I thought of Bukowski again today.
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes.
~ Bukowski, ‘Dinosauria, We’
I thought of Bukowski again today.
I am very disappointed about the forced resignation of Representative Anthony Weiner, (D-NY). In a world with far more significant problems than Weiner’s sexting habits and history, America chose to focus wholy on one man’s odd choice to send someone a picture of himself in his underpants. The key issue was the user error which caused the photo to post rather than be sent as a private message between consenting adults, though mental midgets like Andrew Breitbart, Reince Preibus insist that the issue was the photo itself.
If a majority of his constituents were okay with it, why do members of the opposite party care so much? If they really think Weiner’s behavior is so categorically reprehensible and the cause of untold moral outrage in our country, they should have put their thinking caps on and let him stick around so he could have been the Democratic Party’s Palin. I mean, damn, that woman is a godsend to every opposition party.
Of course, that they did not clearly underscores that they know it is not that big of a deal and so they had to make it a big one while they could.
Total focus on one man’s penis. That Weiner’s own party freaked is an eve bigger mysterty. Maybe they thought they were missing out on some quality collective outrage, or something. We apparently have the collective intellect of a 15-year-old boy. In a world rife with war, degenerating domestic industry, social isolation and sadness, violence, an absence of health care, regular miscarriages of justice, government sanctioned fraud in big business, and rampant political corruption of all sorts of real consequence…
We are
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Bukowski knew. We know. We can do something about it.
Will we?
King Lear: We haiku you.
William Dyce 1806-1864, King Lear and the Fool in the storm
Irrational Lear
Lost everything he owned
Once hidden, now known.
I give you King Lear:
Madness, betrayal, bad weather.
Everybody dies.
The eye does not see
when the storm reduces man
madness his nature
Lear – angry, crazy:
A dragon lose in the storm
Dies of his madness.
The King splits his land
family drama arises
then everyone dies
Kingdom is split up
Bastard hates his legit bro
A lot of guys die.
Daughters: good and evil
Family can’t be trusted
Lots of people die.
Driven to madness
King Lear reaches true wisdom
Harsh realities.
Outcast by daughters
Young daughter dies with his mind
He sees, weeps, and dies.
filled with mad anger
Lear and his children destruct
the truth is revealed.
King Lear went insane,
but it brought him clarity
and understanding.
A king’s foolish words,
Betrayal leads to madness,
And then they all die.
A great King named Lear.
Tricked by two evil daughters
And everyone dies.
Delusional king
Insane daughters betray him
Everybody dies.
The plot is simple-
first, everyone goes mad, then
everybody dies.
Offsrping betrayal
Results in insanity
Finally, all die.
Madness is rampant
Through the storm and the battles
King Lear is crazy.
King Lear is crazy
Blind eye turned to honesty
Everybody dies.
King Lear falls down and
Oh what a horrible storm!
breaks his innocence.
For Lear wanted what
was not real nor realistic.
He lost all he had.
There was a mad king
Who was lied to and betrayed
Everyone drops dead.
Like tempest’s thunder
The King’s mind tears at itself
Sleep is death is peace.
Greedy daughters and
Tempests containing bald men
Where did the fool go?
King Lear is a play
William Shakespeare wrote it
Hamlet was better.
…and what’s that spell?
A starburst.
A cataclysmic event.
A nebulous constellation of color.
Memorable.
Made of a multidunious melange.
Meandering through the madness.
Abstract.
A place in the sun.
A view of the world.
Necessary.
Noteworthy.
Never easy, not often simple.
Distant but dedicated.
Demanding and delightable.
Daring………………………………………..
Anomalous > analogous.
Amazed by the lights.
A.M.A.N.D.A.
