying barefoot on the hillside, muddy and walking on rocks and nettles, snot running down her face.... Jilly alternately yelling for whatever person was not in the room and muttering bitterly about how that person was supposed to be on duty but where were they, and oh well, nothing gets done unless she does it herself. It was impressive. Vast trays of food were produced, none of it edible to little kids unless they are some kind of miracle child like Iz who enjoys goat cheese, salmon with fancy sauce, slices of raw vegetables and those super-plain water crackers. Yes, I'm a bitch...! At some point in mid-party there was also pizza and corn dogs, which were devoured INSTANTLY by the hordes of children.

It made me feel amazingly competent! My party was also chaos and full of dangerous child-killing hazards. But at least I didn't yell at the servants!

I have a warm fuzzy feeling for Spam's parents, because they are such slackers and space-heads. They kind of have bad attitudes, when they seem present on this earth at all. They might be coneheads!

so then we had the coolest bird show ever with trained macaws who ride little bicycles and sing whole songs and whoosh around on skateboards. And I have known many parrots, but none who would not have fucking freaked in a yard full of screaming unruly 5 year olds! The trainers were amazing!

I got kind of uptight when the miniature pony arrived and was mobbed by the children. The pony started jerking its head up and down in a spastic eye-rolling way. And I told the kids to shut up and not scream in the pony's ear. Rama, a nursery school mom who hates my guts 4-ever, told me that you could set off a bomb next to that fucking pony and it would not move. I realized she was right -- oh yeah, she grew up with horses, etc..... Well... we all have our moments of shame! Mine was freaking that the pony was about to kick the crap out of someone or break someone's nose!

The other notable thing of the party for me was that I could not escape those horrible conversations. The "which school" ones! In vain I tried to talk to the guys and the few human-seeming moms. No guys would talk with me -- it made them really uncomfortable. I think I broke some suburban taboo? Anyway then I'd be glommed onto by some coiffed, scary person who would tell me how Moomin is very smart and ask me my secret of how I taught him to read. There's no answer for that... just that he does really enjoy reading and it's nice for us all. But then the school- comparison conversations that try to delicately feel out whether blatant racism and classism will be okay or not. (NOT.) Grrrrr. Well, most everyone there is sending their kids to private school of COURSE because how could they not? Gentle pity dripped onto the one or two moms who are stuck at Clapford or Cloy Loud, the two public schools in the hills where everyone is rich, rich, rich. How annoying -- it was one of the most annoying of any of those school-convos that I've ever had! and I had it about 4 times over a couple of hours with different people. Now I really know what squid and jo are talking about! Usually those people don't even talk with me, I think! so I miss the heinousness.

Rook showed up halfway through the party. I stayed for a bit and went home. Rook's party experience was quite different as no moms would talk with him but instead, horrible loud men would verbally piss all over in that competitive way, boasting foully of their new startup company or their new fancy blackb3rry or whatever the fuck. Or, someone's new fancy blackb3rry being undercut by a horrible even louder man saying how his new startup is going to destroy the bl4ckberry, which is just so yesterday. I'm sure Rook drifted away before anyone mentioned their new boat or which golf course is the best, or whatever!!! Fucking heinous!

Moomin had fun. Rook reports that Moomin said that he wished he had a lot of toys like Spam. Arrrrgh! Well, that rat pack will all go to private school for the next 2 years. Then we'll meet up with some of them again at Pole Star. With any luck there will be artbabes and hippies for me to hang with along with my amazing beautiful homies, Jo and Squid! And the people of the hills can all go straight to hell!

The one nice person there besides Jo was Nakuta's mom. I think I said soemthing slightly too weird or over-friendly to her. But she is neat, and I like her kids.

Yowzilla!

Rook and I went to WWD last night. It was great, and the place was packed with a very friendly crowd! Chula's reading was awesome... her comedy and mc-ing was greater than usual.

Here comes the fashion report from the trivial, frivolous brain of the city Badger. Chula's outfit, stunningly gorgeous... a long, spangley open-backed red dress with a high collar. Elegant and sexy! Rook was charming in his boy-toy makeover, with a stretchy shiny black shirt, very pimp-style, and a strange pink and green psychedelic shirt over that, and pink barrette, and hideous yet attractive 80s-style pink leather belt with grommets... blue jeans and stompy boots. While dancing later at Bootie pirate night, Rook was unbelievably cute as he did his little hip hop dance moves... He was so very "WHAM". As we sexed each other up on the dance floor I thought of when we first started flirting at that vampire larp in Chicago, which had meetings in a kind of sucky club called "Excalibur". How cute Rook was with lots of eyeliner on, almost 10 years ago! Me, in appalling ska-checkered tights, matching belt and backpack, black pleated miniskirt, vinyl boots, and my hair sort of teased up into a purpley bastard daughter of cyndi lauper and a beehive with rainbow hair clips and gel. I kept forgetting how ridiculous my hair was and just thought, "Oh, do I know that girl, why did she say hi to me and give me that blazing, stunning, knowing smile?" And then i'd realize it was because my hair was cheerfully silly and rather cute. I do not mind being a 35 year old punkette.

