From the 2010 Dane Country (WI) Cultural Affairs Commission calender, Bruce Dawson's "Good & Bad Knowledge #3". This one's for my homies. The ones who have kids, just had kids, or are just about to have kids. And my niece, "uno caballo azul" but actually just a brown horse with blue ribbon tied to its tail because blue fabric is expensive and no I'm not going to post any pictures because nobody wants some internet weirdo looking at pictures of their kids, and yes I said "homies."Sunday, October 31, 2010
From the 2010 Dane Country (WI) Cultural Affairs Commission calender, Bruce Dawson's "Good & Bad Knowledge #3". This one's for my homies. The ones who have kids, just had kids, or are just about to have kids. And my niece, "uno caballo azul" but actually just a brown horse with blue ribbon tied to its tail because blue fabric is expensive and no I'm not going to post any pictures because nobody wants some internet weirdo looking at pictures of their kids, and yes I said "homies."
Friday, October 29, 2010
Two Poems Sort of About Baseball
*Nothing against Texas. Really. I almost feel sorry for them and their pitching. This is a poem about George Bush. Nothing against George Bush. Really. Not really. But it's actually a poem about the way the characters in the Cormac McCarthy book "Cities of the Plain" speak. It's hard to have opinions/judgments, especially ones that are bigoted and unfair. SF is a city that is known for its tolerance, a value that I try to identify with. Texas is a vast and great state, but their baseball team is not playing well at the moment, and the moment happens to be the World Series. I feel bad for Nolan Ryan. I feel bad the bagel I just ate. We read a Tao Lin book in my creative writing class so I'm writing a little bit like him. I'm a little concerned that if the Giants win without the Rangers playing well they will have nothing to play for next season, the lesson that if things come too easily things are harder to appreciate. The pitching staff is so young. Not that it's easy to be a major league pitcher but sudden success can be difficult to deal with. After you get to the top what else is there to play for? Whatever. "I hate it when you say that."
On Tuesday morning on my way to work, hopping on my bike in the pre-daylight savings time fall, overcast and dark, about eight o'clock a big black bird dropped a nut from forty feet up and then swooped down to eat from the cracked nut. Smart bird. Today I watched a juvenile hawk get swarmed by a team of black birds, perched on top of a light pole. It looked away to say something to my roommate, something about the hawk. I looked back and it was gone. It's hard to imagine death from a bird, or a team of birds. Bird death. Bird Death 2. Bird Death 3: Escape from the Light Pole. Fini. Music. Credits.
In Texas*
In Texas, instead of saying goodbye
they say “Well.” Well, I am not
in Texas. Goodbye.
Mother's Day, 1975 / Allegations of Racism
____________Marge
____________Schott
It's hard _____was a terrible
to think of __**baseball team
anyone worse owner
*Nothing against Texas. Really. I almost feel sorry for them and their pitching. This is a poem about George Bush. Nothing against George Bush. Really. Not really. But it's actually a poem about the way the characters in the Cormac McCarthy book "Cities of the Plain" speak. It's hard to have opinions/judgments, especially ones that are bigoted and unfair. SF is a city that is known for its tolerance, a value that I try to identify with. Texas is a vast and great state, but their baseball team is not playing well at the moment, and the moment happens to be the World Series. I feel bad for Nolan Ryan. I feel bad the bagel I just ate. We read a Tao Lin book in my creative writing class so I'm writing a little bit like him. I'm a little concerned that if the Giants win without the Rangers playing well they will have nothing to play for next season, the lesson that if things come too easily things are harder to appreciate. The pitching staff is so young. Not that it's easy to be a major league pitcher but sudden success can be difficult to deal with. After you get to the top what else is there to play for? Whatever. "I hate it when you say that."
On Tuesday morning on my way to work, hopping on my bike in the pre-daylight savings time fall, overcast and dark, about eight o'clock a big black bird dropped a nut from forty feet up and then swooped down to eat from the cracked nut. Smart bird. Today I watched a juvenile hawk get swarmed by a team of black birds, perched on top of a light pole. It looked away to say something to my roommate, something about the hawk. I looked back and it was gone. It's hard to imagine death from a bird, or a team of birds. Bird death. Bird Death 2. Bird Death 3: Escape from the Light Pole. Fini. Music. Credits.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Am I Alive or Dead?
