This is my attempt to write about the newish Haruki Murakami book 1Q84. Q is pronounced "que" which is the phonetic version of the number nine in Japanese. So the book's name is 1984, but a little bit different. I finished it last night, all nine-hundred something pages of it, over the course of a couple months. Since about page one-hundred and fifty I've really enjoyed it, savoring it slowly. Reading to find out what was going to happen but also paying attention. It's my favorite of his books since Norwegian Wood and like NW, IQ84 is fundamentally a love story. But unlike NW, it has a happy ending.

Many of the reviews, and the ones that compelled me to read it, mentioned that it was a strange book. And it is. I concur. Not in terms of narrative, or structure, or characters or plot, but in terms of symbolism and ideology and the ideas in the book. There are no archetypes in this book. The world it creates is not recognizable, nor are its themes or details. Part of the reason I read a bunch of reviews after I finished it, was because even after reading it, I'm not sure what it was actually about. Which is kind of what it's about. Not a post-modern mishmash organized by theme, but an entire world of unrecognizable values. The quote that begins the book is from the song "It's Only a Paper Moon," and goes: It's a Barnum and Baily world, / just as phony as it can be, / But it wouldn't be make-believe / if you believed in me.

As I came to the end of the book the quote started to make sense, the idea that all these symbols and characters and references have meaning because we give them meaning. Or more specifically, we give them meaning together, hence the love story. Janacek’s Sinfonietta, a billboard that says "Put a Tiger in Your Tank", a little dog running through a yard as the main antogonist's last thought, "the little people", along with a zillion other references, all hang out, unexplained. And this is what makes the book strange. It doesn't even attempt to round up all the errant wound up toys. Instead it only ties up the ones that are important to the main characters, leaving the rest of this world to run its course.

Normally this kind of thing might make a reader feel like it was a waste of time, and that is what some of the reviews have said. A minority but that's too bad, because I think they missed the point. Busy looking for something outside of the book in front of them. Other reviews have been as thoughtful as the book. That said, I would be the first to say that Murakami's books all started to blend together, Kafka on the Shore being my breaking point, and I had really planned to stop reading him: no need to keep reading the same story over and over again. But this review is the one that committed me to the book. Slightly negative review but it ends by saying that despite their confusion upon finishing, they kept thinking about it. Which is where I find myself now, a little bit under a mysterious spell. Good or bad I don't know, but it's something, and that's more than I can say for most.

After class on Friday I walked down to the Powell Street Bart station to catch the train back to Oakland. Because of some construction at the station, the ticket kiosk, a twenty foot long box, was closed on one side so there were only three machines, and three long lines to get a ticket. Usually I just swipe my Clipper Card at the turnstiles but there was no money on it, and I resigned myself to standing in line. It took about fifteen minutes to get to the front of the line, listening to the chatter of some high school girls behind me and observing the odd trio two spots ahead of me, slotting money, coin by coin into the machine. It would of been easy to get annoyed but I was mostly done with my week, and had accepted the fact that it was going to take a little longer than usual.

When I got to the front of the line, facing the machine, a man stepped up to me, a foot away and asked if he could, "real quick, get change for a dollar." He was a little thuggy, but also a little dirty. His dollar bill was pretty crumpled. I didn't get a good look at his face but I was determined not to let him go ahead of me, and said no, and turned back to the machine. As I got out my debit card and swiped it, he stood there and cursed me: "mother fucking faggot ass little bitch etc. etc. etc. faggot mother fucker fuck you etc. etc." I punched in my PIN, swiped my Clipper Card, saw that the dollar total was correct, "faggot little bitch fuck you bitch mother fucker fuck fuck etc. etc." hit accept, swiped my Clipper Card again to get the money on it, "fuck you fuck you fuck you etc. etc. etc." and put my debit card back inside my wallet, and walked to the turnstiles.

As I was walking away I heard him ask the high school girls behind me the same thing, but didn't hear their answer. It was scary, not knowing exactly what this guy was going to do but I don't think he was crazy, and merely wanted to avoid standing in line. To get change or maybe to get a ticket I don't know. Either way, I stood there and absorbed the abuse. I could almost viscerally feel his hate washing over me, but it didn't feel scary. Instead I was focused on my routine, not rattling but moving slowly and deliberately. There was almost something kind of peaceful happening in those moments. Once I got free though, free to think about it, through the turnstiles and down the escalator, there was a train waiting. I hopped on relived to get away, thinking about what just happened, feeling the adrenaline in my system and a little bit of pride.

Overheard, guy on bus talking to no one in particular:

"I'm not even an original. I'm ashamed of athletes. I'm ashamed of entertainers. I don't care about Whitney Houston."

I sometimes look to my cats and their relationship as something to emulate. Not to say they don't have problems. When I come home Jinx will usually charge towards Kitty Girl (KG) and bite the back of her neck, bringing her down to the rug. Then he might get on her and keep her pinned down, dominating. When they were younger, it seemed to cause KG a lot of pain, and she'd cry out for a few seconds, then flip around and wap him in the face, hiss, and run off. It's embarrassing when I have guests, people who haven't spent anytime with them might think I willingly lord over their violence, and encourage them by my unwillingness to stop it.

Though for years when this would happen I'd always break them up at the first sign, pulling him off her by the back of his neck. Recently though, in part because he's gotten old and feeble, it's like some weird dance, not totally felt. KG allows him but just kind of stands there and waits until he's done. He doesn't have the strength or the will to prolong the ritual like he used to, and seems to be satisfied with going through the motions. "Yeah yeah, you're the boss." Which in my mind is kind of sweet, this allowance. As the stronger one these days she could beat him up but she doesn't. Instead they sleep together throughout the day, body on body. Keeping warm and keeping each other company. They've been together most of their entire lives and I really don't think they know what they would do without each other. They are symbiotic, always looking to the other, for better or for worse.

Granted they haven't had much of a choice, always stuck together, and in the last five years, stuck with me. Eventually I decided to just let them conduct their relationship without interference. Whatever it is they're doing, it's beyond my understanding. They communicate, but they don't reason. Instead they have their own way and I believe whatever it is they are working out between themselves should remain between themselves. It's really sweet when the spend fifteen minutes cleaning each other but then they bite each other, hit each other, hiss at each other and run away. I don't understand how they flip rapidly from what looks like the deepest love the world has ever known to punching each other in the face, but something about that seems natural. High and lows yes, and what's important is not so much the details as much as the commitment to being with each other. At any rate, Happy Valentines Day. I need to go to work.