While I'm mentioning excellent outfits I have to give props to yellowjellybean for her 40s housewife pinupgirl retro thing. She was so cute it was painful to look at her in that red and white checkered blouse - oh so very definitely a blouse, and one would think she sewed it herself in her very own matching red and white bedroom with ruffled pillow covers on Elm Street in ... Lakeville, USA, right after she knitted some socks for her soldier brother... Then off to nursing school, and then to make ends meet (all for the war effort!) to her secret moonlighting jobs as artist's model and burlesque dancer. With a 9 foot long python and gold coins for a sort of cleopatra effect. I had better stop there. Anyway, it was cute.

This morning I slept late. We mooched around... off to the park for the afternoon, the nice big huge park.. the game store... and then I did yard work for a couple of hours. I am sore all over! In the good way. Rook came out and clipped the hedge with Moomin... there was bike-riding... but mostly I shovelled and swept and weeded and evened-out and moved bricks around. It's shaping up nicely. the wood chips from the tree that got chopped are already mellowing out into the perfect mulch.

I cooked, and Moomin and I made a ton of lemonade from the lemons from our very own tree...

There has been no intellectual labor this weekend! I will have to haul ass on monday morning to have something to show my friend Norad. We meet at one. I think Amhar (yellowjellybean) is going to come too which will be awesome as we all need motivation and help to write our Things.

density

I continue writing and thinking about literary quality and judgement, trying to formalize some way of talking about the things i value which are complexity, density, and what A4rseth calls erg0dicity which is sort of different layers or levels of being able to enter into engagement with a text (or artistic work of any kind) So that the work continues to make you think later and provides a space, like a mental architecture, for thinking about things. The unsatisfying nature of the "memoir" writing is that there it is, it's a "true story" but in some way it anesthetizes the listener or reader, becasue it is like court testimony that already happened as if there were a judge somewhere else; you are not meant to be the judge. The courtroom trial has already happened and the memoir is reporting. The testimony of a witness (which often, interesting to see, contains its own cross-examination.) The memoir writing, the usual kind, skims the surface of truth and arrogates judgement. When competent it is like a mildly interesting magazine or newspaper article. but its ends are wrapped up and its "thing to say" is simple. it's said. that's it. It contains its own judgement. Literary complexity not only shows that there is a consciousness of the craft of lying, the craft of constructedness, but it makes the space for the reader's critical judgement to come in and do its thing. What if this, and what if that, and what made so and so do the thing they did. what else would happen. what if that were true. If you look at it as ... metonymy... then what is it talking about or what could it be applied to...

la la la. that's where I am this morning. I'm still obsessed with V.M.'s story on sc1fi.com and all the good, juicy things it contains and makes space for. For example the way that you realize the main char. takes her 'little faces' for granted in some sense - when her ex-lover says "didn't you ask them..." and they are like hard drives she can access at any time but do they have language? they have emotions, bravery, boldness, desire, personality, and they communicate - do they communicate amongst themselves etc. etc. I was struck also by the suggestion about what "modesty" could mean - when the main character thinks that some of the other characters' modesty is "cruel" as modesty means veiling your "faces" but then they can't see out and they get bored and cause trouble. Just to point out that you can see this as parts of yourself that are "created" or become manifest through your interactions with other people, parts of your personality, which if you deny expression to -- if you don't let other people see them because of your excessive modesty, then you are being cruel to those parts of yourself. Modesty is cruel. I could go on about the interestingness of this -- and how masterful of V.M. to have evoked it not just in this short story but in a few sentences really exposing an interesting idea.

revolution in the corners

On phone with spanglemonkey, just now...

"So we're pretty much stuck at the 5 year old's birthday party."
"Yup."
"Okay, well, while we're there we can at least foment revolution, radically restructure society, and create an underground economy."
"Oh, perfect! Let's. In between the chaos."
"Because they are the most incompetent people..."
"Oh, we're a family! Deer in headlights. Hard to explain how there are always 5 people watching the children drink from the toilet."
"They can't do anything, it's like they're on quaaludes! Wait. Maybe they are."
"I'm giving the kid handcuffs..."

Coming soon, the minutes of the first Radical Suburban Marxist Housewives' Economic Restructuring Committee Meeting!

dork fest!

you know you're the absolute pinnacle of geekness when you are describing in detail the magical use of traceroute in your silicon valley buffy roleplaying game to chase down the evil Homeland Pervasive Vigilance (HPV) hacker into your vampire social-networking company, and end up at an ip address in faerie. and everyone giggles. z_amber made a horrible pun about a L33tmotif.....

Aaaaagh! we're dorks. and like 4 people are blogging this. in the room right now. while we're like sharpening our stakes and putting in our "cold iron" tongue piercings. er. huzzah! let the slaying begin!

***
not to mention the insane real life whiteboard gantt chart that Rook made for our rival company. I'll have to take a picture...

and someone saying, "I'd like to shoot him... I figure I have no reason NOT to have a crossbow out."

And the strange plot of us worrying that Uma, the girl formerly set up about 10 episodes ago to be an avatar of kali by her thuggee parents ... well, worrying that she had to be cured of any remnant of kali-ness. With some dumbass xtian bible study students.. and it's all happening at Staffnord...

