Friday, February 29, 2008

Work, School, and Utopia

I've been absent from this blog for about a week now, taking an InDesign course, which is why I haven't posted. I've had this sinking feeling since I came back to work yesterday. My job's not bad in the grand scheme of jobs: I get along with my co-workers and the organization I work for has a noble mission. But I sensed there'd be a sharp contrast coming back to work after having taken a class all week. And that difference was that during the class, my mind was engaged from the time I sat down to the time I left for the day. At work, this is not the case. I experience long stretches of what feels like fatal doses of boredom. And I fear that this just might be the nature of the office job, or more frighteningly the day job.

During times like these, I consider the implications of getting my Ph. D. Mind you, I am not ready to do this. When I finished my Masters, I all but swore that academia had seen the last of me. There's an infinite amount of reasons why grad school was a very bad no good decision the first time around, including that I wasn't ready when I went, I happened to land at the worst of institutions and I had literally no clue how to deal with faceless, byzantine bureaucracies. But to me, the saddest part of grad school was not so much the feeling of not wanting to learn in an academic context (because most good students are good self-teachers), but of no longer having any desire to teach. This was the opposite of my college years in which I frolicked in daisy fields with the great thinkers of the western world at an institution whose name rhymes with 'Lard' (but this too had its ugly flip side: it was a bubble of privilege) and I thought for sure that some day I'd end up a teacher.

These two experiences left me with two very polar ideas of what school can be like, either a 40k per year utopia or a proletarian work camp for ideas. But at heart, I miss being in a place where ideas really matter. Unfortunately, I don't think the American university is the place where ideas really matter; I've come to see it more as the stock exchange of cultural capital, the place where ideas becomes things. I've done a lot of railing against theory in the past couple of years, but theory itself is not the enemy it's the use and misuse of theory that so angers me.

I don't think the academy of my dreams exists, but I do constantly think about a places like Black Mountain College, where the American avant-garde of the latter half of the twentieth century was fostered. The illustrious list of teachers included Charles Olsen, Buckminster Fuller, WCWilliams, John Cage, Willem deKooning, Robert Duncan, Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham, and the list just seems to go on and on. And it was run on almost no money. Students and teachers so wanted to take part in this utopian, interdisciplinary experiment that they slept in their cars. It's so beautiful it makes me want to cry. Can this exist under late capitalism or are we all too bogged down in credit card and student loan debt and the idea that the art world(s) is happening in big cities that cost too much to live in?

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Miscellany


1) Above is a picture from my dad's photoblog.

My dad is a photographer and filmmaker. He's always said he wanted to be a poet but ended up taking pictures instead. A lot of his photos represent the best parts of poetry to me.

2) The Savage Detectives has been banned from a Texas prison:

"Inmate No. 1385412, in Huntsville, Texas (below), ordered a copy of the book, but on its arrival, the prison mailroom intercepted it and sent it, at the inmate's expense, to a relative of the inmate's in Austin. The prison determined that the material could "encourage homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior" and was "detrimental to the offender's rehabilitation." (For what it's worth, the sexual and violent acts described in the offending passage are in fact between a man and a woman.)

Inmate No. 1385412 is seeking to appeal the decision. Failing that, he'll have to find something else to read until his projected release date of August 2009."

The prison censor only got to page 39.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Expat's Choice

I google image searched "astoria park pool" and one of the results was this.

It seems that every urban place in America is going through the process of being condo-fied. And as more and more condos go up, developers turn towards more and more esoteric names. Condo names used to be accorded to developments on the basis of their fanciness-sounding-quotient, hotel-ish names like "The Wentworth" or "The Carlyle" were in vogue for much of the history of condo naming. Alas, there are only so many names with a fancy veneer to affix to the front of your "tower" or "estate." The function of the condominium name is to confer brand identity not only on the housing unit but upon the buyer. The buyer becomes not so much the owner of a fairly homogeneous apartment in a building called "The Carlyle," the buyer becomes "the type of person who would live in the Carlyle," and the buyer is distinguished from the buyer #2 who bought an identical unit in "The Wentworth" because the two names roll off the tongue differently. It's kind of a Machiavellian way of manipulating reality through language. In the traditional baptism condos, the main thing that is given to the buyer through the condo's name is (personal and consumer) identity. But in cities I've lived in recently, I've seen so many ads on public transportation and in other public venues for places like the Oro, the Aria, the Castings, the Beaux Arts Lofts, Lager House.......You won't just live inside an apartment, you'll live inside a big airy idea, with three bathrooms! And these places are so aggressively marketed that even a humble consumer like me who will probably never occupy an income bracket high enough to purchase one of these grand ideas can tell you what the amenities for the Oro are (a purple swimming pool, if you must know).

In the ad culled from the "astoria park pool" google search, "Astoria Park" towers are marketed to Americans living in Singapore through the website expatschoice.com. Here, potential Americans buyers are offered the chance to negate geographic specificity through this particular condo name.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

So who are these shadowy superdelegates?

Names, committments, and uncommittments of the superdelegates who will undemocratically determine our future in exchange for special appointments in the next administration. Who doesn't want to be the ambassador to Antigua?

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Claire Tells the NYTimes What's What

Have you ever asked yourself, 'Why does every major and minor news outlet have different delegate counts for Clinton and Obama?' This is something that's been troubling me for a while. Here, Claire Sandberg calls bullshit on the highly subjective (at this stage, anyway) science of delegate counts.

But also you should just visit Claire's new blog, cartographia.blogspot.com for your own edification.

Telecommunications Companies Granted Legal Immunity for Handing Over Phone Records

FISA is one of the many reasons why our new slightly Democratic majority Congress has proved itself useless, again. Yesterday, another measure to strengthen FISA was voted into effect. Democrats had a chance to stop this, and they didn't; they've voted in favor of domestic spying before and they keep doing it. The bill was approved 68 to 29–the wide margin of votes in favor of extended wiretapping and surveillance gives you an idea of just how many Democrats are rolling over on this issue, still ceding to the Bush administration.

This bill does a couple of things:

-it extends the governments' rights to tap communications domestically (with the provision that American citizens will not be the targets) for six additional years, assuring that we will be living the legacy the Bush administration long after they've left office.

-it eliminates the need for the government to get a warrant at all in cases where the government deems surveillance necessary.

-it grants a degree of immunity to telecommunications companies for giving the government customers' phone records. Republicans are pushing for even more immunity for companies like AT&T in future legislation.

I want to post this because the big news today is that Barack Obama has finally gained a significant edge in delegates over Hillary Clinton and while this development is exciting and important, this bill is proof that even when while the whole country is talking about change, there are still measures being taken by both the Bush Administration and cowardly Democrats that are setting us back even further.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The Turn Towards the Cultural, Away from the Political

There's been a controversy in the world of poetry blogs about an article in the Chicago Review by Juliana Sphar and Stephanie Young entitled "Numbers Trouble" that reminds me of everything that rubs me the wrong way about so-called "contemporary/avant-garde/innovative writing" and feminism. To sum up this long and tedious controversy over which much digital ink has been spilled: Jennifer Ashton wrote an article basically saying, "Wow, the gender gap in contemporary poetry has really closed, hasn't it?! [as judged by looking at anthologies and the like] to which Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young respond, "No, it certainly has not! We've rifled though anthologies! We've crunched the numbers! And the outcome? We women, share a foul cultural lot!" This is not a terribly interesting topic of discussion for me, but what I find striking is the shit storm of controversy it's generated on the inter-nets.

Striking and symptomatic the tendency of both poetry and feminism to argue passionately for cultural representation and confuse this with politics. I'm talking about poetry and feminism here as academic disciplines, as groups comprised of individual practitioners, as practices that spawn ideologies, and as ideologies that spawn practices. It's not that I think that the cultural under-representation of women is unimportant but I find the total focus of the poetry community on issues of representation, rather than issues of politics really troubling. Instead of crunching numbers and blaming nebulous sexist forces in the world of editorship, isn't it more useful to ask ourselves whether there are conditions in women's lives that keep them from existing in literary communities and publishing more? I would point out too that the question of publishing in the innovative/avant-garde context here is a very salient one because in contrast to other genres like fiction (although this is becoming less and less true of literary fiction), poetry is not only a gift economy but you're friends are mainly the ones who publish you, so that literary community and innovative writing exist in a tautological relationship to one anther. Aren't women still disproportionately burdened with all the chores of motherhood, full-time jobs, and housework even when in fairly equal partnerships? The material factors that would make a woman too stultified or too tired to write at the end of the day are the material of politics and those go curiously unmentioned in this type of discussion about cultural representation.




Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Colombian National Tragicomedy, Continued



These are pictures my dad took at the February 4th demonstrations in Bogota.

AWP: The Bookfair

Thanks to Andrea Lawlor for these pictures.
1st picture: Megan's Kathy Acker Tattoo
2nd picture: Brandon Holmquest, Sandra Newman, me, and Megan Milks
3rd picture:same
4th picture: Sandra and I in simulated conversation.

AWP felt like a long-lost friend convention.


Wednesday, February 6, 2008

El Siniestro Horror del Fascismo



The poster above says, "they also marched and they thought that they were doing it for their Country and they didn't know that they were supporting the sinister horror of fascism. I won't march on February 4th."

This poster was made in counter-protest to a multi-country demonstration organized by the Colombian president Alvaro Uribe against the FARC. (Being Colombian) I got e-mails from several Colombians urging me to join this absurd event in New York, outside the United Nations on the February 4th. The thoughts running through my head were, "An international protest against a terrorist group that carries out its terrorism only in Colombia? What are people in Switzerland gonna do about the FARC, who kidnap and harass the Colombian gentry? What the fuck do they hope to achieve, anyway? The Swiss really taking a stand against terrorism in Colombia? Or are Colombians just engaged in the national pass time of keeping up appearances–Believe us we hate terrorists!–except on an international scale?" The protest was not openly announced as being organized by the Colombian government and and it all seemed so poorly conceived and illogical that in retrospect, I should have known.

So many days after all these questions ran through my head, my cousin sent me this article from the Colombian indymedia site. Since it's in Spanish and there was no English counterpart on the American indymedia site, I'll give you a run down of what the article is about. As it turns out, a few counter-protesters did show up at the anti-FARC rally in New York and were basically attacked and called terrorists by the Uribe-organized gathering.

A very tiny bit of background (because to give the full story would be to recount a fifty year civil war in Colombia) of what has sparked this recent public relations campaign by the Colombian government: recently, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez agreed to negotiate the release of few FARC kidnapped journalists and politicians. The negotiations were apparently successful as two hostages were let go, but then Uribe inexplicably pulled out of the negotiations. Colombia is one of the few Latin American countries that fully backs the U.S. foreign policy and is receiving tidy sums of money to keep up the war on drugs. The U.S. has been leaning heavily on Latin American presidencies to not support or form any alliances with the socialist government of Chavez. So it comes as no surprise that just as progress is being made in the release of these hostages, Uribe would punk out of the negotiations. This way, Uribe can keep the money coming in from the U.S. for the war on drugs, the money coming in from narcotrafficking, and the military support of the right wing paramilitaries (the sworn enemies of the left wing FARC). The February 4th protests were simply a way of keeping up appearances without having to actually do the work to achieve peace in Colombia.

Addendum to Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy

I was talking to Brandon and he made a critique of the last paragraph of the "Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy" post, which I would like to share–he thought that the last paragraph sounded rote and abandoned the thoughtful analysis of the rest post for a kind of identity politics stance. In the spirit of clarification and more thoughtful analysis, I'd like to elaborate on a few things I said in the last paragraph of the post because while I think identity politics can be useful in mobilizing individuals to fight against discrimination they face as a group, I'm also really wary of identity politics because I think they negate the specificity and complexities of individuals' lives.