In the early days of teaching creative writing and the rhetoric class, occasionally a student would ask how the material was applicable to the "real world." In response, I'd ask "isn't this the real world?" And that would usually end the conversation, not that I wanted it to end but my question always came off as a joke rather than an open inquiry. I mean, really, what about the classroom is not real? Am I not real? Is this conversation just a dream? Combating the fallacy we sometimes tell ourselves, that when there is more at stake we work harder and do better. From what I've learned, doing well is more of a habit than a talent, and the issue of the real world, waiting for it, becomes an excuse not to be fully wherever we are. One of many.

Last semester I started thinking about outcomes. In the curriculum development class the instructor shares a lot of student art work, and it's striking how much of it is good in a technical sense. Clean lines and concepts. Work that is truly finished. Whereas in the rhetoric class I teach, very rarely does an essay, a proposal argument for example, reach a point where it's unquestionably finished. Or say, the writing of an English as a second language learner, even though it might be very well thought out and organized, there will be grammar irregularities and other signs that keep it from perfection. Maybe it's not fair to compare visual images with writing, but there is a difference between expectations. With writing, at least as I've experienced learning and teaching it, the goal is improvement. Yet if you write a grant proposal, you either get the grant, or you don't. It's a binary in the "real world" yet at the college level, it's okay to fall short.

Maybe this is part of what makes an American style education an American style education: room to experiment and try new things and slack off and charge forward and give up and restart and in general, an education that gives us room to consider the process along with the material. People from all over the world come to universities here despite all the bad news about education in this country. But there must be something to the material fact that it's never life or death in school. I write this not to get all rah-rah about an American style education, but to point out this strange paradox between process and product. If we think about testing, No Child Left Behind and increased standards and measures by which to determine success, education becomes a matter of life or death, of funding and economics and resources. Of jobs and students and numbers. Our interactions translated into dollar values, a real-time symbolic logic that takes us away from where we are, and what we are doing.

I'm done writing about meditation, okay? Instead I'm going to begin a fifteen part series about my cats. It will be called "About My Cats" and will begin with parts 1-15. Here goes: CUUUUUTE. Now it is over. The semester has started and today I finally finalized my final schedule. Today I also discovered the Higgs boson particle. Both are significant achievements but finalizing the schedule means no more worry about money this semester, so as, now I can relax. In other news, an audio piece of mine is appearing in the new issue of textsound along with many others, including Bronwen, who I went to graduate school with back in the day. It's a good publication and there's lots of interesting things to listen to. That is all. Hope all is well. See you.

About Vipassana (part 5)

It's Sunday night and I just watched the last five minutes of the Super Bowl. I didn't really care who won but I always like to watch people celebrate sports championships. The crazy high of all that work, maybe a life's work, must be something else. They're so happy! A couple years ago I made some recordings from the internet (before homeland security blocked most of the illegal streaming sites) of the press conferences after the Lakers won their last one and made it into a really depressing song. You can listen to it here. But speaking of a crazy high, it's been a week since I got back from the meditation course and even though I wasn't exactly "high" I felt pretty good last Sunday. Very clean and clear headed, at a distance from wanting the usual things. Over the course of the week, as stressed piled up from the new semester and as I fell off the schedule of evening sits, I'm remembering what real life is actually like.

This has been the big question upon my return: how far do I want to go with the practice? It's one thing to know how to meditate and use it to reduce stress, have a little more patience, and be a little kinder, or whatever, but it's another to make spiritual teaching the center of a life. What's different this time, is that this far into it, I feel like I can see where all this is leading, and I'm not sure I want to go there at this point in my life. Thus I rebel. So far this week I've been eating meat, having sex, and lying (though I don't know exactly how I've lied, I just figure it comes with the territory of talking), which leaves only stealing and intoxicants before I'm back to where I started. That is to say, it's really difficult to keep it clean. More importantly, I love my friends, and I feel like I would have to get new ones if I were really wanted to commit myself to living a righteous life.

Is there a compromise? I don't know. They don't teach that at the course, so I guess I'll have to figure that out on my own. Morning sits and trying to keep my mind open is the best I can offer. Asides from that I'm not going to make any commitments other than those I've already made to teaching and writing. Maybe when I actually accomplish something in the secular world there will be time to pursue meditation with the commitment it requires. That said, Vipassana has pretty much changed the way I see the world in some fundamental ways. Ways that I believe have allowed me to live a much richer and fuller and in the world kind of life. There is so much to learn by turning one's attention's inward in a trained way, and really, I'm lucky to have a job where I can get away for weeks at a time to study. No ending or conclusion. I'm going to get into bed and read a book. In the morning I'll sit and start my day.

About Vipassana (part 3 & 4)

As I pulled back the curtain in the kitchen I could see that it had rained last night. I set out some food and tried to remember if I heard the rain falling, half asleep. Around five the cats come into the bed to get warm and also wake me up. I don't really ever get a solid nights sleep but I don't mind so much when the black one paws at the covers and eventually after a few turns finds a place on the pillow to set his head. The brown one is only interested in food but that's her job as the female component of the pair, to do the hunting. In this case, the hunting consists of getting me to open the refrigerator and dig out half a fork full of cold chicken pate. It hardly seems worth it but I'm not a cat and I don't really like to eat cat food. On bad days I curse her and throw her off the bed. On good days I get up when I wake up and don't spend much time dwelling on how much sleep I'm not getting.

Today I wanted to continue writing about Vipassana, leaving off from yesterday when I finally remembered what it was I wanted to write about: the conflict between a meditation practice and adopting some kind of religious practice. On the one hand, it's kind of like talking about the merits of different cooking shows instead of cooking and tasting the actual food. But when I speak to my friend Aaron he sometimes calls me a Buddhist and I say no I'm not, all defensively, because I have some negative associations with being anything vaguely religious. I grew up entirely secular, though my dad did take us to a non-denominational church for a little while, and the very large majority of friends and people that I knew wouldn't call themselves religious or believers of any faith. It's kind of a dirty word, one that implies a blind faith or didactic ignorance about science, or social policies that make moral discriminations from an unintelligible logic.