[an experiment in visual verse - google image searched each letter of my name - for the As used a variant in each search - selected one of the top five images to show up - coupled images with alliterative verse]
When a Martian writes home…
In a slew of personal and pedagogical incarnations I have given serious thought to the notion of what a complete stranger to our human culture would take away from it. [It happens to be a great way to teach metaphors and figurative language in English, perceptual and vernacular regions in Geography, the relative nature of History, as well as sense of place in Geography and Literature, if you were wondering whether this might just be another bloody *reflective* rumination.] I am intrigued by this question not only because I am often bewildered by the shit I see in my daily life (in positive and negative ways) but also because since I was very young, I have regularly considered my actions and behavior in terms of how it would appear as a film; a clear euphemism for “in the eyes of others.” I would not necessarily condone this practice by the way, but hey, we all have our own idiosyncrasies – healthy or not.
IN recent years it seems even more obvious that so much of what human animals do anymore is built around creating this virtual movie montage of our lives and our identities and our significance. I don’t think it can really be just me who does this. And further, according to that same sourcce the blogosphere is booming, if not always blooming (or maybe that should be expressed the other way around?) I spend a great deal of time trying to articulate effective comparisons of my Hong Kong life to my homies in the States, and vice versa. I often turn to photos, but still, the experiential differences are often so much richer, and confoundingly more subtle. How can one gift an experience so removed, to others, who in spite of familial or familiar intimacy, have not seen what you have seen?
There was a minor literary movement in the late Seventies in Britain built on what was/is called Martian Poetry. The primary aim of Martian poetry (incidentally ‘Martianism is an anagram of Martin Amis, one of the key contributors to the movement – I like how these guys operate) was “to make the familiar strange… through the heavy use of curious, exotic and humorous visual metaphors… Martian Poetry aimed to break the grip of ‘the familiar’, by describing ordinary things in unfamiliar ways.” Of this movement, loosely associated with several others including surrealist and metaphysical poetry (about which Samuel Johnson dished one of my current favorite quotations: “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”) Martian poets tried to force people to let go of their accepted assumptions of cultural norms regarding behavior and culture both material and abstract. Breaking the grip of the familiar.
Thank you 欧阳江河 (Ouyang Jianghe)
Poetry. Again. No escape. I guess I will just admit it. I like it. Dammit.
Last week one of my students came in with a proposal for a literature project on the Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe. What the fuck? Chinese poetry? Are you kidding? Nothing but a little thing (4,000 words) examining the life and work of Ouyang Jianghe. (Who?) And then, as they say, a funny thing happened in the midst of my negativity. I read the stuff.
Most students who deal with Chinese poetry over here study Bei Dao, one of the so-called “Misty Poets.” These guys were, for the most part, booted from the PRC following the Tiananmen Square events in 1989, and are described as “misty” because their work is full of intentionally vague allusions and hermetic references. Probably the most famous Bei Dao poem is “The Answer”, though the collection, At The Sky’s Edge gets a good amount of play. Anyhow, suffice it to say, I was totally unfamiliar with Ouyang Jianghe.
And for good reason. The guy is no longer writing poetry, as has been said, everyone’s a critic. And now he is too. A member of the third generation of Chinese poets, Ouyang Jianghe is not “misty” but known as one of The Five Masters of Sichuan. Rather than focusing on politics or more abstruse references and metaphysics, he writes about everyday things – a modern/Eastern incarnation of literary realism, I suppose. He is pretty hard to find info on (shit, he is not in Wiki? What ever will we do??) but there is a brief bio online from a Berlin literary festival as well as a couple of others from various events.
But of course, my student came armed with verses. Literally. And we began to read.
“Every moment is the same moment.”
“So, an incisive look will reveal mankind to be wholly faceless, appearing as everything but being nothing.”
“But English has no territory in China.
It is merely a class, a form of conversation, a TV program,
in university a department, tests and paper.”“Transparency is a mysterious visible language of waves,
when I say it I have already separated from it…”“Language leaks out, dries up, before light penetrates.
Language is to soar, is
openness facing openness, lightning against lightning.”“Language and time are transparent,
we pay a high price.”“But who is the master of hat wild thought and ornate diction
speaks with flames, smears lips with tulips”“With one eye people look for love
the other presses into the barrel of a gun
bullets make eyes at each other
your nose aims at the enemy’s living room
politics incline to the left
one person shoots at the east
another falls in the west”“Wind, a masterpiece that surrounds the body.”
