Honorary Punjabi of the Month: Alphonso Lingis

Dear Alphonso Lingis,

You're so unlikely to be reading this, which works for me, as I think I just used improper English.

Hello. My name is Bhanu. Hi there. Like you, I long to visit Bhutan; although you actually have. You once said that every minute you were not teaching, you were traveling.

Please take me with you.

I would not be much trouble.

I too want to purchase some bees in a jar, though the thought of holding such a jar makes me scream.

You are my favorite writer ever. I would choose your book, "Body Transformations," over "Midnight's Children" any day of the week, including Tuesdays. I like you that much. Once again, I apologize for my misuse of commas and the fact that I have no further evidence that might convince you to let me tag along the next time you slip off your ink-stained cardigan, hire a pet sitter for your cockateel, and head off to the airport.

Yours,

Bhanu.

PS. It was your theory of the fetish that educated me in the use of narrative motifs that might be animate, of their own accord. I hope it is not too boring to come out and say that. I once met Agha Shahid Ali. I tried to strike up a conversation about Indian writing in English. He stared at me for a bit, then said: "Are you always this serious?" And burst out laughing. The next time I saw him was on a loading dock at Wells College. He gave me a big hug.

Architect/Artist Visit: Naropa Undergrad. Writing Seminar

"Writing is the trait where species appears," said Jarvis, in the last possible minute of the class. No, I think I said that, re-phrasing the marks on the board. The inoperable trait that gestures dismissal, that doesn't care if you die or live. Writing breaks physical cycles to create a surrounding gallery, which is sagittal. It's what you walk through, a disturbance that brings the next life, versus more of the same.

Shared Consciousness

Last night, I dreamed that I introduced my mum to Alexi Singh Grewal, Loveland's Sikh-American mayoral candidate and former Olympic Gold Champion in bike racing. I didn't know he was an Olympian until recently, when he decided to run for local office. When I see him reading the paper at The Coffee Tree, I have to suppress myself from offering to be his speech-writer (Punjabi Pride!); at moments like these, I recall the moment when I was fired from a grant-writing job, which depended upon producing a sequence of dynamic and convincing declarative sentences.

This morning, my mum described her dream, which involved meeting a young Sikh boy from Canada, who was dressed in a white tank top, white shorts and sneakers. He said he was "David" and that he'd come to America to find Goliath. They met at the airport. I guess he was traveling alone. Later, my mum told her mum: "You have to meet him." My mum's mum said: "Yes, I'd like to be introduced to him. He sounds like a wonderful young man."

Peshawar

I've been working not on narrative but on the map of Pakistan, how the logic of that map's "being set" - - a map is cake -- have it/eat it: see: 1947: the withdrawal of British troops as correlated to the exact moment a (bloody) (aren't they all?) civil war began -- precedes all territorial events. The news that 95 are dead in Peshawar comes a day after I've worked on Peshawar -- where my grandfather lived, passionately, pre-war. A home, absorbed by the planet. My grandfather kept diaries from the 1920s on; notes towards the second planting of a mango and lemon orchard. A description of Peshawar at dawn. I've been transcribing these notes -- for what? I'm at the limit of an art form, like every other early American. The bomb went off in a market, as it does every day now in the ghostly U.S news. Where the army is, a country is. Cartography is a psychotic act when what is inside a body is projected far beyond it, which is never good. The flat meat of the inner organs wraps the window of the shop like a second skin, an intact film. Retracted. And the body starts to shake, poisoned by clairvoyance: no longer "immune."

Yesterday, at Naropa, we looked at "a" by Sophie Robinson and "beloved integer" by Michelle Naka Pierce. In the first class, we worked on the concept of "continuous mourning." In the second, we wrote letters to absent beloveds. "Dear *, I miss you. Love, *." Meanwhile, my son's dad just dropped off a bag containing our son's Halloween costume. A scythe. The robes and mask of a crypt official. Keeper? Something like that. At home, we light ritual candles, burn sage gathered last week at Devil's Backbone, and keep warm with chai and baked apples. Outside, there's a blizzard. Campus is shut.

Day of the Dead Reading: The Coffee Tree/Anthology Book Company: 441 E.4th Street, LOVELAND, Colorado: 3 pm. Co-hosted with "Jackie." Bring your poems or makeshift shrines. I bought a pomegranate last night; I'll bring that. I'll bring a description of Peshawar, translated from hand-written Urdu in faded blue ink. I'll bring notes for an orchard, to be planted, come Spring: an account of the seeds, their cost, and the market they are from, nearly a century ago.

Naropa: A mid-semester report...

In experimental prose, we talked a bit about texture and aftermath. A tiny bit.

In memoir/anti-memoir, Kass Fleisher, visiting, said: "Linearity is a fascist fuck." We thought through, as a group, chemical and psychic intersections of trauma theory and narrative theory. Quickly, with the desire to think properly, later. In the summer?

In narrative/architecture, there were circulating questions about cities, bodies, and horror. We were, in this latter class, reading "The Route" by Jen Hofer and Patrick Durgin: an undergraduate student, Tucker Rhinehart, said: "I think what moved me most about this book was the friendship, the idea that there could be someone you could speak to, who, even before you asked the question, even if you didn't know what that question was, would help you to figure out a way to ask it. It made me realize I don't have a person like that, and that finding that person...."; another student, across the room, said: "Write to me."

A Buddhist monk offered me a chocolate chip cookie, in Hindi. I replied, "No, thanks, I can't eat that right now; please get it away from me, pronto," in a version of Hindi that strongly resembled Punjabi as spoken by a three year old child who has just eaten a kit kat.

I asked for a small cup of chai at the Naropa Cafe and they gave me a big one, saying something about the chai expanding when it heats up.

Trans-species conversations next to the free box.

Gold and silver leaves pouring down over the quad. If not a quad, then a green.

I felt like the next part of the teaching might be to translate the thinking about a book, what a book is, into a formal list of narrative strategies. Not to bring to the writing, but to bring to the body: to wire and course or mesh the body with, so that when the writing begins, must begin, or fails, an occult linguistics is in place. Coiled. Like an index or mutated alphabet, which is the deep or vertical structure that operates/flickers above and below a sentence. The pen lifts from the page, hesitating, or a finger, and narrative is the re-touch, to experience a sensation in a different place, or to intensify it. Narrative is a decision made, by the writer of narrative, every day. What is a day? It's a block of three to five words: a sentence, or part of sentence. What is a sentence for? It is for living in and then to be dead. Burn the sentence. Take the ash to the river in a little cup. Add some oil. Pluck a flower. Light a match.

Re-Thinking The First Person Twice Removed/GOING INSTEAD for a "vengeful narration": analagous, as far as I can tell*

*to the dead appearing during a reading or a bodywork session. As the unlicensed psychotherapist, you remain calm until the day when an outline of light, a being, an emanate structure, turns its head to look at YOU. Probably vengeful narration has existed since Tristram Shandy but I have just discovered it. Genre and I bed down. Genre has a gender. Genre wants to do something but me, no way. No way am I taking off my coat. My coat cost 275 euros.



Some questions for narrative, which I have been creating for my students, European questions mixed with American ones, to get at the body; it occurs to me that I need some Indian questions, but Indian space [woke up this morning and read Mei-mei Bersenbrugge's beautiful poem "Chinese Space" with my Earl Grey tea, which made me think of how the courtyard functions in my own "crumbling" ancestral home, on my mother's side, in the village of Bhulan] blanks me out; arriving in India, the formal questions that I engage, for example, in classes at Naropa or residency seminars at Goddard -- die. They simply die off. In the English Bookstore, I select a Penguin paperback, I go the restaurant and order a masala dosa and cold coffee with whipped buffalo milk cream, etc. Here, instead of devouring the English language, I run the program of mixed-use questions on my own book, to test if it is useful as an architextual strategy, and it is: it helps me to bring to life someone who (Ban) is dead, dead just before the novel begins:

What is a vengeful narration? The yellow Mercedes hitting Macabea from the back, or does she turn at the rev, I can't remember.
How did Ban die?
Describe Ban's hair, which attracted partners.
Eat as Ban would eat, privately, in front of the television.
Who loves you, Ban?
What is Ban's oblivion?
Ban is a lovely adventurer who left it too late in life to find love exactly, having WASTED the last good years of thick hair on foreigners. Americans and Europeans. Why?
I write these questions for Ban.
I see Ban.
I see Ban walking to Pinner Station after the fair, a stick of candy floss upended, fluffy, in a bag.
Ban's dead.
How did she die?
Ban's eyes are light brown like a boy's.
Ban is more beautiful than you.
Ban beneath Minerva's bell in Manhattan.
Ban in Starbucks in Manhattan.
But Ban's parents?
Ban's people?
Ban's Earth?
Ban's flight?
What is Ban's favorite film?
Ban arcs, hits, then flips back, flagellate, cumbersome, slick; then gathers her energy to arc again.
Here's a good memory: "I sat at the edge of the Pacific Ocean drinking tea with my sister, in Venice. We watched the surfers wade out of the water, then strip to the waist, like eels."
Ban reverses the zipper action and sends them back into the sea. Family lets her. Family is the best company for a person who is broken in two.
Ban is more beautiful than you, for about a minute.

Christian Bok: with the two dots above the "o" that I can't make on blogger

[Attempted to upload a digitally manipulated photograph of Donna Haraway glad-handing, as in an election, Christian Bok, but blogger function is sticking each time I try; the file is corrupt, the file is too big, try again....]

Amazing event sponsored by Canadian Embassy with CU/Naropa cross-fertilization at the level of Jack Collom pre-tea party (I couldn't go; my social life consists of feeding my son whole grains disguised by parmesan cheese and strained tomatoes, then driving very fast to arrive just as something begins; later today, for example, I am going to a Butoh event, directed by K.Kan at Naropa's Perfroming Arts Center, and we've run out of buckwheat pasta) plus venue: the Atlas Auditorium. When asked, after the reading, in the questions/concerns portion of the evening, by an audience member (okay, me; the last time I attended an event at CU, it was a Donna Haraway lecture; I asked her about wolf-human co-habitation - - had she heard of the story of The Wolfgirls of Midnapure?; she responded: "Well, it's a myth, isn't it? I don't think that sort of thing is strictly true"): if he could replicate the sound of a wolf, having just performed, as part of the reading, his part of an opera set on a remote lake, in which he, on a boat and masked, was a "three horned" demon figure abducting the Princess of the Stars (the moon) from a lake (see: above) into which she had fallen, having heard the sound of a wolf calling up to her: scrawling/screech-factor: Christian Bok replied:

"No, I don't do animal sounds. In fact, they offered me the part of the wolf but I didn't take it. The wolf sucks."

Michelle Auerbach: Honorary Punjabi of the Month!!!!

Techincally Jewish, Michelle Auerbach has displayed many of the behavioral, culinary, and mental aptitudes/propensities (leanings) common to the "Punjabi," specifically the Punjabi daughter or daughter-in-law. Evidence:

1. Likes to knit. (See: above photo with Punjabi grandma; both of them knitting complicated hats with size 13 and 9 needles with yarn culled from alpaca remnants; while being leaned on pleasantly by gorgeous children with pink cheeks.)
2. Can make parathas/chai/aloo subjee/saag paneer etc better than her Punjabi peers (me.)
3. Has an expansive vocabulary and when asked what it means to be an honorary Punjabi, replied: "Are you serious?"
4. "I just hope a Jewish girl from Cleveland can hold up under the weight of all those parathas." -- Michelle Auerbach, considering the question again, though not pausing for a second in her Hannukah scarf-knitting enterprises. I thought it was a hat, for example, and it was a scarf. I don't knit.
5. Writes stories that interlock, fragment, and shine where they do these things. Punjabis are earth artists, whether they are threshing corn, doing a bhangra routine at the gas station in the five minutes it takes to refuel, making music videos that are vaguely deranged by common standards (see: the recent winner of Indian Idol), or writing fiction.
6. "Because she integrates into the Punjabi family culture so well [with heavy accent]." -- My mother, when asked by Michelle's daughter, Emma, what made Michelle such a classic Punjabi specimen.

Liberia, India, Colombia, Serbia: IA [An aesthetics of non-violence. Notes for the book to come.]

Clinic, Congo.

Room 2 [Panel 2]:
Lacrimae of the Medusa; or, Cixous (33 years later) and Cruci-Fictions: Let’s Talk about Sex (Again)
Chair: Laura Jaramillo
Panelists: Dodie Bellamy, Kass Fleisher, Bhanu Kapil, Laura Mullen
Description: This panel will explore how womens' experimental writing re-inscribes female subjectivity and desire, how we ride the boundaries, borders, inter-species-genre crossings, body spaces through Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa.

..........

IA...[Typed up from notes] [This is writing.] [I wrote it, as they say, the night before. Going home to light candles, pour a tiny bit of wine, and write, incorporating fragments of the plenary: waste/repurposed material....] ["Don't collaborate..."]:
..........

1. "Most of all, don't go into the forest." -- Helene Cixous

The sexual story I came here to tell is the story of a woman who is "absolutely disposable," which are not my words. They are ancient words. They are for a woman who, in a forest, in the "dark continent" Cixous imagines, encounters, the woman encounters: a militia. The encounter is an abyss. It's extremely difficult to forgive what happens next. The sounds that are made are neither radical nor symbolic. They are not defensive. They don't come from the mouth or even the throat. They don't exist at an intersect of "orality and inscription." It could be said that nobody made these sounds because the woman, as she was, no longer appears on the earth. The sounds she makes and does not make are deep sounds. I can't distinguish whether they come from the body of the man or from her: the low sounds that come from the core are below "voice." Then out comes the blade slipped from the belt and after this, nothing. If not nothing then an image. If not an image then a color, the colors red and black, broken down and distributed on the jungle floor until they too are reabsorbed and no longer exist.

[I'm tired now. I will continue writing tomorrow. I am thinking of giving up use of my cell phone to protest coltan, the heat-absorbing mineral contested in the Congo, where the sexual violence I am describing above is being played out. Have become used to my cell. My laptop overheats as I write so I switch on the fan of my laptop stand. Coltan again. More tomorrow.]

Vahni Capildeo

Capildeo is Kapil, mutated, Caribbean. See: Naipul. Okay, reading Vahni Capildeo, from the Vivek Narayan-flavored Almost Island, an experimental writing journal founded in India, thinking also of the day of workshops at Naropa -- questions of how language emits light:

"At night, you see, there seems to be one lit room. Who is at its exit, in the doorway, back
turned? The soft rectangle of human frame widens. Who waits within the metal edging?
In this state of nervousness, forearms go cold seconds before hands catch fire, excessive
lotuses of flame. Would you – two dark torches loose at your sides – would you walk into
the first of the long dark corridors in a building that consists more nearly of corridors than
any that should ever have been designed? Each corridor runs like a spill of milk on a
black tile reflected in a smoked glass ceiling clapped on the width of one layer of a hotel.
These corridors are dark; you would feel them all like paleness? Though there were light
I could not name their handcrafted nougat colours, gentler, intentionally washed-out. I
walk in the dark, and you feel the walls’ paleness? For we ourselves are luminous. Except
we do not give off light."

PS. Except that this is a prose block but blogger did something feral. Silly blogger. Bad blogger. Naughty blogger.

PPS. There were other questions, but I have just put my son to bed after a round of T.S. Eliot "cat poems" and seem to have lost all of my reasoning faculties. Processing Christine Wertheim's MOTHER/OTHER poems. Shirin Ebadi is coming to Naropa this Friday at 7, keynoting a conference on human rights/women in Islam: www.naropa.edu. That is a mother of something. I feel as if Capildeo is literally a female relative, which she is. We share a common ancestor, Kapil Muni, and now the dots are doing something erratice, re-forming as the glyph of Biswas, but I'm long gone, as is everyone, from a possible common century or calm home where the dogs are called Jack, and people think through the cotton of their jackets and skirts, preceding the current climate of ethical outer wear.

Frankfurt

Swan feud. An abandoned summer forest. A better-looking partner. Coughs from the back row, then the noise of someone getting their stuff together to go. Lobby doors articulated to flap shut with a slap.

An invitation to Frankfurt, at this time of year? No way.

My dad nearly settled in Frankfurt, deciding at the last moment to check out London. He broke up with his girlfriend, and -- he must have been freezing. I remember his duffle-coat, but that was later. I was alive. Thus, Frankfurt has always held a place in my imagination, like Kalamazoo, or Vancouver. Intuitive and random choices diverted us from these other homes. The planet is circular, though it doesn't feel like it. I think of it as embedded with thick black lines as high as mountain ranges, so that people are caught in sections between these lines, in the abstract shapes of unique territories. Landscape as suicide. Landscape as zoo.

Well, I am only being so shivery about it because a dense silver sky has mingled with the golden fraction of the tree-line, here in Loveland. Like a schi[x]ophrenic, I confuse outer events with physiological ones. In the cafe, Tiffany makes me a breve macchiato with rat poison on the side, and it comes in a gorgeous, tiny, scarlet cup and saucer, with a little spoon. [See: below, complete with Times headline about Swan Feuds]. Porky presses his nose up against the window. Tiffany and I briefly discuss knee-pads and Elizabeth Grosz. Jarvis comes in and we discuss Darwin. Jarvis says: "He says that the need to attach ourselves to something or someone we love is persistent but very weak, and that there's also another instinct towards the thing that's beautiful. So, even if we're alone, and even though our minds can sort it out, it's actually very hard to be completely, and I mean completely, alone."



I visited Frankfurt in my early twenties, and had the same sense of concentration* that I do as I consider catching an "auroraplane" [Vanessa Place] East-East-East: well? So what? I chose Haberdasher's over North London School for Girls because the radiators were on the blink during my written exam. It was a bitterly cold day, and the backs of my hands, though brown, turned faintly blue. I chose the well-heated school with sadistic teachers instead, attending on a bursary scholarship until I was seventeen.

Still thinking of Ronaldo Wilson's panel talk -- the "pull" to a place, a copse, sex, road, man -- that, actually, we don't even really want. Does this connect to Kass Fleisher's malevolent dream (not hers) of the sentence, an idea of it, in which the sentence is a truth-bucket: it's the bucket and not the drink. It could be the drink. Ronaldo talked about addiction, too, and when I think about narrative practice, "pull" translates. How do you deprogram yourself, as a writer, from a version of contact that is not contact at all, but which substitutes for it and in some cases surpasses its intensity? And then, what if that, too, is a fib? Form is so macabre! Form's charred skin is peeling off its thighs, its forearms, its sharp cheekbones, its compartments!!!! But what comes next? Idea number 1: Sit naked in a charnel ground until dawn. Sit with the corpse. Hinduism again. It's not a very practical religion.

I have a cousin in Frankfurt. He works in a Radio Shack, or whatever they have instead of Radio Shack in Germany. He has a daughter called Pinky. Not her real name, but who knows what that is? Fused to the body, a name proliferates. In my early twenties, my name was Jac, short for Jacasta. It was a middle name. During the citizenship process, I leaned in as my biometric details were being typed in, in an outsource building in Arvada, outside of Denver. I said: "Could I be 135 pounds instead? I'm trying to lose weight." "Sure," said the woman, "Anything else?" "Yeah, I don't really use that name anymore. Could we just...." The woman skimmed the room for a supervisor, then said: "Sure." And with seven taps of the keys, I was gone. The feminine was gone, leaving in its place an immigrant with a completely Indian name. A man's name. The name of someone from a call center in Bangalore. "Hello, sir. Is this Bhanu Kapil that I am speaking to?" "No. Mr. Kapil is dead. Please take me off your list." "No problem, sir. Sorry. Ma'am."

Things are rotating very fast. Swan feud. "I..I...I had this gold scythe [Perseus]": (reading La Medusa, having finished LUST.)

Adfempo/Belladonna plus Feminnaissance: Reverse Your Blood

(Drawing by Ronaldo Wilson, my favorite. Wait. Vanessa Place. Wait. Kim Rosenfield. Wait...)

Home from the rain and leaves to the bright blue snow refracting on the mountains above Boulder, where I am writing this, in the Russian teahouse on 12th, between Canyon and Arapahoe, beneath a Mughali roof embroidered with red, turquoise, and pale green paint. A peacock eats a poison, which makes its tail particularly bright.

Notes from Adfempo, which are really scraps I have to make into a "meat blanket"/JELINEK: "Lust": a book. Don't read it. I began to read it waiting for the plane, sat down on the floor with some amazing looking people about to leave for Berlin. I sat down then they did. I have rarely seen a more sexy group of passengers of all ages. It wasn't that they had the surefire erotics of being white: NO. Maybe they weren't even German, though my pod of stunners was. One of them offered me a Heineken, a tall woman with blue, blue eyes and ice-cream hair that reminded me (her looks) of the face of a writer whose book converted me from memoir forms to deliberate ones, ones that you couldn't write again: Carole Maso. Then, as if I too was going to Europe, when the facts are that I belong in the company of wolves who drink cappucinno at the edge of a great wilderness, I opened Jelinek. Don't read it. If you read it, you will turn into me, or something like me. You won't want anything else, not even the Travel Treats box they give you for free in economy if you're runway-delayed. You'll read, read, read, missing the boarding call and then, in long term parking, you'll take the shuttle to 001 when it was JJ1 where you'd left your Subaru Impreza, a car that makes it possible to commute during winter storms.

1. Let "genitals roam freely."-- Dodie Bellamy.
2. Laura Mullen's wedding dress, cut from flipper to fin from her body on the copper desk. If not copper then plastic.
3. Kass Fleisher on phatic communion: the violence of the sentence.
2. That the rose's boundaries open to the woman. The woman opens to the space surrounding the red flower in the dark silver of the garden. The flower receives her, pre-appearance. Mei-Mei.
3. Tonya Foster on waste.
4. Tea in the interstices, beneath Minerva and her bell, at Starbucks, and in the morning before the days began, which they did, dark blue, the windows of the hotel open to the rough bit of garden and its scarlet vines.
5. The women reading beneath the red fairy lights just before a storm on the gravel bed. Dogs howling as Christine Wertheim performed, with an intensity that would have had Ulysses untying the knots that kept him in place.
6. Ronaldo Wilson on desire.
7. Nathalie Stephens on sorrow.

I have to go to Naropa now. Tonight, I'll have a bath and finish "Lust." As I said, don't read this book. Protect yourself from writing novels, or wanting to, which is just as bad. I am trying to say that I have been writing, and that I had to stop. I had to stop BAN EN BANLIEUE. I wish it were possible to write and read at the same time, as it is during the sexual acts that dominate ardor, shame, and so on. The sensations. Memory. Beloveds. "Violent numb emigration" -- La Medusa.

Here comes the jasmine tea. I have to go.

Merlin/Yorkshire/Funny/Cafe

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/20/richard-hawley-sheffield

1. Above. Funny. Richard Hawley: "Today, smoking furiously in a recording studio in Sheffield, he is immaculately turned out: his quiff is slick with grease, the collar of his drape jacket is velvet. "We now live in a country that appears to be the most sporting nation on earth," he says. "Everybody wears a tracksuit. It looks like everyone's going to the gym. They're really going to Pizza Hut and getting 24 cans of lager on their way back. A nation fascinated with dressing like sportsmen – I find that quite odd.""

2. Cafe. We went very early, in the driving rain. Autumn Equinox: a thirty degree drop in the temperature overnight. The dog, apparently, is scared of rain; my son announced: "Hats. Yuck." Therefore, cafe. Very early. Ordered a macchiato. It came in a scarlet espresso cup and saucer with a little spoon. I was enchanted. Nice quiet stretch during which the boy reads Wizardology and makes his way through a bagel, and I drink my coffee and re-read Cesar Aira for Experimental Prose later today. Not shabby. When he finishes his cocoa, my son inverts his cup on its saucer without comment. I said: "Why did you do that, darling?" He said: "To find out my future of course." We have a bit of a chat about the mutability of the future, make plans to visit the places where Merlin [below] was, when we go to England next year -- if you are born in a place, does it put a spell on you?, and then watch the foam slip back, over the scattered dots of dark chocolate, as evidence, when we turn the cup right side up.



3. The darkness/rain bring life, and when I've dropped my son at school, I come home and make a quick map for the morning's work:

*** is an outcast, but also dead, which complicates things.
*** is very beautiful despite being unattractive, on the whole to white people. Her words not mine.
*** is kind.
*** went to Portugal on holiday, and found no reason to stay, so came home.
*** has never been to Chicago.
*** is an artist.
*** had many friends, all of whom, after her death, were willing to tell the narrator everything in exchange for a cup of coffee and the gluten-free equivalent of a cigarette.
*** went to Rome and drank coffee at a counter, bought flowers at a market, and managed to shake off the person who was following her.
*** is paranoid.

-- Notes for ***, my new character, who died in her early forties -- how? How will she die?

Memoir/anti-memoir

I want to ask, where does the work open up to life? We moved our class to an art studio, done in by the darkness in Sycamore building, which I tend to, but that is marked: it sets a strong tone -- whereas the calligraphy/ikebana space is more ambient. While the graduate students, in clusters, marked the first draft for sites of "non-reproductive productivity"- - not culling/deleting, but scanning for the "imperceptible" marks: the marks vibrationally related to mutation -- not newness, but the rate at which newness appears in the world: E. Grosz via A. Spain, though from M. Buzzeo the news is: some latest thinking on desire/discernment: I stood at the counter with red paint. Actually, magenta paint as the red had hardened in its bottle. With a long brush, I marked, in each piece [10 to 15 pages/11 students] -- the places where life appeared, either as a botanical motif or as feral language, the sentences and sounds that had never come forward, before, into the world.

I let the manuscripts dry, remembering A. Spain's dictum that the imperceptible is not solely contained in the site marked for attention or research but is attracted to or tracked, by migration or chance/digestive processes, into "site." Thus, to observe the places where the paint sticks to the next page, and look there too, for what's "bracketed." Brackets and stars.

At home, I return from volunteering in my son's third grade class, bedraggled, and sit down to do a Goddard packet. Instead, I write. I feel as if every day for the last two years I've been laying down the veins of a person, building her cell by cell on a table, with the ordinary ebb and flow of that forming, and destruction -- I live in a rich, busy household of creatures of all kinds, some of whom pounce -- and ONLY TODAY, at 11 a.m., did she "appear." Or flutter, of her own accord. In fact, she's not a girl, but I cannot give her name or describe her more than this, because she's still wet, still stunned by the sound of her own heart -- rather like my dog, yesterday, at the dog park, who entered into puberty in full view of a variety of owners/pets. He was so shocked by what grew out of him that he put his head down, almost as if he was scared of his own body. We went home and fed him tasty treats of all kinds, such as dog biscuits and dog salami from Poudre Valley Grain and Feed, a scruffy shop just off 287 heading up to Fort Collins, on the right, tucked in between Budget Rental and Front Range Antiques.

Jen Hofer's amoeba and spirogyra are balanced on the desk next to me as I write.
"Francis Bacon," by Weiland Schmeid is balanced on the desk next to me as I write.
Notebooks. A photograph of Rohini, my sister, a pink butterfly hair clip taken from a friend of my son's, architecture essays of various kinds, a drum, an image of a Hindu goddess, and...well, many scraps of paper are balanced on the desk next to me as I write.

I wish I was back at the Getty, ocean-side. I wish I had a bright yellow lemon, fruit juice sweetened ice lolly, and that it was early morning and that next, I would drink a cup of coffee and continue writing. I feel sometimes as if, with 48 unbroken hours, with another day to sleep on the end of that time, I could finish what suddenly clarified today.

In other news, I went to a party on the shore of Lake Loveland during the hour that my son was at flag football practice. Putting aside the question of what flag football actually is, I can report that I took off my shoes and went into the lake. It was so beautiful. The mountains were like pale blue tissue paper, collaged against an intense sun, a gold sky just before dusk. The water, sheet after sheet, more active than you'd think: radiant, pulsing turquoise and navy blue. A bluegrass band was playing under a canopy and just as I was leaving, some people got up to dance.

Los Angeles Schizophrene PLUS "Kass Fleisher: Honorary Punjabi of the Month"

Took the Metrolink to Newhall. Drank tea next to the Pacific Ocean. Got my jeans wet. Filmed a man replacing a light bulb in a chandelier. Got to hear Christine Wertheim growl/open. Bid on Jen Hofer's knitted amoeba and spirogyra. Went to an open AA meeting by chance, though am not an alcoholic. Just got swept up some stairs in a small town in the desert. Made notes on the desert. Had dinner with tall, kind people in a Japanese businessman's hotel, as they described it in its former incarnation, down the road from Otis. In Otis, met a young writer from Mexico working on a story. We talked about her story, a contemporary version of the fable of La Llorona; "all the girls who go missing, you know?" We talked about how to write in the voice of a feral child. I said, font. Ate a cupcake. Drank "adultery lemonade." Saw nice ladies in dresses of all kinds and a man in a T-shirt tucked into his trousers, which were held up, obviously, by a belt. Discussed color on a brown armchair on a stage. Amar Ravva called me a hedgehog. Amina Cain had a red-orange artifact in her hair. We wanted to win the hyperbolic coral reef. Bonny Diadhiou and I talked properly. Alaman said, close your eyes. And I did.

My sister lives at the edge of a desert with braided gourds, pale yellow ones, stretching out into the sand. Wine costs $1.99. I had a sip. Stars in the sky. No, not stars -- the hugest slab of a red moon we had ever seen. At the Getty, I feel like I am getting sick and so go to a balcony and eat a lemon icicle pop, holding it up occasionally to the muted blue sky, brilliant blue through my sunglasses. Made a film in the desert. Made a silueta out of bouganvillea flowers. Went to the Debbie Allen Dance Academy. Was given a Senegalese "early education primer" written in French. I recognized the thin, thin paper. Read a palm. Caught two buses. Tisa Bryant talked about the essay form; I scared her. She thought it was me, then it wasn't, but then it was. She said: "I thought you were an apparition." Bill Berkson told me stories about the beginning sessions at Naropa. I cannot repeat them. I lounged by the pool of the Custom Hotel, which has sheep in its lobby. I felt confident about "humanimal" but less confident about "schizophrene." I think I have exhausted the provisional forms I have been working in. On the aeroplane, I read and responded to student work. Today I met Kass Fleisher who said we are in the 6th Die Off. That the same things that happened before the dinosaurs died are happening now, and that it is not just that the dinosaurs died: "Everything died." Because of this, life being short, potentially, I suggested we scan the work rather than edit it, which is monstrous. Scanning lets a creature still-forming form. I met two sisters who have a cat called Monster...either that, or it is a monster. I said I would send it kibble, the special home-made kibble of Colorado, garnished by elves with sprigs of catnip and dehydrated tuna fish. I didn't say the part about the elves. In a British monotone, I said: "I will send you kibble, priority mail."

Seeing Michael Smoler in L.A. prompted me, on the way back to my car, to push open the gate of a house I once lived in on Goss. It's where my son was conceived, in the room where Allen Ginsberg used to have his harmonium; I peered into the porch where I used to sit at my computer looking up what was happening, exactly in week three, deep down, the eyes still pulsing nubs of blood and shade. Where I once was, pregnant, a massage therapist, with no idea or thought of becoming a teacher, was: is: now: a -- skateboard! With the word KASHMIR sprawled on its underside between the wheels. Kashmir is right. I felt the word was connected to my son, and it made me feel more hopeful, about everything, though to have this feeling in my body, I had to empty out the word, Kashmir, of its ecology. Its river of moonstones: a river of bright orange mud -- something happening, as Kass Fleisher said, "upstream." "Until we sort that out, unless we look at it, really look at what's happening there, we're just pulling one body after another out of the river." Kass Fleisher: Honorary Punjabi of the Month. That doesn't have the typical cheery ring to it, but what can you do? Below, I append the notes I made for class when I returned from Denver in my car, having made a stop to pick up Porky, my huge, white pawed great dane/black lab combo, from the home of my friend, Anne Franke, who has horses:

WRITING EXPERIMENT:

From Nowak, we derived the idea of an experimental prose form in which a narrator does not appear; something else does. An aesthetics: the series of decisions underlying a possible sequence - - with some question, from our discussion, about the risk of “impresence.”

Today, as a precursor to Aira:

1. Give your work to the person sitting next to you. Dear “person”: please scan and delete/put brackets around – very roughly: see/recollect – last session’s remarks on the “sketch” of a possible biology, from the lab, from metagenomics:

i. Any reference to a self – whether that is first-person narration or authorial presence in any form. This could be a matter if pronouns, but also any area that corresponds to your notion of persona. It could even include the presence of any character. Additionally, write a few sentences on how you made your decision.

ii. Can you also put into words, in a sentence or two, what the writer has set in the work as a “problem.” Environmentally/ecologically – landscapes re-form around a “tear” or “fire”: the part of a site that can’t resolve itself prompts a deep growth or new attention. So, in an experimental text, that might be a clearly visible site – aligned with poetics: a place of visible rupture or lack of closure – and, as episodic narrative, it might be mimicked in the form. An insect psychosis. {Callois/Grosz]. But if you are looking at a piece that is more genre based – attend to the meaning, to the presence of an uncalculated sorrow. The thing that can’t be received by a character or reader. What’s amiss. Here, you are indicating a site that might be engaged with formally – but that part is up the writer [themselves].

Then, return your notes and marks to the writer - -you’ll both have a short exchange.

A break.

You drink coffee. You eat an orange. You walk around for five minutes. You smoke or do not smoke. You live your own life completely, and then: community/coterie/class. You come back. Why? To write. To write something new, either subtly tilting the plane of the work or embedding a radical geometry into an organically flickering form. Good luck with that.

Writers:

The experiment is to bring place/biology/landscape/locale into your work. Why? I’m culling from symposiums/readings/exchanges with experimental prose writers in other cities and regions: Melissa Buzzeo's City M/Montreal, David Buuck’s site-based installations, Juliana Spahr’s integration of florescence and garden and culture into the longer book (see: The Transformation), and, from visual art (which has known this for 200 years or more), the decision to foreground a landscape as a way to express, in a deflected way, what occupies a psyche. Think: Arles.

I invite you to make a simple bricolage today – to look at the sites identified in the “scan” as persona-based in some way – we scan landscapes for mates and predators, as virtual animals: Grosz again: the blue of the periphery: the speed with which desire or fear come – a “libidinal economy” as it relates to prose, which is the ultimate fleshed-out site – more so than poetry, which records the instinctive flare, the feather ruffling, in more precise ways [MAYBE: I sort of want that for prose: “language is not form; it’s breathing” - - Elleen Myles]:

and: SLIP in/GROW something else: right there. A soft “there.” From the images/text you brought in, as a prompt, or mixing that with more language/seeing of the place/city/landscape that surrounds the work. Look away from the body into the tree-line, or the architecture, I suppose. Re-write, emptying site to re-fill it with something both indigenous to the piece – related to the problem, the under-thread in some way – but also something very new. This is tactility, which I propose as an experimental gesture. It depends upon the body, upon sensation, upon looking around what is already there, extending and blurring the gaze: but it is not the body.

You said you wanted to attend the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. This is my version of what that might mean!!!!! (They nearly called it the Gertrude Stein school….but Allen Ginsberg won.) Adapt/mutate my “prompt” for re-growth in any way that makes sense to you in the context of what you have written.

Bring planetary space into your work. How will you do this? How will you record the event as seen from above? This is an example of a mutation.

Arrival: "We die and become architecture" -- Rousseau's Boat/ "His son kicks off his red crocs and lies down" -- Harper's Bazaar

September 5th/6th: the night between the two days: it's the anniversary of my first "day" in the United States of America. Celebrating with a friend, I take her August 2009 British Harper's Bazaar, flipping to the "sexy" profile of Hanif Kureishi who's being interviewed on a banquette at the Cafe Rouge, his eleven year old son asleep and stretched out next to him, and she takes my Lisa Robertson's "Rousseau's Boat," reading aloud from it while we wait for our coffees:

"I am confusing art and decay.
Elsewhere, fiction is an activity like walking.
Any girl who reads is already a lost girl."

She backs up and reads:

"Rain buckles into my mouth.
If pressed to account for strangeness and resistance, I can't.
I'm speaking here for dogs and rusting ducts venting steam into rain.
I wanted to study the ground, the soft ruins of paper and the rusting things."

Because it's an anniversary, I open the magazine and put Hanif Kureishi's mouth on Rousseau's Boat. I make them kiss. I make the two different kinds of writing kiss, just as two immigrants, or the children of immigrants, might kiss, which in turn differs from the embrace one exchanged, upon arrival, with a citizen; if not a citizen, then a person of the place.

Narrative and Architecture:

Week two, and the following question appears: an undergraduate student, in training at Naropa to become an archivist, suggests that we re-phrase the question "What are the maximum and minimum conditions of a house?" to become: "What are the maximum and minimum conditions of [fiction]?" A novel. A "prose installation." It was brilliant, and though I was slightly bedraggled from waking at 6 a.m. -- third grade drop-off for my son, dog park for my dog, both of them early risers -- I became suddenly alert. The question was so strong, stronger than what we had been talking about, so we stopped to answer it. I answered it too, finding some language for the first time about the collapsed space between regions, as emphasized by their partition. In other news, we built a "boite-en-valise" in memoir/anti-memoir, towards "what can be said." What "brightens" and what "fades" -- from Foucault's language for archival processes: from ARCHIVE FEVER: our text book. If not a text book, then the prospective material for an ill-fitting hat or dress. What else? We looked at Mark Nowak's "Coal Mountain Elementary," a book without an author -- our conversation, in part, was about numbness, the lack of sensation in an aftermath that takes place in a future past. "Prolapsis." What is the place of the event in a work of experimental prose? Of research? Of a companion text, which may or may not appear in the book? Some vague plans to visit a slaughterhouse developed from this. On Thursdays, in Greeley, out East on the plains, they burn the blood. At night, after class, I met Anne Waldman for dinner. She demanded more sauce, and got it! By the time I got home, night had fallen and the moon was a wet red, a red-orange we haven't seen before, from the fires in California, to our West.



When I woke up I went to Boulder again and sat next to a Buddhist administrator who gave a brief talk on undergraduate curriculum. He said: "What's sane? What's working well? What's precious? What can we preserve?" I thought that was lovely. Then I went home. I like it at home too.

Reading Robert Gluck and Sarah Schulman in exchange: Belladonna Elders 2: for Monday's Experimental Prose Class

Robert Gluck: "Those friends we share our psychic lives with, give them the stage of our psyches to restage their stories, as they do for us, do they somehow take those stories with them when they die? If a story is not complete unless I tell it to Ed, what happens to my story after he has died? These are the questions I ask myself?"

Experimental prose, to reverse and inhabit these words, is a way of talking to the dead. Are the dead who are buried different to the dead who are cremated? Could a dead person be analagous to the person never seen again, after the break in the relationship? For an Indian writer who is not Indian by birth, prose is a weird epic, an address to the water of the lake, river, and sea. Meanwhile, I want the novel up against the perspex of the airport wall, like Juliette Binoche at the end of Blue, absent and ecstatic: expressionless. I want the prose that is written on departure. Meanwhile, my dead dissolve, reappearing as outlines of indigo light, person-shaped, and surrounded by a partially visible grid of white electrical flares. Dots and flecks. Narrative as nerve-net, the centaur appearing as we draw the lines between nodes. No. Prose is the creature. Prose is the feral construction that cannot exist, and thus disappears. It is killed down or it vanishes, leaving an occult trace. This is why the experiment never makes sense. Its end point appears in a place no longer on the page, which is also a definition of diaspora. If not a definition, then an attempt to start feeling something again.

I fell asleep last night thinking it was time to write a proper will. Well, maybe I can do it here, as a public record.

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF BHANU KAPIL, AGE 41 AND COUNTING:

Dear Beloved,

You'll find the letter, as it relates to my material possessions, such as they are, in my safe deposit box at the bank, the one on 7th Street. I'd like to move on to the question of my remains. Please cremate me after three days, and in the three days before, please read to me. Please read to me, when I am dead but not yet cremated, from a combination of self-help literature, the Bhagavad Gita, and the interviews at the back of the Belladonna Elders series, because I haven't finished them all. This is only if I die today.

My ashes should be taken to the Ganges, as high up as you can travel at this time of year. Rishikesh will be fine.

As to my notebooks...I don't know. Please give them to a writer, or to the daughter of a writer.

Yours, hoping we caught that train to Moscow from Paris, etc.

Love, BK: a dog, a wolf, a woman.

"What does mama do? Tell the truth. For the blog."

"Write. You write. You make tea and sit around and don't buy Grim Reaper costumes." -- my son, age 8, when I asked him to describe a day in the life of a writing teacher [see: title of the blog], as it really unfolds. We went to Party City after school, but the Halloween costumes aren't in until after "Memorial Day," according to the lone teenage girl who was manning the tills. I said: "You mean Labor Day?" She said: "Oh yeah, Labor Day." My son said: "Okay then, mom, you can make one." So, I have been sewing all afternoon, which is a joke of some kind. On the way home from Party City, though, we did stop at Home Depot, where I enquired after "the plastic thingies that have the little holes that you put on the thing that hangs down. In the toilet." A man in a rigid-looking apron said: "You mean the flapper?" I purchased a "flapper" and installed it, the most competent act of my entire afternoon. The flapper was orange. Tomorrow, I am going to harvest carrots (which you would think are orange, but are so vibrant, they are almost red) at Cresset Farm. Who knows? Maybe they'll put me on broccoli detail. I am scared of the broccoli. It comes in a forklift thing, and you have to de-frond it. Lonely work, out by the chicken coop. Last year, late summer, they'd just slaughtered a bull, and the bull's head was in with the chickens, composting. I kept glancing over [from my position inside the forklift, which itself was not how I imagined life would turn out] and gazing at the horns/retracted gum-line combo that looked like a Georgia O'Keefe painting gone wrong. Last week, a cow died and her calf was being nursed by a different cow, who hated being separated from her own, slightly older calves. There was all sorts of wailing moo-based noise as I shucked the bok choy. Tomorrow, will there be eyeballs mixed in with the cabbage leaves? Will there be an entire head looking back at me as I buckle down to a morning of sorting out the vegetables for pick-up? I love August 27th. What will August 28th bring? The purchase of a black bed-sheet? A thimble? A bucket of tendons? The farmers feed colostrum to their pets. I gave my son unsweetened vanilla almond milk for his pre-bedtime drink. He rejected it. He said: "I want cow's milk." I said: "No, we're nearly out. We're saving it for the morning." In a resigned, world-weary voice devoid of all hope, he sighed deeply and said: "I know, I know. For your tea."

Week One: Naropa: A Poetics of the Oesophagus (Brit-Eng. Sp.)

Sandhya Luther taught me how to write my name in Arabic. Rather, she wrote my name in Arabic, Tibetan and then Hindi in my notebook, then I copied it out.

Driving south to Boulder, completely dazzled by the mountains in the early morning sunlight. Driving north, I pull over on route 4, get out of the car and stare. Some layers are pale green, an incredibly bright pale green, some are this deep blue/purple. Higher up, there's already snow.

Some yellow leaves already coming down from the sycamore outside the Allen Ginsberg library, and at some point, in Upaya North, I say: "Make architecture tremble." I don't say that. Elizabeth Grosz does. Back to the tree. There, post-convocation, eating ice-cream, I met a Lenz scholar. Have forgotten her name. She avoids eating wheat. We discussed skin care, and transformative pedagogy. I asked her if she would be willing to come to one of my classes and give me feedback on how to do that. No, not clarify my pores. Transform them.

Ten minutes into the first class of the school year, a writer called Hannah says: "I'm interested in the identity of the mouth." Do graduate students at Iowa say things like this? Do they discuss the technology of the palate? They must. They have to. Phonemes: "sounds that are uttered." The smallest unit of sound, and also a way of providing a gradient or boundary between one sound and other, which is the particulate matter of the contemporary British poem. In Loughborough, I had a crush on a boy who loved the poems of Geoffrey Hill, which I then analyzed, in segments, for their use of "contrast." The boy moved on to Bob Dylan, but I took a minor -- sort of; we don't have minors in England, we just take extra classes in the subjects we like best -- in linguistics. There, I learned that gossip is a form of phatic communion. See: Bay Area poetry blogs. They are charming. They are addictive. They are good.



What else? I love Naropa. Returning in the Fall, I always long to be a student instead. I feel especially envious of the TCP (Transpersonal Counseling Psychotherapy) majors, with the proviso that in the UK, TCP is an antiseptic gargle for sore throats.

Today:

I woke up and wrote four pages -- "immigrant, immigrant" -- very quickly while my son was still asleep. I climbed a path cut into the side of a mountain, hiking up to Gem Lake (above). I bought school supplies for my son's third grade classroom: pastels, re-sealable sandwich bags, etc. I bought a pink Eiffel Tower: WHY??? It was a shop on our way home from the Corn Roast parade ( a slightly deranged local festival with baton-twirling elk). A man called Roland, whose shop it was, petted our dog and the next thing you know we were inside, with the dog, purchasing random items. A peacock feather, for example. I am not sure it is right to buy things out of politeness, or the fear that your dog's tail is imminently about to whack something fragile off a shabby chic chair. "No, no, you're fine. We love dogs." I think I bought the Eiffel Tower as a way to escape, of which I have a long history -- panicked purchases. I once bought a tricorn hat in Harvey Nichols when I was seventeen, for example, after being tailed by a man in a suit who was obviously the store detective.

Right. Naropa starts the day after tomorrow. I am planning on wearing a fuschia salwar chemise with gold embroidered spots.


No. I am in denial. After a summer of writing, I orient my neck towards teaching, feeling so much desire for a more normative working week that I'm on the verge of polishing my shoes. How to balance traveling this Fall with teaching in two places, third grade, my son's meat-lover's diet (he lay on the floor and wailed when I presented him with a biodynamic carrot yesterday), and writing? Writing slips in like a little black tail at the end of the sentence.

A new yoga studio has opened round the corner. I intend to go as often as I can, and to drive up to the Idaho Springs hot springs/sulphur caves once a month, in lieu of psychotherapy. I vow not to socialize with acquaintances. I bought a strange kitchen table with wooden flaps from a yard sale, and I have fixed plans to write on it, and then to slot Schizophrene into its little drawer. I shall try not to watch British TV on Netflix, reserving it only for emergencies. Ditto, coffee with milk and sugar.

A poem by Laura Mullen....can't get over the "where the, where the." Have started reading Duras' The Sailor of Gibraltar. This poem helps.

Because poetry and fiction are like a centaur form. Obviously, fiction is the horse part.

Laura Mullen was wearing a tie the first day I met her. It had diagonal stripes.

Duras opens on an early morning sea, and as Bergson would suggest, prop that sea up and lean in. Poetry is thus a repository for the memories an individual did not have but now possesses. The individual had something else. It had loves, enterprises, the launch of something here or there. Duras gives me memory in a forward place, and reading reaches to this place, which is why reading must come first for the writer. I plan my syllabi for the coming semester -- architecture, anti-memoir, experimental prose -- with an emotion that I suddenly realize is desire.

Laura Mullen writes in new forms; this is an older poem, but I love the second comma, after the first "the," which embeds, before it's written, the work to come, the prose line with is own future, its own past, which (the line) has already arrived. I read the poem for the light, and the sea, with which Duras nets her lovers, who are, even before the book begins, completely doomed. I prefer my late summer reading to be classical and slightly moody, taking as its focus the kind of love that can never be returned, not even at Christmas.



Alba

Dawn where the, where the.
Grey lifting off,
Fog rising, herons on the black mud,
Exposed, of the bay. Blue-greys and greens,
The steady shore, the knife-blade
Leaves of the eucalyptus dripping in fog,
Tic, tic, the air salt. Dawn,
Dawn, dawn; the idiot’s
Stutter. Remarried.
The mirror slips out. Out
On the glazed mud
The vase-shaped birds make their harsh
Unvarying cries. I am.
Chalk smell, damp, of clay and the dull grey
Swelling under his hands, turning, opens
To a vase. Dawn. The shelves full,
The bisqued and the still-damp squat, O-
Mouthed, all wonder, veiled to be trimmed.
Smell of clay, Dawn, dawn, favored a deep blue
Glaze called cobalt, fired all night
At cone six, or cone ten.
I don’t know the trade. The hell
Of the kiln intact, in the dark, a brick
Removed: a window into hell. Remarried.
Up all night for beauty you could use.
I am going to explain.
Dawn the deep blue
Burns away, the fog crawls
Off the edges, exposing
The flesh color, the raw
Clay. The cries of the blue
Grey herons float back cross the bay.
Smell of clay. Dawn. Silence.
Begin again.

"I tell you we weren't here yesterday": a pedagogy with SOME quotes from Waiting For Godot

Great. Quoting Beckett is a fantastic way to begin some biology homework. Ready? Do you have your lab coat on? Safety is paramount, as are boots. And have you buttoned it up? Fabulous color, by the way. Faded blue is my favorite color. I once had a cat...No, let's not go there today. Right. If you could get out a piece of paper, and a pen, I'll begin. Your assignment is:

To begin: Some notes towards a human...No, let's not go there today. After all, I tell you we weren't here yesterday and today's demands are already making my head spin. There is only so much we can accomplish before the bell rings for recess. I suppose you are quite hungry by now. Write this down. Ready?

"What is a sentence for, evolutionarily speaking? And if it is a form, then how has this form, like other animal productions (not shit, not progeny: colors): fibrillated? What are the marks, in the contemporary prose line, of a future in the process of": arrive. Arrive and still come. Those are verbs. Those are the English spoken in the suburb, where poverty is rife. Nanterre/Hayes. Got it.

"I don't hear a word you're saying."

Then move to the front of the class. Dip your feather in the ink well. Did you bring your five [dollars] for tomorrow's visit to the planetarium? I can see the progressive approach isn't working, and that we're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way after all.

"Damn it, Haven't you already told us?"

Lecture notes towards the biology of the sentence: ["I've already told you?"]:

1. Rue des Trois Portes. A tiny electricity shop, and house number 9 with its glossy navy blue door, and so on. The book to come, right there, up against the door. Open the book as you open my ****. It felt like this for me to ***** it.

2. I hate it when people write things about window treatments in Jaipur, yet here I am doing the same in Paris. My sister wrote to me on Facebook: "I've known you belonged there since I was seven years old." I am ashamed of my euphoria to be under the same sky of my childhood. The slate, blackberries, rain, and mourning doves....there the similarities end.

3. I wasn't afraid that you'd -- arrive -- with everything arriving wanted for itself. Just as time, knocking on the door at night, comes to your house, near death, moody, mad/reddened, a blob of plasma with a personality and a half, wanting something, coming without asking, knocking again and again on the blue door of your house and thinking, why the fuck can't you -- hurry up -- already. In this formulation, time is from the United States. What if time wants something from us, and not the other way around? You probably (already) had this thought in 1998.

4. I arrive. The light pooling above the tables of the cafe is white and pink, and discrete, like a block of mist. I head north to the French city my mother lives in, at the foot of the Shivalik mountains, the first range of the Himalayas. Lutyens. Le Corbusier. The French architects did not take into account the deteriorating weather, a future of two summers: hot/dry, and then monsoon. A French woman has made a film called Brasilia/Chandigarh, which is a tropical critique and document of Le Corbusier's cross-cultural architext, at least to my eyes, and who am I? I'm the person who sobbed during Bend it like Beckham. Well, I didn't sob. I just felt intense emotion. Then again, I feel alive every day and this is writing: a banal activity that becomes luminous, shopped out to another part of the brain.

5. You get off the plane in Europe with your European Union passport and you're like, okay. Bring it on. Broken leg, fine. Death, fine. You know that socialized medicine is there for you, no matter what. It is the kind of relaxing deep down where you didn't realize you were so tense; that first indenting of the body on the massage table, even if you are already a therapist yourself. These days, I barter structural integration/bodywork with biodynamic farmers, dog groomers, and tax accountants; not to mention dog-sitters and shamans. It is sort of thrilling to be "responsible" for your own health, but also strange, deeply uneducated, and sad. This is a separate subject, obviously, to experimental prose writing, but what else is a sentence for? It is for traveling. It is for a basic political thought felt more passionately in the body but not expressed there. It is for putting two and two together.

6. I braid my English sentence around the TRANSPARENT CARAPACE of the animal meaning. Language coats sense, to put it in human terms. Language comes down over Normandy, over Colorado, over Berkshire, over the yellow and green plants, like night itself, but this is not language. Language is always coming, always arriving, and if not "this night" then "the next." Each sentence is thus periphery itself, the satellite imprint of mutation, incredibly subtle -- the small fibrillations or de-notes that comprise evolutionary states, which are barely visible within a duration.

7. Got that?

8. "Rubbish!" (Estragon). "You're being asked a question." (Vladimir). "They're coming!"/"Who?"/"I don't know."

परिसिएन्ने

For some reason, blogger just translated "Parisienne" into Hindi. I don't know how to reverse it, the accidental command. Let's just say this: I am drinking cafe creme beneath a soft silver and duck-egg blue sky, in the garden of the Sun King, and I'm reading Cixous on a bench, to prepare for the sex I will have thirty years from now. That's not a strong thought. It's a weak thought, but here, it operates illogically and gets more pink, more orange, by the minute. I don't know what else to write, but I am here and should write something. I'm here with my child, and so the fact that I am reading French theory, in preparation for the Belladonna symposium, is a minor miracle. Give me some ice cream please. No.

"Novellish"/Reading List for the Aeroplane

[BERGSON CAMPER 3 SLEEPING BAG DELUXE: Available in Forest Fern, or Black and Red]

Are there two "elles" in Novellish? To state the basic, late afternoon facts: I am reading -- research for the memoir/anti-memoir class I am teaching this Fall -- "How I Became A Nun" by Cesar Aira. It is so small you could eat it. But what is it?

The sky is uncharacteristically overcast, my son is at a sleepover in an RV in someone's garden, which is his dream - - to travel by camper with our dog across the continental U.S. until we get to Buffalo, New York, a place he associates with dogs, whom presumably ours could get to know -- and so, an early evening of reading stretches out before me. "Is this it?" "Yes." You often read exchanges like that in tracts and colloquial discourses relating to Zen Buddhism, but, in one's own life, the reverie and softness of thinking and reading and writing as they flow into and out of the notebook and the body might sometimes be mistaken for a kind of flickering immobility. See: Bergson on posture; returning in time ( as a way to overcome writer's block, I suppose) to the sensation of being compressed and curved over a desk, that particular light, and in this way, to shift.

Earlier today, forcing myself to be practical, I tried to quilt the novellish thing I am writing "using industrial materials" as my friend Harvest might say. Jarvis. I call him Harvest. Not sure why. Myself, I respond, still, to the nick-name "Barn," although I sincerely hope I do not look like one. What would Bergson say? He might say, 109 years ago this summer: "In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour." I love that. I love the spelling of neighbour too. Like aeroplane, it connects me to my British citizenship, which is a kind of mechanized warfare, but that's separate.

Note to self: Read Rachel Levitsky's new book of the same name, spelled naturally, as far as such a thing is possible.

The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Like "The Ecstasie" by John Donne, this is a reading I keep returning to, attempting to translate, to understand. Intense response, since 1981 (Donne) and 2003 (this particular Duras) but no language. No "coming back" -- which is what differentiates the creative process from schizophrenia, according to Prem Chawla, a researcher/psychiatrist-linguist I interviewed in New Delhi last year.

This summer, determined, and dazzled by the hundred thousand and one notes and scraps that comprise "Schizophrene" -- blanking out, too, on where to begin in my interview with Dinesh Bhugra, whose P.A. has written to set it up: another thinker/doctor [the President of the Royal College of Psychiatry]/BK Europe-bound, Europe-"wrapt" -- Donne beneath me, is the sentence/ is the horizontal and slightly curved meniscus bounding what's below: the deep structure: the thousand and one possible choices for what follows "the" or "a":

I re-read Stein. Lol Stein. After some years, during which my happiness became less balcony-driven, and more breath-based -- I recently attended a twelve step/Buddhist meditation group at my local Shambhala Center called B 12 -- a vitamin? -- sitting cross-legged in a room full of recovering addicts and alcoholics: I had, this summer, some time on my hands. Like, a week. My son in New York City, lounging pool-side with his cousins, and me, with books, attempting not to fuck up the only seven days for a year that I've been completely alone, with the exception of a huge black dog and a randomly ecstatic calico cat with a partially amputated foot.

(Summer) reading is, thus, the dharma that comes before the book, which is both karmic and relational, as well as a pathway to the third jewel: sangha, as performed, in community, as the psychology of groups: the ability to love, to persecute, to desire, to witness, and so on. Thus:

Stein (LOL): some notes/past the summer's red point:

1. Lol Stein re-organized the matter of the traumatic event to produce -- an event -- that allowed her to live, with abandon, the conditions that previously paralyzed her/turned her into: "an upright sleeping beauty." The "matter": Tatiana: her only witness, who petted her hand as Michael Richardson danced with Anne-Marie Stretter in the ballroom at Old Town Beach. She was there becomes: she is there/the "there." Lol Stein says it to Jack Hold herself: "a substitute." I think the word and then she says it. Re-phrasing becomes an addiction, the minor pleasure of this book. The dog licks the salt off my shin, where my leg is hanging off the couch, but I don't move. To re-phrase: I cannot move.

2. Lol Stein lies back in the grass, exhausted from her day. Elizabeth Grosz, in my companion studies, writes: "Exhaustion at the limit of a species field." No, I wrote that in the margin, then transcribed it to my notebook. My dog ate the book. The dog ate "Chaos, Territory, Art." Have to take the cat to Dr. Butts to get the stitches removed. Reading, I am not a mother. All year, I've been reading as a mother, exiting and entering the night-time space where the books are, regulating myself, dominated by ritual acts of preparation. Question: Why is Jack Hold so aroused by the possibility of being destroyed by Lol? "Let her consume and crush me with the rest." Page 97.

3. I want to ask Dinesh Bhugra the central question of "Schizophrene," to see how the problem set in the document is resolved or imagined by transcultural psychiatric practice. A question that links the visual recollection of a war/non-injury to desire, a displaced erotics, an intense contact that becomes, temporally, something that is both arousal and numbness. Not simply the desire to repeat, and thus discharge; something else. Something that depends upon an optical progression. Jack: "What is it you wanted?' Lol: "To see them."

4. To have contact with the person who witnessed your betrayal. To betray the witness because you were not aware of the witness stroking your hand all night. To counter-obliterate the shame of having been seen, entranced, by your own betrayal. To see and not to feel. To reverse the conditions but not to repeat. To recreate them with an ancillary element not dominant in its time. A psychotic rephrasing. A new path.

5. Page 67: "One should never be completely cured of one's passion."

6. "...her body is only whole in a hotel bed." Page 70.

7. The blank female deity of Lol Stein, activated. A fetish. Who arrives? Lol. Who goes? Lol. Who goes back? She does. In this way, her obsession becomes an act of divination. A trance. Who is Paolo Javier? " Dear Bhanu, Hope all is well. Jill Magi forwarded your contact info. We wanted to tell you about our next volume of 2nd Ave Poetry, in the hope that you will consider submitting your work to it. With guest editor Alan Clinton, author of Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics (Peter Lang, 2004), we are putting together a special volume on the Occult and other performance-based spiritual practices. For this invite-only issue, we are soliciting the work of poets/artists like yourself who might be willing to devote themselves to seeking an intersection between avant-garde art/poetry/prose and various spiritualist, magic, and occult practices ranging from their oral roots/routes to the more recent history of haunted media—from spirit photography to electronic voice and image effects of the post-cybernetic era./ While there are many artistic traditions one might cite/elaborate that have appropriated, more or less earnestly, sacred or occult practices, we are especially interested in what magic and ritual could mean today, how it could be reinvented for you, for us, for an everyday life that is not necessarily everyday. Alan Clinton and I believe in the power of spiritual energies (whatever their source), prophetic utterances (whatever their destination), and magical rituals (particularly practices that haunt a space by introducing the element of chance or producing altered states of consciousness) to intensify artistic events for the producer/practitioner as well as the observer/collaborator./ We also believe that the results of divinatory practices are more often than not merely a new topography of the unknown rather than a definitive revelation. The interest for the spiritual adept as well as the avant-garde artist lies in the uncanny parallels, the wrong turns, the polyglot or inscrutable marks, the visual and aural blurs and scratches, the cracks in the shell produced by the divinatory event./ Whether you respond to our invitation from the standpoint of an experienced practitioner or a willing experimenter, we would be interested in you collaborating with us in the production of individual works in the vicinity of this bewitched terrain and perhaps including, not explanations of the results, but descriptions of the compositional processes you have borrowed, adapted, or invented, including perhaps explanations of your guiding motivations. In doing this, you will be contributing to an issue that will contain brilliant work as well as an array of shared practices that we might call an ensemble of occult poetics. Who knows, perhaps new relations between contributors and our audience will emerge, societies and collaborations secret and not so secret, group spells whose result cannot be predicted in advance?/....Best Wishes, Paolo."

8. Have to let the dog into the garden. 6 a.m. Last night, I wrote a burnt sequence, burning as I went. Pema Chodron, Shambhala retreat, July 2009, when asked, "How do you let go?", responded (tried to write it down quickly, as she spoke): "When you find yourself hooked by aggression, by an addiction, by the undertow of an addictive relationship, whatever it is, that surge, there are three things you can do to unhook. One, drop the story-line. Two, connect to the vast space that surrounds what's happening, the feeling in your body, whether that's discomfort or pain. Three, abide with the texture of the energy as it is." I came home to the book. Not a lover, a book. After years of attempting to read this book, I finished it, then re-phrased, following the instructions of my teacher, and also those of Elizabeth Grosz, and also those of Duras, who let narrative exhaust itself, which is what I want too:

"I write in a field of rye.
I watch a woman let her hair down in a lit window.
I blank out over my children's tea.
I feel something.
Love is posture. Aperture. Stance.
I return to Town Beach.
I slide onto the ground.
I pin up my blonde hair and button up my grey coat."

Honorary Punjabi of the Month: Amber Di Pietra...

Who sent me this article about a reform school, in Punjab, for delinquent monkeys. There are many stories I could tell about these monkeys, and Punjabis, and what happens if you are Punjabi and bring a monkey home (which I did as a nine year old, and then, metaphorically, when I was thirty-six), but for now:



"Indian school for rogue monkeys

Monkeys have become a major nuisance throughout India
Wildlife officials in India plan to build a special school to improve the behaviour of delinquent monkeys.
They say the aim is to target monkeys that pose a serious threat to people in the state of Punjab.
Officials say monkeys are a growing menace in Punjab as the animals move into towns and cities looking for food.
The state government has asked India's Central Zoo Authority for funds to build the country's first monkey rescue and rehabilitation centre.
Punjab has more than 65,000 wild monkeys.
As more and more forests disappear, they are increasingly encroaching into human settlements, say experts."

Poem with line breaks: Mumbai, 1989

I wrote this poem twenty years ago, in a time and place when I didn't know New York was a state; I never thought about the U.S., never had any desire to visit it, or any curiosity about what it contained. Some vague idea that it was a place where people went to whale-watch; also, to eat bagels with cream cheese and lox (in Woody Allen films). The first thing I did, my first morning in Manhattan, a year after I wrote this poem, was to march myself down some long road to the Empire State Building in a black dress and huge black Italian straw hat embroidered with red flowers that cost me seventy pounds in Covent Garden, from a little hat shop where only three people can be in it at one time and the rest have to wait outside in a line. I bought it to come to America in, blowing all my money. I think I had fifty dollars to get me to where I was going, in Western New York. At the top of the Empire State Building, I took my hat off and another tourist photographed me -- grinning, with a shaved head. Then I took the elevator down, to a basement cafe, where I ordered the mythical bagel with lox, not knowing what lox was. "Is it a kind of jam?" I asked the waitress. She had a pink 1950s uniform on and sat down with me in my booth, to watch me take my first bite.

First Sips/Bites, continued:

In Colombia, I drank coffee from a tiny paper cup.
In Chile, I drank an apricot liquer from a cloudy blue bottle, in a walnut orchard.
In India, I drank chai from a clay cup then threw it on the tracks.
In Holland, I drank beer in a movie theater, watching Betty Blue in French with Dutch subtitles.
In Scotland, I drank tea in a basement cafe with green plastic tablecloths.
In Saudi Arabia, I drank filtered coffee with a side of cream on a balcony that smelled (the air) of sugar and dried fish.
In the Kingdom of Oman, I drank filtered coffee. I drank it black; I thought the milk looked watery.
In England, I drank champagne on a riverbank with my friends, and in the Sherwood forest, and in my garden at night.
In Wales, I drank coca-cola at Barry Island, where the water came up to our waist in a swarm of kelp.

I feel as if I am forgetting some countries, such as France, and so on. Okay, France. Hot chocolate from a bowl in the morning, licking the foam off my fork.

Switzerland. Italy. California. Oregon. Montreal. Toronto. Maine. Iowa. Colorado. And my very favorite, New Mexico. I could drink anything in northern New Mexico, water, wine, and I would not cause any trouble.

All of this is to say that when I arrived in Mumbai, the first thing I did was have a juice from one of the stainless steel stalls a few blocks from the water. Tangerine juice. Massumi juice. Then I wrote this, in a little cafe -- I wanted to write it before I reached the sea, a sea I had never touched before, set eyes on, travelled across. For me, this was what writing poetry with line breaks meant, in the time just before this one, in which I do not break anything; on the contrary, I try to make things stream. In 1989, I thought of the poem as something a person would also keep private from others; to be read to a particular person, perhaps; a map; a net; presage; a way to fold something into the time; not visible; without any pragmatic function. Romantic. Dramatic. With a small detail of place. In this poem, I felt so much intensity to be so close to the Arabian Sea, and not to have seen it. I delayed myself, with my juice, writing and hearing at the same time, but not seeing.

Yesterday, opening an old notebook, looking for a description of the Ajanta caves, for "Schizophrene", I found it. God knows how I knew about the stars around "attracted"; I repeat "unseen" twice, which I vaguely remember thinking was Marxist -- that it wasn't about embellishment, it was about exhausting a physical value from an artifact before discarding it:

POEM FOR YOUR LAST NIGHT IN INDIA

I don't want to be sad today.

And I wasn't.
reliquary - objects *attracted* to
an unseen central place -
I saw bits of cloth, a collage of
feathers.

I saw the sky between the rotten houses
and felt- seagulls-
the sharp air - that it
was close. Sensed

But unseen. Shops of dried natural
forms, as if the ocean itself
had crystallized on the shelves
of a Mumbai boutique.

Don't go.

Quick Question: Who sent the Buddha?

I received a birthday package containing a really cool skirt, a tiny Buddha, and an experimental, collectively written novel with a red cover. I thought I recognized the handwriting on the box as my friend Bonny's, and thought it was strange she would send two packages on the same day. I threw away the box. However, long after the Recycling Truck had come and gone in a puff of acrid air and diesel fumes, it became clear it was not Bonny who had sent me the Buddha etc; she sent me a book about chimps. Having exhausted the list of kind people of my general acquaintance, hello! If it was you, please tell me, and I am very sorry for not writing proper thank you note on real paper earlier. You possibly live in L.A. or in a zip code with lots of ones and twos in it, which is all I remember.

Wait! I am a detective of some kind. I just typed in Uta Brandes, so that I could download an image for public display and the first thing that came up was Laura Mullen's blog, afteriwasdead:

".....brush with Fluxus works I didn't know, artists I'd hardly heard of, hours spent choosing books (*The Walk Book,* *Uta Brandes--she, and she as a colective novel*) I'l probably have to mail home--but what it is to linger in a room with that kind of selection! Then there was the Beuys exhibit: his work ups the ante is an understatement: his work changes everything. The stacked...."

It is very late now so I shall stop there. It must be Laura Mullen. This also explains the skirt.

WAIT!!!!!! New clue: the L.A. I thought I saw was really LA, for Louisiana! Which is Laura Mullen of Baton Rouge!!!!!

UPDATE: It was. The package also contained a fantastic mascara.

Southall Black Sisters: Two Short Videos Appending Schizophrene: Stapler Marks [up and down the right forearm]: NOTES towards a book-in-progress

In fact, it is not a grid. It's the body, slung around the neck, pasted there until it is revived. By what? Trance. Thursday nights, Sunrise Radio broadcast Quawaali, and sometimes my mum would call in and have long conversations with the DJ, who called her "Aunty." In my book, I want to make a quawaali space. I want to fill the dark grooves of the paper, folded so many times, then unfolded and placed in the grass, with a coarse gold powder. Saffron. Dried paint. The shed carcasses of the petals on East 5th Street that are sedimented, casually, in the gutters, the last two days. Not petals. Something that has fallen from the trees. Flowers? I leaned down to look more closely, out walking Porky last night, and found, face down in the thick of the gold matter, an angel. In the form of a badminton cock, it's white face painted or marked with the primitive lines of a face. No arms, and then the dress. It wasn't such a co-incidence as I was on the corner with Pierce, next to the Greek Orthodox Church, which has a small Sunday school in the shed behind. The sketch for an angel/the angel must have slipped from the hand of a child.

I've been thinking of the role of lament, of a sub-dominant song, an alaap, in the healing of war-time effects, and also as the counter-obliterative gesture to the kind of domestic violence that goes unmarked in a minority community. I've been re-reading Edward Said, who haunts Kimiko Hahn's "A Narrow Road to the Interior." But mostly I re-read Hahn's book of poems, which takes on sadism, sadism and intimacy, as weak subjects. Weak in the sense that the head can't maintain its position on top of the neck with its typical integrity. I imagine her writing her book in bed, though she probably wrote these lines at a desk, or at the table of the cafe she mentions, somewhere in Brooklyn: "Do I fall for men not this girl's father - as fuel? As tonic for the waiting? As a way to ruin? As a way to subvert some painful remnant?"

The remnants are sticky. They long to adhere. My friend Zvi Ish-Shalom, a deconstructed rabbi currently completely a training as a Rolfer, once explained to me that the remnants, the visceral shards, are made of light, and that light is an attractant. Dismemberment is useful. It's the precursor to radiance, or at least the kind that's transmitted through the body to other bodies. A kind of touch. Remnant #42: One of the first lines of poetry I read in this country was the translation of the Vallejo line: "I think I will die on a Thursday evening/in Paris/when it is raining." Okay. Enough of that. It's a sunny day in Colorado. Here's the Southall Broadway at 4 pm:

Reading report: Summer Writing Program: The Last Night!

Simone Forti stroked a twig/branch and pretended to be a chimp. There was a primal image of a girl lying in the grass, hiding, during a war time scene. She said: "I wanted to visit Delphi."

Michelle Ellsworth performed an auto-Ayurvedic sequence on her third eye with Morton's iodized salt, or possibly non-iodized salt. She said: "I wanted the cheese-burger to have a good life. Some good times." In the next scene, ketchup substituted for the permission, or actually, the ability to, eventually.....no, I can't say it. Actually, I can't spell it.

Steven Taylor sang a Sephardic love song.

C.S. Giscombe mapped out Dayton, Ohio, assiduously, whether it was raining or not. He said the rain "was not a symbol" of his mother's death, "it was the actual death." I think he said that.

In other news, Milwaukee is not in Michigan; therefore Woodland Pattern is in....Wisconsin? Kass Fleisher is working on violence and poverty, an Appalachian novel in the form of three books ("I've written the first book"); as she was speaking, I had the image in my mind of a lotus root* - - how shaggy and dirty it is, and how it thrives on shit. She is speaking and I overlay the whole thing with unasked for pre-played recall of Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir. That is where I saw the filthy water, housewives washing dishes, squatting at the rim and then the flowers, which I then saw everywhere else, scanning my environment like the Punjabi teenager version of Terry Eagleton, who said reading bus tickets was the same as reading Milton. Textural. I lay awake in bed with John Musson all night, skim-reading Paradise Lost. We both got As, or A-s, on the exam, which we took the next day. Nodal, sickened by our time together in so many ways, we nevertheless succeeded in latching on to the veneer, which is an adaptation. The writer awake in the thick of the night is not 100% human. The eyes slip up to the top of the head. I focused again on Kass, and for the rest of the night, I learned that other writers were also working on subjects that had a complex, rotted sheen.

*Perhaps because she brought up Pakistan. (Like a mouse, sicked up by a terrible cat. I think of the cat as England. But not, in Kass's case, regurg. like that. Never. It is turbulence, in her document, and I compare this with the terrible blankness of act. being proximal. She said: "Maybe bec. it's not their war." (L'Inde.) I want to drink chai in Lahore, the home of my mother's family for a generation. Not long. Long enough to produce a sequence of primal images which are worked out in different ways by the different children. New idea for Schizophrene: go to Pakistan. This fact would be comedic, repugnant, a form of suicide. That order placed at the window for an absurd, and egocentric, cup of tea.)

Creature/paragraph: A Midsummer Report

Reading Gertrude Stein to two eight year olds and an eleven year old: they laugh themselves sick. One of them suggests that "Rose" is a "Rose": "because she looks like one." That isn't entirely pleasant to think about: the petal-structure of a human head, carved on its rope-like stem. Luckily, I was raised (sort of) as a Hindu, and in my next life, I hope to come back as someone who is not embarrassed by her genre. Inter-genre, I have wasted at least eight months, if I added it all up, wondering how to convey and scrape off pages, so that fiction is a coat, a bed, a cardigan, a wetsuit, a chamber-pot: see: 1879, a plum year for the novel in it strictest form: and not narrative. The 11 year old, hearing Stein for the first time, said: "Bhanu, did you know that there was a creature that we come from, and then we grew and grew?" He said it in the middle of laughing about Pepe, the dog that did "inside" what should be done "outside." Prompted.



It's midsummer. I wanted very much to go to the Thursday night reading at Naropa, but had cat situation. My cat Brenda somehow pushed the fan out of the window and was trapped, upside down, by her foot. It was horrible. I reached out to move the fan (it was dark and I thought she was under it; instead, she clung on with claws and teeth, to my arm). Puncture wounds, vein, blood pouring out above my wrist, dog barking, cat screaming, son crying. I am on antibiotics for the first time since I was a kid. They make you sleepy. Hopefully can go to to the reading on Saturday. Simone Forti. Michelle Ellsworth. C.S. Giscombe. And someone else. Can't recall. Must start drinking coffee:



Actually, have to pick up the kitty from Dr. Butts at 3; she had a broken toe. Very sad. Last night, she just stared into my eyes with such expression, then licked my right forearm and hand, where it's all going on. Scabs and biscuits. The doctor said I have the softest blood he has ever heard. We discussed meditation. This is in the Take Care clinic at Walgreens. Okay, a whole paragraph on my cat, and so far a smaller paragraph on experimental prose.

This summer, I taught at Goddard College in Vermont, a succession of green hollows:



It rained and rained. I loved it. I loved going back to my room, peeling off my wet clothes, and getting into bed with a book and a cup of tea, with the forest outside my window. I spoke to the forest in French, which I cannot speak normally. My vocabulary is limited to love and coffee. This worked out for the forest, I think, as one day, after a chanted VIENS MON AMOUR AUTOUR DU FORET AVEC LE FORET and so on, I looked down, to see on the path, amber with pine needles, a turquoise eggshell. A half of one. Then I looked up to see Douglas Martin and Darcey Steinke, and Abby, Darcey's daughter, coming up the slope. I gave Abby the shell for a montage she was videoing, in her palm. They were like a family. It started to rain. I felt shy. I felt shy of novelists. They looked so lovely, pale, and glittery (Douglas was coated with a golden sheen of something along his cheekbones and on his neck), there at the beginning of the woods. I went back to my room, and wrote this, for Vanessa Place and Laynie Brown's project, an anthology of conceptual writings and statements by experimental women writers. This is what I wrote, in language formed from the study this past Spring, of architecture/thresholds/language, at Naropa:

Dear Laynie Browne and Vanessa Place:




"I write with an interest in matrices: the diagonal relationships between remnants, sentences that do not go away, and so on. In my current project, "Schizophrene," I'm working out how to fold, tear and re-build vertical or trans-generational space. The work with organizing space- - Indian, Pakistani, and British space -- triplicates an already water-damaged grid, and what I have noticed, as I continue to extend my narrative, is that this grid has started to fail. The closest I can come to describing this failure is that the surface of the book, whenever I write a section, refracts its contents. This isn't a process of fragmentation. Rather, it feels like trying to write on something that isn't there, as if the bonds of the paper, its basic grasses, culled from a landscape, have started to loosen. How this is worked out through the subject matter is that the schizophrenic herself has started to vibrate. Instead of describing a character or a figure, I'm notating a disseminated "red and black." My question for this project has become: How do I compose/re-compose a body that's pure sensation? Working towards this body, a body not typically visible in diasporic writing, I've found it useful to re-think the concept of a book that can't be written. The failure of my subject to adhere has become the site of my enquiry, rather than a disaster of genre or a collapse of language and form (and not in the good way that such collapses happen in hybrid forms.) In other words, I've trained myself to think of failure as a conversion threshold. This is from Manuel De Landa's thinking on chemical processes. Just before water boils, it goes flat, and then, abruptly, it changes phase. Similarly, how can I trust that the exhaustion and blankness of an immigrant content, a content that comes close to death, to a certain kind of madness, is a threshold state? The exact moment before something never seen before: appears? Arrives. And that vibratory effects, the loss of form in these primal ways, have their own integrative trajectories?"

UPDATE: JUST BACK FROM THE VET. BRENDA'S TOE WAS AMPUTATED!!!!!!!!! HE SAID IT WAS NOT JUST BROKEN, IT HAS BEEN SEVERED IN AN ALMOST COMPLETE CIRCLE. "I GOT IN THERE AND SAW THE TOE WAS DEAD." I HAD TO LEAN AGAINST THE WALL. YOU THINK THEY ARE GOING TO REMOVE THE TOENAIL, AND THEN YOU FIND OUT IT'S THE ENTIRE APPENDAGE THAT IS IN THE BUCKET.

Goodbye for the Summer, My Chickens!

A chicken: possibly handicrafted and arriving, in a cardboard box, at the Berthoud Post Office without fanfare. Exotic. Silly. Lays eggs. I brought four creepily blue-ish eggs home and gave them immed. to Cordell, my neighbor, who is my own personal Cesar Milan when it comes to dog training and human etiquette (around dogs and each other.) Are you a chicken? Goodbye forever! No, just for the summer...I will resume my blogolia, my infernal and busted up documentation of the Jack Kerouac School, come Fall.

Summer Writing Program notes: [To be filled in at random when something happens that could not previously have been guaranteed.]

Ciao! And here, from Indian Idol, to tide you over, in case you miss my extremeley intelligent and inciscive critiques of contemporary poetry, is "Bhanu" -- a star of stage and screen [he's the one in the red turban and lycra catsuit): and, not to mention: a MAN (Bhanu is not really meant, unmodified, to be a woman's name):

F: gilla

F something. Something beginning with F - gilla. I potted it. It was flowering. The greenhouse is so beautiful and soft. The really nice greenhouse people let me do anything. They wear hats and listen to music and discuss the fertility of the soil at the drop of a ***. Then I went back to my classroom, where I was stunned by how defiant each performance/reading was, how divergent and strong. Driving home, delayed, I said every writer's name aloud and then, for each one, I invented an "animal geometry." It was too late. I drove too fast. I wanted to say: your mutated city (Rodrigo), your borderland Frida (Dominique), your lyric essay at the last possible moment (Bret), your blood imprint (Suzanne), your genetic algorithims (Jen), your neon-lit factory (Flash), your oceanic trajectories (Megan), your feral children cuffing each other's necks and jaws (Ashe), your woodland perimeter with its flash of red (Jesse), your back yard that functions as an underworld, as seen through the mesh of the porch door (Shane), your quixotic East Coast novella (Sarabeth). Instead, to their faces, I said:

GOODBYE FOREVER.

The class (MFA) ended, and I went to meditate in the shrine room. Nobody else was there, so I lit the candles beneath the golden Buddha, right to left. Then I went to the next class (BA) and was stunned, by what burst out. Is the whole year a kind of insane build-up to one Tuesday afternoon? It was worth it. I crossed the boundary of the campus: intact, smiling, and when I got home, I felt like a mother to my son, a real one, a sun.

Sunday Night: Chimp City

Just read a 26 page essay on the (irreversible) thetic imagination. Just read several hundred pages. Just disagreed with a definition of divination. Just learned something about: the graphic novel (Molly Connor), Oklahoma (Emrys Moreau), vertigo (Jenny Henry), stunting (Marie Larson), and the kind of infinite snow a page is made of (Kristi Yorks). Five MFA thesises. That's not even a word, but I can't bring myself to say the real one, the truly abnegated plural.

As the intensity of this year, my first full year in one place, ebbs, I turn my attention to my own writing: editing the third draft of a novel detailing the life of a chimp, post-lab/post-TV, "Chimp Haven"; a re-telling of the story of Hanuman as an experimental children's story for the Kindegarde project in SF; a collaboration with Elena Georgiou (a mixed-place Londoner with Cypr. roots) that comes in the form of heart-breaking questions, the most recent one being whether or not, in speaking about my life before life in this country, I feel like I'm lying [answer: yes]; transl. the final eighteen sections of Marguerite Burnat Provin's 1939 prose-poem book, "Un Livre Pour Toi"*; writing a non-dead-draft of "Schizophrene," which dies every time I leave the desk to make a sandwich, though, really, what's the point of a sandwich? [I never eat them, except in emergencies or on Continental flights, in country. Once, absent-mindedly, somewhere above Kansas City, I ate a...cheeseburger]:

*Sample Translation, page 87.

XXXIII.

You said to me: Come….
Your hand gripped mine, your gaze penetrated the flesh of my chest, your hip presses against my mine and above me, your desire, circling “my hair/head” like a raptor.
In your strong arms, my waist flexed like a poplar, “a kind of poplar,” your breath “rapidly coming into my mouth”: I vaguely heard your words: I will carry you for a long time, a long time.
And the room reversed itself in my eyes, “which had rolled back into my head.”
You said to me: Come.

In the novel I am writing [define: writing], someone watches this:

PS. I don't mean they are watching the Rivers of Blood speech (solely), but that they are watching the BNP version that includes the "fruition" of Enoch Powell's "prophecy."

PPS. BNP: British National Party.

A Bit Of Daljit Nagra To Start The Day With

Year End Socialization Module With Brie

It was lovely. Had top conversation about species, anesthesia and a kind of lyric gaze that can't be avoided with Marie Larson. J'Lyn Chapman's boyfriend, Alex, said: "I have always had an aversion to fake meat."



That was Sentence of the Day, hands down. Afterwards, when I asked my son what he liked best about the evening, a Naropa drinking-wine-in-the-garden kind of evening, he said: "I liked the lady who knows about pirate ships, and the man who said that thing about flamingoes, and the man who brought me the brownie. That was a good brownie." That would be Megan Di Bello, Jack Collom, and Andrew Schelling. Then we drove home, where we read poems for a bit before bed. When T. asked me if I knew any poems with airports in them (we think a lot about airports), I read this one, but not to him:

Marina Boroditskaya, "Untitled":

So much gentleness from unknown men
So much gentleness from unknown men
for no particular reason.
Once in Paris a waiter turned to me: “Chérie!
Don‘t forget your cigarettes.”

And in a London market, when
I wanted to buy a Beatles record,
the stall-holder sighed: “What can I do, love,
if the price goes up again?”

In New York airport, an old black man
took me to the right gate, saying:
“Don’t panic, baby, just follow me!”
And I followed in his footsteps.

So much kindness from strange men!
Why the hell should I need more?
Lie peaceful in your oyster, pearl.
Stay calm, Moon, in the heavens.


Translated by Ruth Fainlight

Diversity Task Force

"Buddhist-Inspired" University Anecdote # 32:

Suzanne Bennally (Chairperson of the Diversity Task Force): "Well, maybe we could meet one more time this semester, perhaps for breakfast, or happy hour?"

Michael Franklin (Transpersonal Psychotherapy Department/Art Therapy): "I don't want to be happy for just one hour...I want to be happy for the rest of my life!"

Wonderful conversation about group psychology, W.S. Bion, how an institution might begin to work with its unconscious, race and environmental studies, contemplative pedagogy, and the support a culture might give to the person who says the thing that no-one else wants to hear. As a professor, you're meant, I think, to abhor your administrative responibilities, but Wedesday mornings in Paramita are secretly the most brilliant thing ever. As I left to get my coffee then go the car, three Somatic Psychotherapy graduate students were doing some kind of slow motion dance/traverse in the corridor, in a pod of some kind, their feet a mutual tentacle. You can't go wrong with a sloppy hybrid. Ever. Because they are the hybrid that, pre-animal, hasn't carved out a spectacular niche.

I have nothing else to report. That's not true, but I have to go pick up an extra-large pizza for a kite-flying party with two "wolves," and it starts in 15 minutes.

Tulip Talk

Erin McCarthy: The concept, via Luce Irigaray/Daoist models of maternity, of the embryo ejected through the top of the head into the community of the sky and then (probably) a kiss.

Lisa Birman: Tectonics, diptychs, the Czech republic, how countries are gestated, and what it means to have been born on an island that is also, even after all these years, a "naughty child."

We recorded then archived their conversation, for an undergraduate class, Hybrid A, who looked, quite frankly, exhausted and so, in due course, we decamped to the tulips on the back lawn. I said: "Tulips?" They said: "Tulips." All of this is archived, and if you too wanted to think about alternative models of maternity, or about the philosophy of geography, you could. Possibly you could wash your hair and move to Prague for the summer instead. Please steal the tiny spoon from your saucer and mail it to me, as proof that you wrote in your notebook and ordered coffee, even though you hate drinking coffee before noon.

David Buuck

I think I spelled that right. More fingers placed upon more blank space. My uncle told me once, in an entirely imperfect and left justified version of English, which was not English and never will be, which I never explained to the five or six men who wanted to marry me when I was much younger than I am now, which (now) isn't bad, it's just: "Passions and Impressions" TAKE TWO. You can never, as a rule, get enough Neruda down you, though there are often consistent delays lasting between four and eighteen years between the encounter with his poetry, his essays set in tropical Ceylon, in which he declares that he can't really stand Indian people, and then the poetry again.

Back to my uncle and David Buuck. My uncle was, from childhood, functionally blind. You've already heard this story. I should stop. Oh, okay. He was blind, but he wasn't really, he was just poor and there was, obviously, not a ripe cent for the operation that would (eventually) correct his vision. In the jungle, where this sorry and memorable tale is set, is where he would have been found, circa, I guess 1960. I'm not very good with time. See: above. Anyway, he was there learning the Bhagavad Gita by heart so that he could, post-jungle, earn some kind of temple stipend. It was about this time that he began, too, a lifelong study of astrology, palmistry, and color so intense you have to just take it in all at once. Like straight through your face or something. Which resembles love. Which doesn't matter anymore.

Back to the lion. My uncle, a rarefied waif of a grown man, in his saffron tatters and flip flops, was wandering along, or going somewhere directly I suppose -- "wandering" to the unsophisticated, contemporary eye -- when all of a sudden a "lion" appeared before him on the path. Putting aside the question of what a path is for now, what happened is that the holy man whom my uncle was apprenticed to: fled. Leaving my uncle standing there, oblivious really to anything but an intensive and proximal form. An orange and gold blur, perhaps with stripes. (My uncle, I found out in my late twenties, when I asked him to re-tell the story, said: "Yes, a lion", when I asked him if what he'd actually seen was a tiger [an animal more common than a lion in the section of Himachal my uncle was: inhabiting].)

Me:"Then what happened?"

The Roach (Uncle Roshan): "I stood very still and he walked through me."

A sentence, an explanation, that has mesmerized me for years. Did he mean to say the "lion" brushed past him as he froze, pinned to the background of cedar trees? Or did he mean that vibrating, becoming something beyond the spectrum of known colors, he grew transparent, that this happened very quickly, and that the lion did not see him, a person who could not see? That the lion walked through his body, in real?

I mixed David Buuck in. I could not make a separate animal with horns, and so instead of converting a writer into a beast of some proportions, I just pasted him in.*

Almond paste. Almondine. All week, an old friend has been here from Paris. She stepped over the line at DIA into "Passengers Only", and I said: "You're stepping over the line into atelier space." Drive north to the atelier, stopping in "A" for pastries filled with a dense almond paste. Waving goodbye, I stepped over the line too, just for a moment, and said: "I'm in atelier space too." Soft rain, erratic sunlight, the fellowship of a sculptor called Pierre in his early sixties, the ubiquitous "marzipan"...

A paste you can eat. In other news, I'm back from the dog park, and I just discovered that the Cub Scouts are an anti-gay organization. Was I the last person on the planet to figure this out? So, in lieu of scouting, I am trying to train my son as if I was his "father." We climbed a cliff, crossed a river though it was raining, then went to the cafe for cocoa, poetry, and Captain Underpants. I am trying hard to be a Shiva-Shakti parent, and failing miserably, I sometimes think. Though when my son is reading at The Coffee Tree counter, I try to write, and I do, responding to Elena Georgiou's question: "What turns you into an 'upright sleeping beauty'?"

Later, at home, we read a Hans Chr. Anders. fairy tale called "The Angel and the Child." It is very dark, which suits us, because it's raining.

*come visit?
>or i come in fall?
>or tell me a story?
>or write a blogpost starring me as a horned animal
>how do you 'read' an urban environment?
>how do you 'read' immigrant visual culture w/o fetishizing it?
>how do you do?
>buuck

Maternity, Lisa Birman, and Feeling vs Design PLUS Frank DiBello, his friend Mike, Elizabeth Lonzano and Jarvis Fosdick.

I just wanted to write something that I can return to. Put my finger on the spot. At the end of the semester closes in, like the floor routine in the Olympic gymnastics final, except that nobody is wearing a leotard, which is good (doing a brief mental scan of my colleagues, though I think, actually, that some of them could carry it off very well. It: pale blue nylon with a "number" safety pinned to the left shoulder-blade), I am writing faster than I am thinking. Or the other way around.

Currently, I am eating applesauce. I have to read Amina Cain's palm. These are my main two thoughts on the subject of what I did and what remains to be done. This is a picture of "Frankie with applesauce" that seems to combine the various elements of this blog post (which, as Frank Di Bello, a liquidator from Manhattan, pointed out, nobody asked me to write: WHO ASKED YOU? WHO? [On blogging.])

