I heard them because I accepted the limitations of an arts conference in a Virginia girls’ finishing school, which limitations allowed me quite by accident to hear the blackbirds as they flew up and overhead.

John Cage from “Lecture on Nothing,” 1959. It occurs in a passage where he's talking about structure, that we need it to see and hear life. That life without structure goes "unseen" but structure that contains no life (read: heart/reason for being) is dead. Take for example a mediocre Hollywood blockbuster or network sitcom. Things that go through the motions quite competently but ultimately don't move us or leave us with anything meaningful, or worth remembering. The new Mission Impossible movie probably fits that bill. Or on the other hand, those who have a lot to say but don't intentionally push into mainstream channels don't get heard. Without structure, one that makes sense to others, one that is visible, the content and quality of ideas can be lost.

He goes on to talk about his experience at the "Viginia girls' finishing school," that there he was, listening to a lecture, and he looked out the window to hear birds rising from a field. Simple, but he was only able to experience this moment, to hear this "sound de-licious be-yond com-pare" because he "accepted his limitations." What exactly are his limitations? He accepted his situation, whatever that may have been. From the passage, it reads as if he was a little bored, maybe bored with the speaker, and turned his head to look out the window. What's remarkable is that he was ready to hear these birds. It's one thing to turn distractedly away from a thing, be it a speaker or a TV show or a man on the street holding a sign, but it is entirely different to recognize this impulse to do so. And once he does, he's able to accept where he's at, and move on.

Easier said than done, to accept where we find ourselves. And it's hard, and at least for me, takes a lot of talking and processing to even begin to understand the "limitations" of a situation. But it's a quote I always come back to, partly because he doesn't seem to blame his situation. That a thing can't be anything more than it already is. The speaker was not boring, but the arts conference was not for him at that given moment. It is from this same distance, this same perspective, that allows him to hear the blackbirds rising from the field. A kind of ethic or posture, and in his terms, a kind of structure that allows him to experience clarity. Once he comes to the one moment of clarity (which may have taken him days/weeks/years to arrive at. Who knows) it's no coincidence that the world suddenly becomes beautiful. That his ears and eyes are suddenly in tune with a bigger world.

Whell, back in Oakland. It's sunny but a little chilly, not warm and not cold. In Wisconsin the newspaper said it was going to be a "brown Christmas." Meaning the landscape was going to be muddy and gray. Grey. I don't know. Either way I was back here. Went for a hike on Christmas proper and ate Chinese food. Saw a movie but left before it was over, as it was putting D and I both to sleep along with some other patrons at the movie theatre. Because I don't want to use this platform to spread slander I won't name the movie ("The Artist"). On Boxing Day, after sleeping in for half the day we got some groceries and made breakfast. Later I watched bits and pieces of basketball games over the internet, and now, Tuesday, it's back to work. Not school work but writing and other projects. Which is really really really really really really nice, to have nothing pressing to do. No big stress or immediate deadline for the next month. It feels good.

Mr. Exstein helped my brother and I learn to play tennis when we were kids. Mineral Point. Summers in the late eighties. He would stand in the middle of the court with an old wooden racket. He didn't have to move, and couldn't really anyway because he was old and frail, and I'm not sure what we actually learned from the handfull of hours we spent with him, but I remember the drool that would fall out of his mouth when he would talk. A string of it with a bright wad at the end. He'd wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. A couple years later my dad took us to see him in the hospital. I don't remember what was wrong, but my dad thought it was important to visit an old man who didn't have much family or hardly any other visitors coming through. I asked a few questions about tennis, not that I really cared, and we sat there for fifteen minutes in the glow of a television, and left.

I think my dad wanted me to experience the ambience of the hospital, and demonstrate a kind of ethic. There were others. Florence, who lived in Dodgeville, was another old person that us kids had nothing to say to, or do with. Yet he made a point of all of us going to dinner once a week during the summers. Either Pizza Hut or Hardee's or possibly Narvey's, it didn't make sense to me why we were spending time with these people who we didn't know and really couldn't wait to get away from, to get home and get back to video games.

Yesterday I went up to visit him at Clearview, where he's been for the last six or seven years. They just openend a new building, much more modern than the fifties insitututional architechture of the old one. Juneau, Wisconsin. He was slumped over in a wheel chair and drooling. Like a baby, his back muscles are too weak to support his body after the many years inactivity. Mentally it's a wash and has been for a long time, but physically his body gets weaker and weaker. I wiped his mouth a few times and tried to get him to sit up straight. Some nurses came over and wheeled him into his room, and he went right to sleep as soon they got him into bed. After all that, I thought. After all that here he is, surrounded by strangers. I don't know what this means. It's been 12 years since he was diagnosed, and there's not much left to visit. After all that. I left him the clothes my sister ordered, some sweatpants and a shirt, kissed him on the forehead and drove back to Madison.