“Always I read, draped in flame or hunger.”
A realist. Perhaps. Realism gives a writer an opportunity to be supremely subversive by presenting something that is just about understandable and only subtly askew. Then only the truly astute will notice and how rare that the astute would be the ones who would choose censure or dismissal or death. Ouyang Jianghe writes about words and books and beauty and planned economies and leopards and diaspora and Soviet composers and workers in a glass factories Hamlet and fast food and language and power and death. Everyday is art. If all that is not political than I am not sure what is. For people who do not understand that… well, I suppose there is FNC and the WB for them.
So, Ouyang Jianghe is a master at that clever Chinese sleight of hand/mind/tongue/thought… he will let you think as you will about his poetry but he is most certainly saying what he means to be saying; and he feels no need to correct you, your error is your responsibility not his.
I think this will be a pretty interesting research project.
On Communication (again.)
A World Where News Travelled Slowly
It could take from Monday to Thursday
and three horses. The ink was unstable,
the characters cramped, the paper tore where it creased.
Stained with the leather and sweat of its journey,
the envelope absorbed each climatic shift,
as well as the salt and the grease if the rider
who handed it over with a four-day chance
that by now things were different and while the head
had to listen, the heart could wait.Semaphore was invented at a time of revolution;
the judgement of swing in a vertical arm.
News travelled letter by letter, along a chain of towers,
each built within telescopic distance of the next.
The clattering mechanics of the six-shutter telegraph
still took three men with all their variables
added to those of light and weather,
to read, record and pass the message on.Now words are faster, smaller, harder
…we’re almost talking in one another’s arms.
Coded and squeezed, what chance has my voice
to reach your voice unaltered and then to leave no trace?
Nets tighten across the sky and the sea bed.
When London made contact with New York,
there were such fireworks, City Hall caught light.
It could have burned to the ground.~Lavinia Greenlaw, 1997
I am going to stop saying I don’t like poetry – I think at this point I am going to have to admit that I actually do like it. Or at least some of it. A good amount of it in truth. I mentioned this poem the other day… I am not sure why I cannot find it on the Interwebs – as you know, you can find, like everything out there. Though, in light of the subject matter and the apparent tone, I appreciate the irony that it seems to be hidden deep out there in the ether. This poem certainly touches on some things that have been preeminent in my mind for a while now…
In considering communication, does More = Better? Faster = Better? Louder = Better? Or… maybe…. Slower = More well thought-out? Fewer Words = More Meaningful?
I do not suppose I will work this out before I go to bed tonight, but I will still be trying to work it out bit by bit.
I still get mail. Like, real, tangible physical mail. I love it. It is pretty much almost always from one of three people (shout out to mom, Aunt Nancy and Rennie) but still, it is real mail, yo. And not bills or coupons. It is really cool. Everyone likes to get mail. On the other hand, email doesn’t do the same. I mean I appreciate the efficiency and certainly with regard to things like job hunting I can get a little rush out of receiving relevant emails, but it is just not as cool. That definitely has to do with the whole numbing effect of instant gratification, which leads to expectations of a certain speed and style of interaction, which in turn commits one to substantially more communication and before you know it – it is constant.
I am not convinced this is bad. But I am also not convinced that this is necessarily the Golden Age of interpersonal connectivity that people seem to assume. There is a lot of it, that is for sure. And there is an assumption of accuracy and “realness” that I think is misplaced. But, we have certainly come a long way: Just look.
From face to face to glyphs to quipu to ships to ponies to trains to cables to radio waves to E.T. phoning home to fiber optics to… honing one’s cone? (You never know…) The conventional wisdom says it is better. I wonder. More on this later, unless you can read my mind and know I will be talking about the massive amounts of constant information and the consequences intended or otherwse; at least for this kid. If you know already you are honing my cone and that is impressive. Though weird if I do not know you… Or is it?