As the course was ending and the "noble silence" was lifted I had a long conversation with a guy named W, who had a mustache and a build that reminded me of the bass player from Do Make Say Think, and I sat across from him during lunch on the last day. We were talking about the course, it was his first time, and were talking about what we felt were the most difficult parts of the last ten days. I spoke specifically about the sixth day, how I was going a little bit nuts thinking about things I'm not going to write about here on the blog and literally trying to figure our reasons to present to course management so that I could go home. On every course I usually have a moment like this, sheer panic followed by a ton figuring out the best way to justify this panic, like a philosopher using his rhetorical powers to justify why the dishes don't need to be washed.

**

W talked about his problem with the meditation, that during the hour long discourses we listen to in the evenings the teacher says many times that Vipassana is not a "rite or a ritual" and is not an "organized religion." But there we are, following a strict a set of rules and practices. To boot, there is chanting at the beginning of some of the hours, and there is a call and response that happens sometimes as well. At first the chanting put me off but eventually I came to not mind it, and even enjoy it because at the very least it gave me something to "do" (listen) asides from paying attention to what was going on with myself. W asked me how long I had been practicing and I told him, three and half years, three ten day courses, two three day courses and on most days I sit an hour in the morning. That sounds like a religious practice he said, and I have to agree with him.

W came from North Carolina and his family is Christian in the Southern Baptist tradition, a faith that, even though he doesn't go to church anymore, he still feels has relevance. As a person who actually has a lot experience with organized religion, he knows what he's talking about. Taking it a little further, we talked about similarities between Jesus and Buddha and more contemporary leaders like Gandhi and Malcolm X (note: not between Christianity and Buddhism) and the idea, referred to above, that to have a religious identity is generally considered a bad thing. Why is that, and it comes back to how we see ourselves. That any question of I don't want to be this, or be that, is really a question of how we perceive other people, and more broadly, how we see the world. That instead of accepting things as they are we're drawing lines and separating ourselves, (a skill that I am very good at).

At any rate, a more useful distinction might be in the realm of semantics, as in, what exactly is a religion in the first place? One could argue that the gigantic evangelical megachurches are better described not as religions, but as businesses. In the history of the world at large, religion has mostly been used to justify wars and economic expansion. One thing to be said for the communist revolutions in Russia and China is that at least they didn't hide behind ideas like "spreading democracy" and "nation building." Which is the thing: if religion is no more than a belief system one acts upon, then we should consider what exact "religion" the hedge funds and lobbyists and politicians are practicing when they make decisions. In a sense, we are all "religious", some of our beliefs open and on the surface while some of them hidden even from our own eyes. Regardless of what we say we are, it's useful to make a study of our own actions, to know what it is we actually believe.

About Vipassana (part 2)

It's turning out to be a sunny day in Oakland. About ten thirty. I don't teach until Thursday (Friday Saturday) but volunteered to sub for a class this afternoon. I'm waiting to hear back. It will be good to go back to work, as yesterday was a tough transition from the meditation course. After two weeks of a very controlled schedule it was difficult to have a full day at home with nobody to tell me what to do. Um, did this then did that, then did this, etc. As a result, when dinner time came I wanted to eat something big and cheesy because it felt like I had earned it. Which is a kind of preview into how the cleanliness of the ten days unspools: reacting to vague and broad feelings (in this case, a generalized anxiety about time and work and things to do) instead of hanging out with them. Instead of sitting across from them, chatting and listening and maintaining one's own autonomy. Our constantly troubled friends driving us to drink.

But oh well. Kitchens eventually get dirty, and one the first things I did on Sunday was to eat a chicken burrito, thereby cracking the delicate shell covering my "sila" (morality): not killing, stealing, lying, sexing, sexting, sensual entertainments, or anything that would rev up my juices. Since it was going to end anyway, I thought I might as well get the pursuit of perfection out of the way. In the past, coming back from a course I haven't written much about the actual experiences of being there, a little embarassed of if being a mediator meant being religious or a "buddhist", and as I was sitting, wandering away, I thought that I'd write in detail in this blog about that. But those thoughts were early on in the course and I don't remember exactly what it was that was that I wanted to communicate that was so important.

So here I am trying to write about the past. In the future, I have twenty minutes to finish before I need to put some shoes on for basketball. I heard back from the ESL people and they don't need me to sub. Maybe get back to 1Q84, the new Haruki Murakami book (it's great!). Since I haven't looked at a newspaper yet (avoiding it) I have no stories to report though I will ease myself back into the habit soon. I thought about so many things up there but they come and go, like clouds, one day something seems so important, and you're sitting there, paying attention in a particular way, and then somewhere somehow this thing that was generating so much trouble and stress is no longer there. And eventually something else comes up and the same thing happens. It's like cleaning out an attic, you have to get through the stuff on top before you can get to the really old stuff. Kind of like writing, writing, writing, writing to remember why we started writing in the first place.

About Vipassana (part 1)

Ah. Back to my empire of ego. Whew. Feels good. Vipassana meditation is not easy. Neither is learning to tie your shoe, how to ride the subway, or play a realistic flight simulator with all those terms like "yoke" and "yaw" and the fact that when you pull back on your mouse the nose of the plane goes up and when you want to turn you have to plan way in advance. Not that any of things are comparable to the meditation, but come to think of it, these are things I've had trouble with. I didn't learn to tie my shoes until middle school. My mom got me elastic shoe laces so I never had to untie them. I didn't learn to ride a bike until fifth grade. I still get lost on trains, sometimes, especially the New York ones (the BART not so much) and have no interest in ever playing a flight simulator again after summer afternoons with Adam and Matt, playing the Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer on their dad's super powered Mac.

Instead it's more like sitting still all day, or trying to. Lots of time to think, but eventually it becomes more interesting to pay attention to what's going on with the body. For me, this time, I didn't get to this point until the 8th day. In the last three and half years, this is the third time that I've done a ten day course and they haven't gotten any easier. I try to make it through an hour so I can make it to the next one. Then to breakfast. And then to the next hour, and then to the next one. Time passes really slowly but usually that phrase indicates a kind of boredom, which is not really the problem. The problem is more of a survival issue, trying to make it though each day. It feels like an enormously long time in part because I'm usually not focusing my attention as consistently and repeatedly as I do while there. Instead, at home, I'm doing one thing or another, reading a newspaper or watching a car go by. Mostly responding to external stimuli and letting my environment dictate where my mind wanders. When my attention is focused the day gets longer in a full way.

Over and over, even before the actual Vipassana meditation starts, we spend three and a half days focusing our mind, over and over, feeling "sensation" for as long as continuously possible on the patch of skin just above the lip. If we wander away we come back. All that to have a fighting chance to expand this area of sensation to other places on the body. So as, the body becomes a kind of landing pad for a continuous parade: a puff of air, an itch, a tingle, a warmth or a chill or whatever. There's a a lot ways our bodies hit the world and we're responding to these sensations whether we're aware of it or not. Regardless, once this kind of eyeball opens and begins to look around it turns out that there's a lot going on other than what we're thinking about. Why is this important? Because when we're looking at a thing, for example a back pain, instead of feeling the pain, we can instead hang out with it. Ask it questions. See how big it is, how long it will last, and eventually we see that it goes away. Or with bigger kinds of feelings: how long will this anger last? How big is it? What does it feel like and eventually, we see that it goes away.

___________

Tomorrow I'm going away for a little while, about twelve days, for a meditation course. Also known as a "retreat", which isn't exactly an accurate word as sitting for twelve hours a day ten days on end actually brings most things a little bit closer, but, the point is, I won't be around. No email or cell phone, and no blog postings. The semester begins day after I get back, so will all of a sudden be back in the swing of things, Spring 2012 until the middle of May. Non-stop, and I'm sure you'll read me complain about it many times between now and then.

The good news, at least in my own lists of things to do, is that most things that I set out to accomplish in these last three weeks got done: finished my grad school application to the best of my ability and will hear back sometime this spring. Spent a couple intensive weeks working on two collections of poems, improving little bits, here and there, sequencing and sorting. That and sending out some submissions, individual poems and manuscripts, as well as submitting to a residency. I didn't get to finishing any music projects, cleaning up old files well enough to share them (I counted 78 MP3s of "songs" that were borderline finished) but there's time for that when I get back.

So as, like many, I've been busy, and now I don't have too much pressing as I head out tomorrow. It's nice to have time to work, though it's necessary the person who teaches reading and writing actually have time to read and write, or else one ends up teaching the same thing over and over again, like a boring high school history teacher. At any rate, in the spirit of automation, please enjoy this video while I am gone. The world is full of mystery. See you in February.

Greetings from Oakland California. This post is not a post but a way to put off working on the personal statement that I must complete to complete my application to graduate school that is due is six days. I should of written it earlier and I did but it was bad, twice, and now I'm on my third foot dragging draft of trying to explain my desires in a way that doesn't transparently pander and stays true enough to the nebulous and unformed ideas of what I like to call myself. I'll get on that in second, but first, no news but no news, I've been very busy this last week working on a couple different writing projects, mostly prepping pages to send out to publishers, collecting and revising and stringing together days in a row of writing time, which unfortunately never ever happens during the semester. So it's been really productive. It feels good to get back to these things in earnest.

But, even though it's been a week since I posted last, I figured all anybody really needs when it comes to reading is that last paragraph I posted (see below). Probably one of my favorite little pieces of writing, though it actually comes at the end of the book, so as, maybe I fill that paragraph with all that came before it and maybe it doesn't stand alone on it's own. Don't know and won't know. Not much else to report, no thoughtful short essay or joke to make or picture to post. The weather has been warm and the cats have been sleeping. Saw A Dangerous Method, the Freud/Jung movie, that I quite enjoyed, have been watching basketball, running a little, hanging out, and also getting over a little bronchitis, which actually, though it was kind of painful, forced me to keep a reasonable schedule that lead to getting much done, unlike today, where it's eleven in the morning and I haven't started. Okay. That's enough. See you.

But oddly because that was two paragraphs I feel compelled to write a third solely for the sake of symmetry or balance or something like symmetry or balance like lining up a fork with the wood grain on a table, folding a napkin neatly or lining up my foot along the edge of concrete the mildly OCD impulse to square things up live, in action. Of course it's difficult when there's not as much to say and instead the only impulse that fills space is the impulse to fill space and if I were you I would just stop reading right now because I'm not going to say anything interesting or of note for the next six lines, entirely self-referential makes me think of a little article I read in the paper about Animal Studies, studying animals outside the context of biology and instead in a field like philosophy they cited Derrida who wrote, "An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?"

Happy New Year.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

_______________________________-Cormac McCarthy, from "The Road"

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.

Hi. Good to see you. Happy Thanksgiving. I mean I hope you had a happy thanksgiving. If you celebrate Thanksgiving. I'm not saying that you do. I hope I didn't offend you. I'm really sorry for presuming that you celebrate Thanksgiving. Again, sorry. Meanwhile, I was down in LA to see J & G, and on the way back saw J&J and their new child, J. Drove a truck. Living large. It was fun. When I got back on Saturday I finished off the last two episodes of Mad Men, so as, now I am caught up. Not that that means anything, but it's nice to come to an end thus far, and now I can talk about it with others, like my mom. One of my favorite parts of the show was its pacing. That is, a lot of these TV shows rely on the cliff hanger to get you through, whereas with Mad Men I felt like I could watch an episode, maybe two and go to bed satisfied. A show like The Wire was intense and non-stop, and was really difficult to pull myself away from. It didn't feel good. It felt bad, like when you're looking at the last third of a roll of cookies and thinking, well, I may as well just finish it off. So thanks Matthew Weiner for not jerking me around. Okay. School work to get to.

On Thursday (and Friday) in class we discussed this article, about putting a tax on junkfood and using that money to subsidize healthier foods. Tied up in this equation are the current government subsidies for corn, which explains why it's cheaper to buy a Dr. Pepper than it is to buy a pepper. That there's a much higher demand for corn syrup than fresh vegetables, and that's why obesity, and the healthcare costs that come with it are such a problem in this country. Because it's more profitable for big food companies to feed us junk. Anyway, we read it in the context of the Proposal Argument (the third essay that students are required to write for the rhetoric class) because it's such an elegant solution to many problems all at once. A solution than not only makes people healthier, happier and takes the money out of the hands of the powers that be, but also pays for itself and generates additional revenue. The question we discussed in class was not the question of do you all think this is a good idea (which, lefty Bay Area us all, there wasn't much "The government can't tell me what to eat!" represented in the room), but the question of if this is such a good idea, why doesn't it happen?

Stephen, the ESL supporter in my Thursday class, brought up the tobacco companies, how it took twenty years for the facts of the relationship between smoking and cancer to gather enough political will to actually lead to legislation. That it takes a long time for a new idea to rise out of these facts and into our our collective imaginations. The parallels for the Occupy movement are obvious, and in this context of long term change, the come down that the Oakland Occupy movement has experienced (or maybe that's just me) does not necessarily mean the end of anything.

In that light, there was a march this Saturday in Oakland that felt redundant and purposeless. It was mostly younger people, not a particularly diverse crowd. We marched through downtown and around the north side of the lake and then stopped in front of the Grand Lake movie theater. There was a truck with a lot of speakers that played dance music that we walked behind for most of the route. It was kind of fun, but it didn't have a whole lot to do with, say, taking money out of politics or putting money back into schools. It seemed like a street party with a vaguely political theme. Later, after we left, some of the occupiers moved to a vacant lot to reoccupy it. Which was cleared by police the next day. The Snow Park encampment, the one just down the street, was cleared this morning. Compared to the Oakland General Strike, which had a real sense of purpose and a real turnout, it was kind of depressing.

Which I think is an unfashionable tack to take but oh well. So be it. Occupy continues. The events at UC Davis were serious, as were the events in Berkeley last week. This Davis video is remarkable for a number of reasons, one of them only happens if you keep watching: how the human microphone actually seems to make the police officers leave. About seven minutes in. Keep watching. And really, if you're interested in all of this, you don't have to camp or scream at police officers to show support, but simply, talk about it. Ask your friends and your family, what do you think?

Today I made this in a support class:

A sunny and warm day in Oakland. It's a little past noon. Yesterday morning the occupation of the plaza in Oakland came to an end. Today there is a march up to Berkeley to support their occupation of the campus and tomorrow the General Assembly will discuss where next to occupy. Which is the question right now, what to do next. This coming Saturday there is another larger march planned, akin to general strike, which is supported and backed by many unions here in Oakland, which partly answers the question of what to do next but only in the short term. Personally, I'm not sure where my support lies, as I agreed with the main stream narrative that occupying downtown was not going to accomplish much more than it had. My hope is that the occupy movement continues to raise awareness, moves indoors, now that they have some funds, and continues to do the work of organizing people towards practical solutions to the immense, long term problems that center around the economic injustices we perpetuate. It moves on. Here is a comment from an article in the Times (name withheld). Regardless of you how you feel about people in a park, here's some hope:

I have an MBA in finance and work in investment management on Wall Street – and I love money more than any Republican. But I see a lot of shallow comments and mixed-messages posted from all over the country criticizing OWS protesters as ne'er do wells and anti-capitalists.

They should appreciate that the protests have inspired introspective dialog among many thoughtful business professionals – top to bottom. Not all wealth trickles down and capitalism is as virtuous or evil as the people involved.

Hi!

Today is my 33rd Birthday. I am 100 years old. I heard Tom Waits say on the radio that when he was young he wanted to be old. My cat just fell off a slippery coffee table. She is getting old. The other cat is already old. He is very wise but not very smart. My sister and brother sent me a frying pan in the mail. It will be awesome. I will make two pancakes at one time. Ratios are old. Like Euclid or Donatello. The one with the triangles and the one with the bo staff, respectively. About me: I am one billion years old. Did you ever read that Dune book, God Emperor of Dune? The one with the sand worm king who lived to be thirty five hundred years old. That's not old. One billion years old is old. Have we been around that long? I don't know. The dinosaurs have all changed into birds. Earlier today we killed off the Neanderthals. Psychosis is one of the oldest professions. When I'm older, I hope to be a professional young person. Like MF Doom says/raps, it's nice to be old. But I guess it's relative. By that I mean some of my relatives are getting old. And some of them are getting young. Can we say that? Is this thing on? Sorry, I'm not good with technology. I need to go eat supper. Goodbye.

I haven't had much to do with the Occupy movement since last Thursday morning, briefly surveying the remnants of Wednesday's general strike. Except for closing my bank account at Chase, which, finally was possible after about two weeks of little steps; opening a new account, dropping direct deposit, and changing a few billing plans. When I went to the bank on Saturday it took about five minutes. The bank's representative asked why I was closing my account (Chase makes me feel bad) and if large bills were okay (yes). Easy. And now I can feel good and and righteous about where I put my money. Cleaning the platform on which I stand, and from which I speak and write. It's an impossible and entirely vain dream to be all of one thing, to be all good (or all bad), but the few moments I gain from not having to enter Chase's ubiquitous corporate temples twice a week, I'm happy to have.

But back to occupy, I was a bit depressed about the whole thing following Wednesday's decent into chaos. In particular, this video that shows somebody (black bloc? paid police instigators?) messing up a Whole Foods (where I occasionally shop) and punching a few protester's who were trying to stop them. If you read the comments attached to the video, most of them suggest that these provocateurs were not part of the movement and were paid by outside forces. Personally I think that's true, but unfortunately it doesn't really matter as whoever did it was successful in taking the focus off of Occupy's message(s). Obviously they need to do a better job in preventing these kinds of small groups, whoever they are, from creating this much havoc, in order to keep the support of those whose are still not sure about the Occupy movement.

Kind of like me when I'm reading the newspaper, which is why I felt a little foolish on Thursday. Did I get swept up in the hype machine? Did I actively support a movement that didn't represent my interests? Was I fooled? Short answer: no. Of course not. Occupy is absolutely correct in their criticisms of our economic systems. Sympathizers in the media at large have been to saying yes, I agree with Occupy but they need to become political in order to be effective. Criticisms closer to home, have been more about the damage that the encampment has been doing to downtown Oakland businesses (though this report contradicts that report. I'm so confused). It's difficult. Making omelets and breaking eggs. Something is going to have to happen soon with the encampments. One idea it to move the occupation to indoor spaces that have been foreclosed on, which makes a lot of sense, not just for occupy but for people who have lost their homes. And is already happening. When there is so much available space and work to be done why does so much of it sit empty? But the best part so far is this, what we did.

Briefly: last night was huge. Ten thousand people? I have no idea but when we arrived at the port, a couple miles walking, I had friends who were just getting started. That many people. Short version is the actions were a success. The port was shut down. Why is that important? To send the message that if we wanted to and were somewhat untied, we control our fate. Or more directly, that we're "producing for an economic system that doesn't produce" for us. And we have a choice in the matter.

The long version, and the one that will be and is being covered in the media (it's unbelievable how wrong places I trusted have been) will focus on the violence, which was carried out by a handful of misguided people and instigated, in part, by the police themselves. For those who say, "you're crazy and paranoid...the police wouldn't do such things." Think about what you would do if you had a week to prepare for an action against your authority. Would you come up with a counter plan? Or just let 'these people' do what they want to do. The police are as smart as any of us, and of course, it's in their interests to overshadow the days' successful actions and in turn, weaken the movement. They just want the occupiers to go home so the streets will be peaceful, and their jobs will be made easier. I can relate.

Anyway, I need to get ready for class. If you're interested, dig around for the real story and skip the The New York Times.

Poetry is a Religious Act

I thought I saw God
in a dark mass of rain
in the puddles on the roof.

I am not prone
to hallucinations or hauntings
but a shape swirled

like a galaxy forming
out of raindrops gathering
on tar paper, bits

of blackened sand
carried by the invisible current
of rain.

Time stopped as I
watched it spin from one darkness
to another.

Yesterday I paid off the rest of my student loan. "Pay Off Account" and I clicked the little circle next to it and then it was done. Eleven and a half years. I wondered when I first started paying my school loan, living in Seattle and writing checks for the first time, where will I be when I pay it off? What will I be doing? Now I know.

**

Tuition at my undergrad has gone up more than ten thousand dollars in the last ten years. Living the wealthiest country in the world; the rate of poverty, education, healthcare, etc. in comparison to other places that have far less than we do, is astounding. Today is Halloween. Tomorrow is November, and Wednesday is the Oakland General Strike. Below is a pretty good primer on the movement:

Yesterday was a big, peaceful protest in Oakland. Lots of people and lots of enthusiasm. Plans made for a general city wide strike on November 2nd, but the more immediate good news to come from the last couple of days, Mayor Quan has said "nonviolent protesters would be allowed to re-occupy the area near City Hall." Wow. I mean, wow, I guess this protesting stuff actually works.

Yesterday evening around six I walked through Snow Park, that for the last couple weeks had been an outpost of the Occupy Oakland protests. It was over spill from the full up Oscar Grant Plaza, but yesterday it was empty. The police must of taken it down, I thought, and when I got back home I looked it up via the Occupy Oakland Twitter Page and saw that yes, the helicopters I had been hearing all day were part of the police effort to evict the occupiers. And I also learned that people were assembling and marching downtown, about four blocks from my apartment so I put on my shoes and locked the door and found my neighbor doing the same thing. And we walked down there together to join the tail end of the march from the plaza down to Snow Park, and then back again.

An hour later, when we arrived back at the plaza it began to get a little tense. Lots of police officers were lined up around the plaza and the march halted, the organizers organized and then proceed another block to the intersection of 14th and Broadway where there was the biggest mass of police officers. I stood and waited and watched with the thousand (at least) or so others for a few minutes before a recorded announcement that told us the assembly had been declared unlawful, and that we had five minutes to leave before they would use force. Five tense minutes went by and then a few more, and then they fired tear gas canisters and most of us hurried down 14th away from the gas.

The march resumed down 14th and then circled back to the plaza, though in-between, I witnessed an over excited kid break a window with his skateboard, and at that point decided to head back to my place. When I turned down a side street there was a line of police in riot gear so I went back the march and went down a different street and made it home. I ate a piece of toast, had my picture taken as I looked out the window by errant marchers walking down my street, and then went back out, this time a little more prepared with a scarf to wear over my face just in case I got gassed, back to the plaza, and found my neighbor again. Occupied the plaza until others suggested we keep moving, occupied 14th and Franklin where my neighbor and I met up with Sarah, and we hung out there, in the middle of the street until they police fired tear gas again into the intersection of 14th of Broadway and we, along with the throngs, went back down 14th away from the trouble.

I went out one more time with Dara, around eleven thirty, and the crowd at 14th and Broadway had shrunk considerably. There was still a large enough mass to hold the intersection but this time we didn't stay around long enough to be gassed, and went back to our respective homes. These are just the facts of my experience. I'm not going to get into the why . But I will say, beginning at six, there's a general assembly (GA) at 14th and Broadway in Oakland. I don't know what exactly is going to happen but I can't imagine things will be any easier for anybody (protesters, police, citizens of Oakland) tonight. Regardless, I'll be there (I live there!), if for no other reason other than to be there.

"It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement."

_____________-Abraham Maslow, from Motivation and Personality

(the image above is the Michelangelo sculpture "Atlas Slave." This is this blog's 500th posting.)

Hi. I want to write something but I'm a little short for time right now. Not super busy but headed to work in a half hour and have a few things to do first (do my hair). Today inbetween classes I'm going to open an account at a credit union, in preparation for pulling my money out of my current bank, which only became my current bank because Chase bought Washington Mutual. Remember that? And then expanded their empire just like that. The national day of closing accounts is November 5th. So as, I have to do some leg work now so I can still write checks. Right? "Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility" if you know what I mean...

(previously there was a sestina here. i have removed it from the blog in order to do some revisions. have a nice day. my apologies for any inconvenience.)

A little preface for this Frank O'Hara poem, it appeared on an episode of Mad Men (which I've been watching and enjoying). From the fourth section of the poem "Mayakovsky":

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Yesterday when I got off the BART, downtown Oakland, I couldn't help but notice the hundreds of people at Occupy Oakland protest taking place at Oscar Grant square (at the 12th Street BART station). Hungry, I got a cheap slice of pizza (Pizza Man) and found a perch to listen to the speakers and soak in the ambiance of the drizzly evening. People spoke, handed out fliers, chatted, ate, made eye contact, clapped, and cited websites. Last Friday I intentionally visited the Occupy San Francisco protests at the corner of Market and Drumm, where the Embarcadero BART lets out, though on Friday I was a little late for the speeches, coming after work. There were still plenty of people hanging around and talking and disseminating information. I have not attended too many formal protests for lack of any strong political convictions (the 2003 Iraq War protests in Portland being the last I intentionally joined. Informal protests is another story, easily confused with passive aggression), however I believe in 'the message' of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Which, from conversations I've had about it, seems to be a sticking point: uncertainty about what exactly the protesters are protesting about. If you read the signs, they're all over the place, from anti-war to anti-bailout to 'tax the rich' to moral messages ('greedy bankers') to support for unions and teachers and nurses. My favorite sign read "Trickle Down Bullshit." Obviously prosperity has not tricked down from the richest of us, and instead, all that we've gotten is bullshit. Not that that needed explaining, but right now, it doesn't really matter what these protests are about, at least as far as a singular message (read: soundbite). The point is not to advocate for a particular political change, but to raise awareness that they way things are, the status quo, is not working for us. To have this fact acknowledged by the media and politicians and ourselves, is important.