And the parallel plot (I am a sucker for beautiful structure) of Ifurita's mom trying to "fix" her nano-robot thing and put her back to where she was before she died of cancer. Well, anyway, a neat game! definite overtones of feminist interesting plot of women that everyone is trying to heal or cure from trauma but they realize they do not want to be fixed and the thing that would be fixed would be their superpowers or capacity for violence.

Rook is very cool!

***

I named the episode "Damage Control" after we ended sometime after midnight. Nearly everyone almost died. We kept having to blow drama points to save ourselves. Uma, the npc who had just broken up with z_amber's character, scared us all and then ended up killing herself in a surprise, horribly dark turn to the story. Our company is under attack, our characters were under attack, we were trying to save someone who was being threatened by something that seemed real, then fake, then was real again (interdimensional paramilitary). Our company servers were under attack from Ned the guy who works for the rival company and who "telecommutes" i.e. is some sort of pixelish projection over the net... It was a nice detail when we finally broke into his hut in "faerie" with its typical peasant hut stuff, right, but then it was just overlaid with 9 years worth of tech-head clutter, server racks everywhere, bits of equipment...

The werewolf scenes were unexpectedly cool... as Uma in her misery (keep in mind her parents are in jail as mass murderers, and everyone's telling her she is dangerous) spent the evening with the sympathetic dog, confiding in her...

After the game I'm even more amazed at the way everything tied together. The reason I was giggling so hard at the name was that Rook was bristling up right down to his game-running bones at how whump kept pulling his punches on us in a funny way.... (whump GMs the game alternately every 3 games with Rook and they plan each other's basic plots and work on the story arcs.) So Rook felt all the players were getting slack, expecting to be immune from any serious damage - physical or emotional - or death, that our opponents were defeated by easy ways out and we weren't emotionally invested enough. This state of mind is complex and can't be created just by facing off with a big scary creature. Because you whack at the creature and either the battle is long and drawn out or not. But the battle has to be made emotionally complicated as well as imaginarily cinematic AND the outcome should be uncertain. I am sure Rook is typing up his notes right now so I will not describe the fight in detail, but I give it high honors!

Part of the reason the complexity is hard to explain, because the story arcs go back over many episodes. There is something amazing over living through the fleeting experience and it being shared but then it's gone, not like TV which you can play back on a tape or dvd, but we are getting to play through something as complicated as the storylines of buffy or "what firefly could have become" or whatever other show you can think of that is long-running and action-soap-opera structure. So with this small group of people we have had this weird shared experience which is rather intense at times even if it has many a moment of nodding off accidentally to sleep or all just sitting there not sure what to do while we eat pizza or some people listening and some not (me included). How sad that it could not be bottled up or properly conveyed ever again. I still miss our old Vinland game... Well, it's really an art form, that's all I can say. When it's done right that becomes very clear.

Oh, that's me!

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister Machine Gun of Warm Humanitarianism.

Get yours.

shiny new

One fancy-ass bezerkely thrift store and dry pair of jeans later.

The party was fun, I felt really comfortable all of a sudden, I limbered up, got un-diffident, and talked to B.S. who started telling me all about the poetry scene in Queergentina. Cool! Professor F. introduced everyone to everyone else as being "very cool" or "amazingly interesting" ... but I was feeling interesting and also interested in everyone else and what they know about.... one of my favorite things is to meet people and hear whatever it is they have filtered through all of their reading and knowledge that's bubbled up to the top of their judgement of what's interesting. I actually like to hear people talk about their projects (just, not if they're like that one guy I used to go to school with who had only one gimmick (how ears were like sex, or something) and had only read like, one book by L4can, my least favorite theorist...)

I feel a wild surge of hope that I might be able to just sort of hang around the dept. somehow? as a TA? just a hanger-on and "going to re-apply" sort of person? I gave Midge a ride home, and he said it might not be completely impossible that I get in after all in fall if I do some fast talking and persuading. I doubt it... but the TA-ing could be possible perhaps. Maybe I can, uh, be someone's research assistant or something?

Am I not too pathetic? aaaaagh. But seriously I like the whole thing. it is true i am too interdisciplinary and flakey and my language isn't good enough. But i swear if i get my foot in the door of it all, I can kick ass, and prof. F. .... damn... I love how she thinks! and sometimes it is weirdly parallel to how i think, like during B.S.'s talk I was thinking of this one scene in a particular book and how it was related to what B.S. was saying and to stuff we were talking about in class about how the b4roque functions as a distraction and how it's like footnotes. and I am not making this up, professor F. brought it up during the discussion and no one else in the room but me and her had read the book. ?? WTF. that was very strange. It was from the chapter of the book that I had once xeroxed and wheatpasted up all over austin as part of this literature-flyering series... the exact page...

anyway, i was schmoozy i guess but I really enjoy talking to everyone when I'm feeling really on and up and awake. Maybe it was the wet-butt scare; maybe it was the coffee.

