May 29, 2007

Livermore, California

May 27, 2007

There's an important petition over at CA Conrad's Phillysound (5/27).

May 26, 2007

Just published - COR Vol. III, No. I.

Featuring works from David Harrison Horton, Chris Stroffolino, Ira Joel Haber, Stephen Ratcliffe, Thierry Brunet, Vernon Frazer, paul kavanagh, Sheheryar Badar Sheikh, and more.

May 24, 2007

Holy cow!!! Sha has just been offered a fellowship at the Walker in Minneapolis.

May 24, 2007

So Sha & I have decided to partake in an integral part of the American experience: car ownership. That's right, I left the bike at home today and drove that 3 miles into work. I justified it with the fact that I also had five boxes of books in the trunk I wanted to put into my office, so I could maybe actually start using the office as a locus of production and free up some of the space in my studio for other long-lingering projects.

May 23, 2007

May 22, 2007

Willis Barnstone and Aliki Barnstone
Time: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 7:30 PM
Location: Diesel, A Bookstore

Oakland Diesel is proud to welcome esteemed writer and translator, Willis Barnstone and his daughter, Aliki a renowned poet and translator. Aliki Barnstone will read from her new release, The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation and from her collection of poetry, Wild With it. Willis Barnstone will read from his translation of Sappho, Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho and his autobiography, Life Watch. Diesel is so excited to welcome these fine writers.

May 18, 2007

MISSION CREEK MUSIC FESTIVAL
at the LAB (16th and Capp St) San Francisico
Saturday May 19th 7 PM
$6 to $10 sliding

glorious immersice sound/noise delta in 6 parts and 3 or 4 channel alphabet video soup featuring:

BRAN...POS
BULBS
MATT INGALLS
CORE OGG & PAUL BAKER
GOWNS
KWISP
KRISTIN MILTNER & CLIFF CARUTHERS
RHY YAU
ANTI-EAR
DjVj MIC NASTY

May 17, 2007

Reading notes on Meg Hamill's Death Notices (Factory, 2007).

--I can't write that many obituaries, though I'm beginning to understand why I must (7).

--was he one of the good ones or one of the bad ones. . . The missile that killed him now in pieces over there in lieu of flowers (9).

--dominic you signed up for killing and yet you were killed you were guilty and yet holding on to your rabbit ear were you any more guilty than me dominic (12).

--soldiers would mention some english names of stars of football players and request us to remember them or we would be beaten severely (40).

--what does it mean to love courage if we are hurtling through space like this anyway where would the courage go if it was lost (52).

--do not kick the bodies underneath the table that are gathering between us without noticing without taking note of their limpness their inability to hold onto each other their inability to pray or to breathe (55).

--could it be that healing begins at the moment when we learn to sustain our gaze on all the bad and all the stunning things just keep our eyes looking past the time when we want to stop looking (61).

May 17, 2007

Is there anything better after a week of end of the semester stress than a day off and a day game? A's v. Royals at 12:35.

I like how the A's' apostrophe stands for "thletic."

May 15, 2007

Just in case you're not on the Buffalo list, you might want to check this out:

John Cage on a game show (it's pretty awesome).

May 14, 2007

End of semester paper grading, like all paper grading, is wonderfully productive for me around the house. I am an active procrastinator: grade a paper, shave for the first time in a week; grade a paper, take out the recycling; grade a paper, reorganize the pantry; grade a paper, gosh it's been a while since I bleach scrubbed the tub. . . .

May 14, 2007

by Matthew Lusk

May 13, 2007

Proof that I am no longer in my early twenties came Friday as I wrenched my back lifting a keg of beer into a bucket for the ice down. The reading the keg was for went well, despite a few minor techincal & logistical set-backs; that is, the readers were all very amazing.

Saturday, I rented a car for the weekend and drove for the first time in two years. Drove into San Francisco (forgot how frustrating SF driving was), had brunch at a smal place in Potrero Hill, then went to the Masonic Hall to watch Sha's commencement. Yep, she's graduated. Then went to Top of the Mark for a drink with her class. Finished off the night driving by the cranes at the Port of Oakland. They are awe inspiring, a true vision of American industry.

Sunday, drove with Sha up into Sonoma county, then into Marin, winding up at Stinson Beach. Beautiful day for beach combing. Tested my driving skills & reflexes on highway 1. Then went to the Albany Landfill to see how the Sniff pieces were holding up (weathered, but most were still there). There were some newer Burning Man style large scale sculptures.