The world is complex. Things happen for many reasons. To reduce the complexity of our lives and our ourselves to didactic soundbites is to ignore the contradictions and mysteries that make life interesting. It's hard to understand each other. It's hard to speak, and be heard, and to listen well enough. Our words are such pale imitations of the things we feel and of the things we do. They do not begin to hold what we are capable of. For those who criticize Occupy Wallstreet for having "no common cause," I ask, what is your cause? What do you believe in? Is it something that was given to you? Something that you find yourself a part of? Are we all complicit? Born into it? Or is it something that you came to on your own? Something that you made, through the terrifying work of finding a place in the world. Not to say I know any better, how to live or what to do, but a nuanced message, I believe, is a welcome change of pace.

Social Engineering

Under the controlled conditions of the laboratory
scientists have observed Americans turning to
their rights after exiting the train. The stairway
is to their left. I turned to my right, disoriented
on the platform. [Black bird's shadows
passing overhead] They might observe us
doing or saying the same thing repeatedly, oblivious
to which shoulder we throw our towel over,
which side of our mouth we use to chew.
I believe I am clever but the same fear,
and feeling. No mercy,
no love or compassion in the all seeing eye.
No room for sentiment or preference. Just facts,
cold as glaciers.

"I prefer an unjust peace to a justified war. No matter what the ideals are, if they are going to lead to war, I prefer a corrupt, immoral, unprincipled, unredeemed peace."

__________-Nishihara Wakana
___________from Japan at War: an Oral History

Happy Monday. Here are two poems by Matt Turner, who has recently come back from a four year stint teaching in China. Enjoy.

THE CHEF'S SONG

I'm facing south here,
leaning forward
like a shriveled tree.

Surely here,
yesterday,

I had points to make.
Really?

So, do I
hear pipes

even if I hear
wind?

Sometimes
openings resound

like a terrifying
mountain or forest storm -

hundreds of spans round,
like noses, mouths, ears, sockets -

like a crashing
gong.


**


JUST HOT AIR

Humans eat meat, however
crows will still enjoy
deer.

__"Righteousness

feels like burning deserts &
lightning which can split

clouds and seas."

Sam Told Me This Dream:

She was sitting at a rectangular table in a creative writing class. I was also sitting at this table. The teacher had selected my story to read to the class because it was the best one. Instead of reading the story as a story, some of the other students had scripts to read, and performed the story in front of the rest of the class. The first line, read by another woman in the class went "no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no."

I've been reading an interesting book: "The Art of Cruelty" by Maggie Nelson, a poet and academic who lives in Los Angeles. It's a book about cruelty in the arts, beginning with Artaud's call (you know Artaud!) for a "theater of cruelty" about the need for audiences to be violently pulled from their passive spectator-ness. The book goes about exploring the idea of cruelty in everything from movies to books to performance art, how the avant-garde has run with the idea of using violence to shock, and now, how much a part of the main stream Artaud's idea has become. The book is not about the good or bad of cruelty, but where these specific pieces of art lead us and leave us. So it's nuanced and not really didactic at all, which is a little frustrating as two thirds of the way through it still hasn't really arrived anywhere. Instead it's explored different sub-genres, ideas, and trends with a poet's rhythm; one that has a pace and a way unto itself, and it's beginning to dawn on me that this pace, this way of looking at cruelty is, in fact, the argument.

Which might be kind of frustrating to some readers or radio interviewers who want a straight answer/judgment as to is this particular kind of cruelty good, or bad. But it's made me think about my own work, including writing and teaching and being with other people, some of the habits I have such as "brutal honestly" perhaps aren't as blameless as I've believed. I wonder if I subject my students to forms of cruelty, making them read out loud or answering questions on the spot (short answer: no). Over the summer a student came in an hour late on a day we were work-shopping in small groups. Since all the groups had been formed, to add this student would be to create more work for one of the groups. Pissed as I was, I assigned the student to a group and made the late student distribute the extra work, thereby instead of me giving the group extra work, the late student was the one who did. I felt it was a just penalty, a kind of humiliation with the intent to make the student see how their lateness causes problems. This punishment came from an angry place and in retrospect, I think it was cruel.

My action was intended to teach (as well as harm) and this student did not come late to class again. It worked. But this student also did not participate much in the class discussion, and did not seem to invest much in the class or in their class work. Of course I don't know what this student was thinking, and can't know what motivated them, but my action did close some doors on any opportunities I may have had to get the student more engaged. The lesson for me: that when I lose control, it opens the door on choices governed by emotion. Which, in this case, I feel did more harm than good. In a larger sense, this example also sheds light on the dangers of increasing class sizes and overwhelmed teachers. That cruelty is a kind of tool we teach others how to use. And when times are tough, it can be a fast and easy solution to problems. But in the long run in creates a world we might not be too happy living in (fascism?). All that said, I'm lucky to have choices in the first place, to know that there are alternatives to cruelty.

"Privilege of connecting two things remains privilege of each individual (e.g. I: thirsty: drink a glass of water); but this privilege isn't to be exercised publicly except in emergencies (there are no aesthetic emergencies)."

___-John Cage
____from the essay "Seriously Comma" as found in A Year from Monday

Well, the GRE is over. Done with. It took about four and a half hours, Saturday morning, and overall, I did as well as I needed to do. It asked me to write a couple essays, to answer forty math questions, and sixty English questions. I learned about goosebumps, the imaginary town of West Marin, and the field of musicology. By the last section I began to experience feelings of apathy concerning the correct answer, but I pushed through, and am so glad to be done. Here is a poem by Philip Levine, the new poet laureate. It's a good one about "The Man." Have a good one.