Rain

It's raining so hard as to make Colorado dark by 4 p.m., glittery and bridal; though I probably take my definition of marriage from the subcontinent, where the marriage ceremony begins after dusk -- a procession, the bride coming last holding a box of gold on her head, arms up, and dressed in red. A brass band. Everyone hanging on their locked gates as she passes. Hardy, with his love of weather, light at different hours and pre-industrial ceremony, girls in white dresses with flowers knotted in their plaited hair, would have loved India, I think. Blood ties. My friend, G., is visiting from France, fast asleep now as I write. A jar of something something "d'oie" in the cupboard. Champagne in the fridge. "Right now," said G., on the drive home from DIA, "it's burn your decollete weather in Paris."

On Monday, at Naropa, in Hybrid A, we're going to be mixing the concept of diaspora with that of a triptych. I've been thinking of the artifact, in each space, that's fragmenting, not because of form, not because of its own force, but because of its profound attraction to the artifacts in the other spaces. Last week, I visited Leslie McAllan's Transpersonal Psychotherapy graduate seminar on the Paramita campus, to give a talk on trauma and narrative. I described to them the "book that can't be written," and then an amazing woman, Monica, a trauma therapist, said: "Perhaps it's not possible to tell the story because it is precisely the story that floods the nervous system, triggers the traumatic response, kicks you out of the 'book.' I think you're being invited, by this work, to imagine a way of creating it that is not a story at all, not even images. How can you stay with the sensations, let your art be made of those sensations?"

I thought of the earth art I made in India this winter, the Shiva rite mixed with Mendieta process, and how, in the last minutes, when the body was made, flowering, on fire, I placed my hands on the knot of the left thigh. Sculptures breathe, seem to breathe, I've known that from Ellora's Buddhas and from The British Museum's Buddhas. I imagined, I suppose, that the body I'd made was a true body and brought my hands to the place that was contracted just as I would do in my bodywork practice. In drawing "light" through my body into this body, it is not, upon reflection, the art process that's ephemeral. It's not the natural environment, or the extraneous materials the sculpture is made of. It's something that remains unrecorded in the visual domain: a subtle sensation of the bone marrow, or cranio-sacral fluid, I guess, flooding its stem. A micro-stress, said Leslie. "Intersectionality." A word, from psychology, to describe a client who is impacted by multiple categories, such as race, gender, economics and the conditions under which they are parenting.

I loved being in a transpersonal classroom. As if that wasn't enough, the next speaker was Elizabeth Lonzano, a Colombian scholar specializing in global feminism and strategies of non-violence. Setting up her power point presentation, she put on some music and said: "This music just wants to make me burst out dancing. I don't know if I'm going to be able to help myself from bursting." It is hard to explain how alive this person was. Who then spoke on her work as an international witness in the peace community of St. Jose de Apartado, where the people who live there resist, through non-violent means, the "killing, rekilling, and superkilling" that have dominated life in their country since the massacres of the 1940s.

Territory/terror: "It's not just that we're going to kill you, we're going to tell you we're going to kill you first. Then, we're going to cut your body into little pieces, because we know that your body is sacred to you, that it represents the earth, and your relationship to the earth, who is like a mother to you." These were Elizabeth's expressions, describing what it's like there every day, the domination of corporate paramilitary and military alliances, and how an act of resistance might look like this: if someone is killed, beheaded, their body chopped up with a machete, the entire village "goes into the jungle, looking for the pieces of the body, and then they bring them back. It's a celebration, it's saying, this blood is life, it's spilled into the earth, and now we've gathered the body and we'll bury it rejoicing that from this life is going to come so much growth." A "symbolic burial." Integrated power versus the power that comes from threat, in peace studies discourse. She described a man who met a paramilitary soldier in the jungle, on a small path, and when the soldier began to tell him, I'm going to kill you, this is what is about to happen to you, I'm going to cut your arm off and then...the man said: "It is not in your power to kill me. You can kill me, but the order is not coming from you. It's coming from God. God has given that order. I follow God's orders, and so do you."




Tell me what you know about dismemberment. As Elizabeth was speaking, speaking about body, jungle/ground and divine feminine as linked by the cellular matter of blood, the blood a kind of milk, I thought of the goddess Parvati, killed by her father and left on the ground. Shiva, her lover, found her and slung her body around his neck. He sat in kind of ruined trance for a long time until one day, unable to tolerate the pain of having lost her any longer, he stood up and flung the pieces of her body to each direction. So that, in modern India, to recreate the body of the goddess, to make that body whole again and to integrate it (through the physical effort of pilgrimage, through meditation, through opening yourself to the vibration of place) with yours, you go, in a lifetime, to all the places -- in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Tibet -- where the parts of her fell. Vulture Peak is where her ear is, I think. In Kolkata: her eye. Her big toe. And so on. I have visited her eyes, her ears, her tongue and her heart. My blood ties flood me, sometimes, and I want to go to where her stomach is, and her nose.

Elizabeth: "Do me a favor. Don't drink Coca Cola ever again. Don't eat Chiquita bananas. Whatever you do, don't eat a Chiquita banana. If you want to support peace and non-violence in Colombia, don't drink that coke."

Don't Let Poets Lie to You

Grazie, I. L., pour: cette bon(ne?) et macabre manifestation: dans le rue. The beautiful and distressed part of this mashed up Saturday morning says: yes. Now, like a soft doctor of the foot, which is the way a word tilts under the stress of its own body (not to mention the wooden bench I saw and sat on at Shakespeare's true home in Stratford-upon-Avon one chilly day: warped; the entire family used to sit on it for breakfast): I give you, via traits, via prostis ( a kind of bread dunked in whisky and served on feast days in the next neighborhood over in the days when alleys changed personalities as you navigated north, through the back streets, to the municipal pool):

Bjork plus TV:

Bjork's T.V. - The funniest home videos are here

Failed to upload. Am making spelt pasta for some cub scouts, and reading "Like Son" by Felicia Luna Lemus (Akashic Books), for Hybrid A on Monday. No! Wait! I did it. Make instant vow not to go mad on it: the injectable insult, the tall green shoe with twenty holes in it, what regular people call: "Do you want to come to Greece with me in May?" Uploading, I see the white sugar beaches and the turquoise sea. Nah, I say, patting the duvet to plump it up, let's stay in and read books instead.

Naropa, pre-war England, and "teddy bear as completely necessary corsage"

There are times when being at Naropa is like being in a mutated chapter or, I guess, episode (starring Jeremy Irons, not the new version) of Brideshead Revisited. I refer you to the photocopier in Sycamore. There I am, trying to sort myself out, on the verge of accidentally photocopying my left elbow, my right arm up to the shoulder in my "carry all," like anyone in need of finding their car keys before driving north. Suddenly, a graduate student, Jaykub, approaches and strikes up a conversation about my forthcoming curriculum for "memoir/anti-memoir," a class based on the Chain journal of the same name. I'm trying to define narrative, when I notice that the red blur in his arms is not a furry text book with rounded corners, or a bunched up sweatshirt...but Clifford. Actual red dog soft toy Clifford with a red and gold bow around his chubby little neck. I immediately take Clifford in my arms, it being after my class and myself being under no obligation, really, to discuss the early work of Sarah Schulman. (Just read the Belladonna book from the Elders series, her interview with Robert Gluck, amazing. I already lent the book to someone so I cannot quote from it here.) Clifford, a kind of massive, untended-to or recaptured teddy bear. Jaykub is about to take it to class. I let him, after a brief struggle in which Clifford seems really to want to come home with me.

Sean Labrador Manzano

invited me to write something for an Oakland magazine called Tea Party. I wrote this, transplanting from a humanimal log to write a schizophrene submission. This is an excerpt, which I wrote last night after my son had finally fallen asleep, and though I was tired, I didn't notice the time or even my own body. Writing, trance. Sean Labrador Manzano came to Naropa Summer Writing Program last year, and he writes, too, on diaspora, mental illness, and processes of healing that engage trance/altered consciousness. I don't know that this piece does -- but the effect of writing it did, something that lasted well into Sunday, which is a today, the soft "tonight" in which I am writing this:

...............................................................................................

Abiogenesis 4: “Watch Mrs. S. talking then turn away.”* Always turn away. These are exactly what you think they are. Notes that don’t bring happiness; bring landscapes. They bring “stand on knees to reach food.”* A wolf-like existence, a biological tale I wrote before I wrote this, a disaster. It’s not exactly working out, this. In fact, there’s a strong feeling of it should be over by now. Dreamed I left my coat on the aeroplane.

Some notes: a leg, pitted and mute. I took that leg in my arms. And what about London, a long walk through a commercial sector, a sprig of fresh mint tucked into an open pocket? I made an abiogenetic notebook, one that let me die, be close to the person just dead, a year or so out, and me, the **** in a garden and then on a street. Still, when I paused and looked through the shop window, I didn’t think “curation.” What I saw was a glass table subtly tilted on its side, for all the world to see. A woman was dressing it. She was rubbing a coarse powder all over the glass, dimming the play of the surface magically, by occult means, as if to say, it’s easy.

Abiogensis 5: “Rejects too-hot water for bath, saying ‘Na, Na, Na’.”* In this part, anything that doesn’t look like the self is relentlessly attached. Disease imagery. I studied and treated what I’d written until, like the silver geometry on a store-bought skirt, it was no longer elegant. It was no longer metropolitan. It no longer possessed the qualities of a safeguard, of a formal barrier, of bad snow.

Abiogenesis 6: “Kids removed.”*

Some notes: I pulled myself up from the floor and cleaned. The grid of the hospital was medieval down to the lateral, bisected courtyard with its mangy trollop of a tree. A crumpled tulip in its bower. And cats. Who left the gate unlatched? Who took the stars down from the wall? Who poured the milk into a shallow bowl?

Abiogensis 7: “To this date does not come so often for food and drink (in seclusion because of A’s death?). Associated with kids, fowl, hyena cub.”*

Some notes: I wanted to re-imagine the boundary. Perhaps I should say that I grew up partly in Ruislip. The Park Woods that bounded it were the hunting grounds of King Henry VIII, and were rimmed, themselves, with land forms that kept in the boar. I used to go those masses and lie down on them, subtly above a city but beneath the plate of leaves. One night I didn’t go home even when they hunted me and called my name. One morning I went there though it was raining. To soften this place would require time travel, which I am not prepared to do. I am not prepared to take off my clothes. I am not prepared to charter or re-organize the cosmic symbols of Sikhism, Anglican Christianity and the Hindu faith. One night, I went home, and my hands were caked in dirt and dew. My skirt was up around my ears. My legs were cold. The insides of my eyes were cold. The bath I took, I couldn’t get it hot enough. That night, my eyes turned blue.

......................................................................



(King Henry VIII, hunting)

Star Wars Theme Tune

My son is humming the Star Wars theme tune as he buckles himself into a sledding outfit. School is cancelled, and we had warm milk for breakfast and something called "Bunny Graham Crackers." My non-literary/posh reading at the moment is: "Split: A Memoir of Divorce" by Suzanne Finnamore. It is absolutely brilliant, but to quote from it would mean putting on my snow boots and going to the car, where it is at the moment. No. Boots on. And out I go. In my fluffy pink bathrobe -- a Christmas gift rejected by my mother, who said it was the kind of thing English people wear to hospital when they know they're going to die -- I feel like a stuffed animal, an aardvark perhaps, on well-oiled wheels. ( She gave me back the matching pink slippers too.)

"These Alien Feelings That Are Our Own" -- LINGIS (Foreign Bodies)

The Red River crests today; my neighbors are from Fargo (right). Here in Colorado, a heavy snow, the weakened trajectory of the storm in mid-America.

Red river, red river,
Slow flow
is silence...

Ted Hughes wrote those words; I memorized them as a teenager, in case of emergencies. What is chanting? What is the counter sensation that has to be concealed at all costs? I was repeating the words as the news of the ice jams, north of this territory, unfolded, on Facebook actually -- neighbor's status updates: "...is thinking of you in North Dakota and praying for you all." The poem -- the image, really, of a red river bursting its banks -- mixed with the news from Alaska, of Nicholas Hughes' death, a suicide -- he suffered from depression and extreme social anxiety -- which appeared on the front page of The Guardian when the flood did not.

"I hate the fucking Guardian" -- a British celebrity cook in the Mail Online.

"Uncharted territory" -- Dennis Walaker, mayor of Fargo.

"As the river's moving north, our issues are moving north" -- Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney.

"In a social gathering, one finds oneself exposed to a caustic or demeaning remark cast one's way. The blow passes, the one who has thus spoken offensively passes on to other things, to other people. One feels wounded, mortified. The feeling does not pass. One finds oneself unable to be fully present to what is now being said, and, that night, one goes over the wound, probing it, feeling it, verifying the pain. In the pain there lies the image of the aggression. Having been unable to parry the blow at the time or answer it with a counter-blow, one now works on the image" -- Alphonso Lingis.

Lingis' use of the comma...

Every time I look at the news a plane has fallen out of the sky.

Aries New Moon.

I'm wearing a peach-colored nylon dress and a wool cap, just back from the school run (rehearsals for tonight's performance of "Seussical," god help us), and my sister wants to play Othello. One game, then I'm getting down to work. I recently figured out that I have only 25 and a half more years to live, which is a lot in one way and not very much in another.

Spivak's "Righting Wrongs"

Reading it. She takes up the ethics of teaching literary studies/humanities in the West as a "second generation colonial" -- geared to critique hybrid subjectivities and at the same time, as far as I understand what she's saying in this essay, still working out the intensities of hybridity in a life that appears nowhere in any book - but which does arise, as a mode of transport in the university classroom, as a conversation about desire*, of the book-to-be-written as the carving out of [an unspecified] desire. Still reading. Texted my friend Andrea: "What are the characteristics of a second gen colonial?" She texted back: "You're one, by the way." I feel in every cell of my body the recognition, as Spivak has written elsewhere, of a potential category of contact, the "diagonal alliance" between somatic rapture/abnegation - - my language for a process of desire lived out beneath the glare of tribal/ethnic/sexual demands of all kinds -- and "hybrid": the genre that both collapses and propagates a literary "star." It's confusing.

My friend Elizabeth Welch has died, of a drowning; friends from New York called, in waves, to tell me over the past two days. She slipped and fell. It's incredibly sad, sad not to be able to tell her what I know or to discover what she knows, which is a lot, quite frankly. She knew about the sea, and Brooklyn, and getting divorced, and Kodak factories shutting down. Reading all day mixed with lighting candles for the shrine: Bettie and irises, on her front porch. Candles, and a little bowl of tea, propped next to the incense. She used to let me in so I could lie down on her couch and sleep in the sun with her cats. She set up a writing studio for me in her attic. She was lovely. Many years ago, I had a stalker who delivered red roses to her house, having followed me to her doorstep. She hid them in a closet FOR TWO DAYS, not wanting to upset me, then broke down, took me into the hallway, opened the low wooden door and said: I can't stand it anymore! These came for you! Once, we climbed into an ice cave on the shore of Lake Ontario, and once we drove to the Corning Glass Factory to see a display of glass sculptures that resembled the caves.

Also today, because days have everything in them, even yellow roses (brought to the door under more favorable circumstances), New Mexico-esque sun flare at 5 pm - making the neighbor's willow tree turn lime green - and a cub scout meeting for Pack 14, where the "wolves" made an ice-cream cone out of their legs, and then a starfish: I am starting a small press that will publish books with strangely American themes and landscapes, in genres I am not necessarily addicted to, though maybe I am sometimes. The first two books will be by Brendan Hamilton (Civil War) and Judi Salsburg (The Finger Lakes.)

..................................................................................

*Excerpt from a piece I wrote last week [see: notes on hybridity and sensation, above; though today in the cafe, and on the phone, with another friend, had long talks about "counter sensation" -- what you do to take away the feeling you cannot tolerate in another place, though this did not work so well in childbirth when they gave me an ice cube to clench in my fist. I wasn't having anything to do with that. The carpet got wet]:

"Abiogenesis: to flux and squat in an inhabited place, risking something. What? I loved that scene next to the car in The Piano Teacher. When I was a child, I used to strip down and beat myself with a stick. Is this, a root distinguished from its branching plant, kept in a jar on a shelf to grow, watered, schizophrenic? Is it a right thing or a mad thing not to want to re-connect, to avoid reading or writing because of what those will bring?"

Ten Famous People I Met/Saw: Who and How:

1. Johnny Ball. (British TV presenter of Count the Number; father of TV presenter Zoe Ball). Under the canopy of a bookstore on Charing Cross Road. Sheltering from the rain. He signed my Underground pass.

2. Arthur Scargill. (Miner/Activist). In a cafe off Euston Road. I was leaving, then turned and saw him in a back booth. He signed my napkin.

3. Princess Diana. (Obviously, a princess). In Loughborough Market Square. I was protesting the monarchy, but put my placard down when I saw her. Later that year, I lived with Joang Molapo, a serious chess player/geeky and kind engineering student who turned out to be the Crown Prince of Lesotho. He told me he met Princess Diana at a dinner party inside Harrods, and she had to bow to him because of how their ranks worked out, and that she was a giggler (he sat next to her.)

4. Robin Blaser. (Poet, born in Colorado.) Under a full blossoming catalpa tree next to the ATM machine at the Quality Inn on Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder. He was sheltering from the rain. I offered him my umbrella.

5. Boy George. (Obviously, a superstar). Pressed up against the front railing of Wembley Stadium. He was singing and spat on me, by mistake.

6. Daniel Day Lewis. (Hamlet.) Actually, I managed to get a ticket for his performance on the day he did not arrive, due to a nervous breakdown. I can still remember the posters all over the subway. So, I guess I didn't see him at all. But I did see John Malkovich in "Burn This," the night before I left for America. It had mediocre reviews but I felt it was some kind of sign, some kind of excellent way to leave a country.

7. Peter Mandelson. (MP, Hayes and Harlington.) In our living room one day when I came from school, drinking Johnny Walker (Black Label) with my dad. They were drumming up the black vote.

8. Dalai Lama. (A monk.) He was sitting next to Queen Noor. I was sitting just below his feet. Shambhala Mountain Center, Colorado. A blue, freezing cold day. We had to wake up early and drive north. I was one of about a thousand rapt, compeltely quiet people.

9. Tom Sutherland. (Former hostage.) A speech. I cannot remember what he said.

10. Devendra. (Bollywood action hero). We were walking as a family through Black Park, a beautiful English country park with a rhodedendron maze, forests, lake, and so on. Suddenly, near the woods, which were linearly planted and spacious, a helicopter came down from...nowhere, really...and stopped on the grass nearby. Dazzled, we were triply dazzled when Devendra himself got out. A van with his crew came closely behind. The Man Himself saw we were conspicuously Indian, and soon we were having a catered lunch with him; I remember my dad leaning against the helicopter, holding a paper plate sagging with papri chaat, chatting away, and Devendra laughing. Then they had to get back to filming and we continued on our walk.

Today's Sanskrit-Hindi-English Dictionary Bibliomancy

Opening the thick book/as a brick: at random, to:

I can't obviously read the Sanskrit and its mutations, but here are the meanings of one lit-up word, bifurcated into these two meanings, which I'll write here in their English form:

"...coming from the same country" -- OR - - "class of suffixes forming nouns from other nouns":

So that, you can, having emigrated, form a community that no-one will document until the era, such as it is, has passed, OR, you can train in neuro-linguistics at The University of Bangor, Wales. These, as far as I can tell, are the divinatory meanings extended by "Today's Act of Milky and Sustaining Proportions."

Goodbye forever, as we like to say in corridors.

Volcanic Tube Worms: More Research on Threshold Sites

As part of my on-going research for the class I am currently teaching in two undergraduate sections, The Hybrid, I spoke with a "Mad Scientist"; actually, I met him as part of my on-going attempt to be the mother of a son in love with volcanoes. We were at the local science museum, where Dr. Warnock was giving a "mad" demonstration [he had an unkempt, patched together, clearly home-made "time machine"] of the birth of volcanoes which was followed up with 3-D chalk, scissors, and actually building one. After the presentation, my son was the only one at the card table, pressing the chalk with so much force into the black paper that it was turning into a small cloud of pale pink dust before our eyes, when Dr. Warnock trumbled up to say hi. In a lull, I asked him about the tube-worms* Lynne Margulis describes in her beautiful early book "Microcosmos": the red animal life that appears only at the fluxing suture of lava flow and ocean, at a seam on the bed. He knew all about the worms and then we had this conversation, which I recorded and document here:

BK: "Is the bioregion where ocean meets volcano a threshold, in the language you use for what a threshold is?"

AW: "It's a threshold in the sense that it's a site of chemical activity. Organisms and communities of organisms sort of dip in and out of it. It's really hot, and there is so much going on chemically that the tubeworm, for example, wouldn't be able to survive being immersed in it. So they'll dip in then go to a cooler area. But when the volcanic activity stops, the community dies."

BK: "So, is hybrid community, in this context a physical state...or a site, a way of organizing a location?"

AW: "Well, I think of it as related to the site. And something we look at is that these communities are very isolated. They appear then re-appear wherever this kind of volcanic activity is happening, which, as I said, isn't visible. It's happening chemically. It's the chemistry they're interacting with. And then they vanish. There's a debate, in fact, about how these communities form."

BK: "You mean...if the organisms already exist in the water, in the ocean, and they come together as a cluster along some sort of endocrine seam, then they are responding to the possibility of being in relationship -- with each other, with nutrients, with temperature. So, if this is dependent on sensing environmental activity and if this activity goes away...then, it's possible that they disband in some sense. That they are not dead."

AW: "Exactly."

BK: "Hybridity is a process of attraction."

AW: "You could say that, yes."

BK: "Okay, so what's the difference between being dormant and not being dead?"

[To be continued: My son ran off to pet a Ball Python called Toby and so I had to follow him, obviously, as he could have been eaten by it, potentially.]

* Tubeworm basics [From "Extreme Deep Sea Events," a web resource for young children and, clearly, adults in need of criteria in order to proceed, which is good in some cases but confusing in others, when it (the extreme event) is happening anyway and you can't stop it]:

1. There are many different types of tubeworm in the ocean. Some are found at cold seeps (where chemicals leach out of the seafloor in the absence of volcanic activity), some on decomposing whale carcasses, and some near volcanoes and vents in the deep ocean.

2. Each individual tubeworm consists of a soft body surrounded by a tough outer tube of whitish chitin (the same substance that makes up the shells of lobsters and crabs). This tube supports the inner body and protects it from predators (in some species, the tube is leathery, in other species, it is hard). Like plants, adult tubeworms are sessile: they are anchored to one spot, although their top end can move around in the water and can be withdrawn into the tube. Some tubeworms even have "roots": extensions of their body that extend into the sediment.

3. The part of the tubeworm furthest from the surface where it is anchored is called the plume. The worm never leaves its tube completely, but it can poke its plume into the seawater above. This organ is specialized to harvest the chemicals the microbes need to manufacture food from seawater. The plume often looks red because it is filled with blood close to the surface (a bit like our lungs).

4. Not only can they live under immense pressures deep in the ocean, tubeworms living around volcanoes and vents can tolerate a wide range of temperatures. An individual tubeworm can often experience a range of tens of degrees over the length of its body **(or a change in the same place on its body over the course of just a few seconds): from the background chill of most deep water (a few degrees above freezing), to warm fluids drifting out of vents in the seafloor.

**So, hybridity is something experienced (in this case) by the body IN ITS ENTIRETY as -- not site -- but environment, in the sense that environments are fluctuating and overlap.

Dog Park vs Naropa University

Today, Diversity Task Force was cancelled and so, no Naropa today. I went to the *** ****. But there were no other **** there. So me and PorkStar* went down by the river and meditated, for about three minutes, which is a long time when your *** is constantly at risk of chewing through its leash.

*Not his real name. At the *** ****, we sometimes pretend his name is Felix, as in "Felix! Come on! Look Felix, the ball! Felix, fetch!!!!!" Unfortunately, somebody at the cafe today pointed out that Felix is typically a cat's name in the U.S., which explains the looks we got even with what I thought was a perfectly fine substitute/temporary name for use at the *** ****, and to which PorkStar actually responded.**

**I am reading a book on *** training by world-renowned *** whisperer, Cesar Milan. According to Cesar's checklist of behaviors, PorkStar thinks he is the "leader of the pack" and it is my urgent business to reclaim my position on the animal-human chain. Thus, the fact that Porks (also not his real name) came when he was called (albeit to "Felix") is a heartening development. There'll be some olive oil and a soft boiled egg added to his kibble tonight! I get his kibble from Poudre Valley Feed and Grain, a rough and tumble establishment that also sells "bully sticks."

Anne Waldman

was (above, obviously) on campus today, a dominant visual and global presence in black and the opposite of pink. j/j hastain (below, in a cage, less obviously, or maybe more, I can't tell) was on campus today, to give a talk on trans and the category of the monstrous. "The trans is the matter and the hybrid is what you do with the trans."

I think I wrote that down right. C., Naropa's landscaper, whose name is marvelous (and begins with C.) but which, out of my element, I forget, left his botanical/structural post next to the greenhouse, a structure still in process. He left his cutting machine, which was composed of what I think was some kind of chainsaw and a picture of a red hand and a plastic protective shield and the word peligroso in red. Walking along the diagonal between Upaya North and the doubled shed of the Kerouac School/Summer Writing Program office (with its haunted upstairs), back to class, I put my hand where it said not to, beneath the circular blade. I wanted to put my neck, but I have a beautiful home and family members to care for on a long-term basis. If I was not a mother, I think I would do more things that were dangerous, as I used to, like travel by myself all over the world. I still do that, with a more contracted trajectory, but sometimes I'm scared out of my boots, which is chicken but transcendent too, if you burst, if it works out, if you order black coffee with a side of whipped buffalo-milk cream in Kolkata, even if you don't know if the person who is meeting you will turn up. In fact, which helps in all sorts of cases, you give up. You drink your coffee with great freedom.

What else for my campus report? Jack Collom (below, with Reed Bye and Harry Smith on the top of Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder in another era) and I did an exquisite corpse with a tiger in it, on a bedsheet, and a basket containing "philosophy and beets," during a faculty meeting.

Jack said: "Who's going to type it up, me or you?" I said: "You." I noticed that Lisa Birman (below) was wearing a ring made of hand-sewn gold and jet black glass beads the size of dolls' eyeballs, or so it seemed in my peripheral vision. We discussed cookies.

The man in the cafe laughed at me when I ordered my chai. He said: "Sweet?" He laughed because I started off the semester ordering sugar-free soy versions of Naropa Cafe's in-house Indian tea, and it's just been downhill from there. When I left, to mess him up, I said: "Merci." But he, who knows me better than my own mother at this point, said: "De rien." My graduate students wrote about rooms flooded with mercury, to generalize, and my undergraduate students discussed the recent case of the pink dolphin, also to generalize.

Four graduate students finished generating their list of architextual questions early, and so I distributed to them, in an act of biomimicry, the four pieces of pristine cream vellum note paper, embossed with a letterpressed navy blue Charles Rennie Mackintosh rose, that I had found in my bag. I said: "There you go. These were given to me by a very famous writer and now they are yours. I give them to you." One graduate student said, skeptically, "Famous?" I said: "Yes, extremely." During a pause, I said: "Her first name is Michelle." I could not tell them that it was Michelle Auerbach (below), who has written a novel set in New York in the early 1990s, during her time as an AIDS activist, and which will, the novel, make her famous when it is published.

Outside, in the parking lot, Anne Waldman disappeared into a day that was colder than the North Sea off the coast of Holland, which was the last time I went out with my gloves in inclement weather, but so pretty (Anne Waldman and the day). But with no (the day) in-a-cone French Fries and mayonnaise in sight. And yet, as by the seashore I recall, one could almost hear the mutated Bach in the wind coming off the mountains, straight down Arapahoe Ave.

No, that was Alice Notley (above, obviously) from her Summer Writing Program lecture on dreams...atonally distending the Magnificat...humming it...which I listened to in the morning, her talk, a recording culled from the Naropa archive -- you could listen to it too, just contact the Allen Ginsberg library [www.naropa.edu] and they will make you a copy -- : driving in, during an unexpected blizzard, which slowed everything down, big time.

Billy Bragg on "the brutalization of society" in today's Guardian:

"There is a bitter irony in the fact that the Bank of England chose the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the miners' strike to fire off its weapon of last resort in an attempt to damp down the conflagration currently sweeping through global capitalism. The wry smile that passes across the lips of those who opposed the naked selfishness at the heart of the Thatcherite experiment will be mirrored by the disconcerted frowns of those who, having wholeheartedly embraced the free market, never thought that it would lead to this. Like Frankenstein's monster, Thatcherism has turned on its creators.

Is there anybody out there willing to stand up – on this, of all days – and raise a toast to the wilful destruction of our manufacturing industry and its replacement by the financial services sector? Yes, there were unions who were resistant to change, but whoever came up with the idea that the solution to this problem was to import cars rather than make them ourselves sacrificed more than just the entire engineering skills base.

The forces that Margaret Thatcher unleashed in order to defeat the NUM destroyed whole communities before leeching into our society. Untamed by successive governments, these same forces now threaten to devour us all.

The housing bubble that has been source of so many of our recent difficulties, was kickstarted by Thatcher. Selling off council houses to their owners was a popular idea at the time, but by refusing to allow councils to build more stock, it ultimately forced up prices as demand rose. When the Tories slashed the state pension and people started looking around for a way of ensuring financial security in their old age, bricks and mortar seemed like a sound investment.

Without powerful unions to protect them, the wages of ordinary workers were held in check while the cost of housing began to spiral upwards. As it became increasingly difficult for first-time buyers to get on the property ladder, a newly deregulated banking sector began offering ever more "attractive" loans. And we all know where that led.

Would any of this have been different if Thatcher had lost that titanic struggle in 1984?

She would have still been in power for another three years, but she would not have tasted blood. A chastened Conservative party might have realised sooner, rather than later, that the ultimate price of Thatcherism would be the brutalisation of society."

