afteriwas dead

"I Miss the Air Up There"

2012-02-18T17:57:00.004-06:00

I'm writing as one song ends and another begins, as the Spanishtown Mardi Gras parade ends and those who stood out in the rain reaching for the shiny trinkets slope off, sacks full of swag they won't care about two hours from now (maybe?) (what do I know?) (where do you go?) (from here...).
The poet / scholar Jill Darling stood on the porch taking pictures, where Akilah Oliver stood...Spring 2010? She wandered out there with a beer...and came back in, I was working on a grant, glancing out every now and then to watch friends dancing in the street as the "floats" (crudely decorated carts towed by truck fronts) went past. The grant program was cancelled later that summer and...Akilah (I still don't want to type the words) is gone.
Now it's 2012 and a little sunlight (very vague--it's been raining all day) seeps under the cloud cover as the street barriers are being moved and people in black plastic ponchos and layers of glittering beads walk down the street: headed to the next party?
It glows out there.
When I sat down to type this (hacking through the thicket of OtherTasks, thorny with to-dos and sticky w/ sharp shoulds) I had ideas about what I would say...something about lighting candles for five young men--four of whom I never met.
And that I wanted to just start saying the word "alcoholism" over and over.
Alcoholism.
As in a severe (and masked) problem. As in a problem that isn't personal. As in the failure of boundaries because whatever it is you struggle with I struggle with it also.
White police cars slide down a street slick with dropped beads, white pink yellow green and shining--their lights flicker a bright gassy blue spurt spurt spurt as they go past...
Suddenly the street is empty or almost empty. The light sort of peachy and very forgiving, very full, very 3D, very lush...
Jill has the evidence.
I have the beets I roasted for dinner to go with the lentils, and I have some words, mostly names...kinds of absence? (Akilah) (Stacy Doris.)
Lisa Samuels came to LSU this week and ignited an undergrad. class, helped the grad. students dream their way into an open international future (O the WORLD) and gave an amazing reading (with Jill Darling and Afton Wilky [backed by Jackie Kari]). And we worried our way into the spaces of affection and art and laughed them wider and wilder (because Lisa is so wonderfully informed and free--that magic combination), and now it's evening and the cat (who spent the parade & storm day under the bed in terror) is out, crawling over the table...
Sometimes there doesn't seem as if there's enough time for normal.
I don't think this is a good post, but I also don't think that that ("good") is the right thing to worry about just now.
I say their names again and again in a light (dim & struggling) made of dusk and candle-light...
What will you care about two hours from now? Tell me.

2012-01-25T20:49:00.002-06:00

slippage

2012-01-25T20:42:00.000-06:00

There's a movement, invisible, current sliding over current, of what might have been written down and wasn't or was but not here or was not like that (as imagined) when it arrived in the world in some form (however it arrived if it arrived) and was or wasn't read there.

Responses that seem urgent at the moment folding under harder materials, a little splash maybe, or just a ripple, white froth where pressure slips against pressure pouring over some deep edge on its way elsewhere, does it really matter the mini maelstrom's faint roar...

Yes, yes, yes and no. And still will be. And never which doesn't exist and has to be swum all the same. Forded, splashing in and out clumsily or crossed. In the paper boat whose sails and oars are words words words...

2012-01-25T20:28:00.002-06:00

2012-01-25T20:24:00.001-06:00

But I don't want to write anything: I just want to post pictures of the magnificent flowers that arrived last Friday (I remain as astonished--bewildered--by their beauty as I was when I first saw them, held up to me by the florist's courier, on the front porch). They will die. I will. We will...--their fragile and compelling gorgeous energy absolutely part of this, brevity. Meanwhile...a little (precious) meanwhile. Sitting at the table I opened a new notebook and saw what appeared to be the faint image of a wonderful painting a few pages further on. How had it got there? What was it? I flipped through the still untouched pages quickly, but the delicate silhouette never got any more intense. You already know what I'm going to say, don't you? Of course I was chasing the shadow of the flowers I was sitting under--iimagining what I wanted was buried there, that I could find an image: previous and permanent and dark.

2012-01-25T20:14:00.002-06:00

walk paintings

2011-12-18T21:19:00.000-06:00

Rip Currents

2011-12-17T19:51:00.003-06:00

If you gaze out at the Mississippi (& when I can I do) it looks nothing like what you imagine as normal or what I (at least) have experienced as normal for a river: it doesn't look like it's all flowing one way. There's this huge steely roiled expanse (or, if you get on top of it, murky greenish grey) which seems to be going both up and down river at the same time, undecided but headstrong, powerfully confused and--as you watch--changing its muscular watery mind.

I'm just checking in here--a sort of gesture toward a blog post not a blog post. This afternoon I stood with a colleague in the clear late afternoon sunlight (December in Louisiana is like October in the North) saying what everyone's saying to each other: that our jobs are changing but there's no recognition that our jobs are changing, that we're being asked to do much more with fewer resources and of course no extra money (the University I work for just announced mid-year budget cuts), that it was the most hellishly busy and crazy semester ever, that the teaching was fabulous but how can you do it under these conditions, that we don't remember who we are and we need a moment please a moment to remember who we are. As artists, I mean? As people. I keep saying I feel like I didn't get the seat-belt on before it was over. A smear, I say, a blur, but whoever I was speaking to is already gone. I don't know if it's e-mail or all the above (see above) but it feels as if I can't get the faucet (job) to turn off, ever, entirely: there's the drip drip drip of the to-do list (remember to write that assessment of the assessment) (no, I'm not joking--I wish I were...)...

At least I'm done with the 2012 election already: I have no options but Obama--unless you have a really lovely write-in candidate to suggest. But I've only cleared the (dim) future in order to make room for recall: remember 2010? Check in again, your response to a couple of options post "oil spill" is being solicited by NOAA:

The Draft Phase I Early Restoration Plan describes two restoration alternatives:

No Action – Natural Restoration. The No Action alternative would provide for no projects, thus allowing nature to “heal” itself; and
Proposed Action – Proposed Restoration Projects. The Proposed Action alternative includes eight projects, two each in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. The projects are intended to provide services that will benefit impacted marshes, coastal dune habitats, nearshore sediments, oysters, and human uses (such as beach-going and fishing).

Comment on the oil spill restoration plan

"A 60-day public comment period will be open from Dec. 15, 2011 to Feb. 14, 2012. You can comment on the plan online or at one of the public meetings being held throughout the Gulf and in Washington, DC. The Final Plan will also be made available for public comment."

There--I've passed that on. Choose number two (if you were wondering).

How are you--this holiday season? Write and tell me. The most recent comment I got was spam--first time. It's a sign that the site's gotten cobwebby, right? (Just give me a moment.) I've got a strong desire to stand under the freeway: there are a few places in Baton Rouge where you can do that, and when I walk that way I find myself wanting to linger...the ceaseless thud of travel east and west at once pounding over my head, I10, boom boom boom... Who was I? When?

SUBJECT

2011-12-03T18:27:00.001-06:00

pretending

2011-11-26T19:57:00.001-06:00

The romances capital R Romances (you knew I was reading, right?) tend to (too?) often take the same shape: my fair but not fair enough lady, my good but not good enough goddess? A "Lord" a "peer" a "nob" or "toff" likes a little well not quite slut (not quite experienced enough). Likes--as in lusts? Likes enough to make something more of? Likes... Too well...and not enough...and trains her to trick the nice tastes of what? Family--of course! Sister, mother, etc. etc.--and so forth. Her body is real, her accent? Whoosh! "Shall" she intones--and they fuck like...like those who couldn't master language, natch. Bunnies. Rodents. Her explanation of her retirement lit like a fuse, the sizzle the sound of borrowed robes coming off--not fast enough? But I fear I've been too precipitate...

On "black' (read bleak) Friday I spent a couple hours with the "Occupy" group: articulate. And, yes, sparse. Deciding not to be arrested while even the ACLU lawyers are on holiday...only makes sense. There were (in cars) more police than protesting presence... We wiggled our fingers in the air for what we agreed with--all, what? 12 of us?

On the holiday I hid out.

Blessings on they that--and so forth. A gift. Physics of the quest. Forward. Marks in the sand what they make of us. "When do we stop feeling like charlatans?" the graduate student--urgent--asked.

On the holiday I hid out--and I needed that.

Never was the answer of my colleagues: because there's so much more to know... Ah but in fact one can attend to one's costume and...

She pauses in the hallway to adjust...what? Her wrap. Her rap. "My mistress" / My distress--her "I"s nuthing like, like like... Stops there in the dark and clutches--her borrowed throat. But I thought, he says, I could only be myself. The question then? And who is that?

"Just a sweet transvestite, from trans-sexual..." O how the song comes floating back. But I tried (she'll never say this, I tried, I really really really tried...to be just...to be just...)--sure. Didn't we? Both? Don't...--don't say it.

And lifts, in the park they left empty (so far) of tents, her hand to her mouth--lest a stray word betray my origins school me my...

Dawn dawn dawn the idiot's... Bride--in her lent finery. Cautious. Exquisite as brief.

I keep

2011-11-15T20:05:00.001-06:00

I keep shutting my eyes and clawing over the lids along the line of lash: they itch, the shut orbs. Under there, vision--scratch it off, see the number, see if the number matches another number, blow the silver shavings away...

I thought of calling a friend and saying let's have a conversation no the conversation: the conversation that will save me. I poured another glass of wine, paused to go into the bedroom, and into the closet to find the cat, hiding from the rain.

It's absurd, it's completely absurd, this feeling of pressure--on an ordinary life "I want to say" (on something like an ordinary...). Absurd to...gesture. Let's see. There's a kind of folding up going on, a sort of putting away? Behind the shoes, behind the red sequined high heels behind the silver spangled...she curls up and shuts her eyes: it's pouring.

I have the urge to write every single password down here: I'm so sick of passwords, of my secret life, moving (access) from site to site, "linked," then reset, emptying the cache, quitting.

See the number. What were we doing? Assessment, evaluation, something. Not what were we doing but how were we doing whatever it was we were doing. The rip of water across the windows, hard as if hosed, "an ordinary life" spectacularly (privileged) boring.

Do you think we'll have rain today--I asked the gate-keeper (this was a century ago, this morning)--do you think we'll get any rain? The bar lifts, access to campus, I try to see both the road ahead and her.

I write this in the sound of water and the sound from somewhere of someone honking a stalled call maybe in the blinding slash of this downpour the air is milky with the force of something like a typhoon but mild, steady, serious rain, thick, each light in the cone of lit water like a shower, as if from the source, lit, now the drowned sound of traffic... Slither.

Logging back on. Spectacularly unprepared to help my "loved ones"...

Stays with me what from the day one student saying he's going home the out of state tuition it's all crashing down into money the academic conference where someone cited the Amazon ratings it's all another where the author they explained helped her book by blogging about her tour and really really. Thought of calling a friend because you can't think about that and there's so much you can't settles down into steady rain just rain if a bit heavy.

"Well I don't know...but it mist-ified 'bout three times already this morning."

Plan A or Plan B or. Curled up, waiting for it to be over?

The flash of light outside, like someone taking a picture, then the heavy rupture, all percussion, two beats, pervasive and sure, and after, the return: slash and splatter, rapture of wetter weather. November.

The light like a Searchlight

2011-11-07T20:58:00.003-06:00

The western light at the white sink you stand in the starkyou being I is this moment you stand in it stunned by travel eating a hastilyassembled sandwich over the sink later you’ll I mean there’s this I mean sense of wanting to share thisand also the who’d want as if it’s the life itself I mean these words theslippage of I mean moving out from under the gesture when do we say that inwhat situation do we say that? Anything.

You being I and egg salad and the tap dripping into thewater in the bowl a sort of pale yellow dust swirling there

Ran through the airport in Fort Worth and gave up on lunchto make sure she wouldn’t miss boarding the heap of jacket and scarf held inlap and the little shrunken with age Asian woman in the bright pink knitted capbewildered by the loss of her carry on (valet checked as in taken away fromher) and speaking no English “Why,” the Stewardess, huffily, pouring out thedark soda (hadn’t had Dr. Pepper in a while thick and too sweet), “they’d lether get on a plane alone without knowing any English…” How many places Iwouldn’t have gone, I said…and she was gone is gone and also still lifting herarm, focused on the fizzy liquid lit in the soft ambient glow of aloft afternoon

The time wrong changed watchafter watch a sort of insistence I own

Eating the hastily assembled I can’t appear I thought unableto magic up another cute outfit I’m a bit heavy in every sense just now and myface tight with worry balancing too much so I’m always like all of us always ortoo often thinking what do I have to do not learning not exploring not askingquestions but just trying to get the answers into the boxes and home safe homewhole home

Absolutely confident and getting up and leaving the plane sowe waited with the jetway attached for awhile as they tried to make herunderstand her belonging would be returned she go up and walked off the planeand then was coaxed back on confident unafraid and on a flight recently whenthey insisted I valet check the carry on because there was no room and thenthere turned out to be room I felt furious violated and muttering to myselfalmost crazy wrong or not wrong

How to live in the light

At the conference I overheard two different professorsmention they were teaching students who had never heard of the Holocaust.“Auschwitz”? I dunno, one reported astudent as saying, but it sounds likesomething good…

The hour wrong

How can I say violated how can I feel I mean I mean I meanhave feelings after those who have had feelings and are dead now they hadstanding packed together on relentless trains hungry thirsty and how can Isomewhere else breaking in a door having authorized that gesture with my lifebreak the door in man the checkpoint have feelings and

Write

Maybe something German? How canI she you me they feel

Anything

The drip of water onto water turn it off the cat on the rugthen pushing her head into the caress a slow on the catnip strewn rug somersaultthis repeated curve to get as much from each touch as possible a tumblingstaggering up and again eyes closed tumbling

2011-10-20T09:23:00.002-05:00

USES for the Dress! (hit the link)

20 years ago today

2011-10-11T20:19:00.001-05:00

Twenty years ago today I had an abortion. I've decided to put the writing about that event, that decision, that...on this blog today to mark that anniversary: a stuck place. The writing...it doesn't...I don't like it. I don't think it's good, I don't think it's finished--I can't find an ending that seems true for more than 5 minutes. But it's mostly archival (meaning I wrote it then, in that fall of job hunts and temp. jobs and trying-to-write and being in love...):

Abortion Notes (1991)

You’re supposedto wait 4 minutes. She’s in the bathroom, he’s nearby, in the kitchen, washingdishes, calling out the minutes for her. After one minute a dot begins glowingin the little window on the stick: a dark magenta getting more intense.

The guy at thedrugstore where she bought the pregnancy test showed her what he called hiswife’s “results”; he’d taped to the cash register photographs of two youngchildren looking up, earnest and sort of quizzical: why is daddy hiding behindthat little box, why is he saying smile?They squint into the light, they are chubby, sweet-looking: they are children,they are real. The test was on sale.

Is it expensive, her boyfriend asks, the test?
Not the negativeones, she answers.
He slightlyreels, looking stunned and hurt: Give mea break…

Always, in thefirst instants of very bad news, a kind of blankness, like she’s absent, likeshe’s gone somewhere else. What grounds her, she wrote, “What grounds me is theneed to act the emotions I know I should feel and will probably actually feellater. I should be upset, and I’m trying to show him that I am upset. ActuallyI feel utterly erased, blank. I’m not really, at that instant, anything I canidentify as ‘upset’—I’m nothing. Except ‘pregnant.’”

He’s 23, she’s10 years older and she’s on the job market: though they love each other there’sno talk of marriage: there’s a fair amount of uncertainty about the“relationship.” She gets up the next morning and makes the appointment whilehe’s still asleep—and then wakes him to say she made the appointment.

“The feelingsthat well up: anger, grief, guilt, distress—it’s too much: I can’t proceed…Thearrangement of time (past, present, before and after) hurts. There’s just pain,there aren’t words. I can’t make a story out of this, I can’t transform it.”That’s what she wrote, when she tried, some weeks afterward, to write about it:when she made herself write. For some weeks she’d been sort of queasy, but hadno idea why: three college degrees between them and nobody makes a guess at thesource of that on-going nausea. The night before the abortion they watch the Star Wars trilogy on the VCR, and thenext morning her boyfriend, her love—the father who will not be a father thistime—comes with the mother who will not be a mother to the clinic, where hewaits in the outermost of the many waiting rooms for what seems to be the wholeday. She joins him again briefly just after the sonogram, tries to describe thesliding image of the living being inside her, made up of both of them…. Neitherof them ready to say let’s stop, let’s think about… She sits down beside him inthe waiting room and says It seems I’mabout eight weeks in…—and (after a shared look of wordless panic) goes backdown the corridor and doesn’t see him again until the life they accidently madetogether has been erased.

Later he’ll sayhe hadn’t been worried because so many of the women seemed fine afterwards (hewatched them walk through the waiting room and out as if, he said, nothing hadhappened), and then the clinic staff (to explain the delay) told him she wassleeping: “sleeping it off,” they said. They just walked away, he said of theother women, they seemed fine—then, he sighed, you come staggering through thedoors….

The receptionisthad tried to convince her to take the general, not the local anesthetic:“Someone like you…” While they were talking one of the anesthetists cameout to flirt with a clinic nurse: he put his head in his hands and said, “Whew”(acting shocked and weary, or presenting some real shock and weariness as anact), “they’re just vacuuming and vacuuming in there.” She was living offsavings and trying to write, doing temp. work, working as office help, and herboyfriend called his parents to get the cash transferred to his account—theydidn’t know what it was for, of course. I can’t do the general, she said, Ican’t afford it. It wasn’t just the money, though: she wanted to be conscious.

Before theprocedure, in the small, final, windowless waiting room, the young black womenare the only ones talking: they roll their eyes and scoff at the guys who gotthem in trouble—“I hate him!”—puttingon a tough voice. “So I said, ‘Well you bettercome up with the money!’” And then, softly, “If my mother knew I was here she’dhave a heart attack.” In unbroken silence the white women shiver, staring atnothing, each one acting as if she is the only person there, or as if she’sanywhere but here, in this little room, in this paper dress.

In the operatingroom her spread legs are strapped into metal stirrups; “This will pinch,” themasked doctor says, speaking from behind the cloth laid over her knees, andthen he repeats that, ‘a pinch, a pinch…,’ as he works. She doesn’t feeltotally numb, a sharp feeling is there (repeated) but at some distance. “I wasbreathing,” she wrote, “as hard and as loud as I could, trying to hear in mybreath the sound of the surf on a beach I remembered.” “What’s wrong,” thenurse asked. “Nothing.” “I was trying,” she wrote, later, “to hear nothingexcept my breath. But I heard metal on metal and the suction itself, a wet,rough sound, not one thing but something in pieces, torn out…”

“I was trying toremember a beach I loved, the sound the stones made rolling against each otheras the waves pulled back…” She was trying to remember a beach she loved—inFrance. I could almost laugh now: she brought a volume of Proust to the clinic,though she barely opened it, and she insisted, at the end of that awful day,that they catch (neither one of them had seen it) a showing of Les Enfants du Paradise. I could,writing that that down, almost (if you were here with me…) laugh.

She was on thejob market: sending out countless applications and getting a few interviews;two months after the abortion she’d be at the Modern Language Associationconference. One of the Universities had a cocktail party and invited all theircandidates: “Do you notice that we’re interviewing only cute blond girls” oneof her future colleagues leered, over his drink, laughing to let her know itwas a joke or so that she’d have to take it as a joke. But it was—she followedhis gaze—a statement of fact. A month or so later, during the campus visit,near the end of an interview dinner, another male Professor, a bit tipsy, askedif she could clear up a little language difficulty: could she tell him what“the ‘out,’ meant, in the phrase, ‘Eat you out’?” He’d always wondered, he said. “What does the ‘off’ mean,” she snappedback without thinking, “in the phrase ‘Jerk you off’?” Which was evidently thecorrect response. But when she started teaching there the new Director ofCreative Writing (hired with her) told her she only got the offer because ofAffirmative Action, noting that she’d displaced the white male colleague he’dhave preferred to work with (currently employed as an adjunct). He wonderedwhat she was working on: “After all, your first book’s nothing but love poems…”

As the nursehelps her up from the table she starts crying. There was a bucket full ofthick, lumpy, blood set on the floor. All day she’d worried about making a mess(they’d kept saying “empty your bowels,” and someone was talking about enemasgiven to women before they gave birth, and one of the girls in the waiting roomsaid, “because they don’t want to have to clean up…”). When the nurse hands hera swatch of gauze, “to wipe your eyes,” she hears, “to wipe your ass.” When sheunderstands what the nurse is saying, and tells the nurse what she thought sheheard, they share a brief uneasy laugh.

In the finalroom, the recovery room, they give her a shot—she’s Rh Negative (she’d begun toform antibodies in reaction to the baby’s differing blood type)—at which pointshe starts to pass out. And she wants to give in to unconsciousness more thananything (“why can’t I, why can’t I?”), but a nurse slaps alcohol-soaked towelson her head and neck, breaks spirits of ammonia under her nose, shrieking, “Youcan’t!”

Waiting to feelokay enough to walk she watches them wheeling in the girls who got the generalanesthetic: slumped over, shoulders poking out of the paper dresses, headslolling. They mutter and flail and, at the urging of the staff, they makefeeble gestures toward getting up, but mostly they have to be awkwardly liftedand half flung onto beds. Lying there they begin to weep, some of them. Mostlythey don’t seem to remember that when they wake up: how they cried and how thenurse told them to stop. “It hurts,” they moan, “…it hurts….” Conscious, they don’t seem to recall anything except beingasked if they were sleepy yet, Are yougetting sleepy? They compare the pain of the shot they were given, for theanesthesia—they show each other the starting bruises—they lift their heads,they say, “That’s what hurts most.”

“After it wasover,” she wrote, “when I came home, I was afraid to go to the bathroom: I wasafraid my insides would fall out.”

Later herboyfriend says he’d like to have children with her someday, words she clingsto, but there are so many other words (about “commitment”—for instance) toaccount for: on the phone and during visits they are iffy about stayingtogether, and they work on making separate lives in different places. Three orso years after the abortion she lets a letter go unanswered and one of theirintermittent, complicated silences becomes apparently simple, and permanent.

“I don’t want towrite about this anymore,” she wrote, on the last page of the notes she made,“I want to be past it (which not writing won’t exactly help, but will sort ofhelp). I’m not getting at anything here really. Memorandum. ‘Don’t Forget.’”She writes a little about what they did afterward, how rough the cab ride homeseemed, how she felt “beaten up.” “And I’m not pregnant.” She wrote, adding aparenthesis: “(No, I don’t want a child yet.)” She wrote this out on a legalpad and taped the folded pages into her journal: I remembered the color of thepaper when I went looking for these notes. I recalled the bright paper and howmuch I didn’t even want to try towrite about the experience—I knew the writing wouldn’t be any good—and how Imade myself write what little I did. There’s so much I would have forgotten; Ihad forgotten. “Maybe,” she wrote about having a child, “Maybe…someday. Notnow, not yet.” That’s the last sentence.

the clock

2011-10-09T18:18:00.000-05:00

I threw the last of the tampax away (outdated and useless) & took Fellini's 8 1/2 off pause, just at the start: silence, slow pan across the faces in stalled cars in the traffic jam, at last the sound of troubled breath--and then wind.

Vertigo yesterday, and then time on the internet, searching again, a search I've returned to so many times, and the desperate tone in Jimmy Stweart's voice staying with me: "a second chance...a second chance..." The far away but urgent look in his eyes.

All in black and white, and silence: the ascension, then the fall, then the entrance of the doctors and the sound of the typewriter...and on the command to BREATHE--
The critic enters...

Twenty years ago today I was facing (beginning to face) the realization that I was pregnant.

Violins mark the confrontation of the protagonist with his (tired) self in the mirror.

I've just turned 53. On the skin of my thighs I see the faint hints of those surface markings (sort of horizontal slashes, still almost invisible) I learned to look away from when my grandmother undressed in front of me. (She got into her bath, my beloved and far too long lost relative, The Only One, and so on, my angel; she got into her bath and I washed her back, the hard Southern California sunlight, pitiless as movie or police lights, poured in the window she'd had bars put on after three or so break ins, and I moved the sponge over her skin...) The broken veins, the bruises, the damage beneath a surface stiff, almost shining between the craqueleur of the old old flesh (ah, she'd been to Germany just as the Nazis came to power, she went to Beruit with friends in the late 70s, "O that beautiful city"...)--here it comes...okay, the swing of the underarm, the sag of the ass, I can take it (" 'cause you're a champ"), I can...

I'm watching 8 1/2 after watching The Conformist, sobbing as Dominique Sanda stumbled between the trees, between the gunshots, in the snow...

Because his father died--in spring--I at last located the (living) person I miss most of all (I mean miss in that crazy I-can't-forget-or-talk-to-you way). I mean: now I know where he lives (O Google), I know he's married. Everyone's married...--or fighting for the right to be...

The protagonist hums a song and does a sort of dance step in the corridor of the hotel, finds himself in a descending elevator with silent priests...and then the actress stands up and says (subtitles): You're always telling me I'm beautiful, you never tell me about my part! And a band of pixels (some damage on the dvd) opens across her forehead.

I can still feel the bones of her shoulder beneath the sponge, the warmth of the water--I can smell the lemon scent of the soap (shaped like a lemon).

(Subtitle: "I've seen her passport, she's 52...")

I'm in my late 20s in this scene--I can feel the sting of my anxiety, which is 8/10s ambition? And 2/10s fear of ending up dependent as (one set of) my feckless...--but sheesh, sssshhhhhh, those bodies aren't buried... The towels are lemon yellow also, as is the bath-mat, and their thick softness marks them as expensive--after she dies I'll stash towels and dishtowels in a storage space, certain (or should I say afraid?) I'll never be able in my life to own anything that nice...

Another band of light flashes across the screen as the music slows and the children are left to sleep ("you're not scared, are you?")...

Who would you be--you who don't exist? Who am I...

On my birthday--at 2 or so a.m.--I was woken by the clock I'd set in 2009, a sort of joke (or wager) with myself...deep in the project, I was buying all kinds of wedding paraphanelia, including a "planner" that included a sort of doomsday clock for the "countdown" (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years): I'll finish the book, I said, setting it, by... and I woke in the dark two years later, uncertain what that sing-song beeping meant, then recalled the Bride book was done, accepted (by Seismicity) and slated for publication next fall...--unable to halt the noise I opened the back and tilted the batteries out into my open hand.

Don't say I'm beautiful, you make it sound insulting!

Ghosts in the steam urge each other to inhale, to breathe deeply, and I wind down this entry as the protagonist rises to keep his appointment...and then pause the film again where he's about to meet (at last) his gorgeous, nervy wife (Anouk Aimee) ("Don't explain...")...who loves as wives love: who loves despite...

outta here (however fast they went they never seemed to pass anything)

2011-09-28T21:01:00.000-05:00

The plane that finally took me outta Bangor (days of fighting w/ US Airways) wasn't even supposed to be there. "I apologize," the captain announced on the tarmac, "for the diversion from Bar Harbor..."

Back home it's that scene from Alice Through the Looking Glass or is it Wonderland: where the Red Queen grabs her hand and they run as fast as they can "Just to stay in the same place," huffs the Queen, finally...

That scene...becoming...mixed with my viewing of the Atom Egoyan movie Chloe (so "The Red Queen" becomes Juliana Moore, of course...): her heavy or exhausted breathing turning into (hot) panting...

Tonight it's one of those stormy nights...so usual for Baton Rouge (and unusual recently): lightning like outta the Bishop poem, "Little Exercise," and the thunderous roll of the shock waves in the air. My usually stiff and distant cat a softly melting furball I can pick up & kiss--she's nearly unconscious with terror, the windows searing the room intermittently with that pale flare...

I stopped knowing how to write here meaning I stopped knowing what to write here? Whatever...

The days feel like a silvery pour ("Faster, faster..."), the semester's flying ("Are we nearly there?"), the sky makes a sound as if it cracked and half of it (heavy) fell to the floor. O for the moment in the movie when the characters understand each other...and then the removal (by death) of the threat to that understanding?

"'Nearly there'? Why, we passed it ten minutes ago!"

I stayed away from this public site while we lurched through the terrible clumsy stuck and failed 'anniversary' of 9/11--while we made it clear that all we really had to say (a decade later) was Ouch.

The marriage, in the movie, is based on the threat to the marriage or the threat as fantasy...

We would like to tell the Palestinians they need to try again the route we know will fail. "Hell came," as Bidart says in "Herbert White," "when I saw myself..."--but I'm quoting without looking at the page.

In my dreams the truth of who I was emerged as a drawing saved by a friend who smeared a clear layer of glue over an image left by my stepmother...

"Now! Now!" Cried the Queen...her open mouth twisted away and toward the camera.

The sky flashed like a dying screen and the dark sky rumbled off or tumbled down there was the glint of that laboratory light on wet leaves...

Then the silhouette of trees like a t-shirt silk-screen like an album cover like a logo like a frame from a movie in which everything changes in order to remain the same.

I don't know what questions to ask. "Everything's just as it was!"

"If you want to get somewhere else you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

random dum dum

2011-09-07T20:12:00.000-05:00

Today it was moments, murmurs, half-phrases: the woman on NPR who (commercial to convince us to donate used cars to the local station) said something like What can you buy with $950.00 anyhow, sounding fatigued...which took her out of my play group, 'cause I can answer that question.

Then it was the news that the US is getting high-handed (or heavy) w/ Syria on ("wait for it") our "embassy's facebook page." I think I just mentally applied for political asylum. Anywhere. Mars.

Summer

2011-08-08T21:54:00.003-05:00

Summer of the wolf spider and ginger syrup, I feel a desire to mark it, to name it, to fill it in and file it away: summer of the All Saints boots and trying not to complain, mostly in fact managing not to complain, I mean given the circumstances; summer of the Planned Parenthood events and then later the trash bride. Summer of the seafood as in Don’t eat the seafood Do eat the seafood it depended on who you were talking to not the seafood but whether or not to eat it while we talked something dark and viscous shifted at the bottom of the Gulf certain areas were open and then shut there were fish born with their eyes fused together but not to eat the seafood was disloyal and hadn’t the fishermen suffered enough? Summer of the debt crisis and then the credit rating crisis, “jurgatory,” and Japan which no one was mentioning; the cd release, the Stein show and the Francis Alys show not in that order. Why say anything? “My head is full of blah blah,” I wrote in a journal. Dreams of ex-boyfriends. The nurse just pointed at the scale to get me on it, as if I were an animal. Whose season was it? The word was floodwaters, the word was “Everyone trusts the levees will hold, but…” The word was “but.” At the start it seemed like it was always time to fight the anti-abortion bill. Goya’s Caprichos were the high point. The space was sort of industrial gothic and the yoga teacher played songs I’d swear I never heard sober, songs like Hummingbird and Cowgirl in the Sand. Summer of the seashell patterned duvet set and the new curtains, drought in Africa, working on the translation of Stepanie Chaillou’s first book and the the reading series (there was no money there was never any money but now there was less money) and my classes. I cut the coffee with decaf and diluted the lemonade with water but sometimes when the recycling went out there were three empty wine bottles in the bin from just that week. Cave of Forgotten Dreams was possibly the high point, despite the idiocy of the director’s voice over. I bought a flowered linen skirt on sale at Anthropologie and started swimming at the new Exxon Mobil YMCA pool which was empty except for water bugs and bugs that didn't mean to be in the water but were the fenced in patio deserted but for the lifeguards who out-numbered me four to one and all those lonely chaise lounges. I read Underworld and part of The HD Book and liked it a lot but never really wanted to read it I reread Our Mutual Friend and that was the high point or Tree of Life was the high point or maybe it was The Mirror or Stalker again (I know it’s pretentious, but it’s also gorgeous, and I keep forgetting it’s all men or else the way it’s all men is the way everything is all men). The moment when the congresswoman who’d been shot—casualty of the system’s dysfunction—walked into the debt ceiling vote and changed it, something, that was the high point. Her body, as Barbara Kruger might say, was the battleground. I don’t know why I want to name it I don’t know why I want to say anything why I can’t be quiet. The Lady Vanishes was the high point it’s always the high point. The point is the substitutions the way the woman who vanishes is replaced. The Field is Lethal was the high point. She came downstairs, her hair wet, and he went to take her in his arms. Sitting at the airport while rain beat at the windows or stepping out of the pool to wait for the thunderstorm to pass was one kind of waiting and drinking wine alone in the evening was another kind. There was a sea urchin on my plate, its spiky shell broken, the face of Gertrude Stein as seen by Picasso appeared in an arrangement of dangling spools of colored thread it’s hard to explain. My schedule for fall kept changing. “I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real.” James Baldwin wrote that and I read it in Palo Alto. “I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more…[but] this laughter is universal and can never be stilled.” Notes of a Native Son was the high point, or maybe it was that film about Vik Muniz, The Waste Land. I dreamed I got another shot at that job interview. I kept doing things to the house I’d been told to do if I wanted to sell it although I’d given up the hope of selling it not a good time and anyway where would I go. With the good headphones on I could play the cd and the music had the enormous fragility of the live performance, as if each note were a desperate wager. She said, “Don’t touch me I’m dyeing,” and he heard “dying,” and fell back from her, helpless, open-mouthed. I still didn't feel like I could slow down enough to learn to type. They fired her husband. We took a horseback ride. Summer of credit card statements I mean I seemed to owe always another $700.00 dollars without exactly understanding what I’d purchased it kept being a surprise although you’d think by now I’d know how quickly things add up. Then there was Naropa I mean a week that meant something. I could see her back through the turquoise lace and I said but you have to buy it. But you see, I laughed, I’ve never met them! I turned to the board and noticed all the layers of erased markings I wasn’t supposed to see—it was clean, wasn’t it—but all I could see were the traces of urgent messages no longer there. “Allez ou?” as Gertrude Stein put it. Something dark shifted awkwardly down in the sticky blackness completely denied. I couldn’t really think of another answer. The air there was sweet and clean and dry and there were good friends old friends and wine we drank together under trees they’d planted long ago they weren’t really trees then. I added up the people who alive this time last year, and the year before, and then six years ago but mostly I meant Akilah I couldn’t get over that: a year ago today I was in her apartment waiting for my lost suitcase to show up. “But she was here, I tell you,” the heroine says, almost sobbing. Someone has to say it, someone has to (will eventually) believe her. Filming Mei Mei Berssenbrugge and Anne Waldman reading was a little like being at those amazing events twice. Which was the high point. Summer of diamond studs and staying home rereading Wittgenstein. Really. Entire programs were disappearing a football field's length of land (why was that the measure it was always the measure) dissolved each hour. After breakfast in the church we told him he could either admit Susan Howe was a genius or be tossed off the boat. The peaches were the high point or maybe the blueberries, earlier in the season. We sent the oysters Rockefeller back: the oysters were too salty (they had opened, immersed in brine). “You can’t get drunk, can you,” the poet said to me, a little sadly; I was telling her how many margaritas I’d had that night. Le Deuxieme Souffle was the high point. “The great art of the time is the collagist’s art,” Robert Duncan wrote in The HD Book, “to bring all things into new complexes of meaning, mixing associations.”

Season of the Which

2011-07-19T17:48:00.003-05:00

I’m in jurgatory: called but not called, sitting around for the second day in a row in or near the new Government building in Baton Rouge’s ever-more-beige downtown. The new building must’ve looked pleasant enough as a model, life-size it has all the charm of a corporate jail. (Think of it like training wheels? Training jail.) There are weird spatial problems (jut of polished black marble wall out into portico, so you turn to go in under the columns and find yourself turning to sidle around the unexpected obstruction), as a structure it reeks of split committees and pay-offs or sheer ineptitude. The toilets in the women’s backed up on the first day. The screens that descend over the windows in the assembly room only slightly dim the high cold sad bland space. The building they abandoned for this one has a certain power…you can feel the ideology, there’s a sense of what the state is and how in interacts with its citizens worked out in bronze and stone. Granted it was more than a little dark and worn down, but it’s dignified. The new building’s all about denial (I’m not here, you’re not here, anyway we’re already in jail…). If it resembles anything it’s vaguely like a down-market department store or outlet: think Filene’s Basement. Someplace where there are choices, but restricted choices. Or—since the first thing that happens is the screening of property and the discarding of food and drink—an airport? Maybe a bus station. There’s black marble everywhere: the information desk staff, framed by glossy stone, look like countertop salespeople at Home Depot. The jurgatory process involves long stretches of time in which nothing happens and sudden brief flurries of activity, as (apparently randomly) people are let go and others are held. Somewhere, in rooms we never see, decisions are being made… One can see why Kafka responded so strongly to this structure, this material. Our large group shrinks bit by bit (names called of those who are “released,” who flutter off laughing) and swiftly divides into those who can do nothing (I mean, those who can sit, for hours, maybe chatting but maybe just…waiting) and those for whom an hour seems like either a pressure or an opportunity (in the tiny “quiet room,” off the main assembly room, it’s all books and lap-tops). Out in the larger assembly room the screens came down and one of the state workers cued up, on two screens, a movie (chosen for us). I left before it started, but the sound of a woman screaming (in pain or terror) was loud even in the other room, through the shut door—that chilling noise evidently the first sound after the credits rolled. Aaaaaggggghhhhh, Aaaaaahhhgggghhhh! When we were sent home yesterday they stopped the action…when we came back this morning and begin waiting again someone started the movie up where it left off (pleas and yells, swords clashing…). It’s some rollicking paean to superstition, physical power, and violence (starring Nicholas Cage, of course)—evidently good preparation for (possibly? Someday?) attending to facts and then weighing in about what happens to about people “in real life”? I’ve been chatting a bit with a woman who is worried that—as a Christian—she won’t feel able to make a judgment; how can she decide the fate of another… Though I’m trying to take my civic responsibilities seriously (if I was on trial I’d want someone like me on the jury…though, would I want me? Me exactly? Good question…), my joke is that if it gets her out of here, tomorrow, I’m gonna be a “Christian” too.

2011-07-13T21:21:00.001-05:00

Trash Bride Notes

2011-07-12T13:29:00.002-05:00

As far as I know she exists now only in images—images and memories. She returns to that state? If she doesn’t entirely vanish…

What’s interesting (what’s complicated) is where she comes forward from the idea, stinking of spilled nail polish and stubbed out cigarette butts, little flies circling her long livid skirts bedecked with souvenirs and resistant bits of the “byproducts” of our way of living, all that packaging which (like the creamers) I never would’ve seen if not for her. Can I say “we” here? It was a group project, though one that came through me…(and then I came through, because putting that dress on—wearing garbage—made, as I joked, a scarlet “A” seem like no big deal…).

An image came to me…an image came to me as lines, long ago (“nineteen eighties shit”), a poem I never finished (“Observance”) began:

From this distance the gardener

With his white plastic bag

Appears to be escorting

A docile bride across the green.

(I was at St. Mary’s college for a semester—the green was extensive, in every way.) Or say she begins earlier, within the family tradition of marriage/divorce/marriage? A sense of the bride as disposable (and then the family…): “We’re all disposable here, “ as the claymation “bic” advertisement (from still longer ago) put it. A (by)product of the culture as a whole. In our aging bodies, long past warrantee, stumbling toward break-down and obsolescence: We’re all disposable here.

I was teaching a short course on the reversal of vision, learning to see problems as gifts, and I was using the beauty of garbage as example (cf Duchamp & Zizek of course, cf Harryette Mullen’s S*PERM**K*T and poems by Brenda Hillman and Wallace Stevens, cf Eveyln Reilly’s Styrofoam and the MIT / Alphabet City anthology Trash). A bridal gown (bought a summer ago in a thrift store in Baton Rouge—the Here Today Gone Tomorrow store) was installed in the Summer Writing Program office for the week (kudos to the generous, visionary people who lived with the thing, the drippy glue gun and the traffic of contributors!) and decorated with trash (mostly “white trash,” as suggested, but…): June 27—July 1. The gown traveled a little: Lara Durback took it on a tour of the printshop, and there were great greasy-looking brownish slogans and questions on the skirt; the dress spent an afternoon outdoors where the toxic stink of spilled enamel might abate. The thinginess of the thing caused problems in ways I (working so often alone on the page) I couldn’t foresee—though I might have known (it has consequences, what Zizek calls “disavowal”—blindness). And on Friday I wore it (along with a big “rock” of wadded notepaper held onto my ring finger by a rubber band).

And after that…--but there she vanishes…

Please send me photographs and (if you have them or wish to produce them) descriptions of the dress, of your engagement with the dress or reaction.

She exists for a moment, on the horizon of engagement, consciousness… Extending? Our experience.

In(ter)dependence Day

2011-07-04T18:49:00.000-05:00

I don't have much of a feeling for the holiday: there's something about repeatedly crowing over our long-ago throwing off of the colonial yoke that rankles, as we go on trying to inhabit (elsewhere) our own version of (post?!?) colonial power. And though I like the slow graceful fading bloom of transient fire I can't help but relate it to our use of ordnance elsewhere ("rocket's red glare" and so on)--as we are meant to? Are we trained to get used to, to be at ease with, constant war? Is that early delight I recall so well in the clutched sparkler (burning and cool by the edge of Echo Park lake) a foreshadowing (or fore-firing) for later pyrotechnics? I don't know--I just feel an increasing distrust of explosions and all sorts of "bombs bursting in air" and (because tonight all bets are off) the nearby alleyways and yards. And why or how to celebrate the pretense of independence--I wonder. It's the 21st century: let's celebrate the way we are intwined and entangled, let's celebrate the commonplace(s) and "radical connectivity." Tonight it's boom boom kaboom for the birthday of a pretty good but flawed idea, and then? And then it's midsummer, the simmer in the woods of masque and error, wild failures of intention, the triumphant celebration (read adoration) of unconscious monsters--business, in short, as usual...but better...

2011-07-04T18:27:00.000-05:00

Live link for the movie of Trash Bride--click on the title below...

2011-07-02T13:22:00.004-05:00

Trash Bride

"the temptation of meaning"

2011-06-24T13:23:00.001-05:00

"feelings"

2011-06-18T11:27:00.001-05:00

Sometimes it looks as if the people of Louisiana are best at two things: asking for help and refusing help. Half the time we’re screaming for federal aid down here, or moaning about the lack of attention, or complaining that the President isn’t doing enough. In the remaining time we get huffy about “Big Guhvment!” and make a highly entertaining spectacle of the assertion that we don’t need any tainted funding thank you very much. It seems that whenever we don’t have our hands out asking for dollars we’re flinging or trying to fling the cash—in fistfuls—back. Take HCR 54—please. Starting in early June the Health and Welfare Committee has been working hard on one of these gestures: a resolution to “memorialize Congress” to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization which receives Federal funding to provide low cost and effective heath care for three million women nationwide. In the context of shocking statistics (Baton Rouge is #2 in the Nation for HIV infection, Louisiana as a whole is 49^th in the nation for child healthcare) committee members (led by Representative Hoffman) have been using time and energy to demonstrate their resolve to reduce access to healthcare for our citizens. Will getting rid of a healthcare provider make the state a better place to live? You’d think the answer to that one would be obvious: four thousand Louisiana women depend on the care and education supplied by Planned Parenthood and paid for by the Federal Government—and our elected representatives are focused on the question of whether or not to throw that help away. The federal funds coming into Louisiana through Planned Parenthood cover primary and preventive health care, including lifesaving breast and cervical cancer screenings, annual exams, birth control, HIV testing, and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections—urgently necessary services. The problem with our two specialties is that the first one, asking for help, is real: we’re in trouble down here, as the statistics show. But our second specialty reflects a dangerous delight in theater or, as the kids say, make believe—as if we could make what we don’t want to see go away by shutting our eyes, or make needs disappear by refusing one of the sources of help. This resolution to take healthcare away from thousands of Louisiana women has been brewing over the last two weeks: it was deferred and then approved and is now going on to the Senate. The Resolution’s author, Representative Hoffman, is thrilled about the chance the committee has had to attend to and enact its “feelings.” Those whose lives depend on Planned Parenthood couldn’t attend the theatrical performances staged on weekday mornings at the Capitol—they work.

Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing

2011-06-02T14:00:00.002-05:00

The Big Fix

2011-05-25T14:20:00.000-05:00

"shooting for the end zone"

2011-05-25T11:05:00.006-05:00

At the entrance to her life, little Abigale, only six weeks old (“Born on Mother’s Day!") swaddled in fuzzy pink, was exhibit A yesterday: irrefutable proof that women shouldn’t be allowed to have access to medical care that includes abortion procedures. The Pastor, waving his new daughter in the air in committee room 6 of the State Capitol, for the meeting of the committee on Health and Welfare, was in Baton Rouge for the second week in a row to make sure abortion becomes illegal, and that victims of rape and incest are compelled to bear the offspring of the perpetrator. Abigale joined a host of “supporters of the bill” under 10 years old, silent large-eyed children who gape at those their parents have pointed out as vicious murderers, killers of babies, and lord knows what (I will, I imagine, in my pink “I Stand with Planned Parenthood” t-shirt and flowered scarf, haunt some bad dreams). It’s one of the really amazing shell games of our moment, this use of living children to stop those of us who might choose not to have them from being able to do so safely: this presentation of mostly well-cared for kids as stand-ins for the chemical reactions, the heartbeat and slip of fern-like spine, we all start out as… Probably what we need to do—if we have the ghost of a chance (as we say)—of protecting women’s rights in Louisiana, is to bring in the test-tubes, the fertilized eggs in their glass beakers steaming under the camera lights… Oh, the INNOCENT, uhm? Uhm, zygote? Hey? I imagine myself, suddenly, in front of ranked beakers set in dry ice, picture book open, pausing to show the illustrations, asking Who has something they want to share today, or starting the first bars of the National Anthem and waving my arms around… Light sparkles off the fluid when the table shakes and I go on alone in silence, “what so proudly we hailed…”—and so on. If you truly care about and want to protect this version of “life” ("personhood") you not only can’t go to war (!), you can’t eat any meat, in fact vegetables should be a big moral problem for you: sitting down to a plate heaped with slaughtered broccoli would offer a chance to know how members of the Donner Party felt, gagging it down to survive or, so hungry all you think about is how to get more of that…. Speaking of gagging: it seems fairly clear that unless we take the language back, unless we say we are all “pro-life,” we haven’t got a chance: in shrinking realm of shopping-that-passes-for-thought (thumbs up, thumbs down; like and unlike) “pro-choice” is just a start. “I’m for freedom!” probably won't work either, but… I am for freedom: I was in the committee room (with a lot of wonderful, brave women) to admit I had an abortion, to talk about the children I have had—children of the spirit, not the body—to urge the legislators to give their daughters (and sons) choices and chances for happiness, and (and I’m sorry about this) to suggest that adding the offspring of rapists to the gene pool might be a mistake. (I'm afraid I was tempted by this in response to LaBruzzo's earlier efforts to float legislation to sterilize the impoverished.) That was asinine, and I’m having a hard time forgiving myself… Others spoke better: there was immensely moving testimony from mothers who pleaded to be able to plan their families and control their quality of life as well as from a rape survivor whose life was saved by the procedure that kept her from having to bring the criminal's child to term. And there were the dramatic statistics (Baton Rouge is 2nd in the nation for AIDS cases, Louisiana ranks 49^th for Children’s Health...), figures that didn't speak to the legislators (though the thought of losing five billion in Federal Medicare money almost slowed them down), but committee members were (with two exceptions) brought to see the political necessity of taking the anti-abortion crusade all the way into “the end zone.” LaBruzzo used football tropes to establish a sense of community, made his failure to make a joke into a shared joke, and bonded with his mostly make colleagues by interrupting the female lawyer he’d brought in—this time she was in pink and ruffles—to say he’d go ahead and explain what she was saying ‘cause it’s awfully hard to follow ‘em when these women attorneys get going…and I can say that, ‘cause I’m married to one. After seven years here I understand, more than ever, my Southern grandmother’s joke: “It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.” It seems endless—this insistence on connection based on exposure (or celebration?) of weaknesses, errors, lack of knowledge (or anti-intellectualism?), and sheer jack-assery... As Abigale’s life choices tighten around her to a pink cocoon like the one she’s pushing a tiny fist against as her father bounces her triumphantly into the air. But even as I was weeping out under the trees after the bill was approved, I felt how little hope there was in my bone deep sadness, for me or anyone else, though I may have to find my way to hope through that (as well as my distrusted intelligence). I’m trying to say, I sobbed, that they need to give women the chance…to have the opportunities that men have, and they don’t want us to have that. No. (Duh.) The quicker road is humor…—there’s something life or at least day-saving in that. Throughout the hearing the Committee Chair (who voted no, bless her!) was having trouble with the Representative’s term: “feticide.” The invented term is pronounced FEET-aside, but she kept pronouncing a short “e.” “Oh,” she confessed finally, to large laughs, “I guess I was getting it confused with the cheese.”

http://housebill587.com/

"Just a Salesman..."

2011-05-19T10:41:00.002-05:00

"It's less about choice and more about money," Louisiana State Representative John LaBruzzo claimed yesterday, telling us that "killing babies" is a "million dollar industry." Standing out under a tree outside the state capitol, LaBruzzo was speaking to the supporters (and opponents) of his "feticide" bill--after the vote was delayed. The Louisiana Representative, famous for urging that poor women be sterilized, is pressing forward with a bill which, among other things, forces rape victims who become pregnant to have the rapist's child. "Our tax dollars..."--this is the inevitable beginning of the sermon, which then ranges over claims that abortion kills women (in Michigan) and girl babies (in China) and increases the (3rd world) sex trade. LaBruzzo's supporters buzz with repressed fury, spitting out Christian slogans through gritted teeth, and flashing their children (from babes-in-arms to uncomfortable-looking 10 year olds) as if they are proof of something, or a sort of reminder: as if anyone who wants to make an informed choice about the family they will have (about the future) doesn't actually understand what children are... "I'm just a salesman," LaBruzzo said, introducing the lawyer who'd come to argue the case: who reminded us (as if her revealing outfit was not enough) of her gender (as if the woman who argues against the rights of women were not a trope as old as the "our tax dollars" phrase). But then each argument she put forward--such as they were--was based in the body: she had been beaten by a lover (and her jaw had to be repaired) but she couldn't kill him in her own defense: hence no one should be allowed to have an abortion. Too, she herself (and if I hadn't been super keyed up by the emotions of the moment I might have recognized this as a laughable--almost--oxymoron), is "an abortion survivor." Her mother, she tells us, wanted to abort her, and wasn't allowed to do so...so, here she is, I mean was, and will be--next week, when the bill comes up for a vote. In with the rabid anti-choice faction was a woman who has, she informs us, had an abortion: now she knows it was wrong and wants to make sure no one else has that choice. "There are only two roads," she says, dully, "life and death...I know that now." Goodness, I said, you must all be super anti-war activists, and they turned on me, snarling INNOCENT lives, innocent... All this happened yesterday: while the flooding of farmlands and smaller towns continues, while the width of the mandatory evacuation area widens, while the question of what aid those who are losing everything might receive (and from whom) remains unanswered; this was going on yesterday, in a little patch of sunlight, on ground kept dry because territory elsewhere was being completely immersed...

coffee no oranges the chair in shade

2011-05-15T10:13:00.005-05:00

"Complacencies" in short supply: yesterday was the memorial service, on campus, for the first woman editor of The Southern Review. Jeanne Leiby was here a little over three years: long enough to shake up the review's image, become an incredibly important friend, colleague, and mentor, finish and publish her fine first book, figure out how to score that azure tarp you need after a bad hurricane blows half your roof off and then how to deal with the on-going budget cuts, snip snip snip--as relentless as they are foolish--taking away almost everything she'd been promised...--she was still in the middle of those negotiations when she wrecked her car and ended her life on the causeway over the Atchafalaya. The details of the accident ("veered" "overcorrected") are the stuff of which, with a nudge more or less or a touch less pressure, make for a story you tell your friends in a bar, later. And I can almost hear her laugh and see the way she'd turn, the conversation would turn, serious, hear her vowing earnestly to wear her seatbelt after that. (I imagine how she'd say, "I coulda died!"--and shake her head, and laugh... None of which is going to happen in this life.) The white crepe myrtle trees are blooming, stacked blossoms stand out of the soft green leaves like scoops of lemon ice made out of lace, and the magnolias part their heavy waxy petals against the dark green glossy stiff foliage, and the levees are piled high with white and orange sandbags. The sound of rotor blades again fills the air (as they did this time last year because of the oil disaster). It's illegal to walk up beside the swollen Mississippi while we wait for the opening of the spillway (opened yesterday for the first time in 38 years) to take effect. I hear the rush of the freeway and not far away there are houses and farms going under, nothing but the sound of water, only the sound of water--to protect that rush, that flow of cars cars cars. (And the refineries that fuel that rush.) In one of the reports of Leiby's death we were told her convertible "continued west on the interstate" after the impact, and as the report never returned to the car...it still continues west. I put our dead warrior back in her boat, I add the things a thoughtful young fiction writer brought to the informal wake: the package of Marlboro Lights, the bottle of Diet Coke. Jeanne's cell phone, her laptop (if we can resurrect and copy the smashed disc)--they should be there too. ...flames headed into the sunset: / you go down in light-- / we look for you soon / in the east. My grandmother, near the end of her long life, grew impatient with the euphemisms for death she was daily subjected to..."Don't you dare," she hissed, "say I 'passed away'!!" I liked her exasperation, and tried other objectionable phrases on her before we settled, with a laugh, on "gone west." She went west. "Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like wide water..."

contingency

2011-04-14T12:35:00.000-05:00

"The subject is...the possibility that language does not exist, does not take place -- or, better, that it takes place only through its possibility of not being there, its contingency." Agamben, "The Archive and Testimony" (1989).

Lent

2011-03-24T21:27:00.001-05:00

Starting on the day in early March when suddenly there are all these people with dark smears or smudges in the middle of their forehead, print of the ash-smeared thumb between the eyes (I have visited the holy fire I have been close to a dead fire I have prayed), and on--for 46 days--until "holy Saturday" (the 23rd of April) we will all be eating, down here in Louisiana, the gulf seafood that the NOAA & the FDA are still testing and still passing as "safe to eat." Or important to buy? In Alabama, on April 17th, "BP America" is hosting a special "supper on the sand" to mark (or rather, not to mark, but to erase) the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout: to "mark the progress" (!) a "500 person dinner" on "the white sand beaches." Meanwhile Al Jazeera (English) continues to break the news of illnesses in Gulf residents resulting from exposure to toxic chemicals. Meanwhile, the news is that--over the past few days--we're dealing with oil washing up on the shores of Grand Isle again (check it: March 21, 2011): source not yet accounted for: this is listed as "a bit of deja vu." Uh huh. (I hope you prayed you better pray you better--as Traci Morris puts it--hope Jesus saves you, saves you, saves you...)

password incorrect

2011-03-05T18:29:00.000-06:00

There's something important about the trying to enter a space you think of as yours and being refused. The machine can't tell I didn't complete the "username" and keeps telling me it's a password problem. I re-enter the password ("re-enter"?!) again and again. Refusal: red text. Bright (blood-colored) refusal. I was asked to remove something from this blog and I did so. I wasn't informed of the reason: I was informed about the distress. Friends helped me guess at the issue, and someone said "it was something about..." and then dismissed that. I honored the emotion: something I'm trying to do, these days, for myself. Have it: have the experience. Can you imagine how bizarre it would be to have to say that to yourself? Awesome. Now you understand me (hic), unlike my wife... Seriously, taking something I'd posted off or as we say "down" made me not want to put anything "up." Except Akilah's poem. Last year she was here to give a reading and stayed for the Spanishtown Mardi Gras parade that just now (again, some hours ago) rolled down the street. She sipped a beer, strolled out to wonder at the strangeness of it all, caught a fistful of the glittery silly strands of bright plastic beads that signal here (and or perhaps sometimes displace) inebriation and sex. Carnival, with the flesh in it. We hung out, talking about the body, and poetry, about ethics, and somewhere along the way she checked e-mail and worked on a project and I applied for a grant (for which, later that year, the funding would be cut). I can't go to her Facebook site or rather I can't go again: the messages left there for her...it's too confusing. That she was here and gone is confusing enough--and the injustice of her being gone so much too early makes me absolutely nuts. A Toast in the House of Friends is one of the best book-length elegies we have. And, at moments, as in her poem "go," it's as if she felt and described the space in which we would (greeting each other in these disembodied forms) all be ghosts. Re-enter password and re-enter again, looking to see what you left out, off. I don't know how to mourn her alone: gusts of grief and stretches of tense, ferocious denial (no no no no) one unhooked edge of which the wind keeps whipping up and tearing apart and taking away...

from Akilah Oliver's A Toast in the House of Friends

2011-03-01T19:18:00.001-06:00

go

often now when i imagine life i think of what should
be finite, the guise of limitability, the desire for stop

are there greeters there [are you one] when we former ghosts arrive

is this sea deceptive, as if alive or an actor, the world masked

in my own way there was a time when i stumbled over a tense: says / said
now, bereft, in anticipation of how night collapses
into its own effluence i conjugate occasions, ask just for time, just a little time,
to get love right

silence

2011-02-21T20:56:00.001-06:00

There's something to say about silence but it's not clear what it is...

2011-02-05T16:56:00.001-06:00

Online video chat by Ustream

(N)AWP

2011-02-02T14:29:00.001-06:00

I'm not there--but the book (I haven't seen yet) is: tables E20-21, "If you're going to AWP (parsley sage rosemary and thyme...)."

OSC (part one): "hope"

2011-01-16T20:25:00.000-06:00

Riding down to the “Oil Spill Commission” Report meeting in New Orleans (Jan 12, 2011) is its own education. Almost enough for the day—certainly, in terms of bad news, enough for a (not-so-new) year—or two (for Nature, what’s unfolding doesn’t involve fresh starts…or champagne). My companion, a scientist, is describing her data—which is, eloquently (think “Silence = Death”) the absence of data: “60 feet away from the oil, into a healthy marsh, we’ve got no insects.” She speaks of the silence, describes moving through the normally active and noise-filled territory in an eerie absence of sound and a spooky emptiness in the sample nets. She tells me there’s a strong chance that the oil is fumigating the insects… And, in case you are thinking of insects as ‘pests’ or going So what? As you read this? The insects are food for the birds, and the fish…and guess who eats the fish? I mean (‘cause when the day is done and we go out for dinner, the criteria for choosing a restaurant is ‘something other than seafood’), guess who used to eat the fish…

The Sheraton has got an 8^th floor conference room ready for this event: we sign in and put on the blue tags that read “public observer.” It’s a little like any other panel at any other conference: someone waves at us and we—pretending to recognize the guy—wave confidently back, hoping we’ll remember who he is and how we met him, at some point. There’s an unmemorable room, a strong light, handouts, and a solid media presence—and a dearth of commissioners: Don Boesch & Frances Beinecke (2 out of 7) are all we’ve got. Yeah, yeah, yeah: there’s snow at the airports, and illnesses, blah blah blah,—but everyone made it to Obama’s office to sign the leather-bound version of this baby, yesterday, and…for this appearance at ground zero, we get less than half.

Boesch starts things off, telling us when the commission was created and why, and beginning to offer the excuses and apologies which form the backbone of the presentation of the report. “We were doing our best,” “we expected to have more of our staff here today, but…” “We’ve visited…” (list of locations), “We did get an impression of the impact…”—this is the way the presentation starts. From there we move to the (inevitable?) reminder of the loss of 11 lives (presented—with more sentiment than grammar—as those who “Have been imperiled most drastically”).

I don’t know if I can communicate what it’s like to be in a room with those, still living, whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by an event, listening to a rich white man who wants to explain—of the pile of paper he and his colleagues have produced about that event—how “gratified” they were “to hand [the report] to the President personally…” Even if much of what he has to say makes sense, even if I’m glad (and I am glad) that someone did the research, and that someone is here to remind us that the U.S. should be leading the way in safety regulations and not, as we are, lagging behind every other developed country, there’s a sense of disconnection and hopelessness. Much as I love language (and we know, yes, that I love it), that’s all this is…--and that isn’t, as the Q. & A. that follows will make clear, anywhere near enough.

It’s a little easier to listen to Frances Beinecke: I appreciate the fact that, for starters, she’s not smiling. We all know how difficult this is for a woman, and the sour-faced scowl she’s kept for the whole of her colleague’s presentation is as impressive as it is unusual: she looks as if she’s tasting food that’s off, or squinting, as the poet John Ashbery would put it, into a future that stinks… But while her speech is clear and direct and to the point, focused on the need for industry reforms and tougher safety regulations, my companion wisely points out that we are hearing the word “hope” a lot—indeed, we are hearing the word “hope” WAY too much. As in we hope they will do such and such, or we hope the President will take our advice about thus and such, or we hope that in the future…and so forth. “The key issue,” as Beinecke reminds us in her closing remarks, “is to have these recommendations acted on.”

Princess

2010-12-19T18:47:00.000-06:00

There are things to say about being home and then there is nothing to say. That’s how it is with things, and language. I feel distant from Christmas as if it were the quaint custom of a distant race of savages, sorry, might be a thing to say or not say. Biking over the levee means passing through the entrance to the casino, swiftly: I was “exposed” to saccharine caroling for an instant, and then it was over. It seemed right that this heavy dose was for people who wanted to look at face cards or stand in front of slot machines instead of being out in the gorgeous weather. When I left Paris it was winter, here we are starting autumn. I called a local environmental agency to ask why the cypress downtown were turning red and they were patient with me: “They are called ‘Bald Cypress’ and they turn red every winter and their foliage descends as a dense reddish powder…”—I’d come back to a place I was a little frightened of (people are eating the seafood, a couple was robbed at gunpoint a block or so away), I broke out in a weird rash, my body looked as if I’d been flogged with brambles, my red welts itched, I didn’t know where I was… I still get tired at nine and wake up at five, as if I’m holding onto another time zone, weakly, for someplace far far away…where it’s snowing. I’d forgotten that the cypress change. Everything. Today my god-daughter and I hung out a little, she got a doll (well, she nearly could have had anything, but really…): “Ooohhhh oh,” said her mother, sternly, “What happened?!” “She said the magic words,” I answered, helplessly. We were in Barnes & Noble, and we’d been happy playing with a stuffed penguin she’d borrowed from another child: we’d had coffee (me) and milk (my god-daughter Keya, and the penguin—whose gender was iffy) and chocolate (well, Keya…) and we’d been deep in the questions of eating and growing and then it was (suddenly) time to go, and we headed to the trains for a brief glance before parting (Keya had a play-date). On the wall there were stacked stuffed animals and dolls both our eyes ranged over. “Oooooooh,” Keya said suddenly, almost as if wounded, “there’s a princess,” or “Can I have the princess?” I don’t exactly recall. Above her, on a shelf I could reach, two dolls sat together, both made of cloth, one black & one white. The white one had long blond hair and a big golden crown, the black one had butterflies and flowers in her gleaming—kinky—locks. “I want the princess!” Keya said, urgently, and I, feeling sad (and not inclined to follow up on this) handed her the white doll. I’ve had conversations with her mother about the lack of diversity among the princesses little girls are so abundantly presented with: we mourn the bitter narrowness of the message and I was sorry, again, to encounter it. “Nooooo!!!!!” Keya said, “the black one! She has flowers in her hair!” She had flowers and a butterfly in her hair and platform sandals Keya took for ballerina slippers, and her silly 1970’s name (“Bree”) was on a tag Keya couldn’t read and wanted removed as fast as possible (almost as if she sensed how wrong it was to be holding a black body attached—by a string—to a bar code and price). She has a butterfly on her outfit and was dressed somewhat like my god-daughter, in leggings and a little tunic, and Keya noted, with a natural-born-critic’s objectivity that she seemed well-made, an item of quality. But the magic words were spoken when the doll was in her grasp and Keya, almost not breathing, held it close and showed me: “her body is the color of my body!” I nearly wept—I would, I think, have paid almost any price for my love to be able to recognize her own beauty…(I’m lucky it was only $14.95): to see herself in that role, that place. I’ve been writing a series of prose poems about the feeling of “princess,” which seems so important to understand just now. This feeling requires, as we all know, negative space—the not-princess or the failure of recognition—to set it off. I recall how excited I was, long ago, when my stepmother told me about the symbol (Inuit) for hunting which is an extended (open) hand with a hole in the palm: you always let some escape, so there will be more next year… Princess is like that: a flash against the no-she-isn’t, a sudden delicious sensation of not even of excess perhaps, but of the possibility of excess: the surprise picnic feast (never a steady, endless, over-indulgence…). Princess. “She has flowers in her hair.” People die, as the poet said, every day for lack of what is found there.

The Four Things...

2010-12-06T06:54:00.000-06:00

The tiny parking lot of Louie's diner was full on Sunday morning, early (ah, nearly 3 pm--Paris time): out of the 5 or 6 cars the lot holds, two were Lamborghinis. That's a very very very expensive Italian sportscar (you, as the saying goes, can't afford if you have to ask). One was red, one black, both--I'm guessing--older models, and in good shape, "loved" or "beloved," my take. I went on in and as I settled at a corner stool at the counter I heard a man down the way proclaim "There are only four things in life you really need." I'm sure I wasn't the only one who tuned in (who here doesn't love a list? who here isn't seeking the answer to just this...): "A shitload of money, more money, more money than that, and a lot more money."

while it's weird (PS my cat hates me)

2010-12-02T17:28:00.002-06:00

I'm going to make some notes in the jet-lag mode, while America is strange to me, while the sunlight seems loud to me, while I haven't lost the distance and comparative stance: while I still recall the shock of the first public restroom here (JFK, baggage claim, international terminal)--how cheap and shoddy and dirty it seemed...and how amazing to be around people who spoke English, the extraordinary ease of communication, and the availability (or so it seemed) of other consciousnesses...

Now I'm "home" and home. And home, and "'home'." On my first drive (I was afraid I might have forgotten how to do it) I saw a mail delivery truck that had smashed into a fence, police were there, it had just happened; on my second drive, in the parking lot of the St. Vincent de Paul, I saw a woman freshening her make-up in her rear-view mirror and I heard the voice of her companion through the open window: "Bitch, you make me sick!" I was there to drop off bags of clothes: after four months with what would fit into...well, let's say three suitcases (or two and a couple of boxes), unpacking my closet is a fairly horrible shock. There's some shame and grief about all the... Shit. I say "shit" and I mean it, but what I'm describing is... I think the best way to say it is that I own a lot of clothes with sequins on 'em. I think the best way to say it is that I own more than one faux fur coat. I think the best way to say it is to tell you this: I opened, frantic to put something new on my feet, three cardboard boxes labeled SHOES without finding anything I could put on. Really.

On my first morning here I reeled around saying O mi gawd I live in a PALACE! So many rooms, soooo much art, so many "nice things," so many things things things things things things--and repeat. Things. THINGS!!!! (And repeat.)

I'm ashamed, and sorry. I think there's something both silly and sad about owning clothes you don't wear, chairs you can't use, purses for an octopus (or Shiva, perhaps)...? But then I don't regret the five (unused) manual typewriters...and I still wish I could have bought & shipped back a bottle drying rack (otherwise known as a "Duchamp"). Really--I need to hold this thought: I don't need anything more (uhm, except maybe some shoes--and olive oil...)...the idea (and I need to hold onto this) of buying anything to wear (I'm...appalled) should make me shudder...for a year, at least. For some time, for some long time I want to stay aware of the immense wealth of having...enough and more than...

I keep thinking of the good friend who told me about the older woman in her course who had been immensely rich and then (post the revolution in her country) very poor. "'The good thing about being poor,'" my friend said, quoting her student, "'is that you are not afraid of being poor.'"

I feel the burden of these objects and the fear that comes with them. I feel the sorrow of no longer having public transportation that really works: I feel the horror of finding myself isolated in a machine I control, pitted against my untrustworthy fellow drivers, hoping to return alive and unharmed from even the shortest and least meaningful trip.

I feel shaky in this strange country which is my own. I woke on the first morning wondering Where in the hell am I and why is it so noisy and why is it so bright?

au revoir

2010-11-24T13:57:00.000-06:00

Musee Branly, designed and placed to reveal (sudden glimpses of the structure--out the window--between other totemic objects) the Eiffel Tower as just another primitive sculpture, big phallic worship object. African men in the park outside shake rings of replicas at you as you pass. And then you, leaving, masks in mind, see the woman entering the museum w/ the Prada bag over her arm as also mobilizing a ritual piece to good effect, her blood-colored lipstick, the shaggy float of pelts across her back, she's also a witch-doctor of sorts.

The light float of pale stuff on the steps of the Metro (Louis Blanc) that might have been ice.

The radio stations that seamlessly float between world music and jazz. Listening, as I sauteed fennel and carrots, to Lady Day sing the version of "Willow Weep for Me" (Storyville) that sounds as if she's inventing it: finding each word by grace, locating each note as if she flung her body in her husky voice (like an acrobat) through space to find it...bend your branches down around the ground...spacious and spooky and perfect.

These two rooms, eight walls,decorated with a string of shells from Wood's Hole, a flea market straw hat (Italian), and postcards punched down hard on the nails that stuck out (Van Gogh winks at me w/ one steel eye sticking out under his sun hat).

A stinging and dust dry red from the Languedoc (less than 3 Euros per bottle) & Cote d'Or chocolate (lemon & ginger in the dark...).

If I get up tomorrow early I can make it out to an all day seminar...--Julia Kristeva's giving the opening remarks...

Le Gulf Stream--the bar below this apartment (believe it) where I've been working, drinking my "creme" w/ a carafe of water served by a brilliant writer named Anne-Catherine Fath. Her memoir, Rude, is elegant and ferocious and would--if translated--give a lot of small-town girls hope: "Entre se suicider et tenir un appart, j'ai vivote." She's married to the novelist Philippe Jaenada, whose smart & hilarious La Grande a bouche molle was one of the sweet joys of being here.

Goodbye--unless I am very strong--to the sense that art comes first. Goodbye to public transportation so exquisite I fear I'll simply, once home, stand at the curb w/ my metro ticket held out and weep. Goodbye to the dash downstairs for the pain au chocolate and the (still warm) Banette...and goodbye (hardly a tear) to the five flights up. Goodbye (I'll have to take it off at some point) to my e-mail's protective auto-response, meaning ("unless I am very strong") goodbye to the sense (always fragile) that I--outside of anyone's sudden need of me--exist.

Sad as I can be...hear me willow...and...

The Thing Called Love

2010-11-22T13:58:00.000-06:00

"The hardest thing in the world is to write a song and sing it for someone."

Les Bienfaits de la Helene Cixous

2010-11-18T05:30:00.001-06:00

An acquaintance dropped me a line, as we say, to remind me that Helene Cixous was teaching seminars in Paris this fall, the first of which took place last Saturday. Because today is Wednesday, because a density of obstacles intervened between the event I reeled away from, shouting (inside myself) “Mon esprit est plein de lumiere…” and sitting down to write this, I can state the above facts with some degree of calmness. Calmness seems crucial, for some reason, or, as I think about that, calmness seems over-determined. I have had one of the GREAT experiences of my life: I have been reminded that seriously brilliant thinking, slow, close (thrilling) reading, and teaching so good it is a kind of magic (transforming the student from inside out) still exists in this world, and those facts alone could bring me tears of joy. When I add my awareness that without her work, without her example, without her courage much of the writing I love (by many authors and in many languages) would not exist…I want to weep. But wanting to weep…wanting to weep (and not weeping) was part of the lecture, perhaps as both form and content. The imbrication and difference between tears and writing informs the opening of her recent book, the Double Oubli de l’Orang-Outang, and was an image in the Baudelaire poem she had us reading as well as a gesture haunting the text by Proust we examined, and the lectures themselves are presented under the ghostly and persistent sign of an active mourning—the brief introduction on the lecture announcement reads (in full):

Besoin d’une communication immédiate avec la vie ? - Téléphone.

Mon corps était en détresse tant que je ne l’avais pas communiqué à ma mère. Vite ! Des ailes, un autre appareil respiratoire, une ligne, qui me permettent de traverser l’apparence d’immensité ouverte

entre Giotto et Garros.

Le seul véritable voyage, c’est de prendre le téléphone, — pourvu qu’il soit mythologique.

In oblique, graceful ways throughout the day (the lecture began at 9:30, and—there was a ½ hour for lunch—let out at 2:30 or so) we, or at least I, was reminded that the calling she responded to, in so generously teaching us, took the place of or doubled for or displaced (these ideas resonant in our reading) a call she could not make or did in fact—in front of us (in the only possible way)—make. From the opening of the lecture, in which the “fils” of the telephone line was linked to lineage (“fils” is both line and son in French), ideas of connection, distance, displacement, love, writing and madness were constellated and sounded out with a miraculous depth and delicacy. The connections she makes are both rigorously erudite (informed by the history of Western Literature) and searingly original (trying to describe it, later, I found myself invoking Virginia Woolf’s description of the art work that must be, and I’m quoting from memory here, strong as steel and light as the wing of a butterfly). While we touched down for an exquisite moment on Genet’s description of a sequin (displacing and making visible his love for the acrobat from whose costume this tiny fragile almost nothing sends a reflected glitter), much of the day was spent with Baudelaire’s “Les Bienfaits de la Lune” & Proust’s “Sentiments Filiaux d’un Parricide.” In the Bibliographie for this course of seminars, continuing through the spring, there’s a list of authors and works we will want to have read: beside Proust’s name is the single stinging word, “tout.” Everything. Of course, and I say this with that heaviness of heart (“for lack of a better word”) that has lasted since my first reading of her crucial essay whose title, in English, is “The Laugh of the Medusa,” of course Cixous is, herself, the only woman author whose name appears on the list of necessary books. The Moon (and this is my translation of the Baudelaire), “The Moon, which is caprice itself, watched you, through the window, while you slept in your cradle, and said, “This child pleases me.” As Cixous led us through the gender complications of this text (as well as the Proust, which involves a matricide, in fact), noting that “La Lune” (fem) is “le caprice” (masc) (making us aware of the weirdness, of the moon’s promise—to its chosen—that he will be “la reine des hommes”) the real and resonant complications of the decision to speak of feminine writing always (or almost always) by way of male writers became more compelling. It helps, of course, that I’ve been in Paris for over two months, finishing a book, and that I’ve been frequenting the many (there must be hundreds if not thousands) independent bookstores here, and that I’ve been very aware—whether I go in and look at display tables or simply cruise the window—of how few, comparatively, books by woman I see. (While I regret the decreasing numbers of bookstores in the U.S. I have a renewed gratitude for the visible reminders I encounter—in my home country—that I am not shut out, as a writer, because of my sex, but Affirmative Action, which ensured that I had female teachers and role models, has a lot to do with that.) The Proust text involves a charged and elegant tracing of the tensile and almost invisible lines (“de long fils soyeux”—there deflected into a line of poetry) which link feeling and action, love and hate, what we write and what we do, who we feel ourselves to be inside in relation to what is coming to be outside (as Gertrude Stein would say), leaving us with a sense of how much of what we are is a matter of reflected light. The Baudelaire…I can barely speak of how much Cixous—in opening its meanings—led me to love this poem, that is, to feel the words as living…the Baudelaire makes vivid the situation of the writer who is always a lover of what shifts, changes, and will not stay to be loved (water, clouds, silence, night...the unknown), “le lieu out tu ne seras pas”: the site of your own absence, the place you will not be.

passing

2010-11-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

The left, or what remains of the left, in America seems to be disturbed and surprised (in a sort of mild way: you know, characterized by the use of exclamation points in status updates) by the results of the recent elections. I suppose the surprise is itself interesting in some ways? Or it might be, if there were some real effort to explain the surprise ("Here's why I was sure it would go differently...")? But so much unacknowledged effort goes so constantly into both maintaining a state of shock and outrage on one hand and displaying a world-weary cynicism on the other...it'd be a wonder if anyone still attempting to think and feel actually experienced anything beyond confusion and fatigue. The on-going tradition of the citizens voting against their own interests was maintained and continues on its upswing, and the reasons for this tendency (that we are ever-more constantly the love-slave of our own fantasies of being other than we are) cannot be addressed directly. The ever-more-impoverished citizens acted at the voting booth as they act in the mall--as they are encouraged to act: they pretended they were rich, white, free, young, healthy and in need of nothing. I might add that they pretended to be male, but perhaps that is implied. They pretended they had tons of discretionary income--and they voted as they voted (as they shop) out of a repressed self-pity, a deep unhappiness all the worse for having to remain unacknowledged or only acknowledged in the form of blame...--and they voted (as well) in a denial so intense it amounts to a kind of ecstasy. In France, as in America, the vote is seen as a reaction to or rather against the President...but I think it might be more useful to understand it another way. In Obama we have an intellectual pretending (as well as he can, which isn't very well--intellectuals are really bad at this) not to be one, a rich guy trying to act (and he's not good at this either) like he's not rich, and a Democrat too often trying to pretend there is no real difference between the parties (or showing that he hopes to erase some of the differences?)...in other words, we should see Tuesday's results as very much a mirroring of the President's own (very American) tendencies.

See Through ("hybrid text" talk from [the archives] 2005)

2010-10-31T14:41:00.000-05:00

“One word on everyone’s lips in May ’68 was ‘contestation.’ It expresses a fundamental version of freedom: not freedom to change or to succeed, but freedom to revolt, to call things into question. [Now]...we’re so used to identifying freedom merely with free enterprise that this other version doesn’t seem to exist.” Julia Kristeva (Revolt She Said p. 12)

“I see through a part of their say so.” Gertrude Stein (How to Write p. 382)

In his introduction to the Best American Poetry 2002 Robert Creeley struggled with the question posed by one part of that annual anthology’s title: What is “the best”? Opening his argument to consider areas or fields where it’s easier to tell (and wonderfully, as a former breeder of show chickens, posing “poultry” against “poetry”) Creeley both raised and ellided another question uneasily roosting there: what is poetry? Che cosi poesia, as Jacques Derrida elsewhere asked. “The poem...dwells on the threshold,” the philosopher Alain Badiou suggests (Handbook p. 17): “it is not a rule-bound crossing, but rather an offering, a lawless proposition.” Asking what poetry is is difficult not simply because every answer must be true to the complexities of the subject, but because that questioning and its strange, multiple answers interrupt the smooth functioning of former question, which we ask all the time, which we are supposed to ask. What’s “the best”? What the Kristeva quote suggests is the possibility of resisting, or finding an outside, to the focus on quality, opposing contestation to the contest. In the contest competition is used to weed out voices and approaches, ways of thinking. The contest has few winners (too often only one winner), contestation has potentially as many winners as there are entrants. The contest too often is used to stabilize value: contestation can be used to undermine the currency. When we set off to find out what writing can do instead of what it can do for us, when we--instead of trying to be The Best X or Y or Z--start allowing ourselves to write what we have not yet seen before, not yet read already, we are no longer in competition w/ those around us. The question of what “the best” is just keeps us in line, or line breaks: it’s a way to distract us from the real work, which is to see through at least a part of the say sos which dazzle and blind us to both writing’s potential and our own.

To start by stating the obvious: the genre categories serve as a perceptual grid, a checkpoint. They frame the “niche” and make what might pass for ‘market domination’ possible. We don’t have to compare, as the saying goes, “apples and oranges.” The experience comes to us packaged and reduced to a few recognizable brands. We have the thrill of a choice (whose limitations we may remain unaware of) and the sense of being informed and competent consumers: after all, We know what we like! Do we? “It must give pleasure,” Wallace Stevens says, of poetry, but pleasure—as we know—is a complex phenomena. Perhaps “liking,” especially immediate liking, is a little beside the point. Maybe the approach of the consumer is not the most productive approach to art, especially not for those intending to produce it.

It must bother.

Recently I find myself making my class reading lists out of what seems to me most disturbing, work that doesn’t look like what I expect and/or challenges me to find new ways to approach it. I’ll include books I flatly do not know how to talk about, texts which—I’ve found—have the capacity to cause discomfort and even distress. And I’m learning not only how to talk about those books, but how to deal with what comes up. When a student in a graduate seminar raises the assigned reading in the air, shakes it, and screams, “I hate this book!” I celebrate that articulate spirit of contestation (silently) & try to take us back to a zero place. Saying you hate Gertrude Stein, I tell a roomful of simmering undergraduates, is like saying you hate Saturn. An art work is a fact. It is a discovery which enlarges reality and cannot be avoided. A negative, or positive, reaction is just a step in the long process of the real work, which is the attempt to fully understand the implications of this fact. Why do we want to avoid or hurry past that work? How did security become such an unquestioned good? What’s so tremendous about comfort?

“If you haven’t, as a reader, burned your house down, if you are still at home, then you don’t want to go abroad. People who don’t like what I call ‘the text’ are phobic, they are people who...dislike being displaced.” (Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 81) The hybrid text, the ‘text’ which defies definition, leaves us a little ‘at sea’ as we say, with more questions than answers. “Who really knows what writing is?” as Mallarme asked. If hybrid work is kept off the curriculum, out of the contests and the bookstores, we limit our chances to find out what writing is—and life itself.

Comfortable in a digital world almost as international and dialogic as it is eye-catching and dynamic, some students find it natural to work across the imposed boundaries of genre. Some students want to engage the kind of questioning which will lead them to write a book of their own, and I mean really their own: something different. Some students are understandably reluctant to be asked to ‘toe the line’ of a specific genre or to draw a line--in that sand--themselves. But sometimes a student will make it clear that they don’t want to consider what poetry might be but to be told what it is and how to do it. They are already in the contest, on the market, aware that a publisher or an agent will have little use for what can’t be identified immediately. They have already lost the possibility of questioning the values.

A question I’m asking myself, now, as a teacher, is What price am I paying for what is seen as the priviledge (beginning on the undergraduate level) of working with students who have (“self”) identified as “poets,” “fiction writers,” and writers of “creative non-fiction”? What’s the long-term cost of the early professionalization of the creative experience? Of course the book marked and marketed as “poetry” or “fiction” has its value, as object, also written on it. And then there’s the identity of the blurber, and the name of the press: we have some idea what those are worth. What’s less clear is the question of what the categories--held in place by the academy as well as the publishing industry--are costing us. What have we lost in the way of talent--meaning ‘what has the world lost’--in an insistence that students decide what they are going to write (what it will look like) before they enter a graduate program and remain (unchanged by their experience) committed to that choice? What do we gain by forcing students whose interests include more than one genre to purchase two degrees? What can possibly make up for the unavailability of “rich and strange” works by writers, who--having themselves suffered a sea change--might in turn change us?

“The Best” isn’t good enough.

“But doesn’t it just,” worried the truly brilliant student in my office, to whom I was speaking about cross-genre texts, “look...erratic?!”

How does it look to live in a culture where a brilliant student would be so worried about erring? Doesn’t it seem awful to see, so early, a capacity to wonder and to wander narrowed if not shut? Doesn’t making a space for inquiry and keeping that inquiry so deliberately limited that the conclusions are—in part--foregone look a lot worse than “erratic”? Doesn’t it seem strange—it should seem strange—that what we are talking about is not writing, but economics?

“No mixed genre work,” so go too many guidelines and the rules of many a contest.

How much does a refusal to look at mixed genre works cost us—long term? What gets lost when we refuse to face what disturbs us? What do we end up paying to enjoy the comfort of easy identifications? How do we feel about continuing to prepare ourselves and others for a stable, neatly catagorized world—a world that (if it exists at all, if it ever existed) is certainly in the process of becoming something else?

The future won’t come at us neatly labeled and catagorized, and we owe it to ourselves and those we love to prepare ourselves for a future that’s probably going to seem “erratic,” at the very least, if not in fact like a terrible mess.

money & trash ("Princess") (10/16)

2010-10-29T15:04:00.000-05:00

A month and half in and suddenly everything seems to be about money. My limitations, my fault? Partially the weather? Summer is so…no, nice weather is so much more democratic. Conditions get worse and then it’s all about class (what were we doing in the Marais anyway, where rain can chase you into a nice-but-nothing-special bar for $7.00 coffee…). One of those afternoons when everything, even the Sally Mann stuff from 2006, looks as if it were done in the 1960s or 70s (I’m sorry, but a lot of French art, when it isn’t brilliant, looks like that): shades of avocado and harvest gold dominate, or it’s all (in another precious venue) bone, slate and bright plastic. Most of the galleries look like good places to get your hair cut. A visiting friend is worried about me: it seems I don’t want to “leave [my] neighborhood” meaning I don’t want to hang in the Marais and eat dinner somewhere expensive and dicey at 10:00. I know, it is a little absurd to live like this in Paris but I liked picking up exquisite raviolis (Cepes!) and a good bell pepper and coming home to dine, a (whoosh!) five Euro bottle of red wine already open… In other areas I’m trying to be more careful than when I got here but with wine…it’s as I see the time draining away that I begin to move from the two, to the three and then up to the five euro bottles, and to look up at another shelf and begin to wonder what a 10 euro bottle would, no, will, taste like… But not yet: there’s something nice about wondering. What can I say when I feel like I can’t admit that I’m sort of running out of money or that (and that?) either I’m becoming a little more like my stepmother, who hoarded hers, or (and) I’m evolving a complex idea about the idea of the feeling of “Princess” which requires tight economic formal constraints. You can’t actually get the feeling if you don’t get its opposite. Princess is a splurge, not a constant siphoning off… We stopped to watch the strike and it was lovely to see the earnest faces of the crowds (crowds!) of people marching down the blocked off streets in the cold, as orderly and organized as a Macy’s parade or a (more like a) carnival krewe. But there seems to be a sort of (at the edges) consensus that what matters is the strike itself (collective action, the opposition to Sarkozy’s casual rearrangement of many facets of French life) rather than the apparent issue, and (or) maybe more than one person has a little regret that what it takes to get the strikers out—at last—is a financial issue. As if that were where our hearts…

The coolest store in Paris is the one full of objects made from the recycled materials used to package various items: things we’d throw away, having another life. Hit the title for the link.

"To do" live link...

2010-10-26T07:04:00.001-05:00

par avion

2010-10-06T05:55:00.000-05:00

Your Paris My Paris Our Paris Their Paris

2010-10-05T14:54:00.000-05:00

The drink is an inky little Merlot from the Pays d’Oc, dense, a touch bitter, not much more than attitude to recommend it. I expect this entry to be inchoate: I just wanted to catch up before I was another year older (wink).

Today’s wander (because this is how the days go: work until you cannot work any more, then walk until you cannot walk any more, then stop somewhere & write a little more or read, or try to read, French…) took me to the Museum of Romantic Life. I am sooo not kidding. I saw George Sand’s landscapes: she evolved or located and made exquisite imaginary places out of stains on paper she called “Dendrites.” I also saw some breath-taking pieces by Fedor P. Tolstoi, an 1837 trompe-d’oeil of an architectural print under its translucent protective leaf (the leaf lightly crumpled and torn) a sort of miracle I’m still sorry I couldn’t remain with. The way the faintly glimpsed city did and did not appear through the protective “paper,” the way that image of paper kept being so perfect it seemed, as the docent was saying (“Regardez ca!”) you could almost lift… The translucent leaf (the image of) was “torn” along one edge so that the signature (or part of it) and the date of the “actual” etching came clear…I almost can’t stand how great it was: imaginary archive for the imaginary image of a probably imaginary city—Borgesian! Brilliant. (Then go home—how the days go—and make dinner, and maybe read a bit more or write a postcard or call someone, maybe or…)

When I said I was coming to Paris, most people went misty w/ memory and sharpish with envy and generally gave me up as a bad lot if you know what I mean. But, I wanted to say this then, and I really need to say it now, I am and am not in your Paris. I am in the Paris that came to your mind, of course: I had a baguette w/ dinner, and some astonishing cheese covered in sun-dried mushrooms (I mean it), I ate yogurt flavored w/ flowers for breakfast. I’ve found (you should just believe me about this, though I know it doesn’t make sense) the best pastry shop in the city (Aurore-Capucine, 3 rue Rochechouart, metro Cadet, 9^th) and the most fabulous candy store (Les Gourmandises de Nathalie, 67 Blvd des Invalides, in the 7^th) (had to stop after writing that and eat another one of the luscious chocolates: “Coeur des figues”) (kill me now), I caught the Robert Wilson production of Beckett’s O les beaux jours at the Athenee…etc. etc. (mind-blowing actress—Adrinan Asti—she never had less than three expressions on her frighteningly plastic face at once, and I’ve never had so much the one-and-the-same-time feeling that it would be terrible if “Winnie” did or did not shut up). And. And. But.

If for the first month I mostly, when not working, reeled about in a state of bliss so acute I was almost afraid I would actually faint (“I exist!” “There’s ART”—and so forth), at the start of the second month I can tell you that that is pretty much over, or now it’s an undercurrent. “Being in Paris,” I found myself saying to myself, as September ended, “kind of reminds me of being in France.” I spent—it was about twenty years ago now—a fall in Vence. There was the superb and ever-so-slightly dubious Foundation Karolyi, run by the elegant fierce daughter of a Countess: the sheets I slept on in the tiny Hungarian prefab perched on the hillside (a single room: it was literally a box) were linen and embroidered with a coronet… It was incredibly cold and damp and gorgeous and the empty days were empty in a way I can’t even imagine, now, being able to recreate. But that’s another story. When I was heading into the time here I wanted to say something about what I knew about time like this, something you might not think of if you were mapping your memory of a vacation onto my three months in which I need to finish a book, but I didn’t want to sound whiney, or ungrateful, or blind to my own amazing luck. And yet, and yet… There has to be a place and a time to say 5^th floor walk-up in the 10^th (splendid place: two rooms, lots of light, a washer, a hot plate and a microwave, and a couch, this table I’m using as a desk). You don’t actually need much else (the purchase of two Moroccan glasses becomes a minor event): it’s heaven, but also a bit strange, to feel that, to live it. Though I can be here without being panicked about money I’m not really in the financial shape to eat out much: tonight’s baguette was eaten with a heap of delicious carrots and fennel and arugula, a nice break from the endless bowls of homemade lentil soup. And then there’s my ambition, I mean, the projects I want to finish, or start, or move along a bit, urgent-feeling plans that can make of what is generally considered to be one of the world’s most glorious cities seem like a nutshell, or a dank closet. But there—I tried to tell you—I still know that I am incredibly lucky to have each step up to this haven, each moment to myself and for the work. “I don’t have a social engagement until 2011,” I laughed, nervously, to a friend here; I laughed, but it’s quite nearly the truth. “Aren’t you lucky!” She said—and she meant it, and I, saying yes, was also telling the truth. Maybe because it wouldn’t be hard to break? ”Jacques,” at the bar near Pigalle where I stopped to read a little, slipped me his phone number…and was miffed when I didn’t write down mine in return. Actually, since I spent the weekend in Brussels, partying with my brother for much of the Nuit Blanche, I’m just trying to reset and get back to work…

Meanwhile Paris, like other cities in Europe, is going through more or less real and urgent Terrorism…terror? How to describe it? As one blogger noted, France has been on “red” alert for five years now—so maybe they’re (in the wake of “chatter” about a planned strike on a tourist destination in Western Europe)—on purple, now? Magenta? I HAVE to joke, because waiting for a train in a crowd that includes armed men in camouflage, or coming to the station to find the whole front entrance in lock-down is not my idea of business-as-usual and I am, a little (a motorcycle backfired in Montmartre today and I leapt) freaked. Yesterday the police were stopping vans outside the café where I was working and suddenly every delivery truck looked like an IED. That’s probably a good thing: I mean, it obviously isn’t a good thing, but since that is how a large portion of the world lives, and some of that version of life is our fault, it’s excellent that I get to experience that. (“Because you’re a writer…”—that was what more than one person said to me, after Katrina’s aftermath, and after the awful death of my stepmother: “it’s good this is happening to you, because you’re…”) The other night I woke from bad dreams of “terrorists” and it was as if I suddenly understood or rather felt the significance of the fact that the way I wanted to live, felt entitled to live (on some level) (almost) required this…(or seems to require this) heavy duty protection (last night I heard choppers hovering over the Gares, “du Nord” and “d’Est”). I mean I got it: the “defense” is also the sign for the lack of liberty and fraternity (etc), I mean it’s the clearest indication of injustice. But the terror terror (!) is taking place in the context of fairly heavy-duty (if, fortunately, intermittent) strikes. “La Poste” (if you’ve sent my any mail or are sending me any…well, I hope…) and various forms of transportation are…uncertain (a friend was gloating over the metro line she uses, which is driverless…). One of my early language mistakes, when I first started coming to France and trying (bless them for their patience) to speak was confusing the sounds of the words “Gare” and “Guerre.” I asked the bus driver to take me to the war. Now…it really wouldn’t be so much of a mistake…

L'Amour Fou

2010-09-24T15:03:00.000-05:00

Virgin Radio has an ad up in the subway—I know it seems as if all I’m talking about here is ads, but they’re works of art (actually, there’s a lot of other stuff I could talk about: I’m reading Badiou, but only the books I can A) afford & B) fit in my handbag: note to philosophers: write more books that women can fit in a reasonably-sized purse), as a friend says: no one ever recalls the product. (Well, but I did, “Virgin…”) The ad says, in French, “Don’t get old too soon” and shows three young people with old faces. I mean, the bodies are lithe and tan “and young and lovely and” wear jeans and sort of grungy-type or rock-star wanna be clothing but bear wrinkled faces and gray hair: it’s a sort of Halloween-effect (trick and treat) as if they are wearing monster masks. And there’s a group (I love this) demanding the removal of this ad from the subways (outside of Paris) because it is disrespectful of old people! (Can you IMAGINE?! Like if I dropped my Yahoo account ‘cause of the endless pressure to botox or buy some massively expensive cream to erase the evidence of the past on my face?!) What I like about the ad is not only the disjunction but the inevitability of the disjunction: Lady Gaga calls her fans “monsters” and I do recall feeling like a monster as a young person, but darlings, You Have No Idea what it is to be a monster until you age! No, I don’t mean that: I recall the sessions with the magnifying mirror, and pimples, and how the entire face seemed reduced to one hot red irritated spot out of which oozed some disgusting thick yellowy white-ish…brrr! I really remember: but…you can recover from that. (Don't pick.) This age thing—it’s terminal. Actually I must’ve just seen Badiou on-screen, bearing his current monster face, the one he refers to when he says that his thinking about love is not the result of his age: the book I just finished (Eloge de l’amour) (sound familiar?) tells me that he’s working w/ Godard on the film I just saw, or saw…last week? He was on the “cruise,” the luxury bateau…(Godard’s dialog w/ Fellini? And others.) (The Drunken Boat, the Ship of Fools, etc.); the film I just saw (as in, a couple of hours ago) was L’Amour Fou: the YSL bio-pic. OMG. It’s a movie about a collection, it’s a movie about love, it’s a movie about money, it’s a movie about real estate, on the side it’s also a movie about love, and then again. It’s incredibly Jamesian: it’s all about “the things, the things.” Which we are: “monsters.” The artist, says the artist’s lover, “lives in a parallel world but changes this one.” I probably have that quote wrong. I drifted in and out of understanding or in and out of thinking I understood. But the deft manipulation of ethnicity and art history: I got it. He was a monster, or a genius, YSL, they are the same thing? Age makes you more…parallel. Today I had lunch with a genius: Alice Notley. Now I’m reading Reason and Other Women (note to poets: go ahead and write huge books for which we need another bag). The problem (that ought to be in scare quotes) with Notley’s work is that it’s incredibly dense and rich and—equally—extensive. You could spend a month thinking about the opening line, for instance: “These old walls are pure because I’m so real”… Just now I thought about the title of the YSL film and wondered what the “fou” part really referred to: that they were gay? How “crazy” is it to love someone over decades and run a (highly successful) business together and collect art and buy houses (for the movie was also about real estate, bien sur) together? Crazy like a fox, as we say. The scored and lined face, the hair without color, the flesh shifting gradually off the bone and toward the earth which will be its final lover: you’ll get there. Monsters. To be “real,” in Notley’s terms, is to be open to (available, we might say, to) other worlds—here with us now. In that way it conforms to the version of love Badiou describes, the “problem,” there also, is to inscribe eternity in this time: eternity and difference. Seeing from the point of view of difference, as versus identity, that’s love: “Cette surprise enclenche un processus qui est fondamentalement une experience du monde.” (33) I really need to go to Morocco. Xoxo.

Miss Havisham

2010-09-15T15:45:00.002-05:00

Pause to imagine her from inside, at the limit for the rest of her life, a space her wealth holds open. She has stopped time at the edge of her thwarted failed transformation. She won’t be carried over the threshold, in fact the threshold is where she will—in a deserted room, dimmed—wait for death like the only bridegroom, the guy you can totally count on. That heartbreaker. I stayed up last night reading junk as if to stall this, stall what, as if, I thought, retreating down a dark hall flinging shoes at… I think of rats. One thinks of rats. In New York in 2010 as the recession and the long years of paying for useless wars and the reluctance to pay taxes for anything except war caught up, rats were on the increase. A country used to living with the nonfunctional the strained and breaking increasingly filthy infrastructure only now a little more demanding about the speed of its connection. Rats are back, big time. I lay in bed staring at the dark and then turned the light back on, again and again. The feeling of being useless? The sadness? “In the middle of my life…” “dark” and all that. I gave up and took an Ambien at some point. Meanwhile she began to come to life for me as a figure for America: Miss Havisham—have a sham, as Dickens heavy-handedly points out. A figure for or at the Aporia, the limit, dedicated to the crumbling travesty of the celebration of a ritual she can’t, alone, complete. It isn’t clear she ever takes the dress off: she wears it like a second body, badge of success become a badge of shame, becoming frayed then ragged and gathering filth… She is a kind of refugee, she is a figure for a sort of repulsion. She is the unwanted and aging and apparently un (re)productive woman who must be hidden—and whose hide-out leaks out to homeopathically infect the spaces, precisely, we want to think she no longer has access to? Okay, then, death: everything gathered falling to worm and rust and so forth. Crumbles. Just one aspect of the consequence of an (in)action paused or held. Held is the right verb: think of this moment of maximum shame as clasped…close. But what’s held (the act of holding) onto isn’t held in: betrayal is key: if the man gets away the traces of what his escape costs are hoarded and put on display—pain, shame, rage, grief become the wedding gifts. Open secret. It’s her special day—it is / it isn’t—forever. A figure for the end of Empire, probably, living on money she didn’t earn in a space (hey, her “loft”) no longer productive: nothing’s made there now, it’s a space for a resonant (private / public) performance. Art. The frost hardens, the cake crumbles, rodents skitter in the shadows, spiders weave delicate fiber-optic lines from outpost to outpost, blanketing dulling silver and dust-cloaked crystal no one will ever lift. One shoe capsized on the floor, one bony flaking heel peeping from the unraveled edge of that stocking black with grime: he makes her so vivid, I suspect he also saw himself (artist) in the portrait.

9/11/10

2010-09-11T15:46:00.001-05:00

There’s an ad in the metro, a picture of a huge bright red (uhm, cooked?) crab with one claw raised as if in hello or as if to reach out—it’s an ad for cheap flights to Brest—“Pince moi,” the posters say, “je reve.” (Is the crab speaking to us? Is there someone already in Brest speaking? Does the crustacean answer a plea or make the plea? Forget I asked: I was simply going to say the same thing, or rather, I’m not going to say it.) I don’t want to be pinched: if this is a dream...back off. Yesterday I went to the Pompidou center for the Etienne-Martin show (he made what is perhaps the first piece of wearable art) and the amazing (all the more so as I hadn’t known it was going on) exhibition of women’s art: “Elles.” Mind blowing, or at least opening: works I didn’t know by women artists I thought I knew and then (even more, because Paris is so much the world) lots of names that were new to me and astonishingly great works (a short list: Sigalit Landau, Francoise Janicot, Sanja Ivekovic, Rosella Bellusci, Elke Krystufek, and Leticia Parente…). Today was the latest Godard movie and a marches aux puces (Film Socialisme doesn’t seem awesome—like most recent Godard it’s a touch flaccid—but it’s still about 500 times more interesting than anything I could have driven to the mall to watch in Baton Rouge: to put it simply, it’s worth seeing, it’s worth thinking about). What you don’t know, when you’re in it, practically ill all the time with a low-grade and semi-sucessfully denied panic, is how restrictive America is: how much the lack of access to real art is a barred or merely broken off road that’s saying No no no no no in ways you can’t help but hear (it’s a toll that echoes in the bones) even if (even as) you do everything you can to resist. “It’s not so much,” Gertrude Stein said, “what France gave as what it did not take away.” If I could stay here (this is what I think at the end of the first week) I would: people here (and it’s not just tourists) seem to be celebrating life, or maybe they are just living and “celebrating” (to one who comes from a country visibly breaking down as it sinks most of its resources into war) is what that living looks like. From here America looks weirdly retrograde if not ridiculous: “Le Pasteur americain qui affole la planete” (sorry I can’t put in the accents), Terry Jones, looks (in the picture from today’s le Parisian) like an extra from a movie made in the 1960s about the 19^th century American West—he looks like a seller of snake oil or like what he is, the head of a dubious cult. I wish to hell the Obamas had had the stuff to say, of Michelle’s visit to Spain, Well sometimes you just need to get a little perspective (obviously they couldn’t say Well sometimes you have to get out of this madhouse). I think the President’s getting there (redundantly) with the speech where he says we can’t “hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.” I know I’m only saying this to those who know, and yet I need to say it (then I’ll stop, I promise): my country is a madhouse. I wanted to write something, just a small something, today, to commemorate the 11^th of September in my own way. We haven’t caught Bin Laden, obviously, and in the striking out we have done around that failure it’s likely that we have made at least as many new enemies (if not more) than any we have (by hook and mostly crook) caught. And the cost—at home and abroad—of the destruction is huge and unacknowledged and mounting every moment. I’m not speaking just of money or of lives or even of bodies alone: I’m thinking of the tragic loss of spirits, by which I mean minds and hearts. I’m thinking of the multitude of lives we’ve twisted into the shape of our own stuck mourning, broken families, erased histories, generations blasted by shock and grief, and then the widening circles…women hurt if not killed by men who come back to their families and communities hurt in ways we can all see and or ways we can’t or won’t admit, and then children whose schools, lacking funds that go to send people and technology overseas, become less effective, less compelling…and the children are bored and angry and hurt and they leave the schools (sometimes because they are having children of their own) and… —we have to find a way to get past our self-pity and fear and rage and back into the world, as a part of the world. What happened to us nine years ago is now less important, less worth mourning, than what we have done, ourselves, to ourselves as well as others, since. One of the most haunting pieces from "Elles" is Sigalit Landau's "Barbed Hula," (2001). In it a naked woman (we only see her middle section), standing in front of the breaking surf in Tel Aviv, sways in a rhythmic limited dance to keep a hula hoop up and going around and around and around her waist. The hula hoop is made of barbed wire and her flesh is abraded by the gleaming metal barbs as the hoop makes its flowing elliptical contact and contact and the wounds, created in the maintaining of the border, mount up.

matisse joke (for Carol)

2010-09-08T06:10:00.000-05:00

money, or...two or three movies

2010-09-07T06:36:00.000-05:00

"Laura Mullen died and went to Paris." That's the 'status update' I'll (sooner or later) have to post. I'm writing from the cafe below my apartment in the 10th arr.--pausing the book project--to make a few notes on the America vs France question while it still seems fresh (before I begin to speak, even in thought, a terrible combination of pidgin English and mauvaise French). The vivid head to head started on the plane ride, with the movie selection: I started to watch A Single Man (everyone had seemed to think so highly of it) and, in the first classroom scene, had to cut it off. I was having problems earlier, because of the images of the house: are we supposed to understand that he has family money? Did I miss that? But the portrayal of what it is or even WAS like to teach English on the college level was so completely absurd I had to turn it off. We are evidently stuck in the Dead Poet's Society for the rest of our representational lives, with no ability to cope with the reality (complex and remarkably free of the sort of heavy-handed assertions of authority enacted on the screen) of a group of people being led deep into a productive discussion of a book. Yes, dears, even in the 1960's the author's intentions were no longer wielded with such a cave-man-finds-tool ker-thwunk. Am I to believe that if you are getting every visible fact wrong you are still getting some kind of special essence ("spirit" or "soul") right? Blaaagh! The movie seemed as blinded by tears as its protagonist. My next choice was between an Italian movie called Amore, staring Tilda Swinton (one of the few people capable of as nuanced a performance as Juliana Moore), and Sex & the City 2. I watched all of the former film and most of the latter, and the comparison, if a bit too easy, is also too vivid to pass up. Amore revolves around an older woman (wife of a businessman who actually seems to have a real business, and the mother of two interesting, complicated adult children) who falls in love with a much younger man. The phrase "falls in love" is at once accurate and empty: being woken (by her son's friend) to life and pleasure and the memory of herself as something more than the perfect wife and mother, results in a savagely intense intimacy and the disruption of...everything. There's a cost...and it's paid. It's a movie made by adults and for adults, strong like Ibsen or Chopin, doing the work that straight narrative can do and doing it better than most. Astonishing to hold Amore up to Sex & the City 2, which certainly blundered along along the broken and shadowy traces of a vaguely similar plot, insofar as it bothered with plot. The American movie seemed made for (and about) weirdly aged adolescents: clueless mall rats with (agh) sagging flesh. It's not the flesh, really, that's the problem (Parker's features are sharpening with age in a very interesting way: she looks sort of boiled and hungry and better with her hair back...), it's the presentation of age as just one more of the problems you can breeze your way right through with yet another shopping trip. I confess I couldn't finish that movie either, though I got through most of it. Though it dealt with old, hard children incapable of intimacy (childish only in their insistence on the imitation of it), and focused on women whose idea of cultural sensitivity began and ended with the adjustment of a scarf, there was the occasional good outfit (very occasional) and the seduction of the spaces these people moved through. Not just Morocco, beautiful enough, but (everywhere, even in broken New York) the excessive care, the plush, wide, lovely receptive room(s) in which to stage their brittle narcissistic little dramas. Big spaces purchased with money that comes from nowhere and nothing, the same money the college professor had in A Single Man, I guess: gushing up to answer the desire it creates and create the desires it promises to answer... (To be everywhere, to vanish, to live forever, and to never grow up.)

JFK: the t-shirt

2010-09-02T15:29:00.001-05:00

There's the murmur / howl of passing crowds and the doting father raising a psychopath brings his darling over (goofy grin, cherry-colored spit down the front of the cute little shirt) to let him try--putting the "terrible" in "terrible twos"--to pulverize the adapter, howling with glee... I'm tucked behind the portable Air France "Airoshop" eyeing the booze. Another rig has blown, back in Louisiana, and I just got off an island ahead of what's a category three (last I checked) storm. Back in NYC (this was awhile ago) (did I say this already?) I kept wondering (for the first time ever) why space that could be used for information (on the subway, for instance) was being used to sell me things, or at least to try to sell me things. Why doesn't the uptown 6, for instance, give me the location (and hours) of the Guggenheim instead a picture of (& phone number for) an expensive dermatologist? I know more about what to buy than I do about where the train stops: why is that? And why did it take me so long to ask this question--and has it become worse (is there less information that doesn't pay for itself?)? It seems like there's less and less information and more and more advertisements, and then so much of what passes for information turns out to be an advertisement...is it any wonder we also ask what we're being sold when we're being informed? Or, it's no wonder higher education looks like four years of infomercials? And yet--and I'm not going, in the civilized maelstrom of the airport, to say this well (or even coherently)--I feel the tear between (the gap between) thinking and shopping getting larger. I told you I wasn't going to say it well. Maybe later. I've come off a quick glowing array of days with a really wonderful part of my family in a place (Martha's Vineyard) that seems...I don't have words for it. It's as if one went back in time to an incredibly easy-seeming and beautiful place. (And yet...on the penultimate afternoon, the beach was...haunted? To be blunt I think I saw an oiled bird, and I wasn't alone in that vision: it kept uselessly preening its strangely dark feathers, spreading its sticky wings, coming out of the surf where it couldn't seem to stay afloat...) I kept thinking of the t-shirts the Wildlife Federation guys were wearing in the Gulf: "Vanishing Paradise." I thought of making t-shirts for the Vineyard: "Unaffordable Paradise." But that's completely legible, right? Already. Same same. No one but me needs the t-shirt (or, Yo--what do you think it says?)...

2010-09-02T14:51:00.000-05:00

The "Sands of Time Motor Inn"

2010-08-28T18:53:00.004-05:00

I need to be honest about where I am—where I am now. (“My wife thinks I’m in Oslo…”—that’s a John Ashbery line.) I’m in Cape Cod: I’m in Wood’s Hole. ("How's the Hole?" a witty friend writes, in the subject line of her e-mail.) I came here to connect with the Oceanographic Institute (WHOI or "hooey," as everyone here calls it); I ended up filming an interview with a scientist known (by his Assistant, at least) as “the oil spill guru.” (He’s transitioning into biodiesel research.) Late, low sunlight bounces in a long reflected line from the mast of an anchored sailboat among others on a little bay I can see out my window. I had a lobster roll for lunch (and, through force of will, managed not to douse it in Tabasco sauce…everything else on the plate got soaked—the food up North seems a bit insipid to me, and it’s not just here…I felt that also in New York). I need to be honest: I’m somewhere nice, I’m somewhere really really nice, and then I’m headed somewhere better and I was somewhere good (Brooklyn) and I am, after the better place I’m headed, headed somewhere even better after that. Complex sentence, huh? The thing is, it feels like (and that feeling is not mine, but a cultural mood) I was a little afraid to admit it. Like—I couldn’t say I was going to Europe unless I, imitating the First Lady, suddenly announced I had a grief-struck friend I needed to comfort… Yep. Sure. Why not? So I’m taking a handkerchief to Martha’s Vineyard where my cousin’s family is weeping into the Bouillabaisse (when they're not at the beach), and then I’m packing the smallest violin in the world for my three months in Paris. The water I can see out my window is dark blue and though it is polluted, too (as are all waters off the coast) it is (comparatively) gently fucked-up. I got good, really complex, footage of the scientist and his lab. After seeing the Macondo well oil on the Port Fourchon beach and floating in the Gulf I saw it again in little vials, and inside a refrigerator that gets chained up, and then on the screen of a computer, in 3-D, broken down into its chemical components, which are also called its signature or fingerprint. A boat crossing the water between here and Martha’s Vineyard catches the light and flares red as if it burst into flames or neon, and then was doused by its movement: it becomes a boat again, and passes out of sight behind the darkening cypress on a cliff. These inlets, these houses and docks and the little homemade-feeling aquarium (I’ve seen fish stores, in Louisiana, w/ more variety and better presentation), couldn’t we do this? Couldn’t Venice, for instance, or Cocodrie, at least (which has the scientific “Consortium” in place) look like this? A little? Couldn’t we put the breaks on the erosion and… I ask this as I listen to what could be the sound of a chopper (does the President leave the Vineyard tonight? Tomorrow?)—I ask this as a way of trying to understand what makes this so much nicer than where I was, so much more (for so many people) worth a visit. Weather is, or course, part of it: it’s heaven NOT to feel sweat pouring down and pooling on your body, not to stick to everything you touch…sitting with a hot cup of coffee in the afternoon and having it swiftly grow cold as Monarch butterflies dance past and gulls whirl and the ferry makes its amazing noise (GWONNNNNHKKKK) and moves heavily off like a giant wedding cake afloat…it’s a great great pleasure. But there are three months of the year when the weather's so bad here that just about everything's shut. I wasn’t going to talk about it (where I am) and now I have to. If I didn’t speak of it, I’d still be speaking (“volumes”) about the problems we have (as a country) with pleasure, and then my guilt. It’s getting too dark to see the keyboard: I came up to my room to write this and to watch the light go, over the water. I’ll stop when I can’t type any more and then I’ll go find more seafood to eat. The liberal owner of an little handicraft shoppe expressed her sympathy for our State but kept mis-speaking, saying how upset she was about “the dispersements.” Me too: I mean, the question of who gets what--I'm with you on that. Claudia Rankine and Carole Maso are crucial to my sense of what political art could and should be: both of them point out that lack of awareness, knowledge (to not even know the right word) is a sign of a lack of interest. The friendly shop-owner said it (wrong) more than once...or twice. And yet, and yet…why is it that someone who can’t say the actual word “cares” and the scientist with the thick text on his desk on Dispersants gets furious with me when I worry aloud about their effects? “I don’t want to play those games,” he snaps, dismissive and almost ready to call our conversation off. I’ve got it on tape. (Oh, hardly "on tape," certainly not, "footage," any more, but pixels, bites, data on my digital apparatus...) In the coffee-shops here the chitchat is of data and whale habits; on the screen in the lab the oil is broken down as an image of oil: pretty rainbow spikes, an exciting event, something to study. Material. "Oil comes in a lot of flavors," someone in the lab says, more than once, as if it was good enough to eat? It’s gorgeous in Massachusetts…and I’m a long way from home. It’s the eve of the Katrina anniversary, also the 5^th anniversary of my stepmother’s death (she came from Boston, and I hear—faintly—the sound of her voice in the harsh-to-my-ears-now accent, "cah," like a crow, for car and so forth...why couldn't we...). As I read over the notes I was making in a journal this afternoon (the hand-writing a little careful and cramped) I realized I sounded sad. When I speak to others I feel as though I am already in a foreign country: this language a little precarious… That’s (I'm correcting this by the glow of the screen) the end of (for now) the light. "Oslo," Ashbery continues (if I recall right), "France." Actually I'm staying in "The Harbor House."

"Vanishing Paradise" (July 28, Venice)

2010-08-20T08:34:00.000-05:00

The guys at the dock, arranging the boat trip for various media, are wearing T-shirts and caps bearing the slogan “Vanishing Paradise.” (I’ll spend some time, quietly and to myself, thinking Maybe that’s not the best way to put it: isn’t Paradise, by definition, always lost? Or almost always? Isn’t it, on some level, something we feel is beyond us or more than we deserve or something, if we can have it, to earn, wait for, work for, pray for…it’s in the future—or it’s in the past.) My friend hooks us up for the trip (arranged by the Wildlife Federation for Ducks Unlimited and a crew from some heartland PBS station…), and by 10:30 we’re tearing through the ever-widening channels of the ever more torn and fraying lace-like Southernmost point of this Southern state, the boat bouncing up into the air and back down, whomp, whomp, whomp, across the hard chop of the wakes of the other fishing boats chartered for the trip. Sky-mirroring muddy water that, as we get into the Gulf, will go a little greenish, and darken, assuming an eerie gloss, which is the oil slick floating out everywhere, making the surface of the water look a bit like a representation of “the surface of water,” something subtly wrong about its polished, slightly metallic, slow smoothed movement. But we’re not out there yet: we’re whomping at high speed down what seem like wide roads of water, six-lane freeways, between walls of “phragmities,” the reeds or “cane” standing up in thick clumps where to mark the vague, constantly dissolving, areas where actual land was once. Our boat’s captain waves toward the islands of reeds, each banded by a brown area along the water line where the oil hit, telling us about the half-a-decade’s worth of damage the disaster did, overnight. But, as we cluster around the GPS which (using a map from the 1980s) shows us as boating straight across dry land, as he traces a finger over the parts of the state already “gone” (“this is all gone”), it’s hard to tell whether the background of damage and loss makes what’s happening now more or less easy to accept. It’s not acceptable, okay, but if damage is the story and damage is the context—the story…vanishes? Tattered by “salt-water intrusions” (the nice way of saying you’re totally fucked) resulting from the control of the river, the on-going pollution, and (most of all) the channels cut by the oil and gas industry, much of what shows up on the map as solid land no longer exists. On the anchored boat, looking out on little islands of dying reeds on one side of the boat, on the other the wide horizon, rig spiked, active with skimmers and tankers and other “vessels of opportunity,” we repeat the statistics: a football field every 45 minutes, 30 square miles a year, 2700 square miles in what was it, the last decade? And the “spill” will do what to this? Because we weren’t smart enough to value anything but profit? How to communicate the fact that this is not only about the natural resources and selling them (Louisiana, by the by, with President Truman’s help, made a deal with the devil that nets it almost none of the wealth from the business), not only about protecting a unique and lovely city (some percentage of America said, after Katrina, should have been built somewhere else), but about a natural, national, treasure, left in the hands of a population mostly neither entitled enough to think long term, nor very well-educated: mostly impoverished and desperate, powerless or corrupt. Despite the “sheen” or through the acutely shiny reflection of sky, the water, when you look down, is laden with land: what you see when you look straight down into the opaque brownish green water you see the churn and swirl of twinkling silt…

start over

2010-08-17T15:08:00.000-05:00

Everything I said or tried to say about them, the guys (mostly) in the Tea-Party movement, today I feel as if I was speaking of myself. Perhaps I am always speaking of myself (perhaps that is the horror of, if not being a poet, me, being a poet). The anguish, the guilt, the grief, the fear—the emotions they can’t admit to and which (as far as I can see) are the main sources of their motivation—those are the emotions I feel also, seeking (as they do) some kind of certainty. The only emotion they can and do admit to is a rage I recognize but no longer have access to except intellectually: it looks like willful blindness now, to me, that anger—an expensive abjection—a way of holding, no, of trying to hold, the world (by which I mean otherness, time, and transformation) away. I am aware today of the immense clumsiness and fragility of my attempted understandings of and interventions in the disaster. What I know or think I know is constantly being changed—where it is exposed to the understandings and interventions of others, of better focus or further engagement or greater peril or longer involvement. And whatever it is you (there I go again), not “I,” understand had better be subjected in a purely scientific way not only to the senses others have of what has happened but also to the otherness of the landscape itself, and the wildlife. Any truth not come to or not at least informed by the need to blink back the sweat pouring down into your eyes better be examined pretty carefully, anyone talking about a place they haven’t not just visited but been uncomfortable in (show us the raised welts of your “skeeter” bites, show us the heat rash or sunburn, raise up your hands which stink of the chemical you used to get the oil off) should be listened to with more than a little distrust. What I mean to say is that we have to take the being there, embodied presence, a lot more seriously than we ever have before. If we do not…oh damn, there I go again. Start over—asking for the grace to understand, to find some understanding of the relation between individual and collective that makes sense, that holds under pressure. Start over. I wanted to say, I want to say, something about the body as the location of truth, not the only location, perhaps, but an absolutely crucial part of any real understanding. It’s the young man speaking of his sister’s being caught across the lip by the beak of the terrified, oil-soaked, pelican she was trying to help: “she made the mistake of leaning down as she opened the cage,” he says, leaning as he speaks, to show us. It’s this mirroring gesture, and the way the story keeps at its heart the cage and the open door and the wild terrified bird, slashing out…

origin / a dress

2010-08-17T14:56:00.000-05:00

2010-08-11T08:31:00.005-05:00

2010-08-11T08:31:00.002-05:00

2010-08-11T08:30:00.002-05:00

The Empire's Old Oil

2010-08-09T10:07:00.001-05:00

Flying out of Baton Rouge (8/7/10), to Houston, the little Continental Express jet went out over the Gulf of Mexico and you could see, you could just (as I did) look casually out the window and down and (double take, after all the “it’s gone” stuff I’d been hearing, WtF) see the massive ugly black “plumes” of oil under the surface.

What I’m ashamed of and worried about is that not only did I not audibly shriek but in fact I felt as if (and acted on the feeling) that I wasn’t supposed to have seen what I saw—and I kept my mouth shut. While I got up to walk back to see if I could catch another look at the long dark arcs I acted as if I were just, you know, headed to the restroom… I acted like it would be dangerous (or unpatriotic?) to say What the fuck! Will you look at that oil?! Or even just, Did you see that?!! (What the FUCK?!) I acted, in other words, as if having seen what I had been told was not there I needed to keep that secret (I come from a long line of alcoholics: I know how to do that—I know really well how denial can become the price of community & how to pay that price: to be “loved” for one’s learned blindness or at least silence…though it wasn’t affordable for me, long-term, the heavy cost). By the time I thought to get the camera out we were over clear water—but I staggered down the aisle, ducking to peer out past the other passengers who glanced up at me or gazed down at books and magazines or looked straight ahead and I didn’t even think of reaching out to anyone else to say Hey, hey, did you…did I…was that…what the…

Stars

2010-07-29T11:03:00.000-05:00

Start with an image (I wrote “Star with”): on the surface of the muddy green water (its opaque depths twinkling with churned silt) a formless glop of orangey-brown stuff floats, looking like nothing so much as a patch of raw sewage, tilting and wobbling across the wind-rippled surface. The oil looks, from a distance, as stable as it is ugly—it’s only from above that you see it is dissolving at its edges at an extraordinary speed, as if “fizzing,” as one observer puts it (but that’s a voice-over, there are no observers in this image, focused on a little patch of weatherized crude in the Gulf). Later I will hear someone talk about the way that oil spreads across water, and I will continue in the uneasy calm with which I watched the clumps of crude float past the boat, each fizzing off as we passed into a sheer film of sleek iridescence. Only the next morning, woken before dawn by the memory, I’ll realize I’ve never seen oil acting like that in my life. Alone in a dim room I’ll see again as if watching a movie those seething rainbows around each patch of what looks like shit and discard the favored theories (microbes, fish) to face the fact that only an almost unbelievable level of dispersant in the water could make the oil act like that.

Briefing ("Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect.")

2010-07-25T20:24:00.004-05:00

"Yes, first of all I've got no knowledge of the inner workings of the corporation. My job is to focus on unity of effort making sure that the responsible party uses the guidance it's been provided. And I'll continue to do that regardless of who is in charge, with oil moving around from the south more to the north and to the northwest and redeposited into extensive discussion about our efforts to remobilize assets subsea to operate the hydraulics and begin preparations for the operations. But it's possible that where you had oil it could be moved. I think everybody understands what's going on right now, where we're going to take some up and actually fly the coastline to give them an idea of the type of damage moving forward. Some of this stuff could move up sooner into the time window I talked about This is all starting to converge and given the priorities right now and the opportunity to go ahead and proceed with the ones that will come out later, the ones that are going to probably be supporting the build out of the containment - the rest of the containment package. They completed a pass this morning and detected no anomalies and this is consistent with our decision in the absence of any indication there are problems with well integrity: it is quiet and not as crowded and doesn't present a problem with simultaneous operations, and these are both indicators of a - and consistent with a well that has integrity. We'll continue to work throughout the day, looking at condition of the boom, where it's gone and looking for oil. And that migration of oil is problematic in that it doesn't come from sea but could relocated from someplace else. We expect some oil that was there before the storm to be displaced and a lot of the residual oil that was out there, that had not been skimmed by our significant effort in advance of the capping stack, a lot of that has moved northerly but we are up doing very, very intensive surveillance today to try and reestablish where the oil is at and also to redeploy response equipment back into the area so we can resume response operations and be responsive. We continue to do all of that but we have to sequence you know what needs to be done out there and the priorities. And, quite frankly, I don't have a problem with erring on the side of conservatism moving this stuff a little bit to the right because we do know there have been things that would have delayed today here but I would go with what I passed this morning. It's been refined and revised in Houston. But we continue to move out. We need to have backups for all these systems. So I think one of the things we're going to do is sit down and take a look at our strategies for sensitive areas. I think we've learned early on and we need to continue to understand that we'll the best thing we can. But those are the types of things we're going to look at as we move forward after the response here. That said we could have a problem somewhere along the line.

And with that I'd be glad to take your questions."

History Lesson ("If we are to maintain faith...")

2010-07-24T19:07:00.001-05:00

certainty

2010-07-16T17:57:00.002-05:00

There’s a deep male voice reverently intoning the national anthem as I enter the Tea-Party meeting in Baton Rouge on July 12: the stressful higher notes of “still wave” (and so on) are being forcefully if imperfectly dealt with as I scrawl an illegible version of a made up e-mail address on the party sign-up sheet and put an even less clear name on the tag I stick on my shirt. I find a corner seat, congratulating myself on having arrived late enough to avoid conversation; I’m already planning an early escape as I scan the crowd, which is mostly male, upwards of fifty, white and more or less overweight. There might be three or four black faces in the room, one of whom (a woman two rows ahead of me) is wearing a tee-shirt I don’t see the front of: on the back it says “A Softer Part, of a Stronger Nation.” (I’m sort of enjoying the idea of making up what it says on the front.) We start with a heavy pitch for the “FLAG FLY N’ PATRIOTS” program (a minimum donation of $50.00 gets you a 3’x6’ flag and e-mailed reminders about when to fly it). “The flag,” so reads the flyer I picked up from my seat, “represents the freedoms and rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. It is a symbol of individual and personal liberty as set forth in the Declaration of Independence.” (Take that all those of you who thought the 50 stars stood for the 50 states, and the union…) The Tea Party leader is glossy: he looks (white hair, white moustache, gleaming fat pinkish cheeks) greased or polished. The subject of this meeting is lifting the drilling moratorium, and Congressman Bill Cassidy (praised for “all he has done for us, in the fight against healthcare!”) is among the featured speakers, but we start with the gleaming man I think I hear named as Ernest Bowles or Boles: “We’re a lot like a person with lung cancer,” he explains, “we don’t want to get rid of our lungs.” I imagined he was trying to find a way to speak of the oil disaster’s relationship to Louisiana’s oil industry—but no. As his image develops (and it is an extensive conceit) it turns out that he is, with the enthusiastic approval of his audience, comparing “Big Govuhment,” to cancer. I can’t map this out for you exhaustively, but a short tour: Cancer is a perversion of normal cell growth and “the big govuhment we have today is a perversion”; cancers “often result from bad decisions and” voila, “big govuhment—doing everything it can to take ovuh our livuh.” The drilling moratorium (they’ve gathered to protest) is held up as an example of government functioning abnormally, as is the failure to supply (& get FDA approval for) what perceived as an urgently necessary amount of treatment for the bites of coral snakes. The scarcity of said treatment is flourished as a really telling point before the purely rhetorical question: “is govuhment helping us or is it hurting us.” The solution to the “cancer” of “big govuhment” is said to be surgery, and the upcoming elections are presented as the place to use the scalpel. (Meanwhile a series of power point slides loop past on one wall, one of which asserts that President Obama “didn’t react fast enough” to the oil disaster: evidently the Federal government is supposed to rescue us efficiently and to “shrink” at the same time.) Congressman Cassidy, slick and perky, is up next: calling the drilling moratorium the “jobs moratorium,” and laughing about the fact that “Washington,” doesn’t seem to realize that renewable energy is useless heh heh because “it doesn’t fuel automobiles.” “That’s NEWS in Washington,” he scoffs, where concern about “the theoretical harm that might come from another spill outweighs the tens of thousands of jobs…” I take a surreptitious scan of the room to see if anyone is, as I am, a little worried by being in the middle of the worst environment disaster to hit the United States and scoffing at “theoretical harm”…but I can’t see any outward signs. But then I (anxious to see as much of this as I can and get out of here) am not manifesting any expression of my worry either. The next speaker is Scott McCay, the editor of theHayride.com who will, in short order, ask (but again, this is rhetorical) if the current President of the United States wants “to destroy South Louisiana,” before accusing our commander in chief of “spittin’ in our face and rubbin’ salt in our wounds,” and of having “waged war on an entire state’s economy.” (Huh?) The only comparison to the moment we are living in, he tells us, is, “1860…and, god forbid,” he murmurs with a cheerful fervor that belies the sense of his words, “god forbid that should happen again.” (Yes: I just heard the possibility of civil war invoked here.) The rest of McCay's speech purports to expose George Soros as the secret but highly influential “power” behind the white house: the drilling moratorium is, we are told, a way to make Soros’ investment in Brazilian oil fields more profitable. “We” (Louisiana) “are in George Soros’ way,” so goes the climax of this presentation (which included a portrait of Soros as a gleeful collaborator with the SS), “and that’s bad news!” Businesswoman Ginger Sawyer is the next speaker, and one of the only people to acknowledge “the spill” at all—only in order to remind us, “we’re not talking about the spill, we’re talking about the moratorium.” While “the consequences [of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout] “were bad…they were relatively certain…” Sawyer juxtaposes this reassuring certainty with the “uncertainties” of the moratorium in order to help dramatize what she calls the current administration’s “record of intervening in the private sector”--which is part of a plot to “kill the domestic” industry which is (wait for it) “the primary source of conservative funding.” “There is just so much noise in Washington” Ms Sawyer closes, regretfully, “Louisiana is being drowned out”—she urges us to join something called Gulf Citizens Unite, to remedy this. The president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association is the last speaker I stay put for. Don G Briggs begins with numbers: “20 billion barrels of oil will be consumed tomorrow in the USA, as they were consumed today.” Briggs is the only one who will speak of what is happening on the coast: “it’s sad,” he’ll tell us, before moving on to express his disgust for BP’s “carelessness.” But the disaster itself is given short shrift in the rush to condemn the moratorium, which is “unbelievable” “Today,” he tells us, “Angola is safer [politically] than the United States! How sad,” he asks rhetorically, “is that.” Portraying the institution of tougher regulations as destructive to the industry: he mimes squinting uneasily at an invisible sheaf of papers, shakes his head, and asks us all to sympathize with those faced by confusing and difficult documents about how hard it is when “you don’t understand anything you just read.” The Tea-Party’s shiny point man takes the podium again to urge us all to attend the upcoming “Rally for Survival” in the Cajun Dome (in Lafayette) on July 21^st. They had wanted to have it, he tells us, in Port Fourchon, but “it’s too hot and there was no air conditioning.” They are hoping, for that event, to get 20,000 people as paranoid, as angry at the “govuhment,” as unwilling to consider changes to our energy usage or policies, as uncaring about the effects of our dependence on fossil fuels, as uninterested in protecting America from environmental catastrophe…as themselves.

my summer vacation

2010-07-13T11:54:00.000-05:00

The water swells and rises approaching the shores, turning face after face: the waves lift, extricate from opacity a long moment of extended clarity, and, frothing, crash, blur back down and are pulled out to again gather themselves. I think—then write (distressed by the lack of impact)—“I’m a better writer than a thinker.” Is it possible to separate? Say (sea)foam is content? (I, obviously, am not.) The sheer gleaming surface of water, visibly muscular, surges up toward the shore—not so high (this is the Gulf, not the Pacific)—but enough to let the light glow along the length underneath the pale froth and white crest. And that translucency rolls under, vanishing in the slide of spent surf, not gone but no longer separate. I work the visual without knowing yet how I’m using it or how it reveals itself to me as analogy (how I’m learning from it, that is, translating it into a language I recognize because I know the subject of the speech), and then to see the way I am attempting to consol myself is something of a disappointment: the image seems less real. (And I pause to check the price of hotels at a not-too-distant beach: on the travel website I read assurances that there is no oil in the water or on the sand—but I hear from people who live there about the blockades and “closed” signs and omnipresence of police.) I had meant to establish the ocean before I remarked on the damage: it’s a sort of craft mantra with me, very (as most such mantras finally are) grounded in the formulaic. My “give us a reason to care before you show us the loss” (or give us a reason to care at some point) could as easily come from thrillers as anywhere else: the dead body on page one matters less than the woman stalked and killed over the book’s first four pages, and so forth until we get to Little Nell or some other (so weighted as to tip over into overdone) sacrifice. Here’s our range: between the body already inert and the person we connect to—at whose death we weep, or as Oscar Wilde famously said of Little Nell’s death, laugh. I haven’t even mentioned a color yet, and I know I should tumble that more visual language out like a spill of stones from a dark velvet sack onto the milk-with-a-touch-of-coffee-in-it baize, the sand of the beach. Aqua, the color of that band of color around the windshields of older cars…, some of you won’t even know what I mean by that. What does it mean to “reach an audience”? The glass of the wind wings (tiny triangular windows between the front windshield and the doors’ crank-it-down glass) was framed in chrome at the top and bottom, and swiveled open. Along the edge of the exposed glass was a color, a very slightly muddy teal: water like that, near in. I grew up in the midst of our great romance with the automobile. So, aqua, but the punctuation should disappear here, these are not discrete bands. Shade mixes in shade so you can’t say this here, that there but struggle to name what you see as your gaze goes out to the brownish blues that thin to something so close to the sky the horizon vanishes, what’s water not air only revealing itself closer in in the chop. Then not so much to follow but to actually haul up with these words a cresting thrust of water, near, that clearer force, rising this time (or is it too soon?) speckled with dark clots sliding thickly off into new configurations. This is descriptive writing: it shows you, and so it is better (according to the mandates of my extensive education in the craft of writing) than writing that “just” tells you. (How many Writers Workshop students does it take to change a lightbulb? / Show us don’t tell us.) But post or past that particular moment of “thinking” about the way we are thinking comes (slowly dragged forward from ignored or distrusted depths, because Walter Benjamin is, just as a for instance, saying this as early as…) the pressure to enact. As in Thank you very much for showing us, but the words should do what you… A pressure there, arguably, in the sonnet: always there in poetry, in short. The pressure—becoming fiercer after Language Poetry’s resurrection and reinvention of the more radical modernisms—to “Walk the walk”? Lurch of only partially emulsified word across the gleaming surface of a restless world: crude the churning surf spits out across the beach, trying over the long arc to get closer to the experience, as the experience itself shifts, transformed by this script (sticky, stinking…suddenly this hiss) thrown off the wave it rode in on, glopped down onto the page or screen in this case. (What does it mean to “trust the reader”? And is it “the” or “a” or “your” or “my” reader? Write me—and tell me—at afteriwasdead@yahoo.com if you already exist, I mean you, reader, now: if I still exist when you read this.) Those who represent the tourist industry are too desperate about their own fate to be honest with their customers: they will claim that there is no oil on the beach, and if the oil appears they will claim that “getting slimed with a little oil” is not an issue, shutting their eyes to the implications of the medical records from those affected by the Exxon-Valdez spill, sealed—by the court—until 2023. (If it’s 2023 when you read this, write to me: if I am here I am 65 years old: I wait for you…where the asphalt runs out.) “Oil,” remarks a scientist, discussing the Exxon-Valdez spill and speaking (on film) at the end of the last century, “is 1000 times more toxic than we thought.” Only an extraordinary sense of disconnection from the rest of the planet could allow us not to know that? Imagine finding an ancient graveyard, or perhaps a mass grave, dead human bodies caught and crushed in some nonpermeable stone so that the corpses have liquefied. Now imagine that we drill down in search of that liquid, selling it, using it, and then imagine that—in an accident at the well—the stuff escapes. Now, swim in the water where the stuff clumps and sluggishly floats. In the many figures I have read or heard to describe the oil (Gertrude Stein was right, everybody is a poet) not one person mentions shit. A silence like that is worth exploring: it marks an agreement, a kind of contract. But even shit would be an evasion: the way toward the words we want (want in the sense of need) for the brown residue of pressurized dead bodies (a liquid which, as those who are working on such a technique for the disposal of human remains note, “has the consistency of motor oil”) leads through decomposition and putrefaction. What has come over us? Death is too easy and clean a word for this stuff we use to bring our machines to life...

Joan Tanner!

2010-07-10T15:02:00.006-05:00

A short studio visit

An amazing artist...

tarballs

2010-07-08T16:57:00.000-05:00

One of the “souvenirs” I brought home from Santa Barbara was what people here might call a tarball. I mean, I assume it’s the same thing, though there was no aspect of “ball” about the abstract splotch of thick sandy crude I leaned down and picked up when I was gathering shells and pretty rocks. This was on Butterfly Lane beach, below a very fancy and fearsomely expensive hotel, and while the crowded beach looked clean and pale, the ongoing “seep” of oil—on all the beaches along the coast—pretty much goes without mentioning. You make an effort to avoid the goop, and if you track it home you sit down in the doorway and try to get it off (salad oil works pretty well) before you put your socks back on. I scooped up the gummy wilting formless blob and put it on an announcement for an art show I had with me in the car, so the oil wouldn’t get (the way oil does) on everything. When I wanted to put it in another container I found I couldn't: what I had was an announcement that opened (reluctantly—as oil loves to hold onto itself as much as everything else) to a Rorschach of unevenly sticky black spots.

I've spoken about the weirdness of the descriptive language before ("sheen," for instance) but I want to confess that all the time I’ve been reading and hearing about the tarballs I’ve been (despite experience) picturing them as just that: round and neat. The musical sound of the word chimes into pleasant enough associations (Tarheels, tar belles), and I was actually imagining that the “droplets” (!) of COREXIT-hit crude I’d heard of were (seriously) glomming into not just neat but perfect, smooth and even pretty, little round… You get it: gem-like. Remember when journalists spoke of the leak's "iridescence"? The question of the moment might be this: does the way that oil is being spoken of reflect the feelings of the place and time? (Governor Jindal has sent a petition to the citizens of the state asking us to ask for a swift resumption of drilling.) Or is it (and this is what I begin to suspect) a revelation about our feelings for the substance (as a nation)?

I need you, if you read this, to send me examples (please cite source) of the language being used to describe the crisis where you are…

Here we seem to be murmuring endearments…--and really, why not? What haven’t we done to get it? What wouldn’t we do?

Shudder to think, and think. Precious, precious, precious…

small memorial (about 4" x 6"? purple...)

2010-07-05T16:27:00.000-05:00

Coming back from day two in the archives, tired but jittery, and typing away on the bus, I lost my notebook. Okay, the syntax is all wrong, that sentence is a mess: on my day off from the archives I went to write something down in the notebook I’d been using and then realized I no longer had it. Then an image came to me, of the way I had it open on the seat beside me so I could get that Russell Long quote right, “If I didn’t represent the oil and gas industry…” I can still see the page, and my spiky handwriting (pencil, because I was working in the archive…). There are particular noises I could make here that are the noises specific to losing things while traveling (agh) and then losing a notebook (GAAAAGH!!!). I never lose notebooks and even though I’d just started this one there were two long archive days and a dream or two I didn’t want to lose track of in there already. It’s the fact that there wasn’t so much in there as yet that kept me human and semi-calm, but I called the bus station so often, and described the notebook so thoroughly, that by the end of the day the person answering the phone could make my heart leap by saying “It’s purple, right? about 4 x 6? picture of a car w/ a cactus coming out of it on the front…” “Yes!” I’d gasp; then, “You talked to me earlier: no one’s turned it in yet.” At least it wasn’t the… plays a big part in the human / calm reaction to what feels like a failure: It wasn’t the computer, it wasn’t the video-camera (either of ‘em: I was traveling w/ two) or the camera (which—because I hadn’t checked the battery before leaving—was useless). It wasn’t my wallet: it could have been worse. (In Las Vegas in April I left the only bathing suit I’ve ever really liked in the hotel—I keep a search on on ebay, there’s a part of me that so fiercely wants it back.) I’d like, in this clumsy prose (in which each sentence feels like a run into a wall and then a stepping back and bursting forward, slam, into some end of breath), to give the lost notebook a memorial, though I’m not sure it’s really the book itself I want to make a memorial for—perhaps it’s the loss? I do want a record, I could say, but now that you see how I went out to do this work (bristling with recording devices and yet still feeling as if I hadn’t had enough of them) that seems obvious. Santa Barbara, where I spent half my life, is so dense with memory for me that coming “home” (to Louisiana) I felt like Baton Rouge was thin for me. It was as if I physically understood the difference time (and memory) makes: repeated experience had made a dense texture of seeing that landscape. (Seeing was feeling, was remembering.) I’ve only been here six years: driving down the freeway toward my house I felt as if I were almost a stranger, the lights and silhouettes (but it was nearly 2 am, and I was exhausted) seemed, comparatively, nearly meaningless. The little notebook I took on my research trip had been given to me by a powerful and original young poet: she’d finished her degree, she was moving, she has moved, off to enter more fully what will be her astonishing and rich life as an artist, and that the notebook was a goodbye gift from her is a large part of my sorrow at its loss. What I’m seeking here, I think, by way of honesty itself, by way of trying to be honest (and the public confession: I fucked up), is an approach to the failure that makes some better sense than the reactions I grew up with and incorporated. In the family structure, such a loss was not just significant but signifying: a signal. Lost glasses meant you didn’t want to wear them, or didn’t care about those who paid for them, a broken vase meant you didn’t love the owner of the vase, and so forth. I grew up, in other words, in a page from Flaubert: what seemed quotidian at first glance turned out to be symbolic, meant to be read with relentless attention, and at nothing was to be read more carefully than carelessness. I shake and I don’t shake that reading: I will go this far, I’ll say I was “tired but jittery,” I felt overwhelmed by the material, the incredible day which had included lunch in Isla Vista with a great artist (Joan Tanner) and the astonishing Sandra & Harry Reese (of Turkey Press), I was trying to get something down…on this screen as the bus lumbered and jolted its way up through streets I know in a way I don’t know any other streets (that’s where I took that dance class…that’s where ___ lived…). The Jacaranda was still in bloom when I arrived: I caught the last week or so of that hot light lavender flare the blossoming trees make, mirrored by the glow off the fallen blooms strewn over the sidewalk and street. It’s as if the asphalt were water: dropped flowers make a reflection of the blooming tree—or another shadow, one made of light. I love that balanced image so much it’s almost impossible to, in words, describe…I want to say “Look,” and have it appear before us both, and then have you see it as I see it. That’s the really tricky bit, but other questions mount, then: how do I get the history in? The way that seeing the tree lit in its shadow by the flowers it dropped was a start for me…that I knew it mattered that I could see that, and that it wasn’t on a postcard or a picture book—it wasn’t something someone else told me to notice… Working with the film clips I made (“took”?) of Tanner in her studio and home (my other project), the searingly gorgeous art she makes, I wonder why I write, or why write becomes a question for me. Why translate the seen thing into words to be translated back out into mental image? Maybe the question is Why write like that? If it’s any good at all, what matters is equally the image and the sense of how the words have been handled. There’s something strong in the delight at the act of translation, fierce and childish as the pleasure of seeing that that picture (painted) looks just like… It’s the back and forth