There was a time in Seattle after I had come back from helping take care of my father, jobless and isolated in a moldy apartment, when I thought about him, his loss and my own. In retrospect I think this could have been considered mourning, but I had nothing to show for it: no funeral or artifact that anything real had happened.
"If you only have enough money to pay two months rent, keep your money and risk eviction. If you know the bill collectors are going to take all you have and want more, don't give them anything. Owing one hundred dollars is the same as ten thousand if you don't have either."
Refusing to advertise or market the product requires a profound confidence in the product; that it will appear of its own strength without prodding or suggestion. It is here that it becomes difficult to separate desire from indifference. Television commercials work or are working regardless if we “pay” attention. I need to tell you something.
There was a time in Seattle after I had come back from helping take care of my father, jobless and isolated in a moldy apartment, when I thought about him, his loss and my own. In retrospect I think this could have been considered mourning, but I had nothing to show for it: no funeral or artifact that anything real had happened.
"If you only have enough money to pay two months rent, keep your money and risk eviction. If you know the bill collectors are going to take all you have and want more, don't give them anything. Owing one hundred dollars is the same as ten thousand if you don't have either."
Refusing to advertise or market the product requires a profound confidence in the product; that it will appear of its own strength without prodding or suggestion. It is here that it becomes difficult to separate desire from indifference. Television commercials work or are working regardless if we “pay” attention. I need to tell you something.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Sometimes it's better to wait to say anything. Like Taylor Swift after the 2008 Video Music Awards, she waited two days before posting to her Twitter account about the shock of Kanye West usurping her award acceptance speech. Or when Indiana Jones watched Mola Ram dig the slaves' heart out with his bare hands. Or the 2010 San Francisco Giants who are playing in the World Series after winning on Saturday night. We listened to the game on the radio and cooked dinner. Then, as if Obama was elected president again, Valencia flooded with well wishers and revelers. Cheering and honking and then a fire truck came down the street blowing its horns and clanging its bell. I think this is the first time I've lived in city where one of its professional sports team was playing for a championship. It's kind of cool. People are happy.
School has been busy. The clouds have been raining. I have been playing again with my music machine, three or four pieces that I will be posting over the next month to the music blog, one a week starting with "Admiring Michael" tonight. More pieces next week and beyond. The link is to the right. Below is a promotional poster for the upcoming cat-of-the-year awards, illustrated by my roommate.
School has been busy. The clouds have been raining. I have been playing again with my music machine, three or four pieces that I will be posting over the next month to the music blog, one a week starting with "Admiring Michael" tonight. More pieces next week and beyond. The link is to the right. Below is a promotional poster for the upcoming cat-of-the-year awards, illustrated by my roommate.
Monday, October 18, 2010
On Saturday my roommate and I sat down with our mail-in-ballots for the coming November elections. This is a somewhat substantial task in California because of the massive number of state and local officials, proposals, and ballot measures. It took a good hour even with the SF Bay Guardian cheat sheet / endorsements in front of us. We went through the candidates voting for things such as State Controller and State Governor (they are different positions), as well as the local officials such the supervisor for District 8; though I didn't get to vote for the supervisor for District 10. "It's amazing that these election people can get the right ballot to the right person with the right zip code with all the ballots that they have to send out." It's called bureaucracy, said Sam.
Governor was pretty easy. Jerry Brown over Meg Whitman. I heard them debate earlier in the week and actually kind of liked what Whitman was saying, but then again G.W. occasionally made sense to me. That said, I don't trust my political instincts because I know I'm easily swayed by rhetoric. As a result I try to listen to what others around me are saying about the candidates. Living in San Francisco, I haven't heard much good about Whitman. In 2000 I remember telling my Mom that I was going to vote for Nader and she convinced me to vote for Gore. It was at that moment that I consciously began to defer to others for political opinions. As much as I personally like the idea of collectively moving towards oblivion (or as Bill Maher put it during the lead up to the 2000 election, that if Nader didn't win he'd rather have G.W. in office so people will see how bad things can get. He got his wish.), listening to moderates is, I feel, a good way to stay healthy. The middle path.