Ravine: More "A Day in the Life of a Naropa University writing professor"

Part of being a professor-type situation, as opposed to being a massage therapist, is that you attend weekly administrative meetings. This week was "graduate curriculum committee" meeting. I put myself in charge of punching holes in prospective syllabi. The meeting ended, and I went for a hike with my dog at Sanitas, a mountain valley I've walked many times before. Thus, I don't know how it happened that we (I) lost our way, but we did. I climbed down a cliff into a ravine in horse boots with "Woof Star" somehow also managing the near-vertical incline. I felt as if maybe the other members of the graduate curriculum committee weren't maybe in as much physical trouble so close to the official business we'd so recently conducted. But you never know. Then I had coffee AND some of Monique Esposito's iced soy bhakti chai, at Spruce Confections, at 9th and Pearl, to recover. Less than two hours later, I took the two Tigers and one Wolf to a fire station. Then we went to the Rialto to watch Donald Duck cartoons. Then we had supper. Then I wrote Abiogenesis 3 to send to Vidhu Aggarwal in Florida, interpolated with my sister's tropical modern triptychs. I wrote:

"Abiogenesis: to flux, to squat: a conjunction of living and dead matter: 3: from Schizophrene, a book without purpose/with a dead start. But with the body displaying signs of early spring: pink bits sensitive to being touched, like a Jain woman crossing the street in her linen mask and with her pole."

Then one of my undergraduate students sent me an e-mail about the pink dolphin, and another wanted to swap Lemus for Herrera, or vice versa, and yet another cut and pasted me a section of Agamben [below], from "Profanations" (Zone Books, 2007), all of which cheered me up (and was obviously before I had had my $1.62 baclava from Not Just Gyros at 4th and Lincoln, which quite frankly is mood-altering and substitutes for brain-spotting, a radical form of therapy that made me tremble in my shoes and which I could not continue, though it was interesting and gave me the visceral sense of the optic memory "strings" that obviate narrative):



"A Latin phrase perfectly expresses the secret relationship each person must maintain with his own Genius: indulgere genio. One must consent to Genius and abandon oneself to him; one must grant him everything he asks for, for his exigencies are our exigencies, his happiness our happiness. Even if his – our! – requirements seem unreasonable and capricious, it is best to accept them without argument. [...as Grace Murray Hopper was fond of saying, "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."] If in order to write you need – he needs! – a certain yellow paper, a certain special pen, a certain dim light from the left, it is useless to tell yourself that just any pen will do, that any paper and any light will suffice. If life is not worth living without that light blue linen shirt (for goodness' sake, not the white one with the collar of an office worker!), if without those long cigarettes with black paper you just don't see any reason to go on, then there's no point in repeating to yourself that these are no more than little manias, that now is the time to be over and done with them. In Latin Genium suum defraudare, to defraud one's own genius, means to make one's life miserable, to cheat oneself. But the life that turns away from death and responds without hesitation to the impetus of the genius that engendered it is called genialis, genial."

Then, at 7 pm, we went to the Berthoud planetarium with the rest of 2B and, looking through the telescope that some passionate and kind person saw fit to build in the middle of a field, we observed that Betelgeuse is actually a refracting red-orange mutated helix made of living wire. Then we had cocoa and went to bed.

Dear Andrea Spain,

Dear Andrea, I hope you are reading this. Well, you are, cos when I finish writing it, I am going to forward it to you with the envelope thingy at the end. I was writing this morning to say: don't stop. Even knowing you are writing, when I am not writing, when I went to the cafe to write an abiogenetic "sloppy joe" [that's disgusting] but realized when I got there that I'd brought Thelonious's handwriting practice book instead and that the only sentence in it was "Porky is so butiful. He has nice fur" [and promptly gave up, drank some coffee, read about Flannery O'Connor in the New York Times Book Review, then went for a two hour hike with the dog along the Devil's Backbone at dusk, to abate the feeling of emptiness from not having written]: when natural space has trumped the "worst" book: then, to know that you have had a breakthrough, as you said last night, with the second chapter, something post-Adorno, the mark that the event nevertheless brings forward, the hybridity that comes not because of the future but because of the past: then this is as if I had written myself. In a true collective, this is also true and because I feel it in my body, that the writing and thinking have gone forward, even though technically I just put the recycling out and responded to David Buuck's interspecies e-mail, both of which were instinctive and filled in the time while my tea steeped, and because I feel brave and strong: as a writer this morning, despite the not-knowing in other areas: I know that what I am saying about the non-local effects of the collective is true.

Thank you for being such an incredible companion to me since the dog days themselves began. Don't stop writing. As Uncle Roshan would say, your inward chant that you did not share with others, which is sometimes crucial to this process, has resulted in your safe passage through the narrow channel. Actually, he would say, Very good! Well done! Now you are safe! If you want, we can call him on his Barnala mobile; I believe he has left the jungle permanently, due to his failing health. Next January, we have a set program of going to Kolkata and then into the ocean, with our offerings for our ancestor, Kapil Muni, from whom we are descended [below] and from whom we bring a relationship to color.

Perhaps you will come too, as you are a true member of our family and spoke well, at Naropa, on the triptychs of Francis Bacon. Did I dream that you came to England and stayed with us in our house before my dad died? As my dad would say, Carry on, Professor! Are you a professor? You are, at the present time, a writer. Before all that other bullshit begins, I encourage you to take great pleasure in the third chapter, and then the fourth. Love, BK.

Amar Chitra Katha Comic Books

A highlight of visits to Southall Broadway every Saturday morning, for our weekly shop [karelas, atta, and packets of semolina from Dokal and Sons], was the rack of comics in the back of the Indian Music Shop next to Woolworths and opposite Lloyds Bank with its black stallion logo on baize green background. My dad would give me a 50 pence coin, and then I'd meet him, my mum, and my sister in A Sweets, where they'd be sitting in a booth eating aloo chaat. I'd just slump down with my comic until it was time to go. Surfacing, I'd force my mum to buy jalebis, and on the drive home in our decrepit Ford Cortina [license plate: OJK 202M -- why I remember that, I do not know; I basically remember everything and should write a straightforward memoir set in a post-nuclear Middlesex], I'd eat them warm, straight from the paper bag, careful not to get my comic sticky. Now, thirty years later, remarkably, my son is reading his way through these brutal narratives (your obscure mutiny alternating with gory demon slayings set in the jungles of Sri Lanka), ensconsing himself on the heating vent with a stack of them at hand; in addition to seaweed, which he thinks of as a nice snack -- he hasn't, bless his heart, figured out that it is in fact a vegetable.

Here's an excerpt of the dialogue on page 18 of Mangal Pande, who was an anti-colonial maniac on slow burn, bless his heart too:

"Meanwhile, at Barrackpore, the news of the revolt of the 19th Native Infantry was received with excitement.
"Those Berhampore men are brave! They sacrifice everything!"
"But they will lose their jobs. This deed will not go unpunished!"
"They may lose their jobs, but not their honour."
"Don't trust the sircar.* [*Government]. All over the bazaar they are saying that European cavalry and artillery are coming to destroy us."
"I heard that a ship full of Europeans is arriving at Calcutta soon!"
The ship being referred to was the 'Bentinck', which was to bring British troops from Rangoon.
Gen. Hearsey knew nothing about the Bentinck until much later. Now he watched the sullen faces of the men and was worried.
"Those mysterious fires...and now the silent, accusing looks.""

Brilliant. And mad. And readily available for purchase in The English Bookstore opposite the park, sector 9, Panchkula; there were three other copies of Mangal Pande, whom I had never heard of, tucked in behind "Tales of Shiva" and "Bheema and Hanuman." I am thinking of going into the comic book business myself, specializing in recent United States History in the style of the Amar Chitra Katha series. Newt Gingrich will be a particular star, I think. He has a dynamic range of facial expressions, which will bode well for my special gift of drawing the creases running from the outer nostril to the side of the mouth. Very human-looking and authentic. As a 15 year old, I was good at very few things. One was analyzing Thomas Hardy. One was NOT the bassoon. I hated playing the bassoon, in addition to being utter rubbish at it and having my hands turn blue from lugging the bloody thing from place to place in its battered case with the metal handle, in all weathers. One was comics. Every week, after art class, Mrs. Whatshername with the orange curly hair gave us a prompt for a cartoon, and then she'd judge our offerings on the spot. I won every time, with the exception of the week we had to do a horse. I was crap at horses, and still am. They look more like stunted Russian bears, of the sort my grandfather would hand over five rupees to a man for, so that I could ride to the gol-guppa stand and back: on its back. The bear.That the man held still with a chain and a stick and a bag of sugar.

Friday Night in HEL

You want some dark silver? Mais oui, you've GOT some dark silver. Also, the "scratched glass" of the airport windows and a bank, a vertical surface, of "dark trees." To continue reading this doppler-effect fairytale, see: Laura Mullen's blog, which I did not realize existed and is now the equivalent of playing truant to go to Top Shop to buy your first pair of distressed stone-washed jeans, circa 1984. (By which I mean, really exciting.) You get off at Tottenham Court Road, fortify yourself at McDonalds with a strawberry milkshake [as Cosmo says, it's wise not to shop on an empty stomach (to avoid impulse buys)] and off you go: afteriwasdead.blogspot.com:

"Notes from a Sno-Ball in HEL

I’m in Finland! Wall of tall dark trees at the edge of the airport, as if seen through scratched glass, lots of white stuff in the air and on the ground. (“Losky” or “loomy” were the shapes I made of the sounds I heard in the words used by the wonderful guy who picked me up at the airport—if he wasn’t teaching me to say ‘Hit me I am a fool’ then I am trying to say that the snow is icy & slushy in Finnish, a language which is, I was told by a friend who’d been here, impossible….) And it is not deathly cold, it is only cold cold. And there’s (immediately & probably falsely) a kind of cheery 80s feeling about it all, as if I’d wandered into a Wim Wenders movie, or maybe early Gus Van Sant when he wanted to be Wenders? There’s a sort of thin Eastern European desperation in the décor of my room at the Sokos Hotel Presidentti (cigarette burned fake marble broken fake marble) and the mall, on a Friday night, was packed with gorgeous young people just hanging out, many of whom—so my guide told me, are now named things like “Slushy” (“Loomy”) or “Rain,” in a sudden mad passion for new names. It’s my first time in a Nordic country and I know nothing, I understand nothing—but there’s a feeling that’s familiar: maybe it’s just jet lag. Around the hotel (in the Spanish-themed hotel restaurant or the British-themed hotel 'pub'), (the hotel for the festival), there’s a cadre of lean black clad figures: the New Yorkers, the music people, here for the “New York is Now” “Musica Nova” festival.

There’s a place in jet lag where identity frays out: or “Where you come from’s gone…”—it’s not just the person in the mirror I don’t know, it’s the idea of such a person. In that place, vodka is a flavor and not an effect (or so you think). On the first night I arrived (Friday evening. Having been on planes since mid-day Thursday) I sat in my room, practicing as if I were a flautist: he-uuuu-vvaaaa, heehyew…. There’s not a sound in English like it; heeyooouvaah: good. You say it instead of welcome: good. Hyva."

Farming

I don't exactly know how this happened, but it did. We farmed, or possibly gardened as a precursor to farming, during an MFA class. There was dirt and refraction and a ritual of burying language by Nathalie Stephens/Nathanael -- the insert of "Face" -- in the under-grid of the biodynamic greenhouse [above]. The gardeners/farmers were kind and patted us on our backs to get us dirty/dirtier than we already were. I liked the sifting thing and the wheelbarrow. To summarize, we felt happy - -I gave some students the option of staying out there if they felt it was better for their writing -- but then we went back inside to discuss the evaporation of salt, danger, and threshold materials that "mate."

"Visability"

I invent the word for that, the process by which a prospective emigrant is funded and managed. Vaccination requirements. And all the necessary certificates not to prove the existence of the applicant, but of the petitioner, through male-female relationships from the time of birth. Markers, I guess. Thus: marriage certificates, death certificate. My former partners and my father, none of whom I am in primary relationship with any more. One afternoon, I had to meet each ex-husband in turn and ask them for their records. How ridiculous. They were very kind. I bought them coffee (husband 1) and tea plus a dense scone (number 2). Also: military records and police certificates, whether you need them or not. Evidence of their not being needed. It's an ordinary process, and one that takes memes. I have been thinking about memes, higher education, and what the body must feel possible in order to begin and complete what are called in the contemporary and ancient worlds: manuscripts.

For example, instead of re-reading "Newcomer Can't Swim" for Tuesday's hybrid class, I'm reading a form. I am writing in impenetrable English. The English that stays inside of you. Inside you. Inside. I can't differentiate the phonetics of the sentence anymore; how to say it properly. I'm re-reading Fanon -- all these texts I read, assimilated, and morphed, as the petitioner of other texts. But which it is time to go back to now, instead of the kind of progressive, anecdotal reading that supports teaching but not, always, the reversal of time and imagination that I associate with writing practice. By reverse I mean deviate, but not in a regressive way. Dogs, for example, make rough beds, re-organizing the fluff of the commercially purchased dog bed. I do this with my books. I tear out their insides and make a nest in the cage of community.

Document Status Description:

A=Applicant must acquire this document and present it at the time of the interview.
F=This form is not necessary for this application.
O=The original document has been received and accepted as meeting post requirements.
P=The police certificate must be requested by the applicant. The issuing police authority will send the police record directly to the appropriate US Embassy to have on hand at the time of the interview.
T=An acceptable document has been received, but a translation is required as the submitted document is not in English or the official language of the processing post. The applicant must present a certified translation at the time of the interview.
U=The applicant has informed NVC that the required document is unavailable.
X=The required document is unobtainable
Y=The required document has been received and accepted.
I=The required form is incomplete. Please ensure that a complete form is presented at the interview.
S=Scanned document received. The original document must be presented at the time of interview.

It was calming to type up these commands. I typed them from scratch from the bottom of the form. As I said, it settled the part of me that has to understand the form and then to act. Thinking of hybrid vigor, of heterosis, of the flair and aggravated red of the blatant field-mouse, the wronged mammal who is nevertheless functional/attractive/the one who gets to go to the AWP [that didn't make any sense/but I liked it!]: and how hybrid purpose is eviscerated, sometimes, by what it takes to fill in the form to become hybrid.

I loathe metaphor. I make a basket and put metaphor in it, and go to the shops, and leave it in the shops. A vignette without theoretical or practical application in the time of CCTV, which is a subtle camera. They'd see the basket and shut the shop down. Here, I would quote Fanon, but darkness has fallen as I write this blog, which is pre-programmed for declarations that I can't make in the other public. What's the other public? My dad used to take me to Speaker's Corner with Mr. Khumra on Sunday mornings. Mr. Khumra, who was from Singapore, had made him a wooden stool, and it was Mr. Khumra who carried this contraption on the Tube, hopping on at Harrow on the Hill. That Sunday, my dad stood a shoulder or so above the other men and read: Shaw. George Bernard Shaw, as a kind of duty. I can understand that desire, but not the passion. I am less passionate, and less violent, than my father was.

Ling-ling, my love!

I have fallen in love....with a DOG!!!!

I met Ling-ling THIS MORNING and I instantly felt more for her than I did for Porky or Brenda, my other pets, who I rescued from alleys and Texas. Well, just one alley. And Porky had it good in Texas, running free on the biodynamic farm. And I do love them. I feed them. I take them to the dog park, the vet, the sofa in the back room, etc. But, Ling-ling is tiny, and looks like one of the monkeys in a Frida Kahlo painting. As this has technically ZERO to do with The Jack Kerouac School of Disappointed Chapati-Makers, I will pause there. Ling-ling is going to Mexico tomorrow with her owner Kaila, so I need to buck up. No, I feel as I have to include a literary reference. Okay, here's my cat, Brenda, next to a book I checked out of the Allen Ginsberg Library, and it has Jack Kerouac on the cover -- Kerouac's notes, that he took for Ginsberg, on the dharma - - which fits in with this blog nicely, or, rather, the title of this blog. My sister is living with me at the moment, and she is always taking photos to put on Facebook, and therefore my blog has got a lot prettier. Brennie:



Let's see. No, that is not really an information source.

Okay, what about Tyrone Williams from "J", which just appeared in Bombay Gin, Naropa's journal, in its amazing new incarnation as designed by Jeff Clark, and with a fabulous editor's note/essay by JenMarie Davis. Tyrone (reaching towards the part where someone/something is tucked under the left arm...):



"Umbrella. Penumbra. I took YOUR little hand INTO MINE to help you across the street. Yes and no, willing and frightened. It never occurred to me that you might want to remain on the other side of the street. Yes and NO, willing and frightened. It never occurred to me that you might want to remain on the other side of the street. Traffic is heavy both ways. I can't get back to YOU or to where I'm going. Your LIARs, my "concerned."

I WANT TO BE HOLDED, you muttered too much. And so I did, didn't we? Holded and holding action, as though the spun tale we dubbed us vortexed its tellers -- quickwater on which we thought to float. But if you let go, are now gone, HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN HOLDING YOU AND STILL BE HERE? WAS IT THE WAY I WAS HOLDING YOU THAT WAS NOT, IN TRUTH, NOT HOLDING YOU? WAS I ONLY HOLDING BACK WHILE YOU WERE HOLDING ON? And what was it about your perfectly imperfect holded, your subjunctive holded, that wounded me ON ITS APPEARANCE? The night you got back from Pittsburgh I lay smouldering, not touching you, as we lay awake. That was - can it be? - two weeks yesterday, just before your last disappearance. And you cried, if you don't want to make LOVE to me, let me be holded. And I cried quietly, you huddled under my left arm as we "

Imprimatur/Literary Friendships/Long Island/Denver

To imprint and exceed. Melissa Buzzeo (her book, "Face," just published this week, from BookThug -- above) read to me from an essay she had written that morning, as I drove south to Boulder in my previously stolen (from a rental lot) and hence cut-price Subaru. It was an essay about "a community of shadow," about peninsula life, the documentary "Capturing The Friedmans," forged memories, and the way a writer has to build an "outside" for the writing, and until that outside has been written or felt, the book cannot be completed. It was an essay about the water of Long Island as contaminated and how this contamination is processed as disease but for an earlier content, European and unassimilable/war-time content.

Noon (by Cole Swensen): I parked my car in the Grove-Goss neighborhood, then walked across Arapahoe to Naropa. There, in The Hybrid class, we spoke about transgression, nutrients, and the causal frame of the sentence. We spoke about the workshop as proprioceptive not just for the forming text, but for the "infinite origins" of the word carried inside the body of the writer. At 4 pm, we had about two minutes, max., of impromptu pranayam (oxygenating breathing), because in the late afternoon, like intellectuals and animals everywhere, my undergraduate students start to wilt. In my account of the week, I am getting the order of the days confused. 7 pm:

After listening to the Daughters of Tuva, a throat-singing collective from a sub-arctic region, the four women dressed in turquoise, gold and scarlet dresses (above), I drove home in the reversed moonlight, through orange crystalline clouds kicked up the high winds that had crossed the high plains, like whips, all day. Melissa wrote me an e-mail asking me if I would pick up a wash-basin she was bidding on, on E-bay. I said yes, you are my friend. Evidence of a literary correspondence:

"This wouldn't put you out?

From: B.K
Subject: Re: Insane Request
To: M.B

of course!!

From: M.B
To: B.K
Subject: RE: Insane Request

This is very insane....

But: next time you go to Denver do you think that you could pick up these washstands for me from 1880's france? Duras** writing house like. If I paid the antique people by credit card now? They are rare and usually 1000's of dollers and these are cheap.

The woman said that this place is on Broadway and is in central Denver....is this true? Would this be a pain? I am sure that there would be no rush to pick them up. They are wrought iron and a little bit smaller than end tables. Very light. You could put them in the shed and I would somehow figure it out how to get them. Only if this wouldn't make you crazy, the drive the shed. If so I understand and will try to move towards sanity myself!!

You asked me why I liked washstands.

I said:


Washstands: I like beautiful things that are practical that are meaning that have use.

Water and the absence of water.

Stagnation and the absence of stagnation.

The curved, small size.

The other century without meaning in the present and so all meaning.

Unmissed century.

The mirrors are missing.

Private.

candle table.

Special one kind of book table.

Washstand does not hate me does not want me to die.

(I know how ridiculous and extreme.)

Private shower space, bathing space, in the woods, the forest.

I already know that the water is dirty. All water, this way. It is no longer a problem.


In other life our table* is the most beautiful comforting thing to my. Thank you for phone last night.


Love,

M."

*A table beneath the trees, the unwritten books, our books, now written, set upon it, in the future still forming, held in place with branches and rocks, or perhaps it is a warm, ordinary day in early summer, and there is no breeze.

**A still from India Song, though it means nothing to me. It will substitute for Duras herself in the interim. In interim:

Sunday Night Tango with Cixous footnotes: A Post-Valentine's Post

I went again, precisely because I feel so much resistance* to this formal dance that has nothing to do with me. Though, I felt much the same as a child learning the fundament of bharatnatyam in my awkward, brocade-edged blue and cream silk sari in George Harrison's mansion in Elstree, which he had donated to the Hare Krishnas. My parents misguidedly sent me to Hare Krishna summer camp, to milk cows, learn classical Indian dance, and spend each day in Vedic prayer in a rustic setting. This is how I found myself on the same wood-paneled, red velvet swag-curtained stage that The Beatles Themselves used to perform on, for their family and friends. All wrong. Plus, the Hare Krishnas used to watch us taking our showers. They set up camp chairs, and passed around a joint as we undressed then dressed again.*** They said it was part of becoming a Hare Krishna. No secrets. No shame. The cows were nice, though, and when our parents came to pick us up, one balmy day in mid-July, we danced our hearts out in a farewell performance. As I recall, I was Krishna's mother in the stolen butter re-enactment scene, and had to rotate in a circle with accompanying hand gestures resembling the necks and beaks of pea-hens.**



[H.C./2004]

*I think what one abandons in writing is one's resistance. One must be afraid, have or keep fear, and cross through fear. In principle, writing leads to enrichment - not of the self but of the self of the person in labour. But in writing, we do not love anyone. Or rather: we love (no)one. On aime personne. [I love you.] Neimand.

**Note 8: The paonne and the paon are the peahen and the peacock. The Cixous verb paonser is a homonym of penser, to think. [Trans.]

***[To undress/dress]: I have searched in the novels on my shelves, for a similar story, with two contradictory genres. I did not find any. One body and two bloods that drive in opposite directions.

Valentine's Day

Hurray! A dozen peach-colored roses!!!!

And: The First Ever Loveland Love Poem Valentine City Valentine's Poetry Reading!!!

Back at home, we put on The Darjeeling Limited soundtrack, even the dog had a bit of a dance around the front room, and currently everyone else is on the front porch smoking the bidis I brought back from India! I don't smoke cigarettes unless I am in deep trouble of some kind and need to think, typically in a doorway. The day started off horribly. But by the time we got to Yeats, all our tears had dried, Tiffany had read aloud from Kathy Acker's "Great Expectations", complete with appreciative murmurs from the crowd, and Christian Wipf thumped himself down and read the most amazing poem I have heard in about a million years, very unexpectedly, what with it being Loveland proper and not expecting it. We tore the poem, which he had written at 5.30 a.m. that morning, from his hands, and positioned it behind the Faber and Faber "Love Poems" on the failed- wedding-sari shrine. Here's the blurry after, then the crisp before, mostly because I don't know how to un-paste a photo on blogger:


In the end, I read Helene Cixous, from "Rootprints," and not the Yeats:

"It is irretrievable. Because in love - if not, there is no love - you give yourself, you trust, you entrust yourself to the other. And, contrary to what one might think, this is not at all abstract. It is true that one deposits oneself. There is a deposit. And one is deposited in the other person. And if the other goes off with the deposit, one truly cannot recuperate the deposit. What was given can never be taken back. Even if we do not know it at the moment we give; even if we do not imagine that what we have given cannot be taken back - while most things one gives can be taken back. So in reality, virtually, when we love we are already half dead. We have already deposited our life in the hands that hold our death: and this is what is worth the trouble of love. This is when we feel our life, otherwise we do not feel it. It is an extraordinary round; that what you give, that is to say yourself, your life, what you deposit in the other, is returned to you immediately by the other. The other constitutes a source. You are not your own source in this case. And as a result, you receive your life, which you do not receive from yourself."

Valentine's Eve

In Victorian England, Valentine's Eve was the brutally cold night that you crept, in the frost, like a pent-up version of Santa, to the doorstep of your girl's house and slipped your lace-smothered card through the slit of the letterbox in her front door. I was brought up to believe that a valentine should always be given in utter secret and that, as a matter of course, there should not, ever, be age-appropriate snacks, Superman decals, or teddy bears. You should not, for example, give a valentine to a family member or an elementary school teacher or an administrative professional. There should not be jewelry or chocolate; at the most, there should be a single rose vibrating on its tropical stem. That is how we did it anyway, circa 1993, in obscure locales like Hounslow, which fortunately is now where M.I.A is originally from but which, at the time, was an INCROYABLE dump. The only mortuary catering to Brahmin Hindus was located there, round the corner in West Drayton, and that is where we took my dad. This is obviously not going very well as a Valentine's Eve post, and so I will go straight to the LITERARY EXTRACT I will be reading aloud tomorrow as the MC (jointly, that is, with Tiffany and April, though April hasn't called back yet...hmm, does this mean I will be responsible for setting up the fake flower encrusted trellis?) of the First Ever Valentine City Valentine's Day Loveland Love Poetry Poetry Reading:

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Makes you want to cry, don't it? Actually, I wanted to type out the opening two pages of Edmund White's biography of Rimbaud, which I am reading at the moment, but...I have to hop off. Leaving W.B. Yeats as a weak but incredibly sustaining substitute, like soup. Soup when what you really want is paneer makhani and a tandoori roti with burned bits and butter.

Valentine's Eve's Eve

I've been learning/re-learning French prior to becoming French, which I think is going to be almost impossible. Nevertheless, here are some basic sentences you yourself could absorb, recant, and reproduce:

a) in emergencies
b) in other people's gardens in the summer-time
c) for love's sake, or Pete's, I suppose, if you love someone called Pete



Things to say on Valentine's Day, in French, if moved to do so by the circumstances, which, if they're anything like mine, are bound to be variable. You've got two days to practice, though as it is Thursday evening, I would wake up tomorrow, go to Safeway for your mini-croissants (in the frozen section) and get to work.

1. Je veux tirer le cou (le coup?) avec toi. [Not sure if I have said something incredibly impolite there. If so, I profoundly apologize.]

2. Je veux faire l'amour dans le jardin avec toi. [Pretty obvious, I think, but probably should only be used in Florida or somewhere like that. Bangalore.]

3. De tendresses pleines, votres mains [which is a bit formal, but I am re-writing Rilke, which is difficult as he obviously got it right the first time, what with his reputation and the castles and the leopards in the zoo and the dark-eyed beauties amassed as entities in his later works], et nul qui ferait le vandage! Faut-il crier aux anges? Something about crying out to the angels and "your hands" being full of tenderness but that somehow not being enough. Part of the reason why reading Rilke at 40 doesn't quite satisfy the soul as it did at 22. Might as well just change into my fuzzy pink bathrobe now and call it a night.

4. Non.

5. Oui.

6. " Maybe." [In a French accent.]

Okay, that should be enough to see you through. If all else fails, say something like: "Would you like to meet for coffee in 2019?" Or: "I thought Slumdog Millionaire was crap."

Chimperella

Am putting finishing touches on Chimp Haven, a revolting comedy/fiction with bit parts. Chimperella, my central character, is not sympathetic...she's not even para-sympathetic, if narrative resembles a nervous system on its best days, the days when the soup doesn't tilt out of the spoon of its own accord and stain your 100% cotton polo-neck under-shirt.

Here is a particularly grotty part from Chapter Six, which comes a little bit after Chimperella has escaped from Chimp Haven and has made her way to Oklahoma, where she hopes to break her friend Charlie out of the Oklahoma State University research lab....and in this scene, set in the on-campus Java City cafe, she's wearing a headscarf and sunglasses, and has just ordered herself a double espresso with a side of whipping cream and a bowl of white sugar:

Customer 1: “He makes me feel like I’m smart and uber-attractive. Sure, I’m thirty-seven but I look like I’m thirty, don’t I? I have to show my ID every time I buy alcohol.”

Customer 2: “Here’s what you’ll see. Almost twenty percent of the females will be uber-pregant. The thighs…lard-ass.”

Customer 1: “They’ll be pregnant and fat. Unattractively fat.”*

Great. I’m wearing my hickory vest and everything, but I don’t fit in. The customers look up, know in the deep of them that I’m listening, and lower their voices. Customer 1 is having an enormous feeling of anxiety about an upcoming high school re-union and Customer 2 is trying to help her see the bigger picture. I loved a man once. I was afraid, more afraid than I ever was, to take my clothes off. I didn’t want him to see my body. It was a phobia.** It was feral. No, I was. I was and am a disgusting beast.

* Horribly (oh, this is just me now, it's not part of the novel), this is a conversation I notated verbatim at my own local cafe some time last year. Not the disgusting beast part. That's just me. Well, not me. My character. The fugitive*** chimp who has, belatedly, discovered Nair.

**This semester at Naropa, obediently and without much fanfare, we are reading W.G. Sebald. Page 86, "The Rings of Saturn": "During the wedding night, the story goes, he was afflicted by a sense of profound uneasiness. Today, he is supposed to have said to his bride, our bodies are adorned, but tomorrow they will be food for worms. Before the break of day, he fled***, making a pilgrimage to Italy, where he lived in solitude until he felt the power to make miracles arising within him."

Tango Lessons: 2

Last night, had my tango lesson again, in the form of a public dance where your teacher wanders around with the verbal equivalent of a long, sharp stick. I am really crap at the tango, I've decided. It makes me dizzy. Really, I just want to be told what to do and eat the food that is already there on the table, metaphorically speaking. Little bits of cheese, the crusts torn off a loaf of white bread, a bit of Cotes du Rhone....poured for me of course....and so on. Like knitting, which is time-intensive and fiddly, the tango requires the use of memes that I can't help thinking could be better put to use at home, writing. Still, I've had a good run of this whole tango thing and if for some reason I visit Buenos Aires before mid-March, I am sure my skills will be fresh enough to let me accomplish the most basic desire of any novelist -- to fail in a very beautiful way.

Job Posting: Punjabi Lecturer, UC Berkeley: or: Berkeley, here I come!

Job Announcement for Punjabi Language Lecturer

The Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, invites applications for the position of a Punjabi language lecturer. The appointee will teach an advanced course (4 units) with a focus on Literary Punjabi to students who will have had at least one year of intensive Punjabi instruction at a UC campus or a comparable institution. The salary will commensurate with degree and teaching experience.

The applicant must have a minimum of a M.A. degree from an accredited university in any discipline, learned Punjabi formally through high school, and be able to demonstrate native command of Punjabi and English.

