maybe lost friendships
maybe what was never was. it never was. it is for a while but there is no was. It was lost; it was remade. it was a new it is a new/before there was new, there was not. maybe friends lost the is, maybe there was an is then that was no more what isn't was—it's true I came too and didn't advise. I don't care because it is over. what was isn't anymore if it ever was.
The writer who would be ridiculous is not sthg to care. Care? b/c it is the glass crashing and the laughter can't put it back together.
--------- UVILOV
4 yrs later, they say the garage is gone. 4 yrs later, the tree is still there. 4 yrs later the trip we took is a memory. 4 yrs later i anger quickly, nerves frayed, tired of a happy face. 4 yrs later, enthused. 4 yrs later, colors surround. 4 yrs later, a yearning for future. Choose the slide—urge the uptake. Caress nostalgia—what was
an accident in the middle—what was a travel ad? What were those beaches flying by yet frozen in a photo of sand and sex. You had it right all along. This is an improvisation, writing this is improv but you don't see it in real time—or is your time more real than mine. Oh we were happy for a moment, yet weighted down at the same time by the force of the fall. There's never another city to turn to. The helicopter fell in the
middle of the park—tiny lights of cars in rows trapped by traffic, trafficked by traps. It was a song—a melancholy one. A great poet once said, don't write when yr sad or angry—write when upenergy uptakes you. Then we'd never write. We are all the us who we've been over the plains—the flat plains of clouds out the window after we burst above the line. Why are there no
checkpoints in the clouds? Marketers in San José are working on a plan to sell us bottled clouds—rainy days in tins like X-mas cookies. How much would we pay for the feelings again? We've said for years we should write down our dreams. She said in her milpa she'd always have two journals, one for dreams and one for life. How to keep the two separate? Her question was in between the
two—in the linkages. The difference is a pause—an alternate possibility, an escape into a deeper recess, an image exploded in the rear view mirror. I don't believe in stream-of-consciousness. How to improvise a memory in its absence? How to piece together a story from photos? For dinner we had Japanese at the place on the corner; it wasn't nearly as pricey as we'd expected. the day after
a riot exploded at the same corner. We stayed upstairs and watched the hordes, not afraid just uninvolved, which happens so often. La distancia entre el aquí y el allá es el espacio que atravesamos para estar juntos—para verse frente a frente y no querer tropezar. El sonido me duele; es demasiado fuerte y me preocupan mis oídos. What was there to connect us? Turn your head / make a lock /
lock this make. Ponle candado al carro. Ponle tus zapatos que está mojado fuera. No hubo lo que pensábamos. No había lo que buscábamos. Igual y aquí todo sigue. Lo que hay en las noticias no concuerda con la experiencia vivida—o ¿será al revés? No transitamos el mismo mundo que antes—ese mundo ya pasó.
Notes from old notebooks I: From viewing of El velador
We wait. That's all we do.
What is there to be seen?
es difícil de aceptar
digitalización/pixelación
How close can we get
to the violence?
Will you leave if this gets too
boring?
What does it mean to be left
behind?
muchas cosas
inexplicados
inexplicables
------------
limited by a code of silence
gestures become important.
to understand what they think
life is about.
not an explanation of
oppression
rather and emotional
reflection of complexity
in an imagined space
-----------------------
a harbinger?
What is there to be seen?
es difícil de aceptar
digitalización/pixelación
How close can we get
to the violence?
Will you leave if this gets too
boring?
What does it mean to be left
behind?
muchas cosas
inexplicados
inexplicables
------------
limited by a code of silence
gestures become important.
to understand what they think
life is about.
not an explanation of
oppression
rather and emotional
reflection of complexity
in an imagined space
-----------------------
a harbinger?
Reading the translations of the Pussy Riot Closing Statements published on N+1:
Thus one of the most important Christian concepts, Humility, is now commonly understood not as a path towards the perception, fortification, and ultimate liberation of Man, but on the contrary as an instrument for his enslavement. To quote [Russian philosopher] Nikolai Berdyaev, one could say that “the ontology of humility is the ontology of the slaves of God, and not the sons of God.” When I was involved with organizing the ecological movement, I became fundamentally convinced of the priority of inner freedom as the foundation for taking action. As well as the importance, the direct importance, of taking action as such.
- Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot
The art of creating the image of an epoch does not know winners or losers. It was the same with the OBERIU poets, who remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible. Purged in 1937, Alexander Vvedensky wrote, “The incomprehensible pleases us, the inexplicable is our friend.” According to the official death certificate, Aleksandr Vvedensky died on December 20th, 1941. No one knows the cause of death. It could have been dysentery on the train on the way to the camps; it could have been the bullet of a guard. It occurred somewhere on the railroad between Voronezh and Kazan. Pussy Riot are Vvedensky’s students and heirs.
- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot
And check out the translators' statements. Like this one:
I spent May and June this year in Moscow—I arrived just as the protests were re-energized by Putin’s third inauguration. I spent many hours talking to folks in their twenties, and a picture of an ascendant new generation of people who are well-informed, well-read, and not indifferent to the direction of their country started to emerge. The intensity of Moscow still fresh in my mind, I spent the eight days of the Pussy Riot trial getting up at dawn in a different timezone to read live updates from the courtroom, realizing quickly that, just like the protests in Moscow earlier this summer, this was close to something that could be called history in the making. It felt important to pay attention—to the travesty of justice and to the steadfastness of the accused. Some of the defendants are the same age as the students of several courses on Russian culture that I will be teaching this year. It felt important to me as a teacher to make these texts available to my students—both as some of the most important cultural artifacts of today’s Russia, and as examples of civic engagement.
- Sasha Senderovich
I love translators motivated by solidarity and translation as a product of deep accompaniment.
- Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot
The art of creating the image of an epoch does not know winners or losers. It was the same with the OBERIU poets, who remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible. Purged in 1937, Alexander Vvedensky wrote, “The incomprehensible pleases us, the inexplicable is our friend.” According to the official death certificate, Aleksandr Vvedensky died on December 20th, 1941. No one knows the cause of death. It could have been dysentery on the train on the way to the camps; it could have been the bullet of a guard. It occurred somewhere on the railroad between Voronezh and Kazan. Pussy Riot are Vvedensky’s students and heirs.
- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot
And check out the translators' statements. Like this one:
I spent May and June this year in Moscow—I arrived just as the protests were re-energized by Putin’s third inauguration. I spent many hours talking to folks in their twenties, and a picture of an ascendant new generation of people who are well-informed, well-read, and not indifferent to the direction of their country started to emerge. The intensity of Moscow still fresh in my mind, I spent the eight days of the Pussy Riot trial getting up at dawn in a different timezone to read live updates from the courtroom, realizing quickly that, just like the protests in Moscow earlier this summer, this was close to something that could be called history in the making. It felt important to pay attention—to the travesty of justice and to the steadfastness of the accused. Some of the defendants are the same age as the students of several courses on Russian culture that I will be teaching this year. It felt important to me as a teacher to make these texts available to my students—both as some of the most important cultural artifacts of today’s Russia, and as examples of civic engagement.
- Sasha Senderovich
I love translators motivated by solidarity and translation as a product of deep accompaniment.
Introductions: Janice Lee & Anna Joy Springer
I just realized how much I enjoy the form of the "introduction." I like writing them. And reading them. After the reading Monday, Anna Joy requested I post my intros online. So here is the text of both intros:
Welcome to Kaboom Books and
to this 3rd edition of an As-Yet-Unnamed-But-Really-Quite-Lovely-Reading-Series
on the back patio of Kaboom Books. If you have suggestions on the name, let me
know.
Tonight I have the pleasure
of using way too many adverbs. To introduce these two startlingly strange, defiantly brilliant
women from Los Angeles. Two extravagantly excessive and disarmingly distracting
prose innovators. One refreshingly queer, the other comfortingly weird. One a
survivor of nineties riot grrrrl, the other a survivor of the CalArts
experimental writing MFA.
Both are active
contributors to a for-me legendary, yet little acknowledged L.A.-based
innovative writing scene that is exploding right now. Based around a wide array
of small presses and gallery spaces and bookstores and universities, the scene
is a real example of literary culture's potential when it invites dialogue with
other arts and all kinds of people.
And they are on a tour of
the Northwest and Southwest parts of the US bringing this energy all over the
country: they headed out from Los Angeles a few weeks ago and went up north to
SF and Oakland and Eugene (where they had a run-in with drunk dude poets
declaiming paeans to their penises) to Portland and Seattle and Olympia then on
to Boulder, Dallas, Austin to now end up here with us.
So I am thrilled you have
all come out to see both of these women read.
First up is Janice Lee and
then Anna Joy Springer. I'll do an intro for Janice then later I will intro
Anna Joy.
Janice Lee works hard.
Janice Lee is a writer, artist, editor, designer, curator. I first met her a
few years ago in Tijuana, Mexico. In fact, her author photo, the one I see her
use the most was taken in the room where we met in Tijuana. Or at least I have
imagined that we met in that light blue room. (Janice later corrected me. We met in Monterrey, Mexico in 2008.) Janice has two books now: Kerotakis (Dog Horn Publishing, 2010):
and Daughter (Jaded Ibis Press,
2011). Both books have this undercurrent in them, an undercurrent that
something is wrong or has gone horribly awry. Oddly, her main character in Kerotakis has a homonym of the same name
that Anna Joy uses in her book: G.I.L.L. and [Gil]. As if their respective Gils brought them together. As I've been reading all of their
books to prepare for this evening, the dialogue produced between these two
authors has been really fruitful—a dialogue that seems to revolve around writing
one's way around histories, both personal and collective. Janice writes:
"There is a daughter who is an excavator of dead gods, slapping down a
stone path, with a stick in one hand, a mirror in the other, a gatherer of
worries and prayers, a jar full of whispers and echoes." Janice's work has
a sadness, a sense of loss that pervades. But there is also a persistent
exploration, a brave insistence to push outside of the realm of what is known
and understandable and into unaccounted-for regions of the brain and of
experience. She dwells on the limitations of imagination and thought and writes
her way into unexamined spaces: the bends and twists of the cerebral cortex in
all its scary interiority. Janice also has a little handmade chapbook that I
was lucky enough to get a copy of. It's called Red Trees. Red Trees is a wholely different animal and yet surely
of the same species as the other books: a text grounded in Janice's experience
of family and family stories and growing up. And yet, in each one of her books,
I've been struck by the fact of the continually reappearing desert. The desert
as a non-fertile space, as a dangerous expanse. In Kerotakis, "I
have made a nest in the desert. There is so much sand and dirt. Is the dust
here the same as the dust there? Is it my own skin that clings to the lens, or
has the dust, the dry skin of millions of others followed me here?" In Red Trees, "There are deserts that
are waterless. There are deserts flooded with excess." And in Daughter, "The desert, like the
abyssal plains of the sea, is far from the monotonous expanse you might
imagine. There is a slope of no more than one part in one thousand—completely
beyond the ability of the human eye to recognize anything but perfectly
flat."
Janice's writing is always
in the desert, writing her way through the desert and into the desert, always
searching, always on the lookout for water in an oasis always over the next
hill. Sometimes finding an octopus or a cyborg, sometimes reporting back,
always at the bottom of the sea, wondering what this thing called language and
this other thing called the sentence, what these things can do.
Janice Lee.
