November 30, 2006

A Map of Sorts (drawn from memory):

Macomb Elementary (Mt. Clemens, MI): K-1st [now a charter school]
Davisburg Elementary (Davisburg, MI): 2nd
Atwood Elementary (Macomb, MI): 3rd
Goodale Elementary (Detroit, MI): 4th [now run by the state]
St. David of Wales (Detroit, MI): 5th-7th [Catholic, now closed]
Washington Junior High (Mt. Clemens, MI): 8th [now charter]
Mount Clemens High (Mt. Clemens, MI): 9th [now charter]
De La Salle Collegiate (Warren, MI): Fall 10th [Catholic]
Mount Clemens High (Mt. Clemens, MI): Spring 10th-11th [now charter]
Lycee de Fumel (Fumel, Lot et Garonne): 12th
Eastern Michigan University (Ypsitucky, MI): 1988-89
Macomb Community College (Warren, MI): Summers 1989-92
University of Georgia (Athens, GA) 1990-93
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI): 1993-95
University of Georgia (Athens, GA): 1995-97
Mills College (Oakland, CA): 1999-2001
Nanjing University (Nanjing, Jiangsu): Fall 2004

November 29, 2006

Towards the south end of Nanjing, China stands one of the many causes of tension between China and Japan: the Nanjing Massacre Museum. This memorial was erected on a mass grave (skeletons in situ are part of the exhibit) where Japanese soldiers buried the 100,000 (conservative) to 300,000 (Chinese gov't numbers) Chinese who were killed between December 13, 1937 and February 1938 as Japan occupied the capital of China. It would seem that Iris Chang's painstakingly researched Rape of Nanking (Penguin, 1998) would be enough for post-WWII Japan to recognize atrocities committed by a prior generation in a war full of atrocities on all sides. But the government in Japan continues to allow school districts to adopt history textbooks that rather than omit any mention of the Rape of Nanjing-- which would be bad enough-- flat out deny that it ever happened.

I visited the memorial with another foreign coworker [ie, not Chinese] at the Chinese Uni where I was teaching. We were both appalled at the curatorial model that the museum follows. About every five feet, there is a plaque in Chinese and English--Chinglish really, but it's an honest effort--that seems to fall back on the Party model of making sure to tell everyone how they should feel, as if seeing a mass grave somehow wouldn't stir the mind enough to draw the conclusion that what happened here was an outrage. There were lines in the museum text like (I'm using memory here, so not verbatim) "How can you bear to see such atrocities!!!" & "Imagine how you would feel in the face of such outrage and shame!!!" The plaques really lessened the impact of the devastation, as saying nothing and letting the viewer take in the scene would have had a far deeper impact. This museum should have the same impact as the Ossuary of Douamont which memorializes the frontline of WWI Verdun, using the bones of some 130,000 unknown soldiers stacked on top of each other to make it's point; outside there's a cememtary with 15,000 crosses. Both force the viewer to consider the human consequences of war.

November 28, 2006

He had such high hopes. It's
almost sweet.

November 28, 2006

How many of you out there are Eagle Scouts? Just asking since it seems that a truckload of my more artistic and still doing it friends were once Eagle Scouts. They know how to tie all the necessary knots when the time comes. Strangely enough, the time comes more often than you'd think. I myself was a Cub Scout, but didn't go any further than that with the whole scouting program.

November 28, 2006

Prospective reading list for after I turn in grades; that is, my book order came in from SPD and I'm excited, but have to delay my enthusiasm:

Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (Roof, 1977; repr. 2003). I saw Stephanie toting this around the other day and thought 'Damn! I wish I hadn't left that back in Nanjing.' So I re-bought it as it's been a while since I've read it and now seems like as good a time as any to reacquaint myself with it.

Ron Silliman, Under Albany (Salt, 2004). Haven't read it yet, and thought why not?

Ron Silliman, Tjanting (Salt, 2002). Likewise with the one above. These both came out when I was in China and too broke to afford books from America (this title is a reissue from 1981). A Ron triple bill, again why not?

Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford UP, 2005). Mostly it was the title of chapter 2 that did it for me: "What is a Poem? Or, Philosophy and Poetry at the Point of the Unnamable." Indeed, what is a poem? That and I love when philosophers (especially French) write about poetry.

Araki Yasusada, Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof, 1997). Kent Johnson's hoax that forces the reader to contemplate how much a poet's biography matters to the reading of a text. Ah, crushing the myth of the poet while also exposing how much biography matters for publication.

November 24, 2006

Yoko Ono, One: Fluxfilm 14 (1966). 5 minutes.
___, Cut Piece (1965). 8.58 minutes.

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Taiwanese rapper Jay Chow, "Shi Mian Chu Ge." 4.05 minutes.

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Sergei Eisenstein, October (1927). 5 minute clip.

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Mak Shing-fung, Some interesting Hong Kong animation (2006).

November 22, 2006

Adam Small & Peter Stuart, Another State of Mind (1984). 78 minutes.

In August of 1982, punk band Youth Brigade bought a bus and asked their friends in Social Distortion to go on tour with them. It was pretty much the first tour for both, five weeks 35 cities including some stops in Canada, all very DIY. And which is almost always the case with DIY tours, the bus repeatedly breaks down, club owners rip them off left and right, and by the time they roll into Detroit, half of the crew are headed back to LA on the Greyhound. When the bus breaks down again in DC, Ian MacKaye and the Minor Threat folks open up the Dischord House for them. The kids in Social Distortion up and leave their frontman Mike Ness and Youth Brigade to return to LA without bothering to tell anyone. Shots of MacKaye working at a local HaagenDazs while off-camera narrating about the virutes of the straight-edge movement alone make this documentary worth watching.

Ah, the Reagan youth era. . . This movie reminds me of going to the Greystone (all ages club where the Misfits(1) & Black Flag played their last shows) and seeing all the hardcore bands that came from or to Detroit.

Hearing the Mike Ness commentary where he calls his younger self "an asshole" is kind of a nice moment as well. Strangely enough, musically Mike Ness and his Social Distortion vehicle have kept pretty true to their musical approach over the years, not so much continuous repetition but rather a core thread that seems to connect all of his work.

_____

(1) A reunited Misfits without Danzig just isn't the Misfits.

November 21, 2006

Free reads for the long weekend:

Geof Huth, To a Small Stream of Water (or Ditch) (Standing Stones, 1992).

Saburo Taiso, Sound System Cantos (Bad Noise, 2006).

Edward Lasker, Chess Strategy (1915).

K. Lorraine Graham, Diverse Speculations Descending Therefrom (Dusie, 2006).

Giles Goodland, A Bar (Beard of Bees, 2006).

November 21, 2006

Wow, Kasey's weariness with contemporary poetry resonates, and also seems like something Ionesco lamented about when he recognized parts of his practice being coopted into the mainstream, while ignoring other parts that helped to shape the ideological whole of his work.

____

On a more positive note, I just came back from the grad student run "informal" reading series at my college (ie. beer & cookies, not wine and Euro-cheeses, no faculty around), and they take the opportunity (freedom?) to actually experiment with what a reading can mean, sometimes resulting in failures, but more often than not ending up in interesting approaches & work.

November 20, 2006

Michael Cross (ed), Involuntary Vision (Avenue B, 2003).

Even though I went to school with most everyone in this slim anthology (was Geoffrey Dyer [his book reviewed here] at West Coast Girls' College when I was?), I was luckily in China during the brunt of the New Brutalism hoopla and folks had also luckily moved on to bigger (better?) fights by the time I returned.

But I keep returning to Ryan Bartlett's poems. I am re-surprised by his work with each subsequent encounter:

One day,
I would walk in a room
And see a marker and a man.
The same thing essentially
Makes them sigh.
I would walk in the morning to
The middle of their shoot and
Ask a question I already knew I knew.
I would walk in and watch the marker eat
My cupcakes.

Walking in is a matter of habit (13).

November 20, 2006

The new profile photo is me acting as docent in Lehmann Maupin Gallery during a Do-Ho Suh exhibition.

Being a docent in Chelsea isn't difficult; when folks act inappropriately, you just need to look at them and frown a smidge. You save the speech act for flagrant fouls.

I am pictured younger (taken 2003?), svelter and inside the Do-Ho Suh piece. Photo by Matthew Lusk.