Preference will be given to candidates with:
Ability to read, write and speak Punjabi with native fluency
Past teaching experience in Punjabi
Willingness to work independently, teach classes during normal working hours, and maintain office hours

This position is ideal for someone who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area or is willing to travel from surrounding areas.

Applications should include: 1) a 2-3 page statement in Punjabi of vision and teaching interests, 2) a curriculum vitae, and 3) names and contact information for three references. Please arrange to have these letters of recommendation sent directly to the address below. Candidates should direct their recommenders to the University’s statement on confidentiality, found at http://apo.chance.berkeley.edu/evalltr.html.

Search will remain open until the position is filled.

For information about our program, please visit our web site at:

http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/sseas/ . For information about the Center for South Asia Studies, please see http://ias.berkeley.edu/southasia/

All documents should be sent to: Prof. Raka Ray, Chair, Center for South

Asia Studies, 10 Stephens Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA

94720-2310.

Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. UC Berkeley is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

********************
Center for South Asia Studies
10 Stephens Hall, #2310
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2310
http://ias.berkeley.edu/southasia/

(510) 642-3608 (Phone)
(510) 643-5793 (Fax)

PUNJABI OF THE MONTH

A blog dedicated to the Punjabi as much as the poetic should have, I think, "Punjabi of the Month" as a regular rotating feature. I already know that this will be a category that transcends ethnicity. But, drumroll (or roti roll -- roti rolled up with alloo subjee inside...mmm...with some lime pickle), The January/February Punjabi is.....

AUNTY BALBIR!!!!!!

Who called me this morning from Maidenhead. We had a solid chat covering what we were about to have for lunch/breakfast (eight hour time difference), Nice (where Aunty Balbir had recently been staying in a chateau...A CHATEAU), and Mona, Aunty Balbir's daughter and my oldest friend in the world.

Due to not having a photograph of Aunty Balbir other than grainy photos from picnics in Burnham Beeches, circa 1978, I am forced to also institute feature number 2.3 of Punjabi of the Month. I will dress up as Punjabi of the Month, and take a photograph, and that will, I hope, suffice, in the absence of actual documentation.

Right. Here we are:



Ah, this is technically a photo of Eric Baus, as I was unable to upload the video I made earlier of myself impersonating Aunty Balbir, complete with holding up a tupperware container of Tata Gold tea with the price in rupees, and in the other hand, a plastic orange and black zig zag patterned tongue cleaner. Was going to take a photo but got carried away. Wish I lived in Iceland with Ragnar Kristjansson, my pen pal from the mid 80s. He was the only person I ever knew who was less straight-down-the-garden-path-into-the-mouth-of-the-wolf than me. Or more, I suppose. Video detour. "Blogger cannot upload your video at this time." Okay. As evidence of his naan-concept potential (though I believe he eats only gluten free breaded products), Eric Baus:

a) has been draped in a sari from Ludhiana next to a creek during the Ana Mendieta event in last year's Summer Writing Program at Naropa
b) is a lover not a fighter
c) dances with very little restraint, according to someone whose name I can't remember
d) forgot a water bottle made of stainless steel at my birthday party and which was subsequently taken to Punjab, where it was re-filled and played a starring role in hydrating my family members at a visit to the horrific Chatabir "safari" park, where the forelegs of an elephant were chained together. "Quickly, yaar, take my photo, CHETHI, the damn elephant is DANCING": etc.
e) never visited Maidenhead town center as far as I know, which technically disqualifies him

When my sister gets home from Denver tomorrow, and helps me to figure out how to upload the video, I will immediately remove the Baus-related content from this page. Until then, I hope that it functions as a marker for what is possible if you only put a mind to it.

With that, I must now leave. I have been to the dog park since making the video earlier and now a soft, perfect moon has risen. My son has gone skiing and so I am at an unnatural liberty. Next stop, a glass of white wine at Henry's, in Fort Collins, with my friends, with whom I am planning The First Valentine's Day Love Poem Poetry Reading of Loveland, the Valentine Capital of the World. It will be at 3 pm next Saturday in Anthology Book Company/The Coffee Tree* on 4th Street. Obviously, I am curating this event, which is for people who want to read their poems about love, though the flyer also encourages those recovering from stupid, pointless, ridiculous love affairs/LTRs with people who they should have avoided like the plague in the first place but couldn't help themselves leading to the current state of things: watching the Bette Davis film "Of Human Bondage," for pointers. I can see I shall have to make another video with a self-help emphasis. But, I wish you could have seen it. The Aunty Balbir video. I wore a tie-dyed chuni and everything, tightened it across my forehead and tucked it behind my ears, gurdwara-style**.

*My son and I at the counter of The Coffee Tree, with local Buddhist/deranged lunatic David Hays:



**Aunty Balbir doesn't actually go in for this kind of thing. Just normal chuni. And nivea. And chocolate covered Hob Nobs in the top drawer. And the best saag paneer this side of the A40.

From "In the Pines": an evergreen mixed with a: "fingerprint"

My friend speaks, as he describes it, "bad English." He asked me to help him. Life is short and so I said yes, but between the Cub Scouts and Naropa and Cresset Farm and being a novelist*********, I couldn't arrange to meet him in the cafe, where such things -- a casual education -- should take place. Thus, in the kitchen, while I was making supper for my family last night, I forced him to stand on a chair and read aloud from books of poetry. He chose Alice Notley, and I can tell you, there is nothing quite like Alice Notley at 5 pm, in a French accent. This is the passage, from page 54, that I stirred into the potato and leek soup, a la "Like Water For Chocolate":

[blogger collates the line breaks, so it is transcribed all wrong]
[imagine it being read in strong French accent]

Don't answer if you can. And he talks with me and walks with
me. Where the sister dwells, with the flame jaguar.
Is this the debt to beauty? The whole conception was bloody.
Heap of silver******* and turquoise. My magic.

["..magique."] I am not ending on the correct line, the line that made me ache, which is what poetry should do, it should hurt you, I was brought up to believe (on a diet of Urdu ghazals, whose content -- longing for a beloved no longer present -- was always metaphorical, in an enclave of refugees, of people whose marriages had only recently been arranged) it should. But the light in the alcove has burned out, and I can't read the words in the darkness that has fallen, just in the last five minutes.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. I want to write about the new anthology, "American Hybrid." But my reaction is so severe, so unofficial -- the hybrid* as diasporic gesture and entity entered my psychic lexicon in 1992, through the writing of Homi Bhabha, which I lapped up like a dog, like Sophie Kinsella paperbacks -- that I think I should ask at least four other people before beginning my career as a post-colonial literary critic. They probably stopped having post-colonial theory by now anyway.

*What is a hybrid? It is the most basic of questions. On Tuesday, at Naropa, I wandered over to the biodynamic greenhouse where I met some gardener-builders. I asked them for an example that I might take to class. What is a hybrid? "Well, take a plant that's grafted from an evergreen, and a plant from the deep south," said one of the gardener-builders, "Your hybrid** will have the aesthetics of one, and the soil-needs***** of the other. That's pretty cool."

**What are the ethics of making: a soft cross***?

***No, not a fellowship group that meets in the basement of a local church**** to crochet crucifixes from llama fur.

****I used to sing second soprano in the choir of St. Luke's in Brockport, New York, so, I know from basements.

*****What are the soil-needs of a novel set in 1979, in Southall, Middlesex?

******"Heap observer with turquoise. Is this right?"

********http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/02/hutnyk-strands01 [A critique, by John Hutnyk, of the diasporic representation of the hybrid in contemporary theory, especially in its relationship to biological antecedents.]

L'Optimisme

The Duras quote depressed at least three people, that I know of, and so I thought I'd attempt - - beyond the province of making Facebook videos with my sister -- to cheer up....well, about three people. Did John Donne ever worry about the levels of optimism in his early works? All those mandrakes and crescent moons...what did he have to worry about anyway? He lived in a time when words were still completely sensual. As a teenager, I'd make a nest of my body and a book behind the long red velvet curtains, which my parents had purchased in an attempt to make our house more elegant, but which, the curtains, were more like knickerbockers on a leg of mutton. And read "The Ecstasie." I promised myself that when I grew up I would find out what the poem meant, for real.

I hate mutton curry.

Right, on that note, and with reference to the neighborhood I am from [as above], here is a paragraph -- what is a paragraph?/"it's revenge" -- from ABIOGENESIS, which I wrote in the Fall one sunny, unseasonable day. Voila:


"3. To flux, to squat. I grew up three streets over from a Nestle factory. Tower blocks dominate the place I came from. Imagine a Parisian suburb. If I can do this, if I can fictionalize the pack ‘n’ play, the patterned behavior of those early years, then I can do this. I can stand out in the rain and beg you to take your love back. You gave it to me. Now remove it. I don’t want whiteness in my body. Cracked, flecked whiteness with deep blue folds. No more fats and sugars. No more milk."

Actually, it's a translation of Mira Bai bhajan, but with a London twist. As a novelist-to-be, I am currently mapping out a race riot. We were shopping for...what? KARELAS?...on the Southall Broadway when suddenly, like the sky, the sky fell down on the street:

"1979: Teacher dies in Southall race riots [fragments from a BBC report]
A 33-year-old man has died from head injuries after a bloody battle broke out between police and demonstrators in Southall.
The fighting began when thousands of protesters gathered to demonstrate against a National Front campaign meeting.

The extreme right-wing organisation had chosen Southall Town Hall to hold its St George's Day election meeting. The area has one of the country's biggest Asian communities.


It was a case of the boot going in - there was no attempt to arrest anybody

Martin Gerrald, Anti-Nazi League protestor

Police had sealed off the area, and anti-racism demonstrators trying to make their way to the town hall were blocked.

In the confrontation that followed, more than 40 people, including 21 police, were injured, and 300 were arrested. Bricks and bottles were hurled at police, who described the rioting as the most violent they have handled in London.

Among the demonstrators was Blair Peach, a New Zealand-born member of the Anti-Nazi League. A teacher for special needs children in east London, he was a committed anti-racism activist.

During an incident in a side street 100 yards from the town hall, he was seriously injured and collapsed, blood running down his face from serious head injuries. He died later in hospital.

Witnesses said his injuries were caused by police baton blows. Martin Gerrald, one of the protestors, was nearby Mr Peach at the time.

"Mr Peach was hit twice in the head with police truncheons and left unconscious," he said. "The police were wielding truncheons and riot shields. It was a case of the boot just going in - there was no attempt to arrest anybody."

'Excessively violent' charge

Another witness, 24-year-old Parminder Atwal, took the injured teacher into his house and called an ambulance.

He said, "I saw a policeman hit a man on the head as he sat on the pavement. The man tried to get up, fell back and then reeled across the road to my house."

The Anti-Nazi League claim Mr Peach bore the brunt of a "brutal" and "excessively violent" police baton charge.

A spokesman for Scotland Yard said it was impossible to comment on the death until a full-sca...."


My novel is called "Peach."

My teacher that year was also from New Zealand; Mr. Taylor, and his daughter, Rani. Rani, Mr. Taylor, why on earth would you be reading this blog? But if you are, please be in touch. But how can you read this? I want to write something you could read. So that I could speak to you again.

Mr. Taylor, like Mr. Peach, was part of an influx of teachers (from NZ and AUS) who'd come in to inner city and greater london schools due to teacher shortages. He asked us to write a story about a monster and when he read mine, he made me read it to the class. After that, as the curriculum unfolded, he told me it was okay, that I could keep writing about monsters instead and each week, I'd stand in front of everyone and read what I wrote. I wrote about monsters while everyone else was learning French and studying the ecology of Peru. Mr. Taylor knew Mr. Peach. Mr. Taylor was the most amazing teacher I ever had.

The novel is written from the point of view of a girl very much like Rani, which is an Indian name, of course.

I feel as if I have to write the novel because this scene, the riot, has not appeared in any work of Indian writing in English that I know of. Am I wrong? Please contact me if I have missed something I needed, the way everyone has needs.

At Naropa this week, we looked at the difference between morphodynamic and morphogenetic architectures. What do you do if you tend towards morphogenesis, but you're writing a novel, which processes the event in irrevocably capitalist ways?

In Reverse

The story of my life does not exist. It doesn’t exist. There never is a center. No path, no line. There are vast places where one makes you believe there was someone, it's not true, there is nobody.

From: Bhanu Kapil [mailto:thisbhanu@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2009 5:15 PM
To: Pierre Perinet
Subject: please translate this for me....

L'histoire de ma vie n'existe pas. Ca n'existe pas. Il n'y a jamais de centre. Pas de chemin, pas de ligne. Il y a de vastes endroits où l'on fait croire qu'il y avait quelqu'un, ce n'est pas vrai, il n'y avait personne.
- Marguerite Duras

J'adore cette photographe de David Bowie. Hope that made sense in French. Possibly not.

After a bit of lull, I became, this afternoon, a French Cat again. Not sure how that's going to work out. For example, I used the last of the Horizon whipping cream to make my first quiche, which was my attempt to balance out running out of gas for the first time in my life. Pulling over on the Diagonal Highway, I felt stunned, calm, and brown-skinned. That would be the cars whizzing past and me, like a small tree of some kind, on the verge. I instinctively called the Department of Writing and Poetics rather than State Farm, and Jennifer Phelps, an angel with a ziplock bag of pre-cut vegetables on the dashboard of what I think may have been a Honda Accord, rescued me. At the gas station, I purchased, as an addition to the red peppers and carrots, a Snickers "for the shock." Well, these are just some provisional notes before going to France, which is a sort of logical end result of becoming partly and accidentally French. It happens. Let down your guard and you find yourself eating white bread with a thick crust in the middle of the day. But, how to prepare for a future of eating the ends of baguettes whilst simultaneously losing weight? It's a challenge. I always used to think I wanted to go to Portugal but my friend Shockie says, and I quote: "It burned down in 2005." What is a Shockie? It is basically someone who makes you hot chocolate on command. What else? Am still reading Duras like an undergraduate, or like myself, I suppose, when I was one, which is to say a person reading: assiduously and with more feeling for it, the world of the book, than for her own. Have spent the last week compiling the black and pink grid of Ana Mendieta/India, for: what? I don't know. This desire to make something, when I am so impractical (and failed, to confess, my Haberdasher's Aske's School For Girls Art O-level), makes no sense. It is do with being able to process an image in a way that I can't in language. That is about all I know so far. Also, what with the warm weather here in Colorado, have been playing a bit of tennis in Sunnyside Park. I apologize if you are reading this in Chicago or Boston.

It is now Day 22. I tried to upload an amazing photograph of David Bowie (c. 1973) [in a dirty white T-shirt, stretching, with his arms up] from The Guardian but it didn't work. That is how I spent the last 5 days. Here's the link; I think the photo I love is number seven When you see it, you'll know:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2009/jan/23/david-bowie-pictures?picture=342181586.

It was an interesting week at Naropa. The following three to five things happened:

1. In the architecture seminar, I began to form a tertiary grid for Schizophrene, at the same time that the new graduate students were dilating/hatching their permutes. Is permutes a word? Yes. It is. It's the future anterior of a bad noun, the kind of noun that insists on a recombinant form. How can you blur a technology? Someone, a student called M., reading the essay on Tschumi that we began with, like robots, gave her notes on repetition and blurring: how the matrix converts optically but also emotionally. I understood something about the role of intuition in building a project when she said it: how the book itself is a destiny. But, most valuably, for being a writer at the same time as being a teacher, I also wrote with the architect-artists. In some ways, the passage between architecture and hybrid writing is most useful for me when I am re-writing. In Boulder, I sometimes go to see a shaman called Swan Ashley. At least, I think she is a shaman. She lies you down on a table and collects her hands above you and...the closest I can come to describing it is that she creates a kind of suction. All this light is sealed in around your body and it traps the images. It traps them long enough for you to form a narrative in the deepest kind of time. For you to understand what you are seeing. The process of gridding -- whether cubically or in the kind of list Virginia Woolf used to write in pencil above her desk...questions, motifs, sentences...that she could observe when she blanked out...did she blank out?: is like that. It's tonal. It's, as Beatriz Calomina writes, " a double envelope." Writing these notes makes me miss living in a city.

2. In the break between Notes on Architecture and The Hybrid, I bumped into Marco Lam. He teaches permaculture and biodynamics at Naropa. Ergo, he had a key to the silvery dome structure that has appeared on campus next to the Japanese tea-house. It is some kind of futuristic green-house with tubes to redistribute fish poop. On a low shelf, I saw a paper model of the structure, complete with pencilled in numbers on each triangle of the dome. When I enquired what he was going to with it, Marco said: "Return it to the earth, I think." I said: "I don't think so, ducky." And took it. We are going to have a joint class, maybe, with our very different kinds of students. What is the biology of architecture? And how can we re-distribute the nutrients generated when a hybrid structure is being formed?

3. I met Lisa Birman in the loo. We hugged, and Lisa talked briefly about the penguins of Australia, who are not your run-of-the-mill penguins.

4. Back in class, invited my undergraduate students to talk, if they wanted, about the inauguration, which had been that morning. (I wept, even though the only channel that comes in clearly at my house is Fox News and then, only if you position the bunny ears with tantric prowess on the windowsill.) The conversation was split between "it was amazing" and questions/concerns about future policy on Guantanamo, Gaza, and gay rights. After class, a student scrawled down this Facebook link:

Worldwide List of Demonstrations for Gaza
Take Action: for an update on the list
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=42365143132

5. Tripped over the robes of a MONK on the steps of the Allen Ginsberg library. Very bad. I was returning books in the white bin outside then whirled around to go down the steps...and it was all over. I think the monk was from Bhutan. He didn't seem to mind but obviously, I felt like a plonker. Offered to buy him cup of tea, and he accepted, so may have rehabilitated myself in the realms of the future Buddha. We'll see. Plus, I'm technically a Hindu, so not sure if purchasing a South-Asian holy man/scholar some chai really counts.

Delhi: Notes from the balcony

This morning, a shaggy, feral-looking golden eagle landed on the balcony railing of the flat. A flat in the Officer's Enclave in West Patel Nagar, a compound protected by a tall pink wall. Peacocks navigate the thick pocket of trees and vines beyond the wall in pairs: cock and hen. I glance up from my book every now and then when a flash of indigo-green crosses my peripheral vision. The officer whose flat this is is also an artist. His books and paintings flood each room. My son, who dreams of becoming a soldier, is in heaven, saluting the colonel, who is running a fever, whenever he sits up in bed. I ask the colonel about his daughter, who is in the hotel industry in Mumbai . When I ask if he had been concerned for his daughter's safety on 26/11, he just laughs as if I've said something hilariously funny. This is a man who has been on campaigns in Sri Lanka for most of his adult life. He says: "You must be joking." I immediately felt that being a writer, a writer engaging Indian content, meant processing his laughter.

Last week, on the border with Punjab, I built and filmed a silueta -- an outline of my body, filled in. Borders are decisions somebody made not entities. Materials: dried lemon leaves, marigolds, rose petals, fire, oil, earth. I found a way to build thigh muscles, to sense the shape of the musculoskeletal structure through the curve of my own hands; other flows too. How the nervous system extends into the wrists as a process, a discharge of strong energy, and how that's different left to right. Over the few days that I did this soft work, layering the dried leaves like scales, methodically, a small crowd gathered to observe - boys, teenaged boys, and old men, mostly. They were very quiet and respectful. A rumor circulated- - perhaps because of the marigolds and the tiny clay divas -- that I was making an offering to Shiva, which I guess seemed completely normal to them. Though I feel very far away, in the kind of India that I go to, from nice things like Rabbit Butoh and the content of Dodie Bellamy's belladodie blog, I feel at the same time an enormous freedom to explore the concept of vibration. To communicate with the dead and living materials at a site, which compose a body then re-compose it. To wait until the body, which is text, begins to breathe. Literally. It's why I love books that are delayed; I can read a dead book for thirty pages until it opens its eyes: "to enter, to re-enter." [M. Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein .] Lol: "an upright sleeping beauty."

Day 3, three boys brought me handfuls of red rose petals they'd scavenged from a local park. "Aap se, didi." I admonished them then took the petals, and scattered them in her hair, which I'd made by scraping my fingers from her body, her head I suppose, to the roots of the lemon tree above. Her: the woman made from local matter, illogically appearing in a false corridor. A border is two lines, not one. Like cellulose, it restricts a mobile, linear content. I wish I could drink the border. I wish I could suck its juice.

This semester, at Naropa, we are studying technological and biological hybrids, and architecture, for the practices and approaches that might return us to the book, in a devoted way. Teaching is dreaming too.

Mumbai

I once slipped into the lobby of the Taj for a proper cup of coffee and a European breakfast. I bought a Bjork tape in the lobby gift shop, then slipped out into the sea-rich day. With my cousin, Muttoo, I caught a boat to Elephanta, an island off the coast of Mumbai. On the way back, I asked the captain if I could steer. He let me steer, if that is what you do (steer) in boats. I sailed us in to the coast. All the passengers were laughing and cheering. The ocean was greeny blue. That evening, we sat on the sea wall, swinging our legs, drinking papaya juice from stainless steel tumblers, watching the sun go down. Why did the juice stall let us leave with the tumblers? They just did, I guess, and we returned them when we were done.

Just now, I read that India declared war tonight. Did I read that right? I must have read it wrong. No, India's security status is "At War." I hope that somehow, at this late hour, that I am confused. That I am not understanding the words on the front page of The Guardian. That it's too late at night, and that's why I am getting it wrong.

Arundhati Roy on the Mumbai attacks:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy

How do you slice a dark space? I think of that as a definition of colonialism, and from it, I can only imagine that nation-builders feel privately the epic scope of their work. An epic is automatically, linguistically beautiful as a form.

Experimental literatures are anti-colonial literatures. I feel more like an anti-colonial writer than a post-colonial one. The effects of decision-making are identical, for me, to the decisions themselves. This is why I don't write poetry, why I don't write novels, why I can't write a basic series of events without wanting to fall down. Fall down and lie there, face down, the orange in one hand, the knife in the other. I saw that in a performance of Macbeth in the George Bernard Shaw theater on Baker Street, with my father, in the beautiful year before he was gone. He fell asleep during the performance and afterwards we had crepes in a small restaurant. I never saw my father drink coffee, really, but he had some that night, to stay awake for the drive home down the A40. My father was born near the border with Pakistan about a million years ago, on land that's contested, and which I will give up this December: land I cannot see. Land I cannot go.

How do you slice a dark space? I keep seeing an image of an imprint, a body's soft imprint, in the full dark of a border at night. I fill that imprint with fire softer than being alive and film it as it scatters and fades, in the paper that moves. Write me something on a piece of volatile paper. Accompany me to the ends of the world.

How do you write something that is made of time, flooded with time, and yet isn't, could not ever be, an epic with an epic's force of memory, its capacity to make you feel?

Amina Cain

I've been typing up an introduction to a book of short stories by Amina Cain, an amazing book coming out from Les Figues Press. This is the first paragraph. I've been trying to write about narrative and proprioception. Hmm. Being crap at formatting, I won't re-arrange the rolfing quote. Therefore:

Touch Me:

Unbounded Space and Proprioception in the work of Amina Cain

"An elastic fabric, subjected to pull of any sort, transmits the strain in many directions over a wide area. If the displacement exceeds the elastic limits, an aberrant pattern remains."

Ida Rolf.

A milky-blue crater. Residue caking the rim. Violet, turquoise and chocolate streaks. I don’t know what I’m flying over. A space. Excessive, chronic, pigmented space. The pilot announces that we’re flying over the border of Pakistan and India. His words, which promise something, at least to me, are a stimulant. They amplify the feeling of being alive although, like everyone else on this aeroplane, I am stock-still, my neck craned to the right, blankly gazing at the clusters of shimmering settlements below. Around each tiny hollow of electricity is a garden, and beyond these gardens, which from the sky are black, is an orange, cream and gold grid of fields. This grid flares then vanishes in the time it takes to read a paragraph or write a sentence, which affects the animals in the fields, and the people who live between them, but not me, and not the other passengers, and not the pilot and his team. In our special world, territory is indexed to allure but not to sensation. We read the marks below for where we’re going, linking our arrival, whether we want to arrive or not, or maybe we’re leaving, to the little movements of the earth’s crust, which are accretions. Hard structures which function both as locators and the way we order time. The pilot, for example, tells us to gather our trash for the attendants. He tells us to get up and move around while we can. Obediently, I snap my gaze from planetary space to the seat-back, where I read: “ABROCHE CU CINTRON.” Clicked in, I reach my finger out and trace the plastic, slightly raised A, which is both a fetish for language and its antidote. For months now, I’ve been touching a public A to make a private one. To mouth a word. To make what stopped happening happen. I don’t mean to be obscure, but this doesn’t work so well in other countries, or above them. If vertigo is a symptom of profound attraction, then, so far above the earth, I prefer to look away and focus hard, until I can’t feel anything at all.

I highly recommend reading I Go To Some Hollow under similar conditions, though not in airports.

Selah and Jack draped in saris from Singapore, and Eric in a red wool scarf of rough knots produced from wool gathered after a Cecilia Vicuna reading

This week, Selah Saterstrom, Jack Collom and Eric Baus visited the Upaya cottages at Naropa. There in the cottages, we listened and asked questions. These are my notes towards writing, and don't hold the many threads that also arose, for other writers, questions about texture and shelter, for example.

Selah said: "We can shimmer beside one another but we can't die for each other. I can't die for you."

Jack said, describing the collapse of hybrid species at the dark center where the overlap is (between caterpillars in England): "On either side of the narrow band, that's where all the new characteristics, all the refined advantages, were. Polka dots and so on. But in the center, that's where all the weak traits of the caterpillars expressed themselves...and the hybrids there were sort of exhausted." ["So, an excess of hybridity is a kind of collapse."] Jack: "Yes, it was a little too much hybridity to bear."

Selah said: "The page is a grave. The page is an altar. The page is an installation space. What else can it be?"

She said: "Mutation is both survival and genuflection. We can survive like that, but what's important is to come back speaking. To transgress but then to come back, and to come up with a syntax that feels like that feels. The work arrives with its own blueprint, its own becoming, and I want to be in service of that. In service of the story."

She said: "Narrative is a condition. It's not something we come up with. I mean, you can do that. But that's not what it is."

Jack said: "Nature modes. Pay attention. No answer. Cladistics. Belonging. Territory. Prompt. Variability. Magic. Hypnopomp. Brownian movement. Relationship. Sex. Lament. Ceremony. Fractal emotion. New entitites. Details of flow."

Selah said: "I've been thinking about the relationship between beauty and anyway."

She said: "Do it anyway. Position yourself to see...anyway." She was speaking about the space that follows violence. Earlier, she spoke about narrative and the nervous system, PTSD loops, a stalled repetition. Jack, when I asked him what brought species to the limit of territory said: "There's no limit. Everything is territory. But....I think....repetition."

I'm still trying to work out the question of trauma and narrative -- and so I observed Selah's radical lists, the line extracted and what "drops down", how Selah described language as a "horizon". The sentence dying, in a way, when extracted, selected, but then re-populating itself in the paragraph. The narrative evolving without attachment. Selah's tarots cards as prompts. I watched narrative create a population, so that narrative is not territory, it's not survival -- it is sex. But sex for a different reason.

I called my friend, Andrea Spain, to work out the question of repetition as it arises in different domains. Actually, I'm getting this wrong. This is before the writers arrived, and I had the idea to situate them at the glass door of the Consciousness Lab in the basement of a Naropa administrative complex on Arapahoe Ave. Selah read from The Pink Institution in a dark corridor. We lay red leaves at her feet, but it was uncomfortable and so we left. We got her and went back to our room.

She said: "I like that. I like being up against the glass plane. I don't know why yet."

But before this, in the car driving towards it, towards the day at Naropa, I called Andrea. I knew I wanted to ask someone something at a threshold, at the door before it's opened, before it was time to go in, but why? Once, I went to the Institute of Health Sciences in London, to meet Dinesh Bhugra, a researcher in the field of cross-cultural psychiatry, and did the same thing. I documented an architecture. I wrote about the corridor as much as his work. I wrote about the view of rooftops and chimneys from the window at the end of the corridor. What is the content of this threshold? What is it for?

Andrea Spain, whom I called with this question, said: "Consiousness, according to Bergson, is the gap between stimulus and response. Perception launches us into consciousness, which is our ability to delay that response, to make a longer interval. If you think of an animal, for example, an animal carves out an image in the world. Images related to survival, you could say. But actually, when you select an image, you're also selecting all these other images. " Me: "Like mutations..." Andrea: Yes, and this is what the artist does. The artist or the writer or the painter can go beyond the habitual cut-out, the image the animal carves out, and is able to see the multiplicity of the object and the image, and somehow not filter that out as non-utilitarian. We're never selecting just one thing."

Eric Baus, the day before, visiting Naropa as Jack and Selah did the next day, but before this, before I spoke to Andrea, said: "I'm interested in listening as a body that extends beyond a literal body. The body of the text. And attending to to the receiving, the absorbing, of all these tiny moments. Like, going beyond the semantic foreground of a recording and paying attention to the document in another way. Like the tape hiss. And all these wierd little artifacts. And I like to listen to something over and over again. Repeat. Repeat. It's a way of exhausting a text in a way. In an non-aggressive way. Like removing a frame but still paying attention to the particular aspects. I think of those aspects as residue, as a way to hear content but also the patterns of things. Alluvial texture. Continuity but not coherence. All these really subtle things. These slight variations."

But what about repetitions you can't control. Repetitions of memory, of physiological response. What if trauma makes an animal out of you. How can you function as an experimental writer, using repetition to select, to sediment, to accrue wishes and fragments, the necessary mutations that expand the interval, when repetition has done you in; when what you want is an "oboe, coffee, water, paper. I want to go to to a place where I feel free." [From one of the recording Eric brought in.]

Andrea: "If we find ourselves caught in repetition, then we need to return to perception in order to expand."

I thought, when Jack spoke about the intense attention brought to natural processes, and Selah spoke about "the moment when fight becomes surrender and everything blooms", and Eric about "bringing an insane level of attention to listening" to recorded poetry readings: that these were acts of biomimicry.

Shape memory. Vibration. Shaking. "Vigilance." (Selah.) What an animal would do. But then: carving the stars out of the night. And capturing those flares. Narrative is threshold, not territory. It's night. Not real night. Not regular night. This kind of night. An extraordinary night with a wave of electricity warping it in the form of a falling star, a star you catch in your arms, which kills you. It kind of kills you at the same time as it lights you up, gives you a different life.