I said something dorkily wistful to F. about how I will be in exile and need an excuse to continue hanging around in the fall and she was like, PSHAW! You must not be allowed to escape! You will be around forever! Yes... Jo is right, it is nice to feel wanted by a mentor sort of person! But even better by one I admire... Well, if it works out then okay, if nothing miraculous happens I will do what I can this fall for work and will re-apply.

We were all gossipping about the quirks of the departments of state and bezerkley and the badness of the sp4nish dept at state... very enjoyable...

2nd talk

The second talk by B.S. was extremely interesting on many levels and more about that later.

But for now: feel my pain, as I just sat down in this cafe to check my email and sat in a puddle of water and now must go to Professor F.'s cocktail party with a wet butt.

Goddamn it!

when the popstars smile down kindly

Well I feel about a million times better just because B. Sarllllo was incredibly kind and interesting and not snooty and scary at all. She smiled down upon me benevolently. And she told all about her "little" magazine and how they started it, she talked about printing, and all the nitty gritty, and the importance of conflict, and what some of the conflicts were. And how a magazine is almost always about a group of people who are all a similar age and that is the way it should be, but then if it is going to make a transition then at some point you have to figure out how to pass it on and how it is difficult to make connections to younger generations, but they managed it fairly successfully. I was very relieved that it was not like we were put on the spot, all of us there, and that i would not be immediately outed as an imposter. And I no longer felt like an imposter once I realized though i am not of the same caliber of, well, intellectual rigor, I do the same stuff that she did really with the same drives. and should value that a little bit. It is true that if there were a dictatorship, i would be one of the people doing what she did. and some people in the room i know they have worked as editors on univ. mags but that is honestly very, very different than putting out zines with no money and yet the freedom to do whatever you want. B.S. talked about following your whims and how the little mag that is independent is a testing lab for ideas. And it is super important to have it outside of academia. and that part of the importance of it is the immediacy and now-ness of it, so that you might have a couple of ideas in an article that you didn't think much of, but they sparked something t hat years later it's clear developed into something important or that people are still interested in; but that later-feedback, if that's all you want, write a book, and it's the fast feedback loops that are interesting for a magazine.

i'm feeling slightly more motivated but less scared. Also, prof. f. wrote me a nice (yet scary, as always) email about how she is going to be a hardass on me but it is because she has total faith that I can do it. (but what, and why?)

what I really want to do right now is go make the 2nd issue of c0mposite because it's been so long that I'm afraid I'll never do it.

I'm wondering very seriously if I should be aiming for december. In theory I will have all of June and maybe 2/3 of july to do it in. But there are relatives, and vacations, and I've made barely any progress on it this semester. December? Could I tutor part time? I'm having serious trouble here figuring out what I'm going to be doing. everything in flux. am I reapplying to Bezerkely? or not?

disturbance in the force

I woke up a lot in the night feeling queasy over my own colossal nerve in thinking I could possibly do all these projects. You know, thinking of times I've been in the middle of something and then afterwards read a newspaper account of it, or someone else's history of it, and thinking but that's not how it was at all. And I'm about to be a person writing something like that. How is one ever to know or say anything? My only answer can be that I have to insist on not claiming to be objective and on the imperfection of knowledge. I'll do the best I can and it won't be the best possible. AND YET. If I don't do it, someone else much stupider will.

I'm feeling the pressure.

God, maybe it would be best not to reapply at bezerkeley and to just remain a happy dilettante. I think professor F. wants to make me better than I can really be. I'm a flake, not a budding Susan S0ntag world-caliber intellectual. I don't have the proper boundaries for this... I don't think I can deal with "the discipline".

and then again on the 3rd or 4th or 5th hand talking to people in my class yesterday i could see how narrow their focus! and the.... the fakery... that one girl Marya, who I realy like, and I like how she can gilbly talk about a book she hasn't read and then suddenly admit it. We were talking about our essay topics and she was saying she'd write about certain authors sort of using this pair of french theory snootypants guys but when I said I hadn't read that and only knew what we'd heard people say in class about them she said she hadn't read it either. Compared to this I am a model of conscientiousness. But I'm still not feeling like I am on any kind of solid ground.

and the essay/review (still not out!) in foetry plash is really seeming like utter nonsense to me right now.

and it's just like every small housish or mom-ish thing I fail to do is telling me "stop it, you are fucking up, you are paving paradise, make your child's life perfect, devote everything to him." honestly i'm doing okay but the (inner) pressure is just a bitch. Hegemony is not a loaded gun pointed inward -- it's a constant rain of blows. I'm feeling bruisey and confused. HOw does anyone deal with life and manage everything? is anything i ever do good enough? what is enough? how do i know if i'm doing okay? really my only external measure is: grades, publication, and the affection and reassurance of people around me. thank god rook and chula believe in me and that my work is worth doing... I'm just saying this because I'm inexplicably stressed and also because I don't want any of you, dear readers, to think that I am self-confident every minute. No. I am so deeply dependent on other people.

wow, coincidence!