Governor was pretty easy. Jerry Brown over Meg Whitman. I heard them debate earlier in the week and actually kind of liked what Whitman was saying, but then again G.W. occasionally made sense to me. That said, I don't trust my political instincts because I know I'm easily swayed by rhetoric. As a result I try to listen to what others around me are saying about the candidates. Living in San Francisco, I haven't heard much good about Whitman. In 2000 I remember telling my Mom that I was going to vote for Nader and she convinced me to vote for Gore. It was at that moment that I consciously began to defer to others for political opinions. As much as I personally like the idea of collectively moving towards oblivion (or as Bill Maher put it during the lead up to the 2000 election, that if Nader didn't win he'd rather have G.W. in office so people will see how bad things can get. He got his wish.), listening to moderates is, I feel, a good way to stay healthy. The middle path.
Prop. 19 was the other biggie on the ballot, taxing and regulating marijuana, a.k.a. "pot" as it's called on the streets. The weirdness of openly acknowledging something that for as long I've known, has been a minor taboo, and the normalization that comes with this acknowledgment is almost too much change to bear all at once. Good thing the availability of medicinal marijuana is such that anybody who wants it can get it already. And by now we're all used to smelling pot every fifteen feet walking down the street, the headshops, ads, dispensaries, t-shirts, and dealing with our stoned friends, selves, family members, colleagues and students. Around here I don't think it would change much. Which is one argument: that CA may as well be taxing it. The other are the drug cartels along the border, that legalizing pot here will reduce the profits and thus the violence, though that argument is may not be true, according to this. Socio-political issues asides, it feels more psychological than anything: are we ready to change our definition of what drugs are? Do we want them to be underground? Counter-cultural? If they were sanctioned by the government would we use them differently? I imagine we would.
And then there are the rest of the measures on the State ballot, changing the way the legislature votes on the budget, little tax measures, more pollution controls...nothing too complicated that leaning Democrat or Republican won't take care of. The city ballot measures are more complicated, something about hotel taxes? I don't know. I just voted with the Guardian. Not sure what the right answer is on that one. But the big ones: cutting the city pensions (no, based on the argument that it would raise health insurance costs for the poorest) and no on the sit/lie proposition L because proposition M addresses sidewalk bound trouble makers in a way that doesn't give the police the authority to do whatever they want. I have nothing against the police but forcibly removing people from sidewalks doesn't seem like a winning long term solution to homelessness. At any rate, that's what I voted for. Now I'm going to go buy some yogurt.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Two sonnets written by two of my creative writing sections, edited by moi, based off freewrites meditating on an excerpt from John Cage's "Lecture On Nothing":
Structure without life is dead, but life without structure is un-seen.
i.**
Life without structure goes unseen
but I wont' tell anyone
what it looks like: a piano playing rests
these thoughts. -------Real life
is about climbing a mountain and talking shit
for hours but I haven't noticed,
dropping out of the sky like a
bird flying into the sunset. -----Air has no structure
and doesn't need purpose. If there's no life
what is art but a structure on a page
a skyscraper by the contractors who
design car door slams and leaves rustling.
Sometimes I wonder how much time gets built
on the backs of other people's words.
ii.
Structure without life is dead
but I guess it goes unseen any
way in -- the -- void --that -- is -- my --soul
at any given moment. -------Meaning
that I forget who I am because I need
structure to follow along, missing out
on dinner while climbing a tree
like I was nine years old. ------- I am not
too sure if I understand the
structure I believe in ----or John Cage
or the shark ---- or the line on the ground
the line where my pupils lie
on the ground swinging like a boxer.
Let's say you live alone and have no
friends. Is this mask a structure too?
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Facebook, because of that movie that I went to see last Friday and no I don't have any children though a lot of my friends do or will soon and yes it does make me feel a little bit like hm what am I doing with my life but it doesn't really matter what other people are doing until I begin to think about what other people are doing in the abstract which leads me back to Facebook, a site that I might log into once a month to reply to a message or write a message through because Facebook is not all that fun for me. Reading about what other people are doing or looking at pictures of ex-girlfriends is kind of painful because instantly my little lizard brain will start to compare itself with all those other bites and picas and pics or whatever else consists of our on-line selves. I read the google buzz because I'm already logged in and its mostly articles. Facebook creeps me out.
