"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.

This morning I dropped off the rental car. I pulled it into the garage and a lady came out, and asked, would you like a receipt? I said no, and turned and left. "Was that the right thing to do?" I asked myself. Not about the receipt but about the damage, which occurred just after I left San Francisco, got on the 880 south and hit a scrap of tire that had been ejected from an 18 wheeler. I saw it ahead of me, and looked to go around it but I was blocked in by a car to my right. By the time I looked back to the road and to my left, I was upon it, and it thunked, and immediately a ticking and flapping sound started coming from the car. I slowed down and a mile later took the first exit off the highway, somewhere around Mountain View.

The piece of plastic that protected the undercarriage of the right front portion of the car, including the wheel well, about a square foot of it, had been torn. There was nothing damaged mechanically, but the plastic bolts that held this black piece of plastic to the bottom of the car had been sheered, and the flapping sound was the plastic getting chewed up as it was battered between the road and the rotating tire, like a can being dragged on a string. It was easy to see what had happened and it was a relief that the damage was not more serious. However I did not buy the insurance that covers this kind of damage. What will I say, and will they charge me eight hundred dollars to get it fixed? I don't know but I'd like to get going, and I picked up a couple of sticks from the ground, a little larger than the diameter of the missing bolts, and reconnected the protective piece to the chassis of the car. It held relatively firmly and I got back in the car and continued south.

The jerry-rig held until Sunday, and when it came undone we stopped at a truck stop, bought some duct tape and resecured the plastic in a way that did not show the silver sheen of the tape. I returned it this morning, bringing me back to the original question of reporting the damage or not. On the one hand it's possible that the rigging will hold for a while and nobody will notice it. The rental car company can afford to pay for it, and I cannot without putting it all on a close to maxed out credit card. On the other hand, it's "the right thing to do" to own up to a mistake, and possibly avoid any mishaps for future drivers. Obvioulsy I've made my choice, but there's the question of will they notice? Will they call? Will I end up paying for it anyway? If they ask will I say it was like that when I got it? Will I continue to lie? These questions have followed me around this morning and soon they will make a little nest somewhere in my body. And they will live inside of me until I am held responsible.

The Doppler Effect (Stephen Hawking Poem 2)

"This should not unduly worry us: by that time unless we have colonized beyond the solar system, mankind will long since have died out, extinguished along with our sun!"

Light emits waves. Shuttering
orgasmic pulses
of life. As light moves away from us
a red tint appears. As it moves closer
a dense, sucking blue. ____We find the truth
of these qualities by subtracting
our own experience. Our blazing sun
not in Heaven
but turning in abandon. Like Stephen Hawking
sorrow expands into the distance between us
______ the terminally dense blue
of night's approach.

Ahem. NICE WEATHER WE'RE HAVING ISN'T IT? Yes. It is nice weather. Sunny in Oakland. Temperate. Monday morning. Yesterday I watched the Japan/U.S. women's football match. DID YOU SEE IT? It was the first sporting event to bring tears of joy to my eyes. Maybe I've been strung out or maybe it was that book of Japanese stories during the second world war but I was so happy to see them win. It's been a difficult year in Japan, with the earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear plant, and the Japanese economy falling from the number two position, and the general loss of prestige that Japan has endured. It made me feel sooo happy. As happy as I felt watching Dallas beat Miami in the finals this year, to see the Japanese coach smiling and joking in the shootout huddle when the stakes were high, as if playing football could somehow compare to the life and death situations people find themselves in. “I feel we have given some kind of encouragement and joy to the people back in Japan,” said Ayumi Kaihori, the Japanese goal keeper. Can you imagine a player (or person) in the United States saying the same thing? To include everyone, and not just the people who agree with them? That is all. Have a fine Monday.

Stephen Hawking Poem

"What did god do before he created the universe?"

The universe has a beginning point.
We know this
because the sky does not shine
like stars. Light
travels and if it has been traveling
____ forever?
even the most distant stars
would emerge in the night sky.
(But there would be no
night sky.) Our world is split
because time projects
from a single point.
You could disprove this idea
if we could be here
enough
to prove forever.

Yesterday I got back from work around five thirty. Sat on the couch, took my shoes off, unbuttoned my work shirt and hung it up in the closet. Meanwhile the cats bumped their heads into my hands, walked across my lap, and we all went into the kitchen where I opened a can of food. I then switched into shorts and changed my t-shirt, put on tennis shoes and got my bike out of the closet and rode out to Sunset View Park, the south-western most corner of Oakland, down South Harbor Road past the car junkery, the train yard, and the many shipping operations punctuated by 24 story high great white cranes. A long, wide road with a slight incline and nobody on it.

I locked my bike to a pole and inspected the crane closest the park, watched the boat from Norfolk and the people on it for a while. I read a placard: the crane was built in Shanghai and it's controls were made in Sweden. One of the workers waved at me and I waved back. I walked to the end of the jetty, past the couple hanging out in the tower, pissed behind a bush, took a picture of some grafitti on a trash can and walked back to where my bike was parked. By then the crane had started to unload the cargo from the boat, and I sat down and watched them work.

Oakland dockworkers. It made me think of season 2 of The Wire, of the big military ships I've been reading about, the loud noises and steel and of teaching in comparison, what a different job unloading boats is. It looked fun, satisfying and probably paid well. I smoked a cigarette. Listened and watched and amazed at how accurate the crane operator was, moving rectangles around with such precision. I wondered if a good crane operator is slightly OCD, or develops a little bit of a natural OCD, trying to line things up just right. Drawing cubes in the margins of note pads. After a while I got back on the bike and rode home. Made a couple phone calls, made dinner, took a shower and got into bed. Read for an hour and went to sleep. Wednesday.