The urge to tie an argument up into a neat little bow is one that's easy to succumb to, but in this case, I would rather not: I make a super-structural argument that Americans are fat because food and the quality of life in this country is so bad and then at the end I say that people have the right to be fat without being judged. In some ways this comes off like I'm talking out the side of my mouth because I start by saying that there is a problem of obesity in the U.S. (a claim that a lot of fat activists deny as a paranoia spread by the diet and healthcare industries) and then I say there's nothing wrong with being fat. Admittedly, I do think that there's something in the water and the food here that's wreaking havoc on our collective pancreases and making us fat as a country. This becomes particularly apparent when you travel outside the U.S. and see just how full of terrible additives our food is and how low our quality of life is, compared to other countries (and I'm not even necessarily talking about western Europe, although yes western Europe). Additionally, we not only have a historical crisis of fatness, but a historical crisis of thinness so that not only are fat people contending with bad food, but with a much more punishingly thin standard of "normality" than ever before. But then, I do think that you can be fat and beautiful and healthy (the medical establishment has not been able to concretely prove one way or the other whether being fat or thin or "normal" is healthier) and that you shouldn't be discriminated against for the shape of your body. These two positions are perhaps slightly irreconcilable, especially if you hold either the public health scare stance or the fat activism stance strongly. But really, the original spirit of my post is that when the law starts to sanction discrimination against people based on what they look like, then we're in for dark times.

Monday, February 4, 2008

Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy

Lawmakers in Mississippi are proposing a bill that would ban fat people from eating in public. This news is disconcerting to say the least, even if the bill does not pass, which it likely won't. I have never considered myself a libertarian or even really thought I had a libertarian streak, but the kinds of measures that are passing in legislatures across the country make me seriously question whether we are losing our personal freedoms as citizens–from smoking bans to this very extreme and hateful bill that would ban fat people from eating in public–these government incursions into citizens' private lives are not only totally frightening, but deeply flawed philosophically.

There is a strange chiasmus of the public and the private here: the "obesity epidemic" is a "public health" concern, and somehow by making fat people retreat into the private sphere, obesity would disappear? This logic is mind-boggling. The Mississippi ban places the responsibility for fatness squarely on the fat individual. The bill purports to protect the American people from the "obesity epidemic," as if fatness was a contagion that you could catch from sitting next to someone at a restaurant. The bill also ignores the role of structural factors in people's lives that contribute to the general weight gain of the American population that the government could actually take measures to mitigate, such as forcing processed food manufacturers to use real sugar instead of corn syrup (by not, you know, giving corn farmers subsidies all over the place). As opposed to trans-fat, which occurs naturally in some cases, corn syrup is neither naturally-occurring nor tasty–it's one of those things that exists solely to make manufacturing of myriad products exponentially cheaper for the manufacturer and shittier for the consumer. The government forcing manufacturers to uphold public health by making healthier products would constitute the government acting in its appropriate role, protecting its citizens on a large scale from industries that will do anything to raise their bottom line including drastically lowering the quality of their products. This would be a refreshing alternative to legislating the citizen's personal behavior. But it's more convenient to blame fat people for the obesity epidemic than to go after the Coca-Cola corporation. Yet, what the government can actually do to ameliorate public health in America is ultimately kind of besides the point anyway.

The terrifying heart of this bill that we must examine is that it's legally sanctioned discrimination against fat people. Exclamations of hatred and fear aimed at fat people are the final frontier of acceptable public hate speech. Not to mention that one of the biggest class markers in this country is the type of food you have access to: and if you're improverished, you're just not going to spend the five dollars for a smallish box of organic greens at Whole Paycheck (I've been in this position). I would further contend that fat phobia is a very acceptable form of classism (which is not to say that all poor people are fat or all fat people poor, but there are demographic correlations); fat is the intersection where class becomes visible. But even this class argument, which I would stand by as basically true, brings us back to the question of what causes fatness and how fatness can be cured, when the real point is that fat citizens are entitled to the same rights as non-fat citizens (that sounds like non-fat yoghurt to me, ha).

