Harper's Friends - Oh yea

hello. long time no post. it's been busy. what is "it"? that's what i ask students in the writing lab. sometimes it's hard to tell. sometime it's the weather. it is raining. what is raining? it. it is raining. or, it has been raining here in san francisco. not hard but on and off for the last week or so. it's been cold for san francisco, dropping to the low forties at night and last week there was a few reports of a few flurries in noe valley. yours truly has been moderately warm, but it was an adjustment the first couple weeks of cold air and in addition to the feeling that i've become a weather wuss living in california. next monday i'll go to wisconsin to spend christmas with family where from what i'm told, there is a lot of snow and cold. i'm looking forward to it, for at the very least, when i get back here in late december it will feel warm.

it's been a pretty busy semester and even though i'm not going to apologize for not posting more frequently i just haven't had much time or impetus. maybe these are the waning days of this blog. maybe this will be the last post. no, but i've been busy with other things. what can i say. teaching has been relatively peaceful this semester, i've been out of town the last couple weekends seeing friends, i've also been working diligently on a kind of new manuscript for most of the semester that given the in-between semester time of january i should be able to finish and send out. i just killed a bug on my computer screen...it was about to be run over by these letters so i squashed it instead. i'm not proud of this.

over this last weekend i saw rosemary waldrop give the george oppen memorial lecture. it was fascinating! i've also been kind of morbidly fascinated by the tiger woods business, mostly because every day there is a new porn star or waitress claiming they were in love. there is a kind of interesting chit chat about the inner-lives of athletes in today's internet paper. but really, there is so much going on news wise with Afghanistan (i support more troops in the hopes of getting the Afgan government on their own feet. however, in the paper on sunday Scott Atran's dry but really interesting/helpful editorial suggests that doing less would actually do more. He writes: "In fact, it is the United States that holds today’s Taliban together." and goes on to explain this. Here is the full article.).

shamefully i admit that the nytimes is one of my only news sources asides from huffington post which i read during down time in the writing lab and the local daily and weekly newspapers here in san francisco. it's hard work to keep up on these things and if i didn't, well, i wouldn't. but i write shamefully, because yeah, the nytimes has its problems too. last week during the opening days of the Copenhagen talks when the authorities there seized a bunch of shields, steps, wirecutters (and other tools protesters were planning to use,) from a building that was specifically set aside by the authorities for the protesters to use, the times ran a picture of the stolen goods but said nothing more about it.

outside of mainstream media and whatever other tangent i was about to go off on, most of all, and the reason for writing this post, right now, today, is that i wanted to post a link to Jack Foley's radio show that he did last week about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (one of my favorite books). He did the show not about the movie that is has recently come out and gotten okay reviews, and i have not seen it and do not plan to, but about the book, specifically he does a Freudian analysis of it in a pretty interesting way, explains the Freudian concept of paranoia, and then read a couple passages. In a way it begins to address why popular culture is so obsessed with the end of the world these days. Here is the link, and by the way, I think it will expire in the next couple weeks so if you're interested don't delay. Have a good day and if I don't talk to you soon merry christmas or have good day off.

While preparing dinner last night (eggs with spinach, garlic, some pumpkin gnocchi that I got from Rainbow grocery) I listened to Karen Armstrong, a writer on religion, speaking on the local public radio's City Arts & Lectures series, and was supremely riveted; listening to her speak about the history of religion, laterally moving between topics such as Brahmans, printing presses, politics, and Nazis. She has a new book about that is a kind of counter argument or response to the Christopher Hitchens anti-religion writings, and after finishing dinner,and doing the dishes I sat in the dark kitchen listening while the cats did laps around my legs looking for pets.

Today on Wikipedia I gathered that she's a popular writer on religion, and there was all kinds of discussion on the back end of the article about her particular biases, tunnel vision, selective facting, and the her self-educated-ness suggesting that she is a kind of huckster. Malcolm Gladwell, similarly and more obviously a kind of huckster, on the same program about six months go was asked about the differences between popular and academic writing. He said that academic writing presents both sides of an issue with an intentions towards fairness, while popular writing has no responsibility or claim on presenting the truth. I recommend listening to this Karen Armstrong interview, not the one I heard (unfortunately City Arts & Lectures is not archived) but she touches on many of the same ideas.

In other news, a couple announcements: about twenty pages of sort of new work is out in Essays & Fictions # five. There are a couple of short dorky essays, and a long memoir-ish piece, made up quite of few things that originally appeared on this blog, granted, they have been worked and reworked over the last couple years. The issue is available on-line for free, but I recommend the print version because the pages are bigger and is a little easier to read. Also, on the topic of me, I've added arras.net to the links on the right, Brian Kim-Stefans' site, which is chock full of just about every media you could imagine, all in the name of poetry. If you click on the video link, you will find some movies starring yours truly as well as my roommate (he's in the "vex" series). Along with lots of other funny/weird/interesting video pieces. My favorite is the one about the raviolis.

When I was in fifth grade I had a crush on another fifth grader named Erin. She had blond hair cut short, covering her ears not quite down to her neck. She was not in my class but in the one next door and I would catch glimpses of her during recess, or when our class used the computers. One day towards the end of the year, when all the fifth grade classrooms were having an open "party," I saw her dancing to the Salt n' Pepa song "Push It" and felt unsure of my affection. I actually had a crush on her since the second grade.

Soon after, in my mother's basement, I looked up her number in the phone book, finding the listing under her mother's name with the help of my friend Aric. He was more advanced than me when it came to romance, having "gone out" with multiple girls and generally, was a little more street smart. It was tense; picking up the phone, putting it back down, trying to back out, laying on the bed, hoping my mom didn't come in, pleading a little, thinking twice, doubting. Aric kept me on task.

I dialed and her mother answered. I asked for "Erin" with an E, though, having a best friend named "Aaron" with an A, I was always a little unsure how to pronounce Erin with an E, and pronounced the E with a little bit more nasally sound, as in the word "See." Whereas, normally, when pronouncing Aaron's name, I would pronounce it with an A, as in "fat." Ehir-rin vs. Air-ron. I asked: is Ehir-rin there? Her mother said yes, hold on, and in her walk to find her daughter, she jokingly proclaimed to somebody else in the room, "Is Ehir-rin here?" emphasizing the high nasally sound. I imagined a divorced mother with a single child speaking and joking with her girlfriends about the little boys calling her daughter. I imagined I was not the first to do so, and imagined a nest of women rolling their eyes at my transparent little boy-ness. When Erin came on the line, without introducing myself, I said, "You probably don't know who this is...." Aric burst out laughing and I hung up.

The Truth About The Swine Flu

I don't know the truth about the swine flue. However, I do know that last Sunday I came down with a flu that lasted throughout the week, and like most flues, there was a fever, a sweaty body, a sweaty forehead, an "ache", a sore throat, a generalized terrible feeling, one that was both existential and physical (if there's a difference), followed by low energy, a cough, green snot, and a few piles of work that were not gotten to. From what I understand, if it was the swine flu, the problem is not the flu itself but right afterwords, as one begins to feel better and resume normal life, BAM! it hits you: bacterial infection in your upper respiratory track! And then you die and will go to either heaven, or to hell.

Part of the confusion about what that/this was, is because I did not see a doctor. A year or so ago I signed up for Healthy San Francisco, but after going to a couple appointments with what was supposed to be a steady doctor and instead was a couple disjointed appointments with interns who were leaving in six weeks, I stopped paying my premium of fifty dollars a month because, as Amy informed me, all the services that Healthy SF provides we already available to me through clinics. The only difference is that if enrolled in the program, one gets a "primary care physician", which was not working out...anyway, to make a long story short, I didn't go to see a doctor, Bought cans of soup, slept, "took care", went to work, rode the BART, and worked with students. They tell you to stay home, but I don't think too many people have that option.

Yesterday morning after taking a trip to grocery store, able enough to be out about, I spoke to my mother. She said that she had a flu a couple months ago that came and went, and came and went with other members of our family in Wisconsin, and that was that. Friend Bill had a flu about three weeks ago. My therapist told me he was going to wipe the door knob after I left his office. Friends Thom and Corrie, who I hadn't seen for a year and a half spontaneously came into town for lunch yesterday but no hugs or handshakes were exchanged. Friend Anna who just got back from a ten day meditation experienced flu like symptoms but didn't pay them much attention. She recommended that I get a neti pot to clean out my sinuses. Roommate Chris wonders out loud if he will get sick. Cats seemed to enjoy my apparent transition from human into cat, sleeping as much as possible.

This morning beginning around six the cast and crew for the television show Trauma began to appear in the park next to my apartment. By nine everybody was in their places: the camera crew, the table full of donuts, the police officer waving cars around and people through, the director and his assistant in a little black tent decked out with monitors, the rails for the camera dollies to run accross, the lights, the key grip, the sound boom, the mic director, the actors playing the heroin junkies, the actors playing the soccer players, the actors playing the homeless people, the actors playing the doctors, and the actors playing the none of the above people. Ironically, they have to kick the real heroin junkies, soccer players, and homeless people out of the park to film. One the one hand yes, the film guild people get paid, which is always good. On the other hand, somebody is getting paid to dress up a shopping cart to look like its been pushed around by a homeless can collector while there is a shopping cart of a homeless can collector just around the corner. That slight sheen of fakery we recognize while watching the television and the people in the background? Now I think I understand a little better.