So I feel like the least I
can do after Janice and Anna Joy have driven all the way across the country in
August (!) to be here is to provide thoughtful introductions and readings of
their work. It's one of the things that I love about this network of writers
who take risks: we read each other and talk to each other about each other. So
here goes:
Anna Joy Springer is a
prose writer and visual artist who makes grotesques - creating hybrid texts
that combine sacred and profane elements to evoke intensely embodied
conceptual-emotional experiences in readers. Anna Joy first started out in a
series of early-nineties riot grrrl bands: Blatz, The Gr'ups, and Cypher in the
Snow. With those bands, she toured the United States and Europe being a wild
feminist punk performer, and also toured with the all-women spoken word
extravaganza, Sister Spit. The energy of the early nineties and the riot grrl
movement is alive and well in her most recent book, hmmmm maybe not
"well" but yes "alive." But I'll get back to that point in a
second.
Ok, so full disclosure: Anna
Joy Springer was my professor in the MFA at UC San Diego, where her bio
proclaims, "she truly loves teaching courses in Experimental Writing,
Graphic Texts, and Postmodern Feminist Literatures." And I can attest to
the fact that Anna Joy brings an energy and an attention to her pedagogical
practice that few people manage. One of the gems of my experience in the MFA was
taking Anna Joy's workshop in hybrid forms and cross-genre writing. Instead of
just hating on the writing workshop or complaining about it, Anna Joy set out
to radically transform and reimagine it. Instead of the conservative,
prescriptive, suggestion-based approach, she proffers what she calls
"Project Attention" because of the unnerving, uncomfortable fact that
on a base level each of us writes to get attention and she acknowledges the
vulnerable place that puts each of us in when we decide to write. Her workshop
creates a space for reading, for experimentation and dialogue, for risk-taking
and pleasure. A space where we each reflect back our experience of reading each
others texts and where we write through and with each other instead of always
at each other. I want to mention this because I think she is really on to
something here and I think we all could learn something from it. In fact, this
intro is another form of "project attention." Anna Joy has two books:
Birdwisher from Birds of Lace and The Vicious Red Relic, Love from the
same press as Janice's, the shockingly multidisciplinary Jaded Ibis Press. Both
of Anna Joy's books combine illustrations and prose experimentation. I spent a
lot of time this past week with Anna Joy's most recent book The Vicious Red Relic, Love and I came
away feeling both deeply wounded and also deeply aware of the possibilities of
language to re-structure experience, to dwell in the forests of our imagination
and our inability to understand or explain. The book, called a "fabulist
memoir" on the cover returns to the emotional wreckage of the early
nineties and her early twenties, when perhaps she had a relationship with an
HIV-positive, seductively self-destructive girlfriend called [Gil] in the book.
There are letters from the narrator, here named Nina, to a small tinfoil
elephant named Winky, who is also a narrative device, who travels back in time
and forward in time, seemingly at will, carrying messages and providing comfort
to [Gil] before she shoots a speedball and dies. There are journal entries from
the early nineties and feminist re-writings of Babylonian and Sumerian
mythology. Oh and then there are the forests: these spaces where meaning
degrades or abounds in all its messy symbolism: the Forest of Good Bad
Intentions and the Not Fake Parallel Forest and the Forest of Clashing Erotics
and the Forest of Mythopoesis. We get lost in the forests and that might be a
space for us to, as Anna Joy writes, "to lose yourself in ways that felt
divine...to feel relief, that almost remembered state before consciousness,
that estatic realm of the freshly post-fetal." But Anna Joy is always
aware when she writes sentences like this, aware that, as she says, "I
know I'm getting far out here, Winky, I know I sound like a burn-out trying to
psycho-babble a teenage girl on mushrooms into his skanky patchouli bed. It's
the pitfall of language."
Anna Joy writes a lot about
language, about semantic slippage and excessive symbologies, about rape and
AIDS and how we find healing through narrative, how we create meaning out of
the wreckage. Especially, how women and queers can create fables out of twisted
histories.
As we were wandering around Kaboom Books before the reading, Anna Joy pulled a book by Antonin Artaud off the shelf and began to read a page at random. Then she turned and said, one day I would like for someone to use this quote to talk about my work. So here is the quote which I think fits into my intro quite well:
I do not sytematically cultivate horror. The word "cruelty" must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given. And I claim, in doing this, the right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck, in short to return to the etymological origins of speech which, in the midst of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete element.