This issue is important to me on many levels: I've been varying degrees of fat in my lifetime (to quote Moe from Jezebel, 'I'm in no danger of being anyone's thinspiration'), I have fat friends who I love and care about deeply, and lastly and most importantly, I want to live in a world where an infinite variety of body types is free to live without shame or recrimination. I don't have a solution but I do know people who are fighting for increased fat visibility and cultural acceptance like my friend Annie Maribona, who started a fat vintage clothing in Portland called FAT FANCY. The road to fat acceptance looks stylish.

Commodification Nation


Red Frida or Green Frida?

Friday, February 1, 2008

Pomes, Po–emmms

My friend Joanne, who makes wonderful films and is very knowledgeable on the subject of film, asked me the other day what books I would recommend to someone who hasn't read that much modern poetry. So I endeavored to compile a highly subjective list of the stuff that I really love and think people should be exposed to if they haven't been already. As you can see, the list includes mostly stuff that's basically canonical in a counter-canonical way. It's all Anglophone and 20th century. Also of note, I didn't include anything hyper-contemporary and that's because I think that it's hard to understand a lot of very contemporary poetry without having read some of the earlier stuff:

-Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems

-Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works, especially the poems "Next Year, or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous" and "My Life by Water"

-Eileen Myles' Not Me

-T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (I know every one reads these in High School, but they never lose their dreary, apocalyptic awesomeness for me)

-Frank O'Hara's The Lunch Poems, especially the poems, "The Day Lady Died" (on the first day of grad school, I was stupid enough to say I loved this poem when the teacher handed it out. The second year students looked at me as if I was some kind of vulgarian quelle horreur! you don't come to grad school to love anything.)

-Alice Notley's The Mysteries of Small Houses

-Kamau Brathwaite's Trenchtown Rock

-Ann Lauterbach's On a Stair

-Charles Reznikoff 's Testimony: The United States (1885-1915) Recitative vol. 1 and 2

-Mina Loy's The Lost Lunar Baedecker, especially the poem, "Songs to Johannes"

-Lyn Hejinian's The Cold of Poetry, especially the poem, "Gesualdo"

-Ted Berrigan's (click to hear incredible Berrigan readings* of) The Sonnets and "Red Shift"

-William Carlos Williams' Spring and All

-
Melvin B. Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

-
Joe Brainard's I Remember (though Brainard mostly dedicated himself to visual art, he also wrote)

-David Antin's Talking at the Boundaries

*Actually, there are good recordings of most of these poets on PennSound, the vast audio archives of poets reading kept at the University of Pennsylvania and made accessible to the public through their extremely navigable website.

Democracy Later

This is a transcript of an Amy Goodman interview with Imran Khan, former Pakistani cricket star turned political activist. Khan gives some interesting insight into the current situation in Pakistan, including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharaff. It would be worth your while to read the whole transcript, but the part where Khan highlights the problem of U.S.-backed dictators is of particular interest:

"And the problem with the U.S. is that, unfortunately, it always ends up backing military dictators or dictators at the expense of the people and unnecessarily alienates the people. I mean, when I spoke to the lawmakers, I asked them a simple question. I said, look, why would people in Pakistan—if you have a democratic government in Pakistan and back a democratic government which comes through free and fair elections, well, you do not pick horses. I mean, the U.S. backed Benazir Bhutto. I thought that was absolutely wrong. They should not interfere in the domestic politics, because if they back one party, then everyone else goes against the U.S. So if a government comes through free and fair elections, why would it not want to work with the U.S.? It’s bizarre. I don’t understand this. Why would a democratic elected government in Pakistan not want to work with the only superpower in the world? I mean, after all, we have to—if I’m a Democrat, I have to go to the people to get their vote, and if I don’t bring them prosperity, they’re not going to vote for me. And if I pick a fight with the only superpower, how am I going to help my people? So it’s so bizarre that they end up sort of picking one dictator, and this is our man, at the expense of and alienating the people."

Why do U.S. foreign policy makers never learn that this strategy of backing the dictators never works? This has been a consistent problem not only in the Middle East, but in Latin America, Africa, and Asian. When will we ever learn the pretty simple equation that U.S.-backed military dictatorships + suppression of real democracy = eventual formation of terrorist groups and hatred of America world wide? It's fairly obvious.