May 9, 2007

All of that Coleman Barks bashing on the Buffalo list drove me to revisit Eliot Weinberger & Octavio Paz's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987). As the title suggests, the authors look at 19 separate ways to present the same poem (the original and 18 translations), discussing the merits and demerits of each. Of Kenneth Rexroth's translation, Weinberger writes, "It is the closest in spirit, if not letter, of the original: the poem Wang might have written had he been born a 20th century American" (23). The one thing that this 53 page booklet gets across is that there are many approaches to translation, each coupled with their own flaws. Barks has done a lot to draw attention to Rumi, both through his translations and through his press Maypop. If we don't like his methodology (which follows Pound's Cathay era methods [of not knowing the source language and using someone else's translation as a starting point]), then we should make our own translations that address our particular translational concerns.

May 8, 2007

Hey, do anyone of you have any leads as to who might now hold the copyright to Pat Parker's work? Any leads appreciated.

May 8, 2007

Pat Parker, Movement in Black (Crossing Press, 1983).

As Audre Lorde writes in the introduction, "These poems would not need any introduction except for the racism and heterosexism of a poetry establishment which has whited out Parker from the recognition deserved by a dynamic and original voice" in poetry (9).

from cavities of bones
spun
       from caverns of air
i, woman - bred of man
taken from the womb of sleep;
i, woman that comes
before the first.

to think second
to believe first
       a mistake
       erased by the motion of years.
i, woman, i
can no longer claim
       a mother of flesh
       a father of marrow
I, Woman must be
       the child of myself (45)

May 7, 2007

So I dreamt that my employers were pressing me on the fact that I haven't put a full-length collection of poetry out. I tried to appease them with my ESL anthologies that I'm apart of, but no one was having it. I then explained all the performances, visual work, etc... and how my poetic practice doesn't necessarily fit the usual model. Again not having it. Then I left the office discouraged, sure I was fired. I went to Moe's and was checking out the used poetry section, like I always do: Lo and what the crap: There was a book of poems I'd written that had everything I'd ever written from juvenalia to marginalia in my college Biology book, everything ever, all there. I was initially embarrased, but then recognized that this got me out of my initial non-book pickle. Problem is, I had published it under a different name. I went back to the office to explain the situation, but no one bought it. The word fraud got thrown around repeatedly.

_____
The alarm went off, I woke up, then bicycled to the English Department, where I work.

May 7, 2007

Super librarian's book: "There's something in libraries to offend everyone — it wouldn't be a library, otherwise."

May 7, 2007

Zhang Yimou, 摇啊摇，　摇到外婆桥 (English title, Shanghai Triad) (1995). 103 minutes.
The Chinese title comes from a song line that is key to the overall narrative of the movie. It's a shame that the English title doesn't quite capture the tone or mood of this film.

It's 1930s Shanghai and a peasant boy of 14 from the countryside, Shuisheng, has come to the city to work with his uncle, who is an underling for a big triad boss. Shuisheng becomes the servant to the boss' mistress, Xiao Jingbao, played by Gong Li. The story is told mainly from the boy's perspective, which has the effect of over-weirding the scenes. Shuisheng's sense of how strange the set-up and these people are intensifies the audience's sense of strangeness and mirrors the audience's slow approach to understanding.

A fitful ending I won't spoil, but will say is bleak, bleak, bleak. Right after watching this, Sha said that Zhang Yimou should consider a sequel that catches up with Shuisheng 15-20 years later.

May 6, 2007

Before I got myself certified as a poet by the fine folks at West Coast Girls College, I used to see Douglas A. Martin do slams in Athens, GA, and thought, "hell, I can do that."

May 5, 2007

Fruitvale was amazing today. Throngs of people, Mexican hip-hop & live ranchera music everywhere.

May 4, 2007

Closed the library at midnight and came home to this:

Warriors 111
Mavs 86

五一

April 30, 2007

CA Conrad interviews Ashraf Osman on Facebook, homophobic censorship & what you can do to help.

___________
from Phillysound:

FROM ASHRAF OSMAN

It has just come to the attention of the administrators of the petition to prevent Arab LBTG from being shut down that we have been the subject of a malicious ploy. It has emerged, after concerns about the authenticity of the person representing Facebook have been raised, that the person in question is an impostor and does not represent Facebook. Facebook stated that they have not been contacted by any governments about the group, and that they will not be shutting it down. (The full statement can now be found on the petition page.) I apologize on behalf of the petition administrators for propagating this without being more questioning in the first place. And while this certainly is a huge relief, and the reaction to the matter was highly validating of the genuine concern for civil liberties and free speech in this country and the cyber-society as a whole, it remains that many of the issues brought forth by this unfortunate debacle are true, including the lack of rights for persons of alternative sexualities in Arab and Islamic countries, and the censorship of governments around the world of cyber-content.

Thank you for your understanding,

Ashraf

April 30, 2007

A good source for 2nd Wave feminism.