I do not sytematically cultivate horror. The word "cruelty" must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given. And I claim, in doing this, the right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck, in short to return to the etymological origins of speech which, in the midst of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete element.
Anna Joy's writing from the
Metaforest is always allegorical, always curving and torquing and never
straight and always excessive and rarely restrained. So often in the book, it
seems like Riot Grrl never ended, like all the grrls ran off into the forest to
find new ways to scream and to explode. This time in words, this time with
language in a riot of skin, sex, sweat, blood and butterflies.
Anna Joy Springer.
(Anna Joy reads.)
(Anna Joy and Janice answer the amazing questions from the crowd.)
(Now you have attended the reading, just with all the readings excised.)
(Anna Joy and Janice answer the amazing questions from the crowd.)
(Now you have attended the reading, just with all the readings excised.)
I thought I would post something clever on Facebook for my birthday. Like some poignant or pithy phrase or text from some poem to talk about this experience of drowning in the Facebook auto-reminder birthday love.
Picked up Adrienne Rich and flipped it open and found:
Raise it up there and it will
loom, the gaunt original thing
gristle and membrane of your life
The page begins like that which I thought was a prescient start. The middle of the page is a bit more meandering off topic, then at the end we get back:
but you have to raise it up there, you
have a brutal thing to do.
But then I think, oh, that's too sad, that's not chipper or upbeat or thankful enough.
So I google Adrienne Rich birthday and a bunch of sites come up but then this odd Google site with "Birthday Poems" that some person "asked everyone to pick a poem they especially enjoy, print it or write it out somehow, and post it anywhere they would like, preferably outdoors!" It's a precious idea. Just precious. And nice somehow. And on there I find a load of poems including first this lovely fragment (or whole poem?) by Anne Carson:
"What is time made of?"
is a question that had
long exercised Geryon.
Everywhere he went he
asked people.
Time is an abstraction--
just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.
But then this ending to a poem by Julian T Brolaski felt better as a way of speaking to my emotions:
spun aground like a human candle
on the 4th of july
under the guise of cupid
thinking myself a very gay dawg indeed
I love this Birthday Poems site. I think myself a very gay dawg indeed today. Xo.
Picked up Adrienne Rich and flipped it open and found:
Raise it up there and it will
loom, the gaunt original thing
gristle and membrane of your life
The page begins like that which I thought was a prescient start. The middle of the page is a bit more meandering off topic, then at the end we get back:
but you have to raise it up there, you
have a brutal thing to do.
But then I think, oh, that's too sad, that's not chipper or upbeat or thankful enough.
So I google Adrienne Rich birthday and a bunch of sites come up but then this odd Google site with "Birthday Poems" that some person "asked everyone to pick a poem they especially enjoy, print it or write it out somehow, and post it anywhere they would like, preferably outdoors!" It's a precious idea. Just precious. And nice somehow. And on there I find a load of poems including first this lovely fragment (or whole poem?) by Anne Carson:
"What is time made of?"
is a question that had
long exercised Geryon.
Everywhere he went he
asked people.
Time is an abstraction--
just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.
But then this ending to a poem by Julian T Brolaski felt better as a way of speaking to my emotions:
spun aground like a human candle
on the 4th of july
under the guise of cupid
thinking myself a very gay dawg indeed
I love this Birthday Poems site. I think myself a very gay dawg indeed today. Xo.
Stop Low-Priority Deportations
—DREAM Act eligible youth;
—Individuals with no criminal record;
—Individuals clearly detained because of racial profiling tactics used by police and border patrol, including the detention of passengers in vehicles;
—Individuals with pending U visa / VAWA applications;
—Individuals with extreme medical conditions.
These brave young people are doing amazing work, putting their lives on the line and they need your support. Read more and sign their petitions here at their DREAM activist site.
These youth are risking their own deportation and standing up to ICE not only to save themselves and other DREAMers but all low-priority deportees. Que valientes, la neta.
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