Strange dreams. They kind I was happy to wake up from. Not because they were scary, but uncomfortable. And boring. Dreams that seemed familiar, familiar places and scenarios and themes. Plus a heavy feeling like I was being pressed on. Physically. Something heavy was laying on top of me. Which probably relates directly to my body, how I was feeling, the fact that yesterday I walked three miles to class and back, stood for three hours in class, and then walked another three miles to my therapist and the grocery store. In my new work shoes, that are more like heavy boots, and aren't exactly made for walking long distances. Or maybe they are. I don't make boots. But they are heavy. On the last leg of the journey I walked slowly, like a caveman after a long day in the jungle. Sings Bill Callahan: "Peace on your hand / don't be silly. / Peace in my bah-dee / when I'm tired and beaten."

But it could be worse. Always. And actually yesterday was a good day. Just tiring. Though not tiring like the Japanese death march through New Guinea, as I continue to read accounts of the fighting on the Pacific islands during the second world war. Every time I put the book down, to go to sleep or get off the train, I say, either to myself or out loud, "this is the craziest shit I've ever read." And keep reading. One thing I'm learning from the Japanese perspective was how defeated they all were long before their government surrendered. Marching for a year, starving and sick with no food and no ammunition to fight a war, and no choice to surrender. If you refused to charge to your death you were shot anyway by your commanding officer. "My own company broke camp in Pusan with 261 men. I was the only one who boarded a transport ship bound for Japan and home after the war."

From the Marines' perspective, the Japanese were fearsome, self-less warriors, jumping bonzai style into their foxholes at night to stab a few Americans before blowing themselves up. Whereas from the Japanese perspective, those 'fearless' soldiers probably had no food or ammunition, and no option to surrender. A suicide attack was just about the only thing they could do asides from waiting to be killed. In many of the accounts by Japanese soldiers, there is a moment where, after seeing a fleet of American bulldozers or tanks or an airfield built in a day, or from the account of a film maker who spent time in the Hollywood, to witness the wealth and abundance of American resources, that many of these soldiers had the realization that victory was not possible. And not because of bogus ideas of national character or racial whatever, but because the Americans we're rich and could build thirty times as many planes, and can feed and clothe and provide their soldiers with ammunition. "The only one who wept at the actual news of Japan's defeat was the commander."

Happy 4th of July! It's hot in Oakland! Fireworks were canceled! Budget Cuts! So was summer school! At least they didn't shut down the libraries! They are staying open! Of course they're not open today it's a holiday! Independence day! We are free! No work! Last night I played virtual basketball with Bill until past midnight! Whoa! Whoa now hey! Hey now slow down! We sat at the bird sanctuary as it got dark and drank beers! Canada geese climbing out of the water and settling in for the night! A raccoon snuck into the fenced-in area! A dog bit a goose! Pelicans fish in groups! There's probably a name for a group of pelicans other than a "flock"! Sorry about these exclamation points!

Hope it's not annoying! We are free! Free to go watch fireworks somewhere else! Free to buy half priced coupons from the internet! Free to turn down invitations! Free to give up on our relationships! Free to read a book! Free to sit in the park! To watch the drunk couple go stand by the dumpster! Free to draw a cube! Free to have friends over it's my own goddamn apartment I can do whatever I want with it! Freedom! Free to afford freedom! Free to make circular statements! Free to read about enslaved Guatemalans picking flavorless tomatoes in Florida! Free to read the stories told by Japanese Kempeitei during the occupation of parts of China prior to American involvement in WWII! Free to share this quote completely out of context!: "It might sound extreme, but I can almost say that if more than two weeks went by without my taking a head, I didn't feel right."

Free to be like whoa! Free to say messed up things! Free to forgive! Free to forgive if that's at all possible! Free bird! Free to be told by a literate international student that they don't read American books! Free to wonder why! Free to speculate that it has something to do with the amount of insulation from the problems of the world our wealth provides us! Free to consider that a Westerner uses 300% more of the world's resources in a lifetime than a non-westerner! Free to be insulated even from ourselves! Free to commit ourselves to health! To stop smoking! To design iPhone apps that help us rent more movies! To write books about the future of cloud computing! Freedom! Yes! It's true! And it feels good! Most of the time!

On Tuesday it rained. Heavy all day and cleared up at night. My raincoat is good one, picked out specifically so I could ride my bike in the rain and stay perfectly dry. It works; or worked until the cuff of the right sleeve began to turn out. Maybe the glue stopped sticking or maybe it was a loose thread, but the rain runs down my right arm and somehow curls around to get up into the sleeve. By the end of the day, my arm was sopping wet and cold while the rest of me was dry.

I looked up the warranty policy and it sounds like they'll replace it, or fix it. The problem is that it'll take a little while, four weeks at least and I'm not sure how much I'll need it in the next couple months. When it's sunny out like it is today, hot and dry, it's hard to believe that it will ever rain again. It will, I know, but it's hard to imagine anything other than what's right in front of me. I want to send it off but experience tells me I'll be sorry.

**

This morning I came to the realization that the little bell that's been ringing in my head this last month is "morality." At least that's how she put it. Something to keep the clan from splitting apart, to let me know I'm putting the social order at risk. Thanks biology. I'm not going to get specific, but it's funny how things hang around until we notice them. Or are driven to drink. We're out of cat food. It's hot out. End of the second week of school. Is it just me or has the Huffington Post gotten less left and more something else since AOL bought it? Not that it isn't a free country.