November 19, 2006

I think I figured out my Thanksgiving long weekend reading. Ishmael Reed, New and Collected Poems: 1964-2006 (Carrol & Graf, 2006).

from "The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday":

Let me laugh my head off
With Moby Dick as we reminisce
About them suckers who went
Down with the Pequod
35? I ain't been mean enough
Make me real real mean (159)

November 19, 2006

November 18, 2006

Clark Coolidge's Words Program 1 (January 9, 1969) available through radiOM.org and the folks at the Other Minds festival. Links to other sound poetry pieces as well as new music pieces, interviews, and lectures.

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China Daily reports on a small Nevada town's redneck English only/American flag requirements.

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The Hiroshima Poetry Hoax

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"One cannot even listen to those songs in Uzbekistan,” said Saidov. “Those who compose poems or songs about politics are seen as criminals. The surge of literary self-expression following the Andijan events has made the authorities panic.”

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Poems by South African poet Kobus Moolman

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300 Tang Poems (618-907).

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M Go Blue (listen to the game)

November 18, 2006

November 16, 2006

I found out today I didn't get an NEA grant. I also got my first credit card in a decade in the mail today as well. I don't think these two events are unrelated.

November 12, 2006

Back in 1999, just before coming out to California for an ill-advised MFA in poetry I spent the summer in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn on Ryerson Street (I lived across the street from Walt Whitman's old house [the projects in neighboring Fort Greene are named after him]). I basically crashed on my friend Nat Harris' couch but slept mostly on the roof in my sleeping bag. Every night was a late night, and I got up literally with the birds. It seemed ideal at the time. Pete Hoffman, then of the Mendoza Line, lived on the first floor and hadn't yet not given me credit on a song we wrote together ("Everything We Used To Be"); I later used his name for the title character of my first chapbook and called it even, we're on good terms like that. After intial attempts to find work failed, I decided I could afford to sit around the place for a couple of months living lean, real lean & read Ezra Pound's Cantos and otherwise write. As Nat was at Pratt at the time, I sometimes used his painting studio for writing in exchange for some help around the joint. I did everything on manual typewriters back then, so my process was portable enough. The Pratt library is tiny, but the second storey has a Tiffany glass flooring, so you can look down on the folks on the first floor as through a fishbowl. The other roommate in that one bedroom (Nat had built a makeshift 2nd bedroom), third floor walkup was Michael Chapman who was just then in the process of quitting his MFA in photography at LSU and learning computer animation. It seemed somewhat stupid at the time to me to quit an MFA mid-way; I mean what's another year? But Mike made good. He and his brother created the whole Homestar Runner thing, and Strongbad emails are just about my favorite thing on the internet. Hell, Mike's been on NPR, a feat very few of my friends have yet to manage.

November 12, 2006

Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes at ACT Theatre.

For some reason, all week before today's performance I had it in my head that Mina Loy wrote this, and thought I was in for something much different than this tight Southern drama that revolves around family, greed and capitalism at its worst.

The cast was strong, with powerful performances by Jack Willis as Ben Hubbard and Jacqueline Antaramian as Regina Hubbard.

This is the second play in a row at ACT that deals with revolutionaries: the last play was Stoppard's Travesties chronicling Joyce, Tzara and Lenin in Zurich. In Foxes, when Alexandra commits to working against the corruption caused by bottom-line cut-throats like her family in the end, she is in effect joining if not the revolution then at least the labor movement. Given Hellman's leftist leanings, this isn't so surprising; what is is how the theater-goers immediately around me chose not to grasp this aspect of the play (the final moral moment that the play has been building up to) to read it as another play about how Deep South families are dysfunctional, a la Tennessee Williams.

November 10, 2006

from NASA

beached whales in New Zealand

Ed Ruscha

November 7, 2006

November 5, 2006

Dimake shares some Romanian Poetry (in translation, I think) over here. Seems a new blog.

November 5, 2006

Ron links to the Bruce Andrews appearance (current now) on "The O'Reilly Factor;" this is truly frightening and so very over the top anti-academic freedom, as I guess is to be expected considering the source. Bill O'Reilly selects Andrews' syllabus at Fordham as his "Outrage of the Week" on the basis that the course isn't presenting "a pro-capitalist point of view" as if that were the only becnhmark to judge a class in foreign policy.

I guess the Department Head and Division Dean and University President and the Board of Trustees and every other filter in place to make sure students are getting a good education at Fordham Univ. (like Fordham's accreditors) forgot to take this singular criterion into consideration.

November 5, 2006

from an article pointed out to me by Mark Weiss:

Christina Cavella and Robin A. Kernodle, "How the Past Affects the Future: The Story of the Apostrophe"

"The use of the apostrophe to denote possession has its origins in Old English, which frequently attached the genitive singular ending –es to nouns. Hook (1999), points out that 60% of all nouns in Old English formed their genitive cases in this manner (p. 44); it is therefore not surprising that the current genitive ending –s has survived in Modern English. The apostrophe could be viewed as a way in which to mark the deleted vowel –e of the –es possessive ending, “derived from the Old English strong masculine genitive singular inflection” (Blockley, 2001, p. 35). Adrian Room (1989, p. 21) provides support for this view, citing the Old English word for stone, stän, whose genitive form was stänes.

Hook (1999) maintains, however, that the apostrophe is “a mere printer’s gimmick, doubtless born of the mistaken notion that the genitive ending was a contraction of his” (p. 44). An invention of mortals, the apostrophe has indeed been subject to human error. The –es genitive ending,

'often spelled and pronounced –ies or –ys in early Middle English, was confused as early as the thirteenth century with his, the possessive of he, so that Shakespeare could later write ‘the count his gally’, and even expressions like ‘my sister her watch’ appeared' (qtd. in Hook, 1999, pp. 44-45).

The unstressed pronunciation of the genitive –es seemed to have caused many speakers to believe they were saying his. This usage presumably caused pronunciation problems and gender confusion with a noun such as woman or girl, or a plural noun like winners, but nevertheless was quite common (Hook, 1975, p.160). The apostrophe became a sort of “compromise” to indicate either the missing –e in the genitive ending –es, or the hi of the mistaken possessive indicator his (Hook, 1999, p. 45)."

November 2, 2006

Okay, I might come across as an idiot, but I really want to know this:

Why, in the English language, do we use the apostrophe and s to show posession? (ex. Stephanie's yellow boots)

The French de and other languages (like the Chinese de 〔的〕, for example) show possession expressed by a word. Some languages have possessive suffixes that latch on to the noun, like Hebrew and Latin.

Why & when did English start using punctuation to do this?

November 2, 2006

One of the beauties of teaching Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (source has typos, sorry) in a freshwomen comp class is the complete inability to be neutral. If nothing else, the text draws out an argumentative thesis, one way or the other.

November 2, 2006

October 31, 2006

The new profile photo: I'm on the right, James Hall (of near London) is in the middle, and Jim Luke (of London proper) is on the left. The photo was taken by Sha during the Dragon Boat races in Nanjing a few years back. Our team just-just got cut in the first round-- not too shabby for a boat full of foreigners who practised only once. I was wearing 75 cent flip-flops at the time of our dis-contention.

I was the drummer.

This photo was taken around 10 in the am.

October 31, 2006

Thursday November 2nd
Stork Club, Oakland
9pm

$5 or something

these are listed in alphabetical, rather than performance, order: ACRE; CORE OF THE COALMAN; TECUMSEH; GREGG KOWALSKY; EZRA BUCHLA

Halloween, 2006

This I didn't know. Found here:

"During the 1960s, the patrons of The Hub, a downtown hangout for homosexuals, held a one-block parade on Halloween. At the time, it was illegal in Detroit for a man to dress as a woman, except on Halloween. Word of the parade spread, and soon the annual event was drawing big crowds as the cross-dressers displayed their outrageous costumes.

Female impersonators from The Gold Dollar on Cass sashayed down the parade route on stiletto heels dressed in shocking bright colors with equally shocking hair colors and ratted bouffant styles. Ostrich feather boas yards long trailed behind, inch-long eyelashes fluttered, and long gloved hands bejeweled with huge fake rings and gaudy bracelets parodied the movements of Marilyn Monroe.

Police provided crowd barriers and stood around hoping the event would fade away. Crowds grew each year until 1967, when The Detroit News, abandoning a policy against covering homosexual events, finally mentioned the upcoming parade. Bolstered by the publicity, paraders demanded the city issue a permit for a parade down Woodward, but city officials resisted. The Hub later closed and the tradition ended."