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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.