This period-lite writing inspired not just by that movie which is pretty good really fast and entertaining with music is done by our old friend Trent Reznor but just now I read this little article about another article about Mr. Reznor's views on Facebook such as this summary his of thoughts: "people don’t put their actual selves forward on the network and instead portray themselves as they want to be seen for whatever reason" which makes me think yeah what a bunch of fakers and then all of a sudden I find myself writing in a blog that I've been trying to post to on a regular basis since the summer and so far have been generally successful and recently I've noticed that the number of people reading the blog has been going up and I can attribute that to two changes; the first being consistency which is primarily the reason that more people visit but second, and maybe this is a distant second, removing the comment option the uncomfortable "0 comments" tag at the bottom of each post which always seemed to create the effect of speaking to an empty room regardless of whether anybody was reading or not.
This period-lite writing inspired not just by that movie which is pretty good really fast and entertaining with music is done by our old friend Trent Reznor but just now I read this little article about another article about Mr. Reznor's views on Facebook such as this summary his of thoughts: "people don’t put their actual selves forward on the network and instead portray themselves as they want to be seen for whatever reason" which makes me think yeah what a bunch of fakers and then all of a sudden I find myself writing in a blog that I've been trying to post to on a regular basis since the summer and so far have been generally successful and recently I've noticed that the number of people reading the blog has been going up and I can attribute that to two changes; the first being consistency which is primarily the reason that more people visit but second, and maybe this is a distant second, removing the comment option the uncomfortable "0 comments" tag at the bottom of each post which always seemed to create the effect of speaking to an empty room regardless of whether anybody was reading or not.
But I want to circle back to Mr. Reznor's comment about Facebook, that is, of course its a false image that gets presented. That is to say I really overuse the phrase 'that is to say' or 'that said' but it seems useful. That is to say this blog, if it wasn't obvious, is actually not me. It's artifice intentionally made to do intentional things. Like a screwdriver or a banana cream pie. It depends on how I use it which depends on how I slept last night speaking of which the bar across from where I live was bumping the worst trance music I have ever laid in my bed for two hours listening to. I wrote them this letter: "Dear Amnesia, It's 1:45 AM. Your fucking shitty shitty techno/trance has been keeping me up for the last hour and a half. I've called the police. You are a fucking horrible neighbor...." It goes on. I don't know if that will change anything but it felt good to write. This fact of feeling also seems like a legitimate way to go about making choices.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
On Tuesday, yesterday, I went to Henry's Hunan Restaurant and received this fortune,
which corresponds nicely with the fortune below, in the sense that both talk about days of the week. The one mentions Tuesday specifically, and the other, since I received it on Tuesday, indicates that today, Wednesday is the day to give flowers. Which could happen, though I'm not sure what kind of opportunities I'll have for that today, as I'm working here in the morning, will be at work in the afternoon and then go to Oakland for therapy. I think what I'm going to do, speaking in the present, is give my cats some catnip which I think is a flower. Here goes:
LLLLLL 
Okay. Now that that's done, that the whole fortune for today has been resolved I can move on with my life. And by move on I mean show you the stamps that I bought on Monday on my way home from work:
which I only bought because it was either these or a stamp that featured a painting of a violet (?) and the word LOVE. Barf! When the postal clerk told me I only had two options I said "Are you kidding me?" and then he said "No I'm not." And then I said "Okay I'll take the sailors." And then he said "Would you like cash back?" And then we proceeded in anonymity for the rest of our transaction and I went home. At any rate, I got up at five this morning. Mostly because I feel asleep at nine last night. Also because Henry's Hunan started a fire in my belly. It's a sunny day in San Francisco. Chance of showers said the guy on the radio but I think the chances are pretty slim. It's cooled off since last week and is back to normal. Last Friday a student in the writing lab informed me that in 2004, over 2 million Spiderman costumes were sold during the Halloween season. This morning I ate a delicious nectarine. Hope all is well. See you later.
which corresponds nicely with the fortune below, in the sense that both talk about days of the week. The one mentions Tuesday specifically, and the other, since I received it on Tuesday, indicates that today, Wednesday is the day to give flowers. Which could happen, though I'm not sure what kind of opportunities I'll have for that today, as I'm working here in the morning, will be at work in the afternoon and then go to Oakland for therapy. I think what I'm going to do, speaking in the present, is give my cats some catnip which I think is a flower. Here goes:
LLLLLL 
Okay. Now that that's done, that the whole fortune for today has been resolved I can move on with my life. And by move on I mean show you the stamps that I bought on Monday on my way home from work:
which I only bought because it was either these or a stamp that featured a painting of a violet (?) and the word LOVE. Barf! When the postal clerk told me I only had two options I said "Are you kidding me?" and then he said "No I'm not." And then I said "Okay I'll take the sailors." And then he said "Would you like cash back?" And then we proceeded in anonymity for the rest of our transaction and I went home. At any rate, I got up at five this morning. Mostly because I feel asleep at nine last night. Also because Henry's Hunan started a fire in my belly. It's a sunny day in San Francisco. Chance of showers said the guy on the radio but I think the chances are pretty slim. It's cooled off since last week and is back to normal. Last Friday a student in the writing lab informed me that in 2004, over 2 million Spiderman costumes were sold during the Halloween season. This morning I ate a delicious nectarine. Hope all is well. See you later.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Each semester in the persuasion and argument class I teach, the transition from personal issues to social issues is awkward. It's a little like, "okay, now instead of doing this, we're doing this," and the 'why' of our switch remains a little bit nebulous. In theory, writing about something important that happened in a-life-so-far leads into thinking about larger social issues; "the personal is political" or more specifically, everything we go through is something that many other people have also gone though. That our lives are examples of larger social and historical trends. The memoir is, for our purposes, a short narrative about a time when a person learns some kind of life lesson. "A time when I realized I was all alone in this cold and cruel world." Translating a subjective theme into a concrete argument requires some work.
On Friday, it was the point in the semester where we give it a shot, and this time it made little more sense than usual. We started with the chapter on narrative argument and discussed one of the essays at the end of the chapter, an essay by Leslie Marmon Silko about border patrols. We discussed implict and explicit reasoning and looked at on the diagram the book provided:
We worked to figure this "nipple" (as a student put it) diagram out. Say you write a story about being carjacked. Of course it's no fun to to be carjacked. You write, "he pressed the gun to my temple and told me to drive to the airport." This is a scary. From this feeling, our subjective reading experience, we conjure up a reason for being scared: I am scared because there is a strange man in my car threatening to kill me if I don't drive him to the airport. Or in simplified terms, I am in danger (vs. the objective viewpoint, this is a dangerous situation). From this reason we create a 'claim': lock your doors; and in turn, an argument: lock your doors because carjackers are dangerous.
That's about 45 minutes of class time condensed. What's neat about this little system is that it explains how the stories we tell are, in a sense, arguments for certain world views. We all know this in a sense, but the mechanisms that actually persuade are hidden, and it's helpful to see them. Granted that all forms or rhetoric (finding the best means of persuasion) require a little hoo-ha/ magical thinking/ faith that somebody is listening, but the point of beginning the class with a memoir is to ground argument in the personal. To show that the reason we are arguing about prop. 19 or tax cuts is not because it's an intellectual game, which it can be and has seemingly turned into on the national level, but because we live in our bodies and experience feeling. Right or wrong aside, we all have preferences for how we like to feel. These preferences color everything we do, including the stories we tell.
On Friday, it was the point in the semester where we give it a shot, and this time it made little more sense than usual. We started with the chapter on narrative argument and discussed one of the essays at the end of the chapter, an essay by Leslie Marmon Silko about border patrols. We discussed implict and explicit reasoning and looked at on the diagram the book provided:
We worked to figure this "nipple" (as a student put it) diagram out. Say you write a story about being carjacked. Of course it's no fun to to be carjacked. You write, "he pressed the gun to my temple and told me to drive to the airport." This is a scary. From this feeling, our subjective reading experience, we conjure up a reason for being scared: I am scared because there is a strange man in my car threatening to kill me if I don't drive him to the airport. Or in simplified terms, I am in danger (vs. the objective viewpoint, this is a dangerous situation). From this reason we create a 'claim': lock your doors; and in turn, an argument: lock your doors because carjackers are dangerous.That's about 45 minutes of class time condensed. What's neat about this little system is that it explains how the stories we tell are, in a sense, arguments for certain world views. We all know this in a sense, but the mechanisms that actually persuade are hidden, and it's helpful to see them. Granted that all forms or rhetoric (finding the best means of persuasion) require a little hoo-ha/ magical thinking/ faith that somebody is listening, but the point of beginning the class with a memoir is to ground argument in the personal. To show that the reason we are arguing about prop. 19 or tax cuts is not because it's an intellectual game, which it can be and has seemingly turned into on the national level, but because we live in our bodies and experience feeling. Right or wrong aside, we all have preferences for how we like to feel. These preferences color everything we do, including the stories we tell.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)