What if there is nothing more to say?
I ran into this guy who lives on the other side of my village yesterday. We are acquaintances through a couple of other people I know here, but not much beyond that. I don’t usually interact with him much. Truth is, dude makes my brain rattle. Knowing this, when I glimpsed him from the corner of my eye yesterday I tried to avoid the potential conversation that might erupt if he saw me. Of course, he saw me. So, there I was involved in the conversation I wanted to avoid. With this guy it is not really conversation though, your job is to pretty much listen and bask in his awesomeness. There is not much room for repartee. It is a good way to practice some cognitive gymnastics and mental subversions. I felt like Gary Larson’s cat:
As he carried on about how fantastic he was, and the faboosh life he has apparently crafted in a way not unlike accomplishing the alchemist’s ultimate goal, I watched the sea. I wondered if he knew that he had basically carried on the same monologue, née, soliloquy actually, the last time we had the occasion to awkwardly pass by the same geographic coordinates. I semi-listened to him; on the off-chance that he asked for input or expected a response, I hoped to avoid the likelihood of making things even more awkward by having to ask him to repeat something. And I got to wondering if this is what happens when you actually have nothing left to say. Imagine, we have run the course on conversation and we are left there, with ourselves, to make a go of it with nothing to say.
I could not decide if this was depressing or liberating.
Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating. ~ Joel Barish, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
In this age of total and constant over sharing, what happens when you run out of things to say? Maybe the other day my ruminations about photos = validation was incorrect and really the issue is that if you have nothing left to say you somehow cease to exist. Must.Keep.Talking. I think the “art” of conversation is dwindling as we spend more and more time with ourselves blogging and Facebooking and participating in on-line conversations, which I am inclined to agree is more akin to mental masturbation than actual conversation, as one of my good friends pointed out a while back. I mean there are some truly hilarious examples of how internet communication goes… and some that are heartbreaking. Consider the redundant and verbose individual who literally converses with himself online or the broken promises that are made online with little regard to consequence because of the safety of literal distance in spite of the reality figurative intimacy, that led to my friend being stood up for dinner on her birthday – or me spending Easter in San Francisco last year… There is so much talking, and I daresay so little communicating. The illusion of modern communication is that somehow faster, harder or larger heaps of words somehow equates to more/better/truer communication. Is communication that much better in its immediacy and intimacy of the modern world? Lavinia Greenlaw wrote an excellent poem on the subject called “A World Where News Travelled Slowly” that I have been using in class lately… I’ll add it here when I get back to the office.
Through all these thoughts, dude on the beach was still talking, I believe he had gotten up to the point of his totally awesome and amazing lunch of pizza and beer… Do I want to know what dude on the beach had for lunch? Does he care if I want to know?
People have long considered the “art” of conversation. Milton Wright (not Wilbur and Oroville’s dad) wrote a book about it in 1936. Wright was an interesting man by all (limited) accounts one can find of him. A Wilberforce University graduate, he completed his MA at Columbia and then went to Germany to complete his PhD. He is noted for his book The Art Of Conversation and a conversation he had with Adolf Hitler. All of this is especially interesting when you consider the fact that he was black. A black man breaking into higher education in America in the 1920s and then chatting up Adolf?
I find myself involved in conversations like this a lot (well in form, not necessarily content.) And it makes me feel a little self-conscious about whether or not people feel the same way when talking with me. Do I carry on ad nauseum with no regard for the pain my audience is suffering? While I would not doubt that has happened in the past, (occupational hazard?) lately, it seems to not be the case. I seem to have run out of shit to say.
Enter the awkward silence.
Wright had this to say of silence: “Silence plays an important part in effective conversation just as it does in music.” Silence goes unrewarded these days. I felt this as I sat down to write in my journal the other day. I just didn’t have anything I wanted to say. Then I felt like a total loser. Or when I sat down to write this blog, which has taken days… But I press on because somehow, saying something is better than saying nothing. Or is it? If what Joseph Goebbels (not to purposefully bring up two Nazis in one post, but there you have it, they effectively assaulted every human sensibility including small talk) said in the 1930s (borrowing, ironically, from Lenin) that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep on repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” is true… what about the inverse of this equation? If you keep something to yourself, does it become untrue? Imagined? A lie? Maybe we have all just become our own propaganda ministers in an age replete with avenues for communication and in doing so the best defense has become a good offense.
To be fair to dude on the beach, I did not really give any indication that I had anything to say at any point as he carried on about his buddy and his day and his life and his lunch. And this had less to do with him than me. I just really did not have anything to say – relevant or otherwise and I didn’t even try to make something up. Maybe I was taking the high road here. Maybe I was being lazy. Dude on the beach did not care either way, I reckon.
I am not sure if I have lost the art of conversation or if I have become so saturated in it that I no longer recognize it. Going back to Wright, he noted that “to chatter is easy. To talk resultfully with the hostile, suspicious, indifferent or even friendly is an art.” True.That. I suppose this is what I want in the end: resultful talk. Perhaps that is why I blog, in search of some sort of result – feedback? relevance? hits? acknowledgment? envy? purpose? Right now I just do not have much to say, so perhaps the best thing to do is to say nothing, at the risk of becoming somehow imaginary in nature. [Or maybe it means it is time to avoid the need for words and get a Tumblr...] My mom says this conversational void may have something to do with the fact that at the moment what lies ahead is simply beyond my ken. That would be fantastic.
Dude on the beach looked up at me and said, “So, what’s up with you?”
“Me? Ah, nothing much. Just walking home.”
Something to consider.
and the world’s got me dizzy again
you’d think after [so many] years I’d be used to the spin
and it only feels worse when I stay in one place
so I’m always pacing around or walking away
I keep drinking the ink from my pen
and I’m balancing history books up on my head
but it all boils down to one quotable phrase
“If you love something give it away”
Circle Slash Phenomena.
Recently, my mom told me that one of the best pieces of advice she has received is the following: Do not create phenomena. After she mentioned this, I began to ponder then concept and the vast potential for its application.
Do.
Not.
Create.
Phenomena.
How counter to the entire human experience of this day and age. I started looking at all the things I do – and how many are honestly specifically designed to create phenomena (this exercise right here for example… and the entire online existence that so many have fully embraced… don’t even get me started on “reality” television.) Suddenly I started looking at what I was saying and doing in a different way. Like honestly considering my various motivating factors. It was kind of amazing.
Like, when I was all irritated at a certain individual in the Silly South and I was thinking of ways to needle him. Why? Why engage? Simply to create a need for interaction = phenomena.
Or when I was telling a certain story about someone who I should really feel sorry for rather than irritation about. Why? For the reaction = phenomena.
It becomes a very effective filter, forcing one to really understand if they are doing something for themselves, or for actual benefit, or if in fact it is really for the perceived “benefit” of others [= phenomena.]
- Talking loud on your cell phone around others (or that fake phone call thing people do…)
- Gossiping
- Creating reasons to call someone
- Micromanaging
- Overreacting
- Public social networking pages
- Blogging
- Over-sharing
- Bragging
- Manifesting a need for behavior
- Buying things you do not need
- Talking about buying things you do not need
- Judging
- Aiming for your 15 Minutes
That entire list is like one single episode of The Hills. How gross.
Haiku, a la Vonnegut.
FOMA
harmless little lie
makes you a better person
better do it right
E.R.
i love, you love, you
i didn’t realize it was
just toilet paper
MORE OR LESS
human dyslogic
all this happened, more or less
four dimensional
FREE WILL
so it goes, it goes
simultaneously here
inconsequential
SIN WAT
look, there’s love enough
a man’s got to tell himself
he can understand
GOD BLESS YOU, MR. R
Mr. Rosewater,
i’m a painter in my dreams
a sum of money
SLAUGHTERHOUSE
like so many she
tried to construct a life from
things she found in shops
BOKONONISM
round and round we spin
with feet of lead, wings of tin
busy, so busy
On assigning thematic haiku in Creative Writing class today I was challenged to participate. So it goes.