School started last Thursday. Two full classes plus three support classes and ten lab hours. Plus I'm taking the GRE this coming Saturday (in the two-digit number jk, the value of the digit j is twice the value of the digit k), writing sestinas on the typewriter that K the cat sitter is letting me borrow, and trying to figure out exactly where I'm going to be applying this fall. For awhile I was sure that Rhetoric and Composition programs were the place for me, but now I'm thinking Linguistics. Capitalized. It's been difficult to narrow my interests down to one specific field. I guess that's what you get for never specializing, that is, a thousand tentacles of interest that take awhile to corral into a single direction. Like a death ray of intention shooting from the glowing disk on my chest.

But really, the big question right now is which of the following statements are supported by the above passage? Is it A) The majority of insect orders are capable of both advancing and inhibiting human interests; B) The male blue-tailed iguana will chew down some of its spines to appear more masculine; or C) The relationship cannot be determined from the information given. Most of the time I want to answer C, and append the answer with, And not only can we not determine the relationship but we don't even really care to do so. I mean, why can we just let y= (x+3)^2? You know, let bygones be bygones? What harm is there in the value of y when x =1? Why can't we just let the mysteries of the universe be? Let them answer their own questions. Who are we to interfere with the length of segment PQ? 8a + 8b=24? So what?

But sometimes the test can be kind of fun, and this resentment doesn't come up as much in the verbal section, where I feel like I have a fighting chance to get every question correct (of course I never do), and where it seems directly applicable to reading and writing and teaching, say. Whereas in the math section, there are some processes that even though I could learn, I refuse. Strange ideas about violence to the soul, that by learning, really learning/burning certain techniques and ideas into my brain, I will somehow do damage to myself. "Dismiss that which insults your soul" wrote Whitman. Though I have a hard time judging which parts of me are my soul and which parts are my ego.

My sister, an expert on standardized tests sympathized with my tendency to question the premise of the test, but suggested I get over myself, just a little, and deal with the fact of test scores. I can't help but think about my own students, art students, some of which probably feel about writing the same way I feel about the math: it's interesting and deep but these are not the problems I want to spend my time solving. Nothing but respect for those who can honestly come to that conclusion but still, we have to deal with the fact of test scores, so to speak. Though hopefully writing and argument is a little more relevant than if the number of female general surgeon physicians in the under-35 category represented 3.5 percent of all the general surgeon physicians, approximately how many male general surgeon physicians were under 35 years? After all, writing is the act of becoming, of speaking and making ourselves real. Unless we're mute, or a cat. Wish me luck.

my nephew's teeth

Grades are done and it's the first semester in four years that I didn't fail a single student. Yay. Twas a hard working class. Now to pack and be off to the middle west. Please enjoy this picture while I am gone.

In the paper on Sunday was this editorial entitled "What Happened To Obama?" by an academic named Drew Westen, who teaches psychology at Emory University. The editorial is a kind of psychological analysis of Obama's political decisions, and more or less trashes them/him. It's a powerful piece of writing, talking about how Obama has lost his sense of self and is bullied and how his language has lost its poetry, and how all of the above contribute to his failure of leadership. Westen makes this observation regarding the Democrats in general:

In fact, the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, "stick."

Which I think is key, making sure there are real world analogs to go along with the sound "reasoning" of the left. That our two wars were launched not on the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans (a fraction of how many Americans die, say, of obesity yearly), but on the image of airplanes crashing into New York City. Or at the very least because of a combination of the two. The importance of poetics, or poetry as a memory aid. Numbers are unreal and unconvincing, and if you want to move people you have to tell a story. At least that is part of Westen's argument.

But who are we to make pronouncements about the person of the president? I guess it's a public office and one puts themselves out there, but if the president were standing in the room with me, of course I wouldn't have the nerve to criticize him on that level. A couple weeks ago I wrote a little about the Women's World Cup Final (Japan won, the US lost) but what I posted here, under my own name, was heavily edited compared to what I posted semi-anonymously on the comments page of the Times. That to call someone out is easy when you're sitting alone with some cats on a sunny morning in Oakland. Regardless, the article is interesting, as is this editorial on Westen's editorial.
**

This Friday I'm off for the glory of Madison Wesconsin in August: crickets, humidity, warm nights, and a relatively empty downtown. Of course there is my mother and step-father, which is really why I'm going, to visit for four days and then, driving down (in my aunt's car) to Indiana (via Chicago) to visit some professors and current graduate students at Purdue's composition and rhetoric program. The one I'm applying to this fall. Then to Kentucky (Ken-tuck) to see uncles and cousins and sister and clan, and then I'll be headed back to 'sconny' for a day and then back here for a week and a half of pre-semester meetings, adjusting curriculum and hanging out in Oakland. That is to say I'm going to be gone for a little bit.

The semester gets over this coming Wednesday and it's been a challenging one. In part because I've been really stressed about money, not having as much work as I need to pay bills. Imagine if your college teachers had to pick up painting jobs on the weekends to make credit card payments. Imagine John Boehner picking up dog shit. Imagine buying a BMW on a whim. Imagine, wait, actually you don't need to imagine any of this. Two comments from the article linked to just a few lines above, Otis writes:

"So sick of these comments about the rich not paying their share. Do folks know that the top 10% of wage earners pay 70% of all the taxes collected? Do you know what percentage the bottom 50% pay in federal taxes? 2%. That's right 2%."

And Kevin responds:

"Do you want to know why they pay 70% of all the taxes? Because they own 85% of all the wealth. Pretty straight forward. What if they own 100% of the wealth and pay 100% of the taxes? Would that still be unfair to them?"

Unbelievable. I was having dinner with Amy last night and naturally, we were talking about debt ceilings and the economy and the turned worm of America's fortunes, and man I wish we let those investment banks fail when we had the chance. Hardship for all, possibly, but from my perspective, I really don't have much to lose. I've been out of college for twelve years, and have been working in two of the least valued fields in the country: education and art. Asides from my two years in graduate school (a full scholarship that was barely enough to live on, but was still a step up from what I was making) I've had one job that provided health insurance, and I'm not even going to talk about my debt. If it's like this for me, a person of relative privilege and very relative talent, what's it like for everybody else?

As our global rank declines in terms of education, income, livings standards, health, and obviously, happiness; where exactly are we headed? In the last couple years I've transitioned from a vaguely optimistic, though cynical perspective on politics and opportunity, to being sullen and bitter and straight up angry at the obliviousness we are invited to marinate ourselves in. The best advice I ever got was from CD (Wright), during a workshop somebody was ripping into somebody else's work, and she said, "Put your anger into your work." I find this advice, and this kind of propellant, to be helpful.