Dispatch from Wisconsin: it's not that cold. At the barber shop today the lady who disinterestedly cut my hair said she wouldn't mind having a cook out in December, and I wouldn't mind that either but I was starting to get annoyed by the clippers that were running a little bit too fast over my head that pulled it as much as cut it and I paid up and left a two dollar tip and went to go eat breakfast. It was eleven in the morning. I spent the next couple of hours doing a little Christmas shopping and now I'm back at my mother's house working towards a nap. Which may or may not happen but Jerry just yelled at the dog because the dog is barking at the ice cream maker and earlier Jerry said "I know you hate that noise" to the dog and then she barked again and then I said "I didn't know she didn't like that noise" and now I do and now we all know she doesn't like that noise and Jerry keeps telling her to keep quiet and now she's outside barking.

Yesterday I sat down in the blue chair that sits in the living room and finished reading my student's papers for the semester. That felt good, to finish, and it generally felt good to grade my student's papers, as it's the last round and these papers are usually in the best shape. Last semester I kind of did a half-ass job grading the final round so this semester I made sure to be careful and considerate. It took about eight hours, all told for both classes, to finish these papers, and calculate the final grades. I really wish I got paid for this time as in a sense my employer encourages me to do a half-ass job as one "gets what they pay for" and we are supposed to be thankful for just having a job. But the good news is that it's done and I have six weeks of unpaid furlough to recuperate and regenerate and remember what it's like to read for pleasure.

All in all it was a good semester, a long semester full of Occupy and Dara, but also full of classes, two good ones, and international students. BUT MAN, I'm tired. I didn't realize how tired until the plane ride here, though I got plenty of sleep the night before for I just passed out. And then yesterday while grading papers I just passed out. And as soon as I get done writing this I'm going to go pass out. And as the semester came to a close I wondered to myself if I was going crazy but now I'm realizing I was just tired, and instead of sitting down at a computer or with a friend and distracting myself silly it's good to be here in Wisconsin, where there is not much continuation from Oakland. And that is all. Like John Cage says, "If anybody / , / is sleepy / let him go to sleep / ."

Well, the port shut down was successful in Oakland last night. It was a lot of walking, a little talking and a little listening, and then we went home. It's really strange how long it took (four and a half hours) compared to how long it felt it took (about an hour). Time flies when you're doing things that I'm not sure are good. And there it is: I'm still not sure blocking the ports was a good idea based on the comments and news stories I've been reading. On the other hand, it really feels great to be out there with everybody, amidst the chaos and the conversations and the signs and spontaneity. Who did the blockade hurt? The workers? That seems to be what most newspapers are reporting, as well as what the sentiments of the comments pages generally leads to.

As an alternative here is an excerpt from a Democracy Now news story, which seems to represent the perspective of the blockaders:

AMY GOODMAN: And the media quoting many of the truckers saying, "Why are you doing this? You’re hurting us more than you’re hurting the corporation. We are the 99 percent," they are saying, Anthony?

ANTHONY LEVIEGE: That question was asked a lot throughout Monday’s protest. And I decided that I’m not going to even respond to that question, because that’s just a device to keep people from dealing with the real issues at hand, because today’s action, if that hurts the trucker or anybody, that’s a sign of the times, that we do need change, that people are so dependent on missing one day’s pay, that they can’t make it if they miss one day’s pay. Those are some of the reasons why we definitely need to have change.

Anthony Leviege is a member of the ILWU and Amy Goodman is a journalist. The rest of the interview can be found here, but herein lies the problem: that on the one hand the larger system, the one that makes it impossible to miss a days work, needs to be changed, whereas, when other people who are not directly invested in the specifics of this change are advocating for it (for example, I do not work with the port and did not lose a days work), it can feel "paternalistic," that those who don't work at the port are deciding what's best for port workers.

Most of the commentators and comment-ers and editorials cited this lack of official support (that is, support not by individual members, but by the union leadership) and the harm a port blockade would do to the longshoremen and truck drivers' daily wages. Oakland's mayor said that the 1% would be laughing at the action as it was so obviously misguided, and suggests that the blockade will ultimately weaken the general public's support for the Occupy movement. As I write this, I don't mean to reiterate these points because they make me feel like a dupe for coming out last night. They make so much sense yet, I'm on my way somewhere else, more along the lines of Anthony's point, that to frame the conversation in oppositional terms of who did who to what is to overlook the big picture. "Paternalistic" is really just a word to end the conversation (boo! scary!) and paints an ugly picture of the Occupy movement as a misguided and elitist group of irresponsible 20 somethings.

Which is a problem if you're like me, the kind of person who believes pretty much whatever they read. I think, yeah, those are good points. But what's important to note, is that these commentators and opinions that float around (where do they come from?) don't actually have any more claim on the truth than you or I. And if I had to choose who to throw my lot in with, I would rather be with those who aren't living on a diet of didactic cliche, and rather, be with those forging into unknown territory. Aesthetically (which does matter), one of the most revealing and meaningful aspects of Occupy is that it is not a continuation of the political and cultural rhetoric that got us here in the first place. Refusing to participate in these tired discussions, and instead, stumbling towards one's own vocabulary, means and methods, making mistakes and breaking eggs, is how beautiful things get made. For this reason alone, the experience of Occupy itself, de-intellectualized and lived, I come to being once again.