I do not like poetry, redux.
I know I keep saying I do not like poetry. And I know that is probably a little bit of a lie, because I have poems I really like. As I was growing up one of my most special friends in the whole wide world used to write me a poem on each birthday. (I still have all of them, if you are reading this and wondering Will.) My friend Jason wrote beautiful poems. My friend John writes amazing songs – and those are poems. So, it is not that I hate poetry per say. Maybe I find it intimidating. I am not sure. I certainly am inundated with it these days.
When I was in the Secondary Education program at SFSU way back in 1994, I had an amazing curriculum teacher, without whom I would be a shadow of the teacher I am today. Her enthusiasm and creativity were awesome. One of the things that she had us do [yeah, yeah... I know all you guys say those who cannot "Do", "Teach" - and I have a lot to say to you... ] was Found Poetry. I am aware that she was not the inventor of this concept, but her technique was the best I’ve yet seen:
1) Select words and phrases that stand out to you from a text…
2) String them together in a way that is pleasing to you… maintaining the order in which they appear in the text, try not to add words, but it is okay to subtract.
3) Develop a poem that reflects your interpretation of the meaning of the text by creating stanzas and lines that work for you.
One of my students came in the other day with about 50 pages of academic text on the Industrial Revolution from which she was supposed to create a found poem. I thought that was sort of ambitious of the teacher…. but hey, still a cool concept. My student did not concur. In the end, her poem was pretty good and definitely made some good points about the Industrial Revolution. She was still unsure. She didn’t like the idea of not knowing which were the “good” words and phrases. How was she supposed to know what were “powerful” words, or “interesting” words or “key phrases” for a theme she couldn’t even conceive of? My advice was to highlight anything that sounded funny or weird at first. Then maybe look at repeated phrases. Lastly, give herself a chance to appreciate an interesting (or repeated) turn of phrase. She still didn’t really see the point or the coolness. I showed her that often when I read I underline words and phrases I think sound cool. She wanted to know why. I have no idea why because I don’t really do anything with them… I just like them. It is like another one of my odd little collections of things. Somehow underlining them makes them something I can hold on to.
Perhaps I should do something with them after all. Here is found poetry from the collection of words and phrases I underlined in my latest book:
(more…)
I do not like poetry.
I find poetry to have a very unfavorable effort to length ratio: so brief, yet so confounding. [Okay - epics aside.] And then, frankly, there is just a shit load of really, really bad poetry out there. I mean people who insist on rhyming when they can’t or meter without rhythm. And haiku? Come on. Further, as a subscriber to the Warholian definition of art ["It is what you can get away with"] I find the notion of “correct” interpretation of poetry really offensive. I mean, if poets want us to get one singular meaning out of their shit they should write prose. And even then they would be rolling the dice for getting a consensus.
But today I came across a poem I really liked. The timing and the tone were prophetic and perfect. And I got it. The literal, the metaphorical, the context: The Point. This poem made sense.
Otherwise
I come
from an opposite country
to yours, where water spirals
and the moon waxes
otherwise.
my stars assemble in unfamiliar patterns
and I watch often
not traffic or television
but hour by hour the huge tide
absently fingering rocks and small shells
and the wet brown kelp
where fish go sliding through.
if you were with me now
on my favorite beach
we’d watch the distant seismograph
of silver peaks darkening to indigo
and walk on the breakwater
towards the harbor mouth,
disturbing the flocks of terns
that wheel up shrieking in slim wild voices
to land again behind us
renewing their conference. I would slip
my cold hand in your pocket,
you’d look at me and grin
and we would walk together quietly
right to the very end,
where big chained rocks hold back
the same Pacific ocean, lumbering in.
~Cilla McQueen, 2001
Amanda
