also--learned yesterday that the following two spellings are both correct: "canceled" & "cancelled."

had one of those weird moments where you think you know a word and then it is a complete stranger to you.

i am a scorpio!
rob breszny usually bugs me but now & again i am swept up in the utter drama of it.

the other day i was outside this office building in downtown oakland, and a baby bird fell at my feet and died. this really happened.

i have been reading fiction & avoiding the newspaper, except for the puzzles page. at work i've been reading the "lists" at mcsweeneys.net, and have had to pretend to cough to muffle laughter.

lists!

i heard a rumour about jupiter.
let's go somewhere else!
but let's go somewhere.

more poets in the news...

Scorpio Horoscope for week of June 17, 2004

"Poets should welcome all opportunities to become befuddled," writes poet
Linh Dinh in The American Poetry Review. "To not know what's happening
forces one to become more attentive." Whether or not you're a poet, Scorpio,
I heartily recommend this approach to you in the coming weeks. The feeling
of having wandered off the path will be a sign of grace. To be confused will
be a blessing. The only possible way you could miss out on the gifts that
life wants to send you is if you act like a know-it-all who's in complete
control.

Free Will Astrology.

Linh Dinh's All Around what Empties Out is available for a special Mills graduate student discount in my office. It is a subpress book.

Hey...it's been a while! It's good to see some blogs. Hope summer is going great for all. I have been busy with my post MFA life in Bangkok. So, so far, I have been attending a 10 day training, by the end of which I'll be hired as the language school's English instructional staff. I'm supposed to be absorbing their teaching principles. Which I am, but, I'm quite critical about them behind their backs...

The thing is, it's true that the best way to learn a language is to be in the country where the language is spoken, right? Absolutely right. From that come a lot of teaching principles. Cool still. But what I'm trying to figure out is to what extent is a "pretense" as such is helpful when one is actually NOT in the environment. I'm wondering what a formal instruction in the native language really does in language learning/acquisition. No answer yet. But something entertaining to keep thinking about.

Bottom line might me that I'm very weird when it comes to learning languages. As all of you know, I LOVE grammar, while this thing is supposed to be monstrous to the whole world. I love also French verbs. I think it trains my brain...

Anyway, teaching here is planned to be my part time "fun" work. I have an interview for the serious work coming...more soon.

The Fela exhibit, Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, at Yerba Buena is worth seeing. (Fela was major Nigerian singer and also anti-colonial activist. Interesting intersection between popular art and politics. The show is art in homage to him.)

A lot of weird stuff. And then one really amazing piece by Kendell Geers who took a classic Mumuye ficture from E. Nigeria and wrapped it in Chevron tape. (The sort of tape that police use to make hazard areas here.) Very haunting. I think it really hit me because I'm writing this piece on early modernism and the article keeps falling into a discussion of Primitivism.

Some of the work is a little less resonant. And the art copy, or whatever those little descriptions that get put on the wall beside the piece of art are called, also doesn't do a lot of the work a great service. I went with Dan Bouchard who was visiting from out of town and we kept laughing at some line that went: Fela: saint or sinner? sexist or romantic? Also, Fela died of AIDS, which does get mentioned, but Fela's insistence that AIDS did not exist or was a con by the colonizer does not get mentioned in the exhibit.

Poetry spouse alert: Lee Ann Brown's husband Tony Torn is one of the husbands of Stepford in the new Stepford Wives.

so far, I could only think of the obvioius, Juliana. Basically, the stuff we read in class but, to add to that,( maybe excerpt from) Proceed with Caution. And of course, Poethical Wager. But I'll keep thinking.

Re:me, I'm getting job interviews. Will keep you posted what I end up doing.

i myself have become interested in kate hudson's post-baby abs. i think it comes from going to see saving helen or whatever it is called in l.a. over the weekend and being weirded out by its christian subtext. is there a relationship b/t post-baby abs of steel and the movie?

otherwise, all my reading has been academic. most of it about Primitivism.

but i did read sven lindqvist's exterminate the brutes. interesting. it mixes the personal with the history around conrad's heart of darkness. isn't as stunning, i think, as his history of bombing but i grew more and more fond of this book as i read further into it (which often doesn't happen). the ending has this discussion of darwin mixed in with his dreams. very strange space. the book begins with him going out into the desert but it isn't really developed why and risks having the desert be exotic space. this bothered me at first, especially weird passage about lifting weights, but the more i read, the more i forgave him the desert which worried me at first.

for this workshop i've been going to in l.a. (on poetry and politics and pedagogy) read pasquale verdicchio's translation of pasolini's the savage father. it is a screenplay that was never produced. tells the story of a white schoolteacher who goes to africa and then of the slaughter of some u.n. forces by one of the students. interesting take on the complicated redemptive power of poetry. i haven't figured the whole thing out yet. how it does and does not fall into those patterns of how white people talk about africa. it is well worth reading and has gotten very little attention.

QUESTION FOR ANY/every/ONE: i want to make a list of reserve materials on poetics for the graduate workshop that will stay on reserve semester after semester. a sort of casual and ever expanding reader on poetics. so i want to know what articles/statements/manifestos you think should be on reserve.

hey!! I am strictly translating Kate Chopin's The Kiss to enter a translation contest here for fun. Neither fiction nor strict translation is my thing, but, see, why not??

Self promoting department: visit the Clarion for my essay!

Thanks Juliana! Obviously, as always, you are more productive than any of us, I think. I'll try to keep up with you.

So far, I am asked by my former editor if I would want to be on TV again. Still thinking quite hard about it; afraid that TV will hinder my commitment to poetry and all related things. The good thing is I don't have to give her a definite answer till later. So, I am thinking.

I need to slightly refurnish my room to accomodate all my new books!

hey padcha... here is a quote from glissant article i was reading today for you.

What might writing mean today? It is not just writing histories to amuse or move people; it may be, above all, a matter of looking for the frail but trustworthy link between the wild diversity of the world and the balance and knowledge that we desire to have. . . . They [writers] should be sensitive to the totality of the world and to everything we owe to modernity: the knowledge of other civilizations that enriches our own; the techniques of orality that are making their way into writing; the knowledge of foreign languages, which bends and changes our ways of using our native language.
--Edouard Glissant, "The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World" from Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization