news of robert creeley

which I came across on Dagzine (my hat's off, way off, to Gary, by the way, for his taking on the arrogant academic wingnuts who wish to do what our university systems what Bush is presently doing to our country), perhaps hasn't hit me how I feel it should have hit me. I'm simply not as familiar with Creeley as I'd like to be. Not proud of that fact, mind you -- and I suppose now isn't an inappropriate time to begin to remedy it.

So many bright stars have gone dark lately . . .

hurray! hurray!

I got into the University of San Francisco MFA program!

Haven't heard from State yet, but in terms of the program itself -- all other considerations (like cost) aside -- the USF program is by far my first choice.

Now I just have to talk myself into having faith that I'll find a way to afford it . . .

delays

It's been a helluva week. Sorry for things being so quiet around here . . .

blogger, get your mouth

Set pen to conjugate the way I imagine this afternoon. Found myself in the way of the difference between words and years. One minute of someone spitting into music theory. I'm sorry for having lost the second of the two. Can't really see me, just a bunch of gravity in San Francisco: a thousand lines, Kabul rustled. National fear arms Simon. Reagan's dead. I determined the dogs to be open to the dogs. Eat the sea. And so much harm to the planet. Here's a single unit: the belly or the string? Bubbles up. He turns to the beach, having lost his face. Nothing warranted the page. To create is what we call her lifelong dream. Guess what we call thinking. The telephone rings, waking the past. It must be someone I sketched in an afterlife. The blow dogs lost, wild sun on their foreheads. Posted by humming it.

not the only one

So I wasn't the only poetically-oriented blogger in Vegas. Pamela of Hello From Me Page just sent me an email mentioning that she was in Vegas during more or less the same period of time that I was.

what to do . . .

I have almost an entire day to myself. What should I do? Here are some ideas:

• Renew some of the conversations on this blog that I've let fall by the wayside.
  
• Catch up on blog reading (which involves backtracking over many days across multiple blogs in order to establish a sufficient sense of context).
  
• Finish posting about Vegas, particularly about NASCAR and a truly awful experience at a children's hospital.
  
• Find a cozy coffeeshop on this rainy day and crack open some of the monolithic poetry books which, sadly, have been doing nothing but gathering dust. (E.g., Maxmimus Poems, Zukofsky's A).
  
• Write until my fingers bleed.
  
• Go through poems I've written over the past year or so and figure out which ones I want to submit to where.
  
• Gather some field recordings for raw material for sound art pieces.
  
• Write apologetic letters to long-distance friends and family I've neglected to contact in months or even years.
  
• Call up some local friends I haven't seen in months.
  
• Break out the super-8 camera and make the experimental film I've been wanting to make for quite a long time.
  
• Fall into paralytic despair over the amount of things I want to do vs the amount of time I have to do them.
  
• Sleep.
  
• Listen to music & mope about the apartment.
  
• Clean up this disaster of an apartment.
  
• Learn more about the music programming language I've been working with lately.
  
• Do some maintenance loads of laundry.
  
• Aimlessly surf the net.
  

What will I actually do? Probably a combination of falling into despair, laundry, catching up on blogs, aimless internet surfing, and a little bit of programming. My excuse? Too tried to really do anything else -- at least to do it well. Odd that programming appears in that list. There's something weirdly pleasant and relaxing about it.

May I take this moment to whine about what a huge chuck of my life work occupies? I've got it pretty good overall, but there is nevertheless something fundamentally unjust about the radical disconnect between what's required of us to make a living and what actually matters to us.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I haven't learned to do things in small chunks. When I work on something, I want to devote all of my time & attention to it -- but that's just not practical.

Multitasking. I hate that overused corporate word (almost as much as I hate "thinking outside the box" which has, by the way, amusingly degenerated in the company I work for to "thinking out of the box", inverting the meaning of the original), but the notion does make some sense . . .

vegas impressions - gambling, hotels, feminism

It was almost all slot machines. I’d expected row after row of card tables, craps tables, roulette wheels. Had it always been this way or is Vegas going the autoteller route? I won $30 at roulette if you don’t count against it the $5 chip I dropped on the floor. Everyone at the table graciously and immediately descended to hands and knees to help me look for it – even while I, at first, merely stepped back from the table and glanced forlornly toward the ground. Even the dealer appeared heartbroken by my loss, apologizing again and again for the rules that prevented him from giving me a replacement chip. Sweet, but kind of disturbing.

The casinos all appeared as ugly and cheap as they really are -- unlike some of the hotels, restaurants, and clubs which at least make an effort to look as “classy” as they pretend to be. So much about Vegas attempts to project an air of “exclusivity”, to convince you that you’re having the kind of experience that someone famous or rich might have. To be fair, many such places are indeed well-designed. One very dim lounge I spent a bit of time in boasted UFO-shaped walls (i.e., as if you’re inside of a UFO – the walls curve inward, in a UFO kind of way) illuminated by the indirect light of an almost-hidden red LED display that ran behind the furniture (i.e., the display was oriented parallel to the floor so that it cast its light upward). Nice. But the truth is you’re not in an “exclusive” place at all – you’re sitting next to a bunch of drunk tourists and people on business trips just like yourself.

Speaking of this particular bar, we discovered a small stage inside upon which a barely-clothed woman danced. No surprise there, but what shocked me is that it seemed many of the women in our party tried to find her as interesting as the men appeared to find her. “She’s such a good dancer – isn’t she interesting to watch?” “Look at her figure – I wonder how much she works out.” I realized I'm being somewhat presumptuous by assuming that they weren't interested -- but their tone of voice struck me as not too different from my tone of voice when I attempt to have a conversation about sports. I asked them whether or not they’d prefer to see a male dancer, at least alongside or in addition to the female dancer -- adding that I would prefer to watch a male dancer. They seemed to think my comment was vaguely cute but I might as well have asked “wouldn’t it be great if there were world peace?”. Keep dreaming, shut up, and at least have to the courtesy to pretend to enjoy the show. When I was in college about 5-6 years ago, “post-feminism” was just starting to become trendy in certain circles. I don’t know whether or not its still trendy or whether things have shifted even further right among young people who live wide-eyed in a squeaky-clean present free of the irrelevant gunk of history but sometimes I wish I could record such moments and broadcast them back in time to the point at which feminism was just starting to become a dirty word . . .

fear and loathing

Off to Vegas today for a regional marketing meeting and a tour of the NASCAR racetrack and facilities. As if the former won't be mind-and-soul-numbing enough. Our meetings will start at 7AM over the next couple of days and my coworkers have expressed a desire to drag me along, after the meetings are done, to strip clubs even though they know I'm gay and, additionally, will likely find the exploitative atmosphere of such places repugnant. I've never been to Vegas. I'm scared.

international women's day

I'm not sure that "happy" is the most appropriate greeting for International Women's Day given that there's still pretty much no such thing as "women's rights" over a great deal of the globe and given that the "fascism lite" toward which our country is steadily progressing will undoubtedly roll back whatever progress feminist movements have made in the last four or five decades . . . so I won't say "happy International Women's Day", but rather:

May awareness of the nearly 100 year-old International Women's Day and the history behind it continue to grow and inspire.

david byrne, powerpoint

Watching David Byrne's lecture I Heart Powerpoint via live webcast . . . (there were only 300 seats available the auditorium they decided to hold the presentation in, so I assumed I wouldn't be able to get in unless I was early, which I wouldn't have been).

He just brought up an interesting point - because powerpoint is a) so ubiquitous and b) can easily incorporate images, audio, etc., from a wide variety of popular formats (not just miscrosoft office products) it can function as a kind digital media scrapbook for non-computer savvy artists, individuals, etc . . .

Given that powerpoint is best suited for sales pitches, I think, though, that Byrne is primarily amused by/interested in what would happen if we all started using it to become salespeople in our day-to-day interactions . . .

On another note, watching via webcast was (the lecture's over now) a suprisingly satisfying experience. Somehow it felt much more "live" and "real" than it would have via, say, TV. Not sure what to make of this fact . . . maybe it's just conditioning (e.g., the interactivity of the web in general makes even 1-way broadcasts seem more immediate). Maybe we should webcast poetry readings . . .

simplicity, minimalism

Thinking about simplicity this morning.

Spinoza's Ethics begins with God or Substance because God is the simplest conceivable thing. Everything else is built up from substance, is a complication of it. What requires a great deal of effort on Spinoza's part (i.e., what calls for his geometrical method of axioms, propositions, and proofs) is getting us to apprehend substance in its absolute simplicity by short-circuiting the theological confusions we bring to the text.

Moving the opposite direction, science begins with complexities of phenomena as we experience them then whittles these complexities down to far simpler causes, principles, and laws.

Life is more complicated than non-life. Disorganized energy and matter is simpler than organized matter. Existence is simpler than what exists. Stars, galaxies, black holes, and so on - all far simpler than we are.

Minimalism in art - to clear away the complications that obscure the art itself. Thinking about all of this while listening to Alvin Lucier's composition Clarinet from Still And Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, which is about the "beats" created when a clarinet gently warps its pitch away from a single, steadily-pitched drone.

remind me never . . .

to try out last-minute formatting changes without first previewing them in Internet Explorer!

At last, things look like how they're supposed to look. From my end, at least. Hopefully they will from your end too. If you encounter, say, unreadable text, however, I'd be extremely grateful if you'd let me know. (When I say "unreadable" I'm thinking of formatting issues though I suppose I should also like to know when I've been abused the English language beyond the limit of the comprehensible . . . )

oh dear

If you're viewing this view Internet Explorer, things probably won't look right. I'll try to fix it soon . . .

mustard edge

wrinkled cigarette legs trashcan
barbecue – parked
in ego leather purse

office swish, a suck
or fluff hair behind the glasses

soft inflated sigh - eyebrows pop enough plastic
sheen to juggle waves - umbrella-less mist

spirals up the watercolor stylizations - a dozen
cellophane flowers, wrong orange marker

dipped in mustard
edge of bread