I hauled out my binder of translations and the woman I try to sit next to in the Bad Class (because she is a grownup, and nice, and ... non heteronormative in a way that is comforting) realized suddenly that the poet I'm translating was her friend Néstor. Whoa! Coolio. I am now dying to pick her brains in massive detail. In 1980 there was a horrible incident in Sao Pa0lo where the police decided to "clean up" the downtown or something and arrested all the tr4vestis and were killing people or something, and there was a big protest or series of protests, and the g/l/t/b people all started protesting and came together in a group called "S0mos"... (with the slogans, "we're all tr4vestis" and "we're all putas")

And then she said that they had to leave town and go into hiding and later there was more intense activism. And P3rlongher moved there in ... like 1982. He had written some articles (as a s0ciologist) on hustlers. And then (I'm unclear... but I'm hoping she'll explain the history to me later) the lesbianfeminists split off from the group (surprise... NOT). Her best friend in S.P. was P3rllongher's best friend, or something...

Hopefully I can do something intellectually helpful for her as well ... maybe give feedback on something she is working on...

So -- one interesting thing here is that just last week I was reading a book by Dale Spender on 10 recent feminists and their theories. And she said something in the introduction to the book - I'm going to have to go back and read it again - about how she realized along the way while writing the book that it was silly NOT to send the chapters to the people she was writing about, since there were all still alive. And she did, and said it was one of the scariest things she ever did! And the responses were scary and a lot of the time she was either way off in her understanding, or offensive to the person in what she said about their work.... and whiel I was reading this I felt really self conscious of all the dumb essays I've ever written and what the authors would say if they could read them! Aaaaaa! So, that element of personal accountability and feeling of responsibility is pretty intense right now. I just wrote 3 or 4 pages last night of what will probably turn out to be complete nonsense and speculation that's way off the mark, after I talk to people who were actually there. I mean to have Nini right there next to me pointing at poems and going, "Oh look, this one is about XX, I lived with her for years. And this one is about Eduard, you should talk to him too."

Jeez. Foot in mouth averted I hope... but on the other hand I have to write SOMETHING and quick in the next month! A month! That means pretty much right now. So I will try to write it carefully without making too many wild assumptions or saying anything hifalutin'.

fresh morning!

If only I could stick a hook up my nose and yank the sinuses right out of my head! But even with the allergy misery that has suddenly slammed me into the windshield of bodily existence, I am happy again in the morning as always. How does that happen?

I dreamed all night of Perlllongher's voice as he declaimes "cadaveres" and of the other poems. that was weird! I used to sometimes dream the entire "rime of the ancient mariner"! What a freak...

And speaking of charming weirdness: go immediately here and buy C.'s novel! It's out, finally! One-click it! Get it! Read it! Review it! Make everyone buy it! It's so good. I'm waving my pompoms!

nuts yet better

I'm so insane... i'm actually woozy and eyes drooping from taking way too much allergy meds, but have been working like mad on these translations and feeling like I am getting it right. wow, if I took a little acid, it would probably all come clear.

No seriously I'm so pleased with how the poems are coming along... Norad's feedback was just what I needed in every way.

Her reading the poem in spanish: "Oh. what? what is this word? what does that mean? it's... oh. but it doesn't make sense. What's going on, oh. OH. it's a guy's... Oh, I love that word. Oh listen how this sounds when you say it out loud. Oh, I have to read it again because it is too confusing, he wants you to go back and figure it out and the images, they are so great, it's like I'm seeing this MOVIE... and ... wow it's dirty but it's beautiful... "

3 poems are now in a non-embarrassing state. they are done. I could tinker if anyone corrects me but I don't feel bad about them. 3 more are nearly there, with another day of work and a couple more questions answered. The other 3, fuck, I'm just hoping I can go faster on them now that I know a few more things. And I just wrote another 2 pages or so on the essay thing to go with them, and it's crap 2 pages but at least a stab at it. Hooray! Such a relief!

passing out now.

breathing! not forgetting to breathe!

I can't breathe... my eyes are watering non stop... snot is like, pouring out of me... I have taken a 12-hour over the counter hell-pill, but it is not helping. how can that be?

this reminds me of when I realized suddenly that all those pretty yellow flowers around my house were RAGWEED. Or in greece, when I realized I was deadly allergic to olive trees.

I have one prednisone, 20mg, in the bottle...

one more thing just fyi. i started doing homework at 9:30am and I am still going. I have not had a break all day. I tried to deal with Moomin, and we went grocery shopping, but I could not cope, I felt like I was snapping at him and he was being rude and that was making us both be mean to each other in way we almost NEVER are.

once again it's not like i'm sitting around on my ass here, people. And as always, I did the laundry, shopping, litter box, and dishes. there was a lot of taking things out of the house and hauling things into the house and moving things from room to room. on my "breaks" from school work.

So, I'm just trying to excuse my afternoon of putting Moomin in front of the TV and going to bed (where I am writing and posting my responses to the week's reading, for class) and forgetting to feed him and then "making dinner" which is cream cheese on some saltines, and whole-milk yogurt. The yogurt has fruit in it. That's healthy, right? Would it really be so much better if I put a hot dog and some vegetables in front of him? -- he would never eat them in a million years. Anyway. Possibly the lamest afternoon and "dinner" ever and I feel guilty that Rook comes home to this travesty to find me incompetent, weepy and complainining of allergies.

really people. I *like* sitting around writing all day. it's just not going right today somehow.

If only I would stop BLEEDING as it has been a week if you count the days of maddening, weird, unpredictable "spotting". because pre-IUD i would just have like, a day of heavy bleeding and then a couple of days of have to wear tampax but like, so minimally, I had to change them so infrequently I kind of worried it was unhealthy. and i could just sleep in boxers and bleed into them a tiny bit and get away with it and wash them in the morning. Now, I"m waddling around with giant mattress pads chafing me and i'm all raw from tampax every couple of hours and I'm just ready to scream about what is probably going to be another 2-week long blood festival.... I will just refuse to get out of bed, and lie on towels. Or lie in the bathtub until it slowly fills up with gross giant clots of menstrual blood and I'll feel like E. Bathory.

Okay I'll stop bitching... my life is good... I could probably make a little bitch-chart of my whiny blog-days and my periods. Watch this be a day that Moomin remembers for the rest of his life as how his Mom was when he was little. Rrrrrrgh. All my days of parcheesi and bike-riding down the tubes as I can see his feelings are hurt at my ignoring him...

reactionary

And the homework reading for the Bad Class is one of the most boring stupid pretentious books ever!

And I usually like this sort of thing! I mean, sure, reclaming feminist history, muses, multiple fragmented identities, dislocating myths! AAAAAAAAGH. But I hate this book! Jeez what a load of crap! A rip-off of all I hold dear!

Doesn't anyone know the real thing when they see it?

Maybe I'll try it again in the morning when I"m not feeling like crap.

fazed

I'm on the rag, cramping, have mystery allergies, exhausted...

Am ready to hop on plane to Buenos Aires and join the Osos club for hairy, burly men. I will buy a small motorcycle and wear big boots. I'll be mysterious and almost never speak to anyone.

Everything is getting to me today. Even the nursery school teacher bitched at me for being 5 minutes late. 5 minutes! fuck her sideways. It was a shock as according to my cell phone I was 10 minutes early. I showed her the phone, apologized, and aksed if I had specially inconvenienced her... but no, she is there anyway with like, 4 kids. Actually, I am not too impressed with her - this is the new teacher - as every time I go to pick Moomin up, she is whining about her life or trying to chat to the other teacher who's trying to leave, or she is on the phone talking to friends. I don't think she gets the concept that I'm paying like 8 million dollars to that school so that someone will NOT ignore my child. I will bitch tomorrow to the director. So then I asked her if Moomin could stay till the late-pickup time on Thursday since Pilot will not be taking him that afternoon and I need to be in Bezerkeley for a talk. And this bitch-teacher acted like she couldn't even believe what she was hearing. You KNOW you have to PAY for that. I'll have to ASK the DIRECTOR. I got mad and said I had been coming to that school for 2 years and it was not uncommon and surely I wasn't the only person who needed occasional extra afternoon and of course I know I have to pay for it. WTF? She just acted bitchier! As I drove home I kept imagining that I had somehow magically defused the situation, perhaps by being sympathetic, or asking her if something else were bothering her as she was clearly just really stressed out.

The deal is that I fucked up yesterday (did I say this already?) and was an hour late. Because of the time change, and all the different .. my phone and the clocks in the classrooms on campus and in the hallways all did not reflect the time change. So I was leaving school, I thought, at 3, to pick up Moomin and would in fact be early. but instead it was 4 already! I called the school and left messages. (On 2nd thought, I realize now why I had to leave messages - it was because the bitch teacher was on the phone with her friends!) Again, it's not like I ruined anyone's day by being late: the school is open till 6, with a very low ratio of kids to teacher.

People in the grocery store kept running their carts into me and not apologizing or sighing loudly as if I were horribly in the way.

Moomin clingy, whiny, and just threw a rock at me. (???) what the fuck is up with the universe?

power line

Power line down in the front of our house... in the street on top of two cars. I called it in and the electric company was extraordinarily non-hurried... It also seems like one of the wires that goes across the street is extra-low. I just watched a truck from the Hole Foods slam into the wire despite my trying to direct traffic around it. O well... i'm back inside and sort of wondering if I should bother to keep standing out there and warning people off.

Had a long conversation in spanish about wires, recycling, and how much money you can get for recycling with an old lady from guatemala who was walking by... I should make more effort to separate cans and bottles out nicely and make it obvious for her and the guy in the hat, who dig thru the trash every few days.

Allergies woke me up in the middle of the night.

Nearby, cats are mating loudly.

A woodpecker is living in our neighborhood again, which makes me happy! I like to hear them.

I also finally met Nukie's mom for the first time. Why have I never seen her? I mean, she clearly lives there....?

That's all the neighborhood news for now. I'm doing homework, then driving to the dump with all the cardboard, then maybe lunch out in dump-town, and more homework.

experts welcome!

Oh beloved experts of my innernet! I need to quickly brush up on my scholarly knowledge of the history of house music and "vogue" and I remember there being some canonical Article that explained that whole scene of the 80s in various big cities and how it was international. Anyone have references? Prentiss, do you have a handy page from early 1995, chock full of usefulness nicely arranged for me to swoop down, ravish & plunder? No? WHY NOT?