For example the soccer players in the background were kicking a ball back and forth from about nine until I left for work today around one. They looked tired and a little bored. As did the actors playing chess, although they weren't actually playing chess, just sitting across from each other with a chess board in between them. Again, for four hours. Probably more. Eventually the director yelled action and the important characters (the doctors) blew through the scene, something about warning all the addicts that there's some bad heroin on the streets. My roommate and his girlfriend spent the better part of the morning throwing paper airplanes out of the window at the cast and crew. Easy targets from our apartment window. We were all a little troubled by the scene.

My roommate described it as a kind of scorched earth policy, why one needs a hundred or so highly trained professionals to shoot a totally forgettable scene for a totally forgettable medical drama. That with all those people, money and resources, we no longer have any option to fail, and in place of uncertainty we get mediocrity, pushing the creative rock half way up the hill for the imagined expectations of the imagined public and their imagined living rooms which are probably being foreclosed on as we speak. Anyway. Medical drama. Sheesh. Sorry to be ornery. I'm a bit sick, some kind of flu. Since Sunday. Halloween cometh. Today a student told me that she thought once people get married then they don't celebrate halloween. I told her it was the devil's holiday.

This morning in the news computer there was this article about the dreaded Hadron Collider that will inevitably destroy the world in late December of 2012. This is an article about a theory about why it keeps breaking down and how a couple of physicists have speculated that somehow the higgs particle is going back in time to kill the possibility of it's own existance. Here is a link to Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" as performed on Conan O'Brien, and thus you've now experienced the two most interesting pieces of media that I've experienced in the later half of this morning.

Earlier this morning I woke up to two doors blowing open from the wind and rain, which I've been told is a storm leftover from the Typhoon that hit Japan a couple weeks ago? It's come all the way over to California! Wow! so, it's raining and blowing outside which is nice if you're inside. It's also doing something else out there, like little gooey chunks of white ribbon but those might just be big raindrops, the kind that accumulate under eves. Anyway. Tuesday morning. This is just a check in posting because over the course of the last week I received a couple text messages asking me if I was "okay." Yes I am. Thank you for asking.

Been reading a lot lately which has been nice. I feel like I didn't read squat over the summer. A couple J.M. Cotezee books, "Disgrace" and "Waiting for the Barbarians", a book of essay's by Eula Biss called "Notes from No Man's Land" which are pretty interesting essay's about race, reread "No Country For Old Men" over the weekend which I still have to say is not my favorite Cormac McCarthy book, but it was interesting to read after seeing the movie. The sherrif's monologues I couldn't help but hear Tommy Lee Jones' (why do I know all these movie stars?) voice. And finally I started the 8th part of the Language Poet's Grand Piano books but I'm pretty sure I'm only reading it because I've read the previous seven. Okay. I've got to go. Hope you're well.

This morning I noticed a large black shard in the middle of my chest. On Monday it was a deep indigo and there have been times in the past when its been an off-white. I think its made by thoughts repeating, muscles tensing in the same way in the same place, the same feeling over and over how one carries their body tension built into the shoulders or how the same part of your shoe wears out no matter what kind of shoe you wear. (In my case its the back right heel that wears from the left outside corner to the inside.)

Yesterday was the last time I will meet with editing concepts study group. Which made me a little sad and gave me the feeling that I was abandoning them, a good group a graduate students. The feeling of leaving in the middle that felt wrong, the feeling of giving up on something before it was done. The feeling that I could in fact have kept supporting the students in the class if I was a harder worker. But this is an idea I want to get away from. I dropped the support class because it met from 7 to 10 at night and was leading to a highly irregular and busy schedule. One where I had to cut out my own work in order to keep up with teaching and other duties. All that is to say when I don't get to my own work shards of various colors begin to calcify in my chest.

Sometimes I have to rely on outside sources to confidently come to conclusions and commit to a course of action. Say, when I begin to feel like I "deserve" things like a bubble bath or a punch in the nose is a sure sign that something is out of wack. If one has to go to extremes of pleasure to balance out stress, like renting a jet ski, this is one way, but I'd rather arrange the day so that it doesn't come to this point. Easier said then done but going to bed at a reasonable hour and getting to my own work is one way to do it. Another name for this kind of thinking about behavior is: MANAGEMENT

was pointed to this via pitchfork. whoa. seriously. now that is some music. all is well in san francisco. last class is monday and school lets out wednesday. off to l.a. this weekend for johnathan's play and then to wisconsin next friday for most of the month. class has been busy but so has summer been busy too. whew.