Happy Monday. Today is the West Cost Port Blockade, coordinated by the Occupy movement. Here is, in the words of Occupy Oakland, why this is happening. Or here is why it's a good thing in the words of the 100+ thousand American Port Truck drivers who are heavily effected in their day to day by the multinational corporations who own and ultimately, make the policies that run these port. Coming from the drivers themselves, this letter is the justification I needed to participate with a clear conscious in these closures that have been widely decried by the media at large (as usual) and in particular, by the San Francisco Chronicle. Which almost, almost, convinced me that these blockades were doing more harm than good. I really need to stop reading that thing but I do like to read the sports and the comics.... Thus, as of eleven AM today, The Ports of Oakland and Portland have been shut down, while San Diego and Long Beach have, from what I've read, been not as successful. Seattle is in progress. I get off work at four and will be joining the second shift. Come out and show support if you can.

Niece

The streets of San Francisco,
She said of herself, were my

Father and mother, speaking to the quiet guests
In the living room looking down the hills

To the bay. And we imagined her
Walking in the wooden past
Of the western city ... her mother

Was not that city
But my elder sister. I remembered

The watchman at the beach
Telling us the war had ended--

That was the first world war
Half a century ago--my sister
Had a ribbon in her hair.


_________-George Oppen

In the last couple weeks in the pronunciation lab, now that we're past the initial curriculum of the three parts of stress, word reductions, and linking (and why spoken English sounds nothing at all like written English) we've been moving into sentences, sentence meaning and emphasis patterns. The idea that I can take a sentence like "I never said she stole my money." and depending on where I place the emphasis, the meaning of the sentence changes. So as, "I never SAID she stole my money...(I implied it)." Or, "I never said she stole my MONEY...(I said she stole my pride)." Pronunciation wise, the work is not so much the meaning (which is fairly evident from our animal ability to read emotional nuance) as much as what emphasis sounds like; how to embody these little melodic patterns in ways that are clear and comfortable.

To do this, we need not just CAPITAL LETTERS, but some pretty sophisticated recognition skills. For example, "Did you eat breakfast yet?" sounds more like "J'eet breakfast yet" when we're out there in the "real world." We talk fast and not so clearly. In the latter version, I only actually hear two words: breakfast and yet. The first part of the sentence I hear as a cluster of sound, one that I've heard before many times and can recognize as meaning "did you eat," like a word in itself: j'eet. Now, I'm not going to get into the hardcore linguistics theory about what all this could mean (in part because I don't know the hardcore linguistic theory about what all this could mean) but what's interesting to me is the idea that we don't actually listen all that carefully to what each other is saying. Instead we only hear a few key words, and assume the rest.

I don't know if this is cultural, or having specifically to do with American English, or 2011, or internet conditioned attention spans, but it's hard to put in the necessary time and energy to actually listen to what a person is saying. And at the same time it's hard to say exactly what we mean to say. The non-native speaker wonders, how is it that they can understand each other, because I could only make out a few words....The answer, unfortunately, is that we don't actually understand each other all that well. You could look at American politics or the one billion and one forms of dysfunction we're immersed in and come to the same conclusion. Whereas, on a micro-scale, like a dog tearing after a squirrel twenty yards away but ignoring the sparrow flitting around in front of its nose (unless it's a bird dog but that's another story), we don't see what we're not looking for. And we don't hear what we're not listening for. My point is, it's hard to listen.

Two weeks left in the semester. This year, when it's over (all over), mi familia is aborting Christmas. My brother and his wife are going to be in Paris, my sister and her family (brother-in-law, neice, nephew) are too complicated to travel to Wisconsin this year, and my Mom is going to Africa two days after Christmas to ride horses. Which is all very exciting but doesn't make for much of a family gathering, so I'm traveling to Sconny (Wisconsin) for four days, and leaving before Santa notices that we have no tree. The last time I missed Christmas was in Japan, and Aric (who was visiting) and I went out into the cold night to observe the romantic holiday that Christmas is in Japan. It's a shopping season for couples and close friends to buy each other gifts and is not so much the firmly realized family tradition it is here. New Year's fits that bill. But to be perfectly honest, I didn't miss it much asides from the being with family part.

So I will be here but won't be alone, am excited to do things a little differently. There's a lot of writing and other projects that I'm really looking forward to having time to spend on during the later days of December and the first half of January. The second half January is for a meditation course and then the semester begins again. In the mean time, two weeks left and asides from the the stack of tests next to me, grading the final essays, and calculating the final grades, the bulk of the work is done. It's been a pretty good semester but it's winding down and we don't mind. In other news, a week from now, today, Monday, the Occupy Movement is coordinating a strike to shut down all the ports along the West Coast. This will require an enormous effort from a lot of people to get the word out, and to get bodies into the streets. I will be there.

Last, this coming Saturday is the George Oppen memorial lecture, hosted by the Poetry Center (in SF). Here is one George Oppen poem:

Boy's Room

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelly
At the lake and saw 'they were just
Boys' rooms' and was moved

By that. And indeed a poet's room
Is a boy's room
And I suppose that women know it.

Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl's body.