***
History of Chicago House

part of what I'm looking for is not particularly anyting about the music itself but about how it is a black/latino thing which all these magazine article say but don't tie to anything happening in other countries as if these latino queens just came from nowhere.
Because today my friend Norad was going on about "where are/were they in Buenos Aiires because I never saw this; not like here in SF where it's like, gay gay gay out everywhere, and guys walking around looking gay, and guys dressing like girls..." (she means 'queer') and I was like, "girl, of course there were gay house music clubs in buenos aiires in like, 1987. You were just not in the right neighborhood. " Weren't there? "But it's so repressed, or it was; not like here. No one would have been talking about being gay, or travesti, or whatever." "But Perlllongher was all militant and was writing all these articles published in newspapers and was part of this militant gay liberation front!"

This was reminding me of how my nerdy friends from Berlin were watching "All About My Motther" with me and saying about the sleazy tranny "wrong side of the tracks" scene, "Oh, surely nobody really behaves like that and people like that don't really exist?" and I was all like, DUDES you're from BERLIN, one of the most perverted cities in the world, as far as I'm concerned everyone walks around Berlin looking like they are right out of "O" magazine or "Skin Two".

Or my mom in librrary school suddenly waking up and realizing like half her classmates were gay and gay people really did exist.

I t hink I can safely assume that something very like the house music scene was international and I would even bet that plenty of its traditions come from latin america and it's not like it all came out of chicago like magic queer parthenogenesis. Again. Puig. for fuck's sake. existence of those books is plenty evidence for me, they are clearly the tiny tip of an iceberg of a giant subculture of queerness. yes it's different from here... but... there are plenty of similarities...

AH! this is a much better research tactic: marcha de orgullo. Oh look... "bears" are the same... I think my cross cultural understanding is on fairly solid ground here.

color and knowing

I just realized something from reading F3yerabend. The strange way that 19th and 20th century novelists and poets write about color is an expression of epistemological anxiety. The long obsessive things about white in melville, for instance... elaborate theories of "azul"... mallarme and whiteness.. the way W.H. Huds0n goes on about eye color and its meanings... This sometimes is very obviously tied to thinking about "how a color is named in one language and not another, or how colors look different to different people" but what is going on underneath it is worrying about experience and perception and how do you know what you know, how do observations translate into knowledge? All the stuff F3yerabend is saying about optics and his point that experience mediated by an instrument was considered inauthentic - that makes a lot of sense - so "of course" you could not trust any perception you got thru a telescope or a hand lens, because it was distorted from what was the "real perception". I'm not really sure what to say about this but those long philosophical digressions on something's color are making a little bit more sense. It's about aesthetics and judgement but also this very basic question about knowing.

the really outrageous thing is

The squalid slum-lord house across the street from us is on the market for... No, I can't say, first listen to the house... For the last year at least 4 different sets of people have lived there... multiple families in the downstairs part, right? It is a small living room, a kitchen, 2 bedrooms, a bathroom,a nd an extra room you have to go through to get to one of the (closet-sized) bedrooms. Maybe 1100 square feet is my estimate. And everything was nasty, you could tell everything was just falling apart and there was no effort to make it even fake-nice for the market. The upstairs is smaller, and one bedroom and a bathroom, a separate little "in-law" setup. There's a garage. They're calling it a 3-bedroom house, but it isn't.

So how much is it going for? >>>>> 900,000. <<<<<

Jesus fuck! I told the realtor there is no way anyone is going to buy it for that. it's just ridiculous. I'll be very, very curious to see what they sell it for.

The thing is, there is just no way that anyone could make that much off the place in rent, is there? Even if annother slum lord stuffs 3 families into the downstairs and ... i think before, there were 3 or 4 single guys living in the upstairs. (I know this because my office window looks out into the street and I see the people come and go, and I also work or play with Moomin in the front yard, and notice who comes home from work... The families rotate in and out very frequently... Yet obviously not a crack house... nice people, immigrants who work in the restaurants and car washes and do odd jobs around here. ) So if you had .. Surely you'd have to pull in around 5000 in rent a month, or more, to make that mortgage payment? how...? It made me feel sick to imagine.

nice time!

I worked on writing papers and translating and tax stuff all Saturday Rook and Moomin were off at the Acrobat and Pilot's ranch, camping. I was going to be a hermit but then it turned out Chula was free to hang out.

I took the train up to the city... C. cooked me dinner... and we went to meet up with this nice-sounding leatherdaddy sort of dude, Earl, at the P0wer Exchange. I looked at his yahoo profile and he was cute, and gave off the aura of old-school bi-queerishness pansexualness that makes me feel really comfortable. And it turned out this was correct and Earl knows like everyone I knew from that scene in the 90s but he was out of town the exact years that I was living here.

***
Look how nice I am. I'm putting the (not very explicit) details behind a cut tag. Don't look if you don't want to know.
***

fightin' words

I'm going to lay the smackdown on critics who wet themselves over the "interactivity" of Rayuela (aka Hopscotch) (glorified choose your own adventure book, a litttle dumb to get so excited about) (not to mention the abomination of that one michael what's his name hypertext book) and say a few more words about muds and IF. Yes, I'll connect it somehow to the cub4n n3obaroque and j0yce. Um, somehow. because that's just what I want to talk about. Hrmph. Now, how to say "critics who wet themselves" in polite academicspeak?

it makes me worry

It makes me worry a little that my heart leaps with joy at this:

new asthma drug

When you think of all the asthma meds I've been on! And their nasty side effects! God knows what the years of corticosteroids have done to me or will do. And let's not even go into the years of wildly fluctuating speed theophylline and the what's now called "rescue" inhalers and the hideousness of over-the-counter primatene that i had to shoplift when i was poor... AAAAA! And the aerosol propellant for many of those inhalers would make me have an attack, isn't that just too idiotic??

the powder I'm on now is good - the advair discus - in theory 2 x a day but I forget it often. once a day, I could handle for sure.

A once a day inhaler sounds pretty damn good... please let it have no side effects... surely my allergist will hook me up with a fistful of free samples! That's the kind of guy he is.

ideas coming together

Yesterday I had a moment of wild happy clarity while driving home down 280, that highway of epiphanies. All my various theory-sources melded together. I felt I could write all the way to the moon and back. That feeling is still with me this morning.

And there is wild blathering! Let there by melding, and juxtaposition, and explaining of the reasons of unreason! Let Feyerabend be cited in the most unthought of ways for purposes unorthodox, and radical 70s feminists slammed together with the MCPs of modernismo and the idea of 'ergodicity' and the Cuban n3o-baroque, and let tiny particles leave their trails in the cloud chambers!

It was in class Thurs. when Prof. F. suddenly was saying that one could do anything with anything and about knowing and how you know and how to read. And I pointed out that this is where you get in Comp Lit, but when you start saying it, it's quite.... (and I was about to say "outrageous" but she suddenly chirped, "Outrageous"...) And then she said something like, "It is what is produced that's important" and I might have actually yelped out loud because it was just what I have been trying to say for 2 years about the method and the tools and the raw material's "orthodoxy" being not so important as being sure to list them and that even not being so important as "is it productive, and what happens if."

Behold my pimpin' glory!

I have just pimped Rook's ride! His new license plate will read "RPGN3RD". (all letters...)

The interface is a little clunky, but it's so cool to be able to test out different possibilities and order vanity plates online... Oh, yay! I've always wanted them. I haven't thought what I might have on my truck, but at least I can enjoy the envious stares of all the other girlies who are longing to ride in the dorkiest car ever, alongside the prince of geeks!

I thought of BADGRR for me, or... BKMNIAC... hmmm.

A thought

I work hard at keeping my temper, and I still think that it's for the best that I do.

work work work

Yesterday I went to another talk but really a small discussion group led by the guy who lectured on Borehays. He talked about queer lit and queer studies in Lat. Amer. ... interesting ideas from everyone, a little vague, uncertain, questioning. Then we all went and had coffee. I told the dude about my anthology project... and he liked it and said i should submit it to this certain very cool place and then it turned out he is on the committee for that place. And it would be incredibly ideal if that happened. so that I nearly had a heart attack hoping that I had not just made an ass of myself.

And my heartattack continues as I realize how I have talked big about this project all over the place and yet it is not realy anywhere near done, and I need to get cracking and my possible credibility (not like I actually have any credibility yet) is on the line. Yipes!!!!

And that Prof. F. probably was deliberately introducing me and she didn't mind (it wasn't like I was just tagging along) and that in a way this puts her on the line too right? that if I fuck it up or don't follow through it makes her look like she is backing the wrong horse. It is weird to feel like the horse, that's all I'm saying. (And she is so scary fierce. She makes quick judgements.)

The other dude who is in my class, Jam, got a ride from me. and I have to say, he is super polished and sort of intimidates me in how he always sounds like he is ... that whole academic professional thing... but as we drove across the bridge it became clear that is a huge fake act and he spent many years owning nightclubs in M3xico City and being something of a drugged up hard-boozing nightlife literary nerd and he feels like a constant imposter in academia much as I do. I hope his fiction is good because I asked to read it and would hate to not like it when he was so nice. And he also had sort of a sponsor-prof who wanted him to apply, and got rejected and then reapplied and got in the next year.

Jam's word on this was, "the dept. is kind of fucked up with no leadership like herding cats and no one wants to lead, it's disorganized, and they beyond discourage creative endeavors, they want to be ivy league and produce little clones who churn out respectable papers, but come, come come to us, you are head and shoulders above so many of these people... they are mediocre..." I could not believe he said such flattering things. I have often while admiring his ability to turn on the slick blarney of academicspeak wondered if it is not a little boring to talk for 2 hours with what seems like wearing critical-theory blinders. And yet if I could do that kind of focus I would be "more professional". So it was nice of him to drop the curtain for a bit and have a good gossip.

Jam also said that nearly everyone in the dept. is faking it with the multi-languages and can't stand the hard requirements and the ancient language req. was hard and felt pointless.

And that I shoudl try to get the dept. to give me a teaching job anyway next semester. Hummm! If that were possible, it would be just perfect.

Okay - enough of this, I am diving into my dictionaries for a while.

I'm a little terrified.