To introduce Selah, I read this quote, from Bruce Mau's Massive Change [from an interview with Philip Ball]: "It's about moving away from the classical idea of materials -- inert stuff that serves a structural role -- toward a more contemporary notion of materials. More and more, materials are active and respond to stimuli in their environment. Materials can light up when an electric current is passed through them...."

Selah: "That's writing, isn't it?"

Even the sunlight looks different

Woke up and saw that the post-election light in next door's willow tree actually refracted its green-gold in a way that reached my eyes differently. Immediatement. I can speak French! Incredible. When I was in India this summer, my cousin Monu arrived on a visit from Sweden, via his MBA and his new life in the suburbs of the erotically self-sustaining metropolis of Stockholm. (Vasu, his brother, a skinny kid in childhood, now some weight-lifting extrapolated and suave man, lives in Denmark and commutes to Madrid.)

Me: "Why?"

Monu: "Didi, why what?"

Me: "Why didn't you go to America like everyone else?"

Monu: "I wanted to do something else. Besides, America...."

And so on. I was startled. The idea that the U.S. isn't/wasn't a promising destination compromises, in reverse, my irreversible longing to come here. Thus, yesterday, driving home from the fabulous bookstore owner/coffee shop owner TV party, I said to my sister: "It's like we live in Norway."

Rohini: "NORWAY?"

After three and a half disturbing weeks/years, I feel like a writer again. Perhaps it's co-incidence to wake up on November 5th (Guy Fawke's Day) and feel this way. I cannot explain it. I even ate poached ruby red trout for supper, which is an extremely Northern European food and/or beverage choice. (Well, I have yet to eat it. I have no appetite. I am too happy. And maybe it's breakfast when the Scandanavian element kicks in. Furthermore, my family members -- my son, my sister and my dog [I have a new puppy, a half black lab, half Great Dane (possibly Newfoundland) mutt-like bit of fierce fur and silliness] - -are dancing to pirate songs. "Sailing for adventure....on the deep blue seas. Hey, hey, blow the land down/ Give me some time to blow the land down."

I didn't know until today that writing and amazement were connected. Writing and nationhood. Writing and a feeling of hope. Writing and belonging to a place.

First thing today, Academic Council at Naropa. All the faculty in a rim-of-a-volcano/vibrating grey carpet circle on the Nalanda campus. Someone stood up at the end of a three hour meeting and said: "I have to name this. This is such a extraordinary morning, and we haven't said anything about the fact that this is such an extraordinary morning. We haven't acknowledged it. Why haven't we? I'd like to acknowledge it now, what happened last night, how amazing it is that....". And everyone broke into applause, and some people stood up. Someone else said: "Someone should write a long-life prayer for Obama." After the meeting, I said: "I'll do it." I was introduced to Judith Simmer-Brown, Buddhist scholar, dakini wisdom-holder of this place. She said, when I asked her about the kind of ceremonial language I might use to write an epic poem: "You write, May he be protected, may his work go well...and so on."

Dried codfish open sandwich.
Meatballs.
Rye bread with salted butter in my tiffin.

I want to write an American sentence. I want to become a writer in a land. I want to write in an ecstatic form that has both lineage and intent. I want to wake up tomorrow morning, take my son to school, come home, make some tea, and start writing. I want to make a temporary shelter for what the language wants.

Day of the Dead: Women of Color and Experimental Writing

After a night roaming the streets in Star Wars get-up, my beautiful son is finally asleep. I can't sleep, and it's almost November 1st. In a bit of time, I'll be relieved of a prophecy that, until November 2008, my life will be "so-so." This is according to a Pandit in Delhi who said that in November, which I suppose would be the prophecy kicking in actually, life would become "[Indian word for amazing, no problems, an imminent departure to the NE corner of Brazil or no departure but either way: tastiness, shiny bits and joy]."

Alright, then:

"3. To flux, to squat. I grew up three streets over from a Nestle factory. Tower blocks dominate the place I came from. Imagine a Parisian suburb. If I can do this, if I can fictionalize the pack ‘n’ play, the patterned behavior of those early years, then I can do this. I can stand out in the rain and beg you to take your love back. You gave it to me. Now remove it. I don’t want whiteness in my body. Cracked, flecked whiteness with deep blue folds. No more fats and sugars. No more milk."

I wrote that last week, translating Mira Bai from scratch, neither a devotional nor erotic choice. I wrote it thinking about the amount of effort it takes to write an adaptive sentence. One that will survive scrutiny. No, it's more literal than that. Mira Bai is begging her lover for something in the moonlight, which turns him white. Basic quantum physics: if it existed, you told me it did, then it exists, you can't pretend it does not exist, love exists, so take it back. Mira Bai -- 1498-1547 of the common era -- stood beneath the tree in a light rain and begged her white lover to return. Not to love her but to perform a transaction in reverse.

I like this as a literary model. Not the form. Not the content. But the act. Of calling out to something. Not to be completed. Not to be re-joined. But to be free of an obliterating attachment. You fill in the blanks:

1.Blankety Blank: hit UK game show, mid-1980s, hosted by Terry Wogan.

2. See: Barbara Jane Reyes on women of color and experimental writing: "Death … is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had I betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words….I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself." Foucault on suicide, but I should not say that, not without the quote.

3. I painted the walls of my home turquoise and butter-yellow. Even tonight, before going to sleep, I said, looking at the colors glowing in the lamp light: "Beautiful." Something about the bareness of an immigrant experience, the time it takes to make a home feel real, is helpful. It slows language down until it's happening at the same pace as other physical processes, so that speaking becomes automatic, a dreadful liberty, a site of longing but not appeal.

Halloween Quote

Today, I am dressed in a black, tail on end, spooky-eyes cat head-ornament. The arched back of the black cat goes over my head. I went to The Coffee Tree to drink cappuccino at the rickety sidewalk wrought iron table and write in my notebook, and forgot I was wearing it. A grandma and a mum and their little one, dressed as a female pirate, walked by and the grandma said: "Do you want to say hi to the big cat?" I thought they were speaking about me and waved and smiled at the toddler, then miaowed dramatically in what I thought was a super friendly and faux-scary-kitty way. Unfortunately, did not realize until too late that they were referring to the bronze "cougar" sculpture a little way down the sidewalk. The grandma gave me a hard stare, but I chalked it up to my on-going assimilation into Halloween culture. In twenty minutes, I have to go and pick up my son from a play date. He has been dressed as a clone trooper since 7 a.m. We didn't have Halloween in England. We spray painted coffee beans gold and silver and arranged them in spirals on black cardboard. We roasted chestnuts. We watched television. I cannot remember anything else about the late Octobers I spent in the United Kingdom as a small person, a tiny person, who then grew.

Okay, here is my favorite Halloween quote ever -- the words, in combination, are frightening; they pose a problem that could not be solved by living/only by writing/by living life in a completely different way -- and then I have to go:

Foucault:

In love, there is, in some way or another, a beloved, whereas passion circulates between the partners....One can perfectly well love without being loved in return. It's an affair of solitude. For that reason, love is always full of solicitations toward the other. That's its weakness, for it always demands something of the other, whereas in a state of passion among two or three people it's something that allows intense communication. This state of mutual and reciprocal suffering -- it truly is communication.

Tango Lessons

I have started tango lessons in Denver, in an attempt to prepare myself for my forthcoming nuptials to -- with? -- an Argentinian millionaire. Well, not exactly a millionaire and also less good-looking than Robert Duvall in "Assasination Tango." Who cares? I might not get married at all, and just continue on like this, writing about India in whatever the opposite of an epic triptych form is. I leave for India in a few weeks. Nevertheless, every day I buckle up my grey metallic 1940s slip-ons. Which, I guess, are not technically slip-on if they have free-basing attachments. I suppose this is the rough equivalent of someone, in preparation for marrying a Punjabi, learning how to make aloo parathas from scratch, when everyone knows you never have to. You just say: "Can I have another one?" And it (the breaded, stuffed product) automatically appears. That, at least, is a memory I just had from 1983. Nevertheless, I suspect the tango is something you have to be capable of if you are going to throw yourself down in front of something (the future) in neo-orange Buenos Aires at approx. 2 pm on a Sunday afternoon in early Spring/Fall. (It flips.) I flip out for you. Things like that. In succession.

Naropa. Okay. On Mondays, we've been clowning a bit, and thinking. We've begun to formulate terrible lies, and once, we had a discussion about race that made me tremble in my boots, in a good way. In an interesting way. On Tuesdays, three graduate students did a presentation on Thomas Glave. There was a gas leak of some kind, a very moderate one, and I felt very dizzy, and then, during the Al Jazeera slide show, my body started involuntarily spasming. Sometimes I say my writing comes from the parts of my body that I can't control; at which point I usually start quoting Marguerite Duras and other examples of writers/artists who lived lives of great desire. I always censor out that there's entire sets of less pleasurable sensations that also suggest books, if a book can be said to be a plexiglass container for a rapidly altering content. "Unassimilable content." Does anyone really want that book? Is it boring? Is colonial trauma boring?

I wish I lived in Nottingham and could meet Michael Cooke for coffee when I got bored.
I wish I lived in London and could meet Mandeep Pannu for tea when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Denver and could meet Eric Baus and Katherine Ross, though not at the same time, for purified water when I got bored.
I wish I lived in L.A. and could meet Bonny Diadhiou for coffee when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Brooklyn and could meet Melissa Buzzeo for cappuccino when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Chandigarh and could meet my cousin Mona, if she happened to be visiting her parents in Ludhiana and had access to a scooter, for iced coffee when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Long Island and could meet Sheryl La Scala for Dunkin Donuts coffee when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Maidenhead and could meet Aunty Balbir for tea when I got bored (though, more likely, we'd go over to her house and also have biscuits from the top drawer, though I am trying to be gluten free at the moment.)
I wish I lived in Haridwar and could meet Aunty Usha for chai when I got bored (though, as above, it would be probably be home-made, with lots of grated ginger, and we'd be sitting on the verandah of the ashram where she lives, in disintegrating plastic chairs.)
I wish I lived in Paris and could meet Gina McGovern for cafe creme when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Buffalo and could meet Andrea Spain for coffee when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Oslo and could meet Monu, my cousin, or Vasu, my other cousin, for chai when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Burlington and could meet Elena Giorgiou for coffee, with milk and sugar in it, when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Boulder and could meet Monique Esposito for chamomile tea with steamed soy milk when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Rochester and could meet Judi Salsburg for a sacred cup of coffee when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Kalamazoo and could meet Jennifer the Sunshine Monkey for a papaya milkshake when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Portland and could meet Lisa Webster and Joyelle for twig tea (and almond milk) when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Brockport and could meet Janet Brodessor for coffee substitute barley drink when I got bored.
I wish I lived in heaven/the emanation of the river Ganges and could meet Tony Piccione, Uncle Arjun, my dad, and Aunty Catherine for Beaujolais Nouveau when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Oakland and could meet Erin Morrill for coffee when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Berkeley and could meet Juliana Spahr for home coffee in a proper California garden with strawberries when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Philadelphia and could meet Jena Osman for mint tea...no, champagne, in a French cafe....when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Pinner and could meet Uncle Som for a few sips of Guiness in Pinner High Street when I got bored.
I wish I lived in the remote wilds of Surrey and could meet Lindsey Norman for hot chocolate (and a Flake for dipping) when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Ruislip and could meet Mrs. Sen for some kind of potent liquer that they only have in Florence when I got bored, or that I could meet Jasmine Koller and Anja and have tea with them, and biscuits, and meditate, but not at the same time as my appointment with Mrs. Sen, whose first name was Louisa (she married a Bengali man) and who taught me how to play a straight up, straight down Bach prelude.
I wish I lived in Baton Rouge and could meet Laura Mullen for tea when I got bored. Not tea. Absinthe.
I wish I lived in Mexico City and could meet Dolores Dorantes, if she was there, for coffee, if she drank it, and if Jen Hofer drinks it (ideally, Jen Hofer would be there too), when I got bored.
I wish I lived in Panchkula and could meet my mum for guava juice at the stand in the park opposite the temple if I got bored.
I wish I lived in Lyons and could meet Reema Ghoste for coffee if I got bored, and just watch her. Some people you don't even need to eat or drink; you just relax in their company and thrive.

Ancillary Notes

From the non-site site:

As part of the Nonsite Collective's "Poetics of Disablement" curriculum, Bhanu Kapil will facilitate a discussion around a short selection from Elizabeth Grosz's *Chaos, Territory, Art,* attached as a pdf below.

Saturday September 20, at 3 935 Natoma,
between 10th and 11th, and between Mission and Howard
Close to Van Ness and Market (Muni)
or Civic Center BART
For information regarding wheelchair accessibility, please contact rob[dot]halpern[at]gmail[dot]com.
About her approach, Bhanu writes:

<< I've been reading Elizabeth Grosz on sensation and futurity: "There is an involuted and oblique relation between the energies of sexual selection...the attraction to and possible attainment of sexual (though not necessarily copulative) partners -- human and otherwise -- and the forces and energies of artistic production and consumption" (from *Chaos, Territory, Art*). That the intensity felt in a body is part of what allows it to extend into a territory or cross between domains - - acts of pleasure, acts of sexual selection, as analogous to the process of making transgressive works of art. Not sure. Am thinking about immigrant bodies, refugee bodies, bodies made hybrid by divergence on a continuum from prosaic (the South-Asian grad student) to traumatic. Have been thinking about numbness, about hyper-vigilance, about what happens to the flow of "energies of sexual selection" in a body that's at the limit of possible sensations. This as depending too on class status. On how desirability is worked out in the port of arrival. My question, then, for writers/artists working through a poetics of disablement -- towards hybrid works, in particular -- is there any language we can think through together, about the experience of hybridity/fusion in the body -- and how might this affect our transgressive relationships to the space of the book, the territory of document, our ability to attain the kind of couplings/intensifications/resonant physical gestures that further the limit of what a book is? I feel as if there is another kind of book I am only beginning to imagine. What about you? I didn't meet you yet. Other aims: I'd like to ask Amber Di Pietra to say more about the hybrid body as "compacted." >>

..........

I asked Lisa Birman, an immigrant, to blog because I no longer felt something in my body when I blogged. Have been thinking a bit about sensation/the forming of hybrid texts, in my notebook before class on Mondays, though things that seem so vivid to me as a writer pale when I start speaking/teaching. "I am stupid," said my son, as we left the tennis courts in Sunnyside Park two days ago. I said: "You're not stupid. You're just starting, bub." "Don't call me bub. Only call me bub at home." Tennis is difficult to explain to someone, and also difficult the first thirty-two times you try to play it. I am trying to write a book that makes sense to me, and that is a cold book. It's a rough book. It's a book that rested in the snow until I retrieved it, come spring. I came upon those pages yesterday and my first impulse was to smell them. I put my writing in a basket and I put that basket on a red shelf in the back room, which has a desk in it, though I never sit at the desk. My father didn't have a desk. My grandfather played his violin cross-legged on a divan, with the rounded part of the instrument pressed against his stomach. My mother made a shrine in the linen cupboard and sang the bhajans of Mira Bai both to a crumpled painting of Lord Krishna and a pile of neatly folded sheets. Thus, I always feel stupid trying to write novels in a semi-upright position, though I long for something -- a wooden table under trees, a bottle of water, the pages of an open notebook held down with a tube of yellow paint -- that, since childhood, since young adulthood, I've believed to be products of a life devoted to the arts.

For example, and only by sheer co-incidence, I knew Inge Goodwin. I knew Dennis Goodwin. I went to their beautiful grand house in St. John's Wood. I went to their even grander, crumbling farmhouse just outside London in the blazing copper fields that mark the near counties in Fall. They pointed out a tree in their garden. "Michael Hamburger." "Seamus Heaney." All the trees in their orchard had been planted by writers over the best part of the mid to late twentieth century. I was twenty, the girlfriend of their handsome, sadistic, ecstatic godson, M., who lived in Amsterdam. They advised me against the relationship and fed me dinner. They said: "Tell us about your novel." I don't know why the translator of Rilke from German into English and the commander of the Ethiopian army (when he was sixteen) asked me this. All I had to my name were notebooks. In fact, all I have to my name right now are notebooks. Perhaps Inge and Dennis are dead by now; they were very old then. I told them I wanted to write a novel on yellow paper. I didn't know what they were asking me. "But what are you writing ABOUT?" Rapidly, bullshitting myself and them, I invented a plot. They had a servant. The servant brought in bowl after bowl of wine and creamed soup and duckling soup and wet blue tea, which turned out to be a chilled dessert. Two years later, hitchhiking in Oregon, having made my escape from Europe, where the only job I could get (seriously) was in McDonald's, I bought a pad of yellow paper in an Office Max or its rough equivalent and started writing. It was such crap that I gave the paper away to a woman who had come into the Eugene cafe with a double stroller -- a baby and a boy of about four. I said: "Would your child like this paper? To draw on?" This summer, I took yellow paper to India but gave it before leaving to Govinda and Sachin, the two little boys who live in the converted garage of my mother's house. They set to work immediately drawing cartoons. Fierce-looking cats, mostly. There are no pet cats in India.

I lie down to sleep next to novels. I fall asleep in bed with them, and when I begin them, thinking, this is it, I'm going to write something that Ian McEwan will pick up in Norwich Railway Station on a whim, and start reading, and then he and his partner will invite me to dinner, and there will crusty bread and runny cheese....I also fall asleep. And the books I end up actually writing are written from that dreaming, which is ancillary.

Books are passion. Thinking is love.

sum of my parts

As ¾ Polish, ¼ Russian, ½ German, most completely Australian, and living in the USA, it is a fine addition to my resume to be an honourary Punjabi. I have been accused of geographical instability, and it is a fair accusation. For many years I thought geography was a cruelty inflicted upon me. Then, in a green kitchen in Berlin, my brilliant geographically-unstable friend Josepha (aka Susie Asado) and I realized we had made geography our bitch and we were paying the price.

So I am in Boulder, paying the price. It is fine by me to pay the price seeing as it is paid in poems at the Kerouac School. Especially as I am interrupted typing this by my chirping cell phone transporting me back to Prague. Pockej!

Je reviens. And so you see how geography interrupts my words. Which is why I read about people in places. Sometimes people who move around places, and sometimes people who know how to stay put. This morning, with oatmeal and goji berries (weird, not sure about it), I devoured James Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem. He knows how to stay put in a place and in a poem, and also how to move through both. It is something I am trying to learn. I have stayed put in Boulder longer than any other place but Melbourne (where I always am anyway). I would like some statistics on poets per capita here. I do not know how to find such statistics, and would really just like to sit in my chair and have them delivered. Or perhaps I could go for a walk and they shall be here when I return.

So, if you know how to stay put in a poem or in a place, or if you know how many poets stay put in Boulder, do tell.

Honourary Punjabi,
Lisa Birman

Lisa Birman: Punjabi 2

I have located Punjabi Number 2. In typical Sikh manner, Lisa is associated with diverse locales, such as Prague, Barcelona, Boulder and Australia. However, there -- wanderlust -- the similarity abruptly ends, though I once saw her wearing her hair in a topknot, though thankfully not with the associated handkerchief and elastic band. (Please see: Sikh boyhood, ages seven and a half to fifteen). When I have given her the secret password to the blog, hopefully something will start happening. Something more delicious than eggs on toast with ketchup!

Mutation

I've spent today thinking about Gerald Ford's penis, for an essay I'm writing about love, and the paintings of Luke Butler, in which strange tiny-big heroes liquidize less obvious sensations like, I've got to get the dinner on.

Currently, I'm looking for a faux or both false and true Punjabi to take over the blogging reigns. Cue: neighing sounds.

As I embark upon the Fall semester, I feel quiet and small, and flooded with _ _ _. Not sure that this makes for interesting blogging. Apparently, now that I am totally grown up, the way I write is to spend a four year period writing slowly, very slowly, and then, in the course of five months, I complete three books at once. Latent, dormant, visiting books suddenly become mad books, books whose thoughts overwhelm my own thoughts. Not sure that this makes for language outside its sphere. Not sure, when life is changing, when one's body is changing, how to write in the register that preceded content. See? That didn't make any sense! I should stop.

It's a trope of the blogosphere to engage the ecstatic/basic services of a guest blogger. I hope to approach a variety of colleagues at The Jack Kerouac School and invite them to: subsist on roti and makhan ki daal. To become an honorary Punjabi. To blog.

Teaching feels mysterious to me, all of sudden, indistinguishable from writing itself, from someone pouring water over your wrist as you write.

So, soon, I hope to offer you some delicious food. Cos you can't slice water. You can only drink it down.

थे बीट्स इन India

Okay, I'm in an internet cafe in the Himalayan foothills, which are obviously extensive. Thus, I am a red dot in a map that's not meaningful/orange out of context. A bomb blast in Srinagar the day before yesterday and at the train station, soldiers with machine guns get on and search random passengers. Sniffer dogs, the direct: "Aap baar se?" Are you from outside? Right now, I'm in Punjab, a province half in India and half in Pakistan, a rough part of the country, and the only white people I've seen in weeks were two bemused-looking mechanical engineers in a Faridabad mall; I saw them, they didn't see me. In my salwar chemise and slicked back ponytail, I look like a well-loved suburban mother, potentially of three children, on a date with her Pepe-jeans clad husband, who may or may not have a moustache but who is defintely busy parking our Hyundai sedan, which is why I am leaning over the railing looking down at all the families and couples drinking their blended coffees from Costa's or queing up outside Haldirams for a 10 pm table and a plate of Raj Kachori. The engineers stand out,blinking in the flourescent auditorium. But I'm not there anymore. I'm here, to the north and west, taking electrobion notes and reading and traveling further in. When I meet writers and painters, they want to know about Barack Obama, they want to talk about the bombings at the Indian embassy in Afghanistan, and they want to sit down and write an allegorical poem then and there. I forgot. I forgot that part of me is wired to write poetry with others, in a natural setting, rewriting disaster and desire as metaphor. Why metaphor? The only answer I could give would be absurd for the kind of writer I became/become in the U.S., and so, for now, I'll say it is because I am a woman, though I am writing both with women and men. I am writing with writers and painters. I am writing from a position with no sexuality to it. Sexuality is not possible. Love is not possible. Traveling, I refuse eye contact, keep my head down, and am completely absorbed into this world, until I speak.

The Naropa University Summer Writing Program

We burned a paper spine. Eric Baus brought the paper and read to us about the sibling text. Tomorrow, we meet at 8.30, to build a theater, a silueta, a fire, so that it's there when the writers arrive. J.K.Rowling writes three hours a day before she is famous and ten after. Lisa Bir-man. Anne Wald-man. I like the Nordic stilts. I like the night when it turns into day. This morning, day 4 of the Summer Writing Program, was fabulous. I refer you to puppetry. I refer you to what the avant-grade puppeteer Sloan Fiffer, if I am spelling her name correctly, calls: "First Passion." Okay, back to the ten most fabulous things about the last week:

1. Chip Delaney's writing is this complex pattern forming before your eyes. There's chocolate cake in it too.
2. The willingness of writers to burn the spine.
3. I turned to Brenda Iijima in the car of the wild animal, Merissa Gerson, and I said: "Right, let's get down to business." We went through, right down the list. Experiences like this make me feel Russian.
4. Yoga in Shambhala Hall at 5.30 pm. I refused to be headstand partners with this kid. I said no, and he partnered up with someone else, which was frankly a relief due to the problems with standing on your head in the first place, let alone in the company of people who have a great deal of physical freedom.
5. We burned the paper between our fingers, securing images for ourselves from now until Tuesday, a kind of eternity with skin.
6. Robert Tejada talking us through an archive that mixed vernacular space with the spectral artifact of the dental mould.
7. Miranda Mellis said: "I began and ended at the entrance of the vault."
8. The student with the red hair from L.A. who read about La Madonna on Wednesday night. I am writing this in my hotel room late at night, and I have forgotten her name. She goes to Cal State.
9. I woke up early and climbed until I reached a stream, a grove, a bridge, red rocks, wildflowers. The early morning sun was streaming through the grasses. Then I climbed down and went to The Trident, sat at a corner table and wrote a letter to my class. It was the kind of morning I had between the ages of 22 and 31. It was exhilarating.
10. Laughing with Lisa Birman and Max Regan in the car, and getting dropped off under a tree dropping it's blossoms. White blossoms with a gold-chocolate brown seam. Catalpa. I think. I once saw Robin Blaser standing under this tree about 5 years ago, right next to the ATM machine outside the Quality Inn on Arapahoe. He was waiting for a ride, whereas I'd just got one.

Okay, that is my minimal report. I apologize. Tomorrow morning, I have to build a silueta, so I have to go to sleep now. Goodnight. Chirp, chirp. No, number 11:

K.Silem Mohammed telling us something that was true, and relating this to the deflective forms he works in now, and I understood that this was what I do too. Tomorrow, having experimented in a public reading, I will continue my work with chimps. I will write for three hours a day, because I don't have a baby, this isn't Glasgow, and my brother-in-law doesn't run an espresso joint on Prince Street. See: earlier Hogwarts reference.

Aggression

Ah-hah! I return. I was unable to write anything due to the following reason: I was still processing the information. Also, I had written so much, perhaps 53 pages over the course of a few days, that I then stopped. Since childhood, I have been unable to modulate my passions. We holidayed one summer at Lake Coniston, where Wordsworth used to go on long walks. His sister had a cabin up a little way. I convinced my parents and our hosts, the Manders -- the parents of an Englishwoman my dad had briefly been engaged to before marrying my mother; I have no idea why we were staying in a caravan on their property, although I know we paid them for the use of it, and that there was always some trouble about using up too much loo paper, or eating raspberries directly from the garden -- to pull over near a bridge, above a stream, where, according to local folklore, Shelley had loved to sit, and write, all day. They waited in the car while I sat under that bridge and wrote, knees up to my chest, for a long time, maybe 45 minutes. June in the Lake District: It was pouring with rain. I wrote a poem about a post-nuclear war society -- I was 13 -- and when we got home, Mrs. Manders, my unexpected champion, typed it up and gave me the blue, smudged under-copy, which I still possess, somewhere in the suitcase of bus tickets, concert programs, and notebooks I brought to the U.S when I emigrated.

I went to the Bay Area to attend the Small Press Traffic conference on Aggression curated by Cynthia Sailer, Chris Chen, and Stephanie Young, who all, at some point in the evening, were loosely associated with a pickaxe. A real one, selected from the garage of a kind, adventurous, terrible creature called David Buuk, who crouched in his wardrobe with a martini glass during the reading with Tyrone Williams, which took place in his bed. Buuk's bed. It was not remotely sensual; rather, I felt as cosy as a piglet in the socket of the pen. Chris Chen tied white silky ropes from our limbs to the books, or, at least, pressed the frayed end of one into my paw, then settled down to read Tyrone and I a bed-time story from "Diary of a Dead Schizophrenic." Then Tyrone said: "It's time for you to go to sleep now, Bhanu." I snuggled down and listened to my second round of fairytales, which were Tyrone's poems. Tyrone is from Ohio. Then, the lights were turned off and we settled down for the night, like two delicious babies. A fragmented lullaby filled the room, and then I sat up in bed, sipping my whisky and enjoying the fine company of Dodie Bellamy, who later dragged me through the living room by my ankle, and Jen Hofer, who was wearing red polka-dotted garments that combined with the night to produce love. Just before I left the bed, Amber Di Pietra appeared to my right in a green coat with glossy buttons, and though at that precise moment I had a hayfever episode, I was so delighted to see her, a person who is accompanied so vividly by the writing to come. It was, in general, so incredibly nourishing to be so thickly surrounded by writers. Perhaps I belong with writers. Meanwhile, the pickaxe was operating independently of my initial capture of it. I came upon it next in the kitchen where Juliana Spahr, Bill Luoma, and Stephanie Young, and someone else, a kind, sharp animal called Alli Warren?, Stephanie formerly of Mills in a red jacket?, were kneeling next to it. To calm them down, I read aloud from a Belladonna chapbook of Kevin Killian, passing off his poems as my own. I said: Do you like my poems? They said yes.

1. There is so much that I wrote on the aeroplane, and that, after going for a walk with my shaman homeopath neighbor Amber Currie, I want to continue, if I can possibly avoid the pleasures of being a French Cat, or just a regular Punjabi Cat, complete with my attempt to read What I Loved by Siri H., wife of Paul Auster, the hero of my late teenage years, when I lived in Loughborough, the mordant East Midlands market town where I studied with the Marxist linguist/theorist/jazz musician, John Lucas, who asked me, on my last night as an undergraduate, if I had written anything, ever, and if so could he publish it in "Critical Survey," though he would need it by 10 a.m. the next day at the latest. I said yes and went home, staying up all night in my bed writing a story called Bad Mango, which I think of as the first piece of writing related to the future, which is now. 2. "What I loved" had a brilliant first section, but deteriorated ten pages into Part 2, when a child died, after which point I could not stop crying and set the book down, pissed off that my first excursion into mainstream literary fiction for a long bit had reminded me of why I don't believe in it as I used to. Fiction valorizes the event. It positions the grid of the future outside the body, and there's no sensing it, which would alter, I guess, the surprise. But life hasn't unfolded like that for me. I want to write a book that maps not my life but how life has opened and closed for me, then split off. In this book, which I haven't written, there will be acts of divination. There will be a treatise on the sickness of the mind. There will be a river, and an Ayurvedic hospital, and animals with wings. Oh dear. I will never get to have afternoon tea with Salman Rushdie at this rate. I recently had tea with my friend Michelle Auerbach, at the Pekoe Tea House in the Ideal Market plaza in Boulder, and we discovered that she read Gertrude Stein and Robert Gluck to become someone who writes agented fiction, and I became an experimental prose writer sort of person via contemporary British fiction of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Clutching my Ian McEwan, I'd take myself to Mrs. Bunn's and read all afternoon, in a haze of scones and jam.

Okay, I can't bring myself to speak of the conference, in which I presented a talk on subjects unaddressed, as yet, maybe, by the ethnic avant-garde. Juliana Spahr argued that avant-garde writing is, in its nature, ethnic, as all of it, in that moment, which I take to be the period between the first and second world wars, was generated in Europe's first sustained contacts with foreign presence, immigrant influx, in its cities and surrounding towns. I am not sure if I got that right. This morning, I woke up and analyzed it, e-mailed Juliana. I haven't typed up my talk yet, which exists in a remedial form, on notepaper, in the travelling rucksack I went to San Fransisco with. Apart from the incredibly delayed experience of thinking about what happened, which is hitting me all at once, I am now having to have new thoughts, towards a class on the silueta, an homage to the work of Ana Mendieta, which I am teaching next week at Naropa's Summer Writing Program, which is curated by the chirping figure of Lisa Birman and the red-black-orange composite form of Anne Waldman. The excavated space of the body. I think maybe Aggression was that for me: a way of accumulating the streaming, Bion-like content, as Cynthia Sailer described it, of a possible narrative; of excavating it in order to re-fill it with something new.

I said I wanted to make a body of red flowers. Instead, my son and I went to the river where we made Ana out of the mud there and set her on some bark. My son said: "Next time we'll bring fire." I said: "Yes, and then what happens?" Thelonious: "We can mix water and fire." Me: "And then what happens?" Thelonious: "Shiva comes."

That kid has got the right idea.

Delicious Babies

Er, this is a blog about being a Naropa writing professor, so I was not sure what to write. But due to the high number of phone calls (two) and e-mails (three and a half) enquiring as to why there were no new posts, I wish to state that I have spent the last two days sipping banana/seaweed breakfast shakes. In addition, I climbed something called Deer Mountain, in Rocky Mountain National Park, and afterwards had coffee with cream, and wrote for three hours, in Long's Peak Coffee and Paper House. Actually, it may have been "haus," and is run by the kindest, tallest man in the world, Tom, who once climbed Mount Everest or something very much like it, and thus has excellent teas and "sari journals" which he brought back from India. Also, since the end of grading, I have been reading Kathleen Fraser's essay on "Partial Local Coherence," as preparation for an essay on Jean Valentine's poetry. What is the difference between a question and line, as it's experienced in the body? Then, I went to an ice-cream social/art show at Winona Elementary School, home of the Wildcats. Have you ever been imprinted with a purple paw? Have you ever eaten a bowl of ice-cream at a table with ecstatic six year old and seven year old boys? They were so cute. So excited to see each other after school but at school. I wish it was like that at poetry readings. It is. Actually, it is. Brain wave: start a kulfi cart. I could order it from Ludhiana and set it up outside Naropa readings, and give it (congealed Punjabi frozen yoghurt) away for free. Then it would be like a cult sensation, and, in time, people would know to bring their own toppings. Must run this by Stuart Sigman, the vice-president of my institution. He is an elegant, formal administrator-Buddhist who fields all the questions no-one else can answer. What else? I wrote to someone called Jared Stanley, regarding his chapbook, "The Outer Bay"; I am the interviewer for Trafficker Chapbook Press -- one of the co-founders is a wild animal called Erin Morrill, who wrote to me from BRAZIL to suggest I interviewed Jared PRONTISSIMO, otherwise it would be too late. Panicking, I responded to his poem, "Weed Patch Floral," in which he writes:

This dreamland,
you could fuck magic here.

and

....I dug into the earth
for an unfounded resemblance recast

as a little nothing; it would be a well
if you put a bucket down into it and listened.

When she goes, the fog will smell of onions....

These were my questions to him, which are questions I invented in the laboratories of Naropa University, and also Goddard College, where I also teach in a letter-writing form, and also Front Range Community College (where I taught a class this semester on the personal essay, primarily to pay for my shamanic therapy, but accidentally fell in love with the essay all over again):

If "chaos is sleepy," then what wakes it up? What
makes a poem oppose the left-right contact of the
person reading it? What makes it look back at you,
which is wrong? I'm asking because, reading your
work, there are all these reversed flows connected to
speech, all this speaking that "pierce[s]" or
interrupts esophageal logic. Instead of the lungs
then the throat then the mouth, you go straight to the
"smiling impasse" of teeth that are not in the mouth
but "close to" it. Language emerges from an orifice
that suggests the body but doesn't adhere to the
body's limits. "The orator," for example, is somewhere
"among the trees." The poem, in this formulation,
doesn't function as expression, but as memory, with
all of memory's unexpected displays, protuberances,
and so on. In another example of a complex alignment,
you link animal and vegetable presences to create
"dissolute striped forms." Then you collate a
"striped road" with a "stencilled cypress," linking
organic and inorganic domains, which is cyborg, or
monster, depending on how "hot and kind" everything
gets.

So, is the poem a site of implantation? How do you
make a site receptive, folded, nutrient-rich? See:
"Weird Patch Floral." Images of something altering
"uprooted," mixed with: "I dug into the earth/for an
unfounded resemblance." And what about the
"dreamland"? The place where "you could fuck magic"?
There's something going on here.

I guess I'd like to hear more about how you think
through "body" and conceptions of the "hybrid" in
these poems, in which "objects" are found beneath
"limbs," yet the space itself is bounded by a lyric
sensibility that you do not slit. I like that you
don't slit it, at least not immediately. What you
write persists, transfiguring itself, until, as you
write in "Poem": "it's so dead."

Dear Jared, who are you and why are you writing these
things? I invite you to present your cunning notes.

.........

Horrible, cutting and pasting from my e-mail, I see that I wrote "Weird Patch Floral" instead of "Weed Patch Floral." Bad. Must now write to this person and instantly correct mistake, though must first take the trash out. Shit, I think that's the trash truck now. See, this is why I didn't blog. When I am not a Naropa writing professor, I am the most quotidien and hypoglycemic of householders. I go places on my bike. No, wait! Something Naropa-related did happen. Michelle Naka Pierce telephoned me last night and read me a fast-paced/nasty (in a good way) poem from her newest manuscript...something like "She, A Blueprint of InterSurface", while I inaudibly (I hope) consumed a concoction of coconut flakes and whipped cream from a squirty can [which I bought to interest my son in eating strawberries, but which (the purchase of a pre-sweetened dairy product) has turned out to be a complete disaster as I am the only person eating it, minus the fresh fruit, because all the strawberries were gone in about twenty minutes of entering the house]. Oh dear, seriously, that's the trash truck, one street over. For now, my chickadees, that's it. Over and out.

Grading

I grade. I made the terrible mistake of giving up coffee this week; actually, I forgot, as I have been so busy zooming around town on my back-pedaling Schwinn. Instead of walking to the cafe, I just (on my bike) kept going, until I reached The Big Thompson, which is a river. There, I lay back, inverted, to make Ana. By the time that was done, I was shivering, so came directly home, had bath with sea salt, lavender, coconut oil and honey, and fell asleep on sofa by 9. Thus, today I am trying to be sensible about it, but the day is gone. I will try again tomorrow. I will order a skim milk latte, with latte art. Oh dear, this is a bit boring. This is a blog about being a writing professor, so I thought I should document this crucial aspect of my glittering literary career. Maybe I will branch out. Hmm. Okay. I have to go now. In case you are reading this, I must warn you that the bread is going to get very soggy if you don't take it out of the milk. That's a metaphor. I am from England. As a child, I ate things like liver pate sandwiches from Valdrey's Patisserie, and coconut-flecked bright orange syrup balls (oval shaped, really) from A Sweet on the Southall Broadway. New idea. This can be a blog about happy things, like being ten. Oh. Maybe not. I was happy when I was five. But by ten I was already writing plays about families of rabbits who lived in the Cotswolds.

Happy Mother's Day

In writing, who was your mother? According to department lore, Anne Waldman wanted to call it "The Gertrude Stein School of Disembodied Poetics", but Allen Ginsberg won.

My mothers in writing are:

My own mother, for the wild gifts of song [Mira-bai], poetry [invented on the spot] and stories [violent, intricate, recalled].

Carole Maso, except she would have to have given birth to me when she was seven years old or something. Reading "Ava," I clicked open.

Erin Moure, ditto. [Teenage pregnancy]. Can a book be a mother to another book? Again, it's not interpretation or comprehension that opens the book, makes its surfaces available for other kinds of productive acts, it's the simple contact. It's the book on the shelf, purchased and unread for years -- the intensity of being in the book-shop, opening it there, was where the book and I were real, or it to me, I suppose. Can books see you? Can they communicate across direction, against the flow of the left-right gaze? The translations in "O Cadoiro" are the matrix for all the loneliness that came after reading that book, the sadness that broke only when I began writing again, translating from broken French into disgusting French.

Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Burnat de Provins: lyric narratives that take as their subject a dangerous dance. I want that dance. I come from that dance.

Mei-mei Bersenbrugge. When I read her writing, I propagate myself as a figure. New Mexico plus Spivak plus the endocrine flow plus the lines taken from the notebook and spread on a different page like fibers of lemon silk. Pressed down like that on the space of the page with the middle three fingertips of each hand: yes. Here, I am formulating motherhood as the force which brings a person into existence. And so I think I may have got this wrong.

Define: Donkey

The last week of the Spring semester has unfolded like a cake. Really sweetly. The undergraduates were amazing, liked fertile mules on hoodia. That's a good thing. Hoodia is an Ayurvedic supplement that increases your metabolic rate, thus promoting weight loss, which is useful if you are about to turn forty and harboring vague thoughts that you might have lost your magic and allure in contexts like "the biodynamic farm" (where you transplant bok choy seedlings and dream of meeting a farmer with an intellectual background in the arts), but less useful if you are in your mid-twenties and writing poetry about the day your cat died. Or, I should say, useful in a different way. Because it makes that poem really interesting, fast-paced and strange, and beautiful. In fact, it doesn't matter what you write about.

My favorite writer in the world, for example, is Dolores Dorantes, whose book is propped up in a sort of crystal plantation on the desk in the back room, where I theoretically write but actually revert, given a tuppence, given anything really -- a bone, cups of tea, delicious Earl Grey biscuits from a kind graduate student -- to the Portuguese alcove next to the kitchen. She (d.d., which means sister in Hindi, a sister in writing) writes about iguanas and dancing, but I don't care what she writes about because just being near the book is altering. An hormonal interface.

I was standing in the Naropa bookstore yesterday -- where I accidentally called Ralph, the proprietor,"Frank" and he told me that three or four times a year for the last 62 years someone or other had called him Frank by mistake, and so we analyzed it from linguistic and karmic viewpoints, which I can get away with because I studied linguistics with Professor Chan at Loughborough University AND I'm a straight down the line Shiva-worshipper (my uncle Som gave me a white marble egg that's been dipped in the river at Gangotri, and every morning I wash it in tapwater before placing it in a bowl of ash). Thus, I stood up, in the bookstore, re-reading Endicronology by Mei-mei Bersenbrugge and Kiki Smith [not that I don't have it at home, but sometimes I can read things in the book-shop that do nothing for me once they're home on my shelf]....and there was this amazing, amazing page about the invisibility of the endocrine field, which is "sensed" not seen. For a body, from a body.

[November 9.
So that the place would sit in me, its wide space with sun, as what it would be in my memory of this time. And how it would be perceived is a matrix of how you were with some people around you, not agents but catalyst or fuel for the perception of light on a wide space, so free as to be impersonal in the company, implacable and impersonal]: M-m B, but not from the Kelsey Street book, from "A Context of a Wave" (Conjunctions).

And so, in the readings yesterday, all the way to the graduate reading in the night-time, I tried to feel it, the future of the writing at the front of the room. In a way, I blocked listening.

I felt the same thing at the end of "Notes on Architecture," the class I taught this Spring. And stopped my students, mid-way through the final reading. Maybe it's something you can only begin to feel when a writer has completed a body of work, or sequenced it: the space around their work, separate to the work. Suddenly, I wanted to know what a door was. I said: What is a door? I said: What is a red architecture? I said: Define hybridity. In the dark theater of the classroom, in front of an iridescent pink sari hung up from a temporary hook, they responded. We were a crowd, quietly addicted a third of the way through the performance. Sometimes, as a writer who teaches, I feel exhausted by the emphasis on process. I just want to know something. Give me a definition of a balcony. I want to sit on that balcony.

And so on. I have no gossip. Elizabeth Robinson had to go home to a sick puppy. Andrew Schelling was wearing cowboy boots. Junior Burke was wearing sunglasses, though it was night-time, and was dressed entirely in black, like a mafia don from the East End of London, if they have a mafia there. It's been a long time since I saw Reservoir Dogs. Wait. That was New Jersey. I belong in New Jersey. And Reed Bye helped me up from the asphalt, where I was lying, looking up at the balcony above Naropa's front door on Arapahoe Ave. Is a sidewalk made of asphalt? That's about my favorite American word. I can't remember what we called the street in England. I think we called it the road. When we crossed it, we looked left then right, and when we got to the other side, we kept going.

Sexual selection and the Arts: Revision versus Editing

"Elizabeth Grosz: At the most elementary level, of course, the built environment is our attempt to create a small territory within chaos where chaos doesn’t impinge as much as elsewhere. In a way, this is the most primordial impulse of all civilization; to build a shelter which enables you to get some space to do something potentially luxurious. So chaos is maybe too strong a word, although it’s not entirely too strong a word. The point is, nature is full of these teeming impulses that we don’t really control, and at best what we can do is carve out a location, a territory, and in the process of carving out a territory, which is the primordial impulse of architecture, we also carve out something like a body for ourselves. So this dual operation of territory and body is produced simultaneously."

I woke up, read some Elizabeth Grosz, as one does, for pleasure, then ate some cashews. Drove to Boulder listening to the radio and trying to avoid mating red-winged blackbirds on the back road. Also robins. At Naropa, I established myself at the oval table in the Writing and Poetics office, where, in due course, I had a 70 minute conversation with a clown. Yes, as part of my day job, I mentor a clown. Abbey Pleviak is an INDT student, specializing in definitions of red noses. "A red nose differentiates the clown from others. It lets others know that there's about to be a departure from conventional behavior." I am paraphrasing. I liked it. Then, out of the blue, a door suddenly flung open, and Abbey said that in a recent workshop with "Barnaby", she learned that clowns should always go through open doors. So, we crawled through the door, and peeked into the Summer Writing Program office. We saw Lisa Birman sitting at her computer. Lisa Birman is an Australian, Prague-soaked poet who has recently started writing a gorgeous lyric epic, that I got a glimpse of, but not today. Today all I saw was that she was wearing a pink jumper. Dark pink. Then, me and the clown lay on the steps pretending to be sleeping, but no-one walking down Araphoe noticed us, so we got up and went back in.

After that relaxing morning activity, I had a meeting with the Chair, Junior Burke, a fantastic screenplay-writing singer-songwriter novelist entity, and Amy Catanzano, our Administrative Director, who writes and teaches at the flickering-pulsing intersection of avant-garde physics and contemporary poetics. I sat down, at the same oval table, and we bowed in. I can't remember what they were wearing, but I did notice that on the filing cabinet behind Junior's right shoulder were haphazardly arranged words from one of those magnetic poetry kits. All the words were Hebrew mixed with Yiddish mixed with English. I saw that my composition, from over six months ago, when I was car-pooling with a rabbi, an adjunct faculty member who was teaching Jewish Mysticism on Monday nights when I was teaching an undergraduate seminar on narrative, was still up. It said: Falling-crazy-in-with-wild-eyed-Shalom. Made note to self: Must do something about that. Continued to have interesting chat about writing as a kind of future, when abruptly realized it was time to go.

Class. I like class the very best of all. On the board, I scrubbed off the Tibetan sentences and the words "palace" and "deity," then set to work with my own sub-headings. I wrote: "Mixed Present: Towards a Successful Question." Then, in groups, some beneath the blossom trees outside, some on the picnic bench next to the Japanese tea-house, and some in our little cottage, Upaya North, the MFA class of Spring 2008 made chaotic, arcing, private maps. The maps were questions, translating from our Small Conference on Failure back to writing. Then, in an act of natural/artificial selection, each group presented the most intensive question. Then, which was possibly a mistake as it required drawing on reserves of intense thought and attention, and I for one was operating on five hours of sleep, we presented our challenges to these questions. I forgot to write down the questions, but it's only Tuesday night of the same day so I am going to pull myself together and try to remember:

1. Where were you most absorbed, and what would you risk for that absorption?
2. What is the messy context?
3. Where in the structure, or in a character: is a home?
4. What new activity emerges in this piece?
5. Is there a core to this piece? Is it intact? Is it shredded?
6. Describe the form that makes the activity, the relationship, possible? [Something about a glass floor.]

Then everyone went back out into the sunlight and tulips, or stayed in the quiet dark, and ran the program of the question on the line. On the work of their peers. Peer revision. What is a peer? During this time, I:

1. Eavesdropped.
2. Went to get a cup of tea.
3. Thought about Montreal.
4. Made notes in my notebook about the question as a kind of boundary.
5. Erased the questions and wrote instructions. I wrote: "What will you do next?" Which is technically a question.

Then I drove straight to my son's school, about an hour north of Boulder, to pick up my son. In a complete change of circumstances, I kicked off my shoes and sat on the grass, and watched the children gallop in the park, like feral wallabees.

PS The decision to "select" shifts the species. Is species stable? No. Is the poem stable? No. It's not stable. It's not even remotely stable. Why should we select in way that shifts context, if we have, up to now, proliferated in a context? These ideas are from the work of Elizabeth Grosz -- her new book on chaos and art and Deleuze is out in a couple of weeks time. I will obviously be eating a snack and lying in the back yard, pronto, as soon as it arrives. This is a link from a lecture she gave in Australia, to a conference for interior designers, on art and architecture:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1435592.htm

Wait. I just read it again. I may have got it totally wrong.

"Elizabeth Grosz: Darwin talks about two fundamental processes that regulate all of life; one is natural selection and the other is sexual selection. Natural selection is about survival, and sexual selection, for him, is largely about reproduction or about sexual seduction. And what I think is the origin of art, basically, is that impulse to seduction. So I take it that all forms of art are a kind of excessive affection of the body, or an intensification of the body of the kind which is also generated in sexuality. So it’s something really fundamentally sexual about art, about all of the arts, even though they’re very sublimated. What art is about is about the constriction of the materials, so the materials then become aestheticised or pleasurable. The pleasure of those materials has to do with the intensification of the body. So this impulse to art is to not make oneself seductive but to make oneself intense, and in the process to circulate some of that eros that would otherwise go into sexuality."

Hmm. Must keep thinking and writing.

Bombay Gin: the ultimate British-Indian beverage

And, luckily, the name of Naropa's literary magazine. This Friday, they had a reading in the back garden of The Trident at Pearl and 9th, in Boulder. Fairy lights in the trees and some outrageously handsome and cool singer-songwriter from Seattle. One of my students expressed a strong desire to give birth to his baby. I cannot recall his name, as my son was with me, and during my reading, Marlon Macallister, a graduate of our BA program, had fed him a brownie. As a result, I could not concentrate on what followed. During Andrew Schelling's reading, Thelonious (aforementioned progeny) tried to whistle, and then coughed loudly, and asked: "Why is he poeming about caribou?" This led to a hasty exit with some bribe related to a fast food joint called KFC, which is the opposite of everything kind and good and Naropa-related, but which has been known to sedate young children in the back-seats of cars. Okay, technically this is a blog to celebrate the writing community connected to the Jack Kerouac school, and not a how-to manual on the care and feeding of seven year olds dressed in hoodies. So, I'll say that other readers included Jesse Kennedy, one of our genius undergraduates, who read about the sex lives of tarantulas, and Bryn Harris, one of our brilliant MFA animals, who read with great presence. There were birds in what she read. So, basically, we like the natural sciences at Naropa, it's true, but I wish to state that we also like cyborgs and other non-corporeal entities with informal, yet emotive agendas. We like the fiction of Dodie Bellamy, for example. KFC was "shut," and so we went to Whole Foods for pizza, where two squares of the cheesey kind cost us eight dollars, which startled me, but I handed it over, the hard cash, happy at the end of an evening that had songs in it, and at least two people stumbling, as they got up from their chairs, or crossed the rustic courtyard with a cup of green tea balanced on a saucer. Being at Naropa is like being in a circus curated by Wim Wenders.

What Naropa University Writing Professors Do At Home

Obviously, they attempt to write something. Today I will be giving a basic set of guidelines to anyone who is trying to write something at the same time as:

a) Rearing a progeny. (Or vegetables.) (Or cats.)

b) Working. (Or trying to psyche yourself up to do so, if indeed you have employment. Until recently, I also moonlighted as a palm reader, offering interpretations of stars, crosses, mounds, etc, to the general population of a small town to the north of Boulder called Loveland. Luckily, my employment at Naropa University really helped out with this. It's all narrativity. It's all sparks and darkness, reformulated as a precis in three parts. Tender triptychs interspersed with straight-talking sense of various kinds, usually in a Glaswegian accent, but that might just be because I've been watching, in lulls, re-runs of the BBC mini-series, Monarch of the Glen, set somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. Brian Evenson recently visited Boulder to read at CU. He said he watched it. However, only a few episodes, from what I gather, which doesn't really count as an addictive diversion. Must get help in this area. Must write three to ten hours a day in cafes, like J.K. Rowling. On a recent visit to Anthology Book Company/The Coffee Tree, my local independent bookstore/cafe, I spent quite a bit of time sitting on a blue beanbag drinking cappuccinno while my son read a book by himself; there, I stumbled upon a book in quite large print which was a biography, clearly aimed at pre-teens, of the esteemed author of the Harry Potter chronicles, which I don't know why I am re-stating, because obviously you know this, because you too had to spend the Christmas of 2002 with your family, and what else, exactly, got you through? Beverages can only take you so far. Anyway, she said she tries to write a minimum of three hours a day, even when she has a baby, no job, and no money, and has to order just a single espresso and water. Now she's up to ten. She was quoted in this brilliant book as saying that she didn't see how else a person could write a book. Thoughts? This would be the casual advice portion of this blog.)

c) Stabilize after a heartbreak. (Not that I am. I'm fine. For example, it's 11 a.m and I am no longer wearing my pajamas. Oh. Just looked down. Appear to still be wearing my Adidas fleecy sweatshirt object, which I fell asleep in last night after analyzing chimps.)

Okay, Guidelines. Well, actually, I think I just accidentally gave you some, totally for free! (Normally I charge a minimum of ten pence and a kit kat. Not that ten pence would get me down to the shops and back for a cornish pasty round here. In fact, it might get me arrested for non-private acts of incoherence.)

Right. What do I say in class? I think, mostly, I try to talk about scraps. That all the fragments and drafts and bits of something are real. They're like the inside of the body. That makes sense when all the paper is on the tables, but it is making less sense in this letter to you. A blog is a public letter. A blog is a park bench.

I stand on the park bench. Writing at home is like this. It's a weird declaration. It's the basic activity of developing a relationship to everything that hasn't been said. I want that. I want what happens when the space slows down enough for it's almost imperceptible elements -- molecules, emotions, needs -- to come forward. About three years ago, I noticed that the MFA workshop had got a bit boring. Why? It's hard to put into words. Form is personal, intimate, biological. What's the point of putting your blood into the body in the next bed, when you are also in a bed, renewing yourself in the medical spa, in the converted monastery in Arizona, in the cottage hospital in the suburbs of London? This is not about transfusion. It's about old blood going out and re-oxygenated blood going back in. Therefore, why all the energy devoted to the potential containers, when the question of the container can't be engineered or paid for, by Great West insurance? What happens if we re-orient, as writers in groups of 12 or less -- the kind that sit at a table with stale organic coffee from the Naropa cafe -- to the question of energy instead?

The question of what is forming, like a soul. It's soulful to let go of the thing that fixed you in place. I don't think of the soul in terms of conception. Definitions of streaming, electrical matter that is also wet: are forthcoming.

Today I sewed an architect to a poet

Lindsay Colahan, a student who writes about airstrips in Montreal- - what do you write about? -- left then came back with a needle and thread.  I asked her to.  Being a professor is all about delegating force.  It's because there's already so much force.  You wake up and want, in a way, to destroy all the surfaces of the morning -- table, chair, breakfast, breakfast plate, fork -- in order to flatten it out.  To write on it.  So, what I love about teaching is that it's this insane activity of unfolding not surface but texture.  Melissa Buzzeo, our visiting writer today, a participant in "A Small Conference on Failure," said: "The book is not about making body because it's already body."  

Similarly, by the time you're having a conversation about an architecture of control, you're no longer the person eating your unsweetened whey shake.  Drinking it really.  The plate's just there to catch the drips, and the fork...well, it's lumpy and, being lazy and not tall, you haven't generated the necessary elan to get the blender down from the top shelf.  Elan with an accent.  Don't know how to do that.  So, teaching means you're already in the space of writing. You're already there: a figure transformed by nutrients. Makes me sound like a tree, or a prairie dog. Perhaps will have leftover spicy cabbage for brek tomorrow instead.

 About two years ago, I took a vow that I would step over the white chalk line of the Naropa perimeter as a writer, and that, once inside it, I wouldn't do anything that wasn't towards writing.  Furthermore, I want, every Tuesday, to leave for the drive home, back to the ordinary world with its sofa reconstructed as a medieval fort, and its refrigerated South Asian meals-in-a-pouch -- "Thelonious, would you like Kashmiri lentils for dinner?"/ "Mom, please, I beg you, can I have Annie's?  The creamy one.  Not the one  from the box" [Macaroni and Cheese.  Disgusting.  Sometimes I eat what he's left in the bowl, but I have to add tabasco sauce and mango chutney.  I gave birth.  I got my period when I was 8.  What I discovered during childbirth was that period pains, the ones I'd had since age 12, doubled over during Wednesday afternoon lacrosse in the Hertfordshire countryside, were more painful than labor.  Who knew?] -- as a writer again.  

In my car, driving north through the broken gold fields of the interior part of this country, I want to be a writer.  Teaching is writing.  Thus today, Melissa Buzzeo and Matthew Jelacic presented their notes on what it means, as a poet, as an architect, to fail. Notes: on traumatized urbanization, on peninsula culture, on slow space, on Rem Koolhaas, on the city, on embankment, on Sarah Kane, on desire, on the notebook that accompanies writing and drawing, on the house, on the circular narrative, on fusion, and on the glorious year with the wine budget followed by the year in the tent in West Virginia....and we asked them questions.  Jenny Henry asked a question about devastation, and then we broke for tea.  Everyone filtered out of the room, but the architect and the poet remained behind.  They couldn't move.  I had sewn them together.  His sleeve, her ribbon.  Isaac Linder said: "It's a little like a marriage, isn't it?"  I said: "It's a cyborg act."  He said: "Hmmm."  His project, he said, when he introduced himself at the beginning of the day, was to "develop a relationship with Marielle Castro."  I want that.  I want to make a space for a different kind of relationship that the ones I've had.  

This class, a graduate seminar called "Notes on Architecture" meets at noon in Upaya North, a cottage facing the Japanese teahouse, and the Boulder hills.  Not so much hills as black, vertical mirrors above the town.  Is Boulder a town?  I've reached the end of writing in a particular form.  "Opening the door, I threw the book into the dark garden." So I need a new form.  "I loved the book," said Melissa, "but it was the notebook that loved me back."  "Rem will be known a thousand years from now," said Matthew, "because he changed it from architecture as object to architecture as activity."  Paraphrasing, I try to remember everything that was beautiful about the day.  I try to sense towards activity.

For lunch, while the knitted guests chatted and drank tea, I sloped off to the cafe like a hound. There, I had coffee with cream, a salad, and some chicken.  And I had this memory: my last night in London before leaving for New York, lying in Helen Barret's garden in Wimbledon, a little spacey from the Bailey's, which I did not realize was an alcoholic drink -- I was 22 -- I listened to the 45 my friends had given me as a going away present.  "Hey, Jack Kerouac, what you think you're looking at?"  My name at that time was Jac, short for Jacasta; a name I'll tell you the story about another time, when I'm 53 or something, and a novelist.  So, the record was a joke.  But it was also a threshold. It was also this, the life I'm living now, a professor at bloody Jack Kerouac school.   It's crazy, like pressing through a word, through the back of the wardrobe, to the forest.  What is a door?  I wanted to ask them what a door was.  I wanted to trick the visitors into saying something even more beautiful than before, but it was time to go.  Where will you go?  Stepping over the gelatin trace that forms the curve of your environment, it's boundary, what's your orientation?  What's the feeling in your body when it's time to leave?  Sometimes, if I'm anxious, I'll go back. I refuse to leave unless I am a person again, a possible person.  Thus, once, I climbed into the teahouse, removed my green coat with the red buttons, and kneeled, shivering a little, until it came. A tiny cup, steaming in the darkness of the room.  

Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?

Right.  Well, obviously it is much too late to reverse my casual and gorgeous decision to title this blog something really stupid and brilliant.  By gorgeous I mean non-commercial.  Though I need to do something about these tatty jeans I've got going on.  A terrific hole in ye olde left knee.  I should explain that I am the only British-Punjabi faculty member at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado.  Hence, I align myself with the whole process of lying under trees in Longmont.  Longmont is a small, rural-industrial town/city situation about 15 minutes down the Diagonal Highway from Boulder.  Or up it, depending which side of the cow you find yourself on.  Right.  So, Jack Kerouac has this thing about pulling over on highway 66 and having a nap under a tree in what is now the place I just described.  So I did it too.  This isn't going very well.  This is a blog to think about and document the Department of Writing and Poetics at the place I just described.  No, not the roadside verge with the stand of aspens.  Naropa proper.  I will not stray beyond the confines of what I learn and memorize there, except in emergencies.  My vow to you is that I will tell you everything I know about poetry.  Okay, let me re-phrase that.  I will provide regular reports on what goes down, somewhere between the Japanese tea-house and the the hole in the wall cafe serving chai that one has convinced oneself is delicious.  Please contact me if you wish to write dark books full of  information re-formatted as magical. I am not perhaps not the person who could be of most assistance, but I could possibly put you in touch with someone who can.  This blog will contain regular interviews with every writer that I meet on this verdant and environmentally complicated campus.  By complicated I mean there is a man called Marco Lam, an acupuncturist, who is often seen wearing the kind of tall, black, woolly hat most commonly observed, on this planet, on the heads of men in red coats guarding Buckingham Palace....I saw him yesterday, leading a group of pink-cheeked students around a corner, and they were all holding armfuls of sod.  I think it was sod.  It was folded, and obviously still alive in some fundamental sense.  Right.  That's it for today.   Yours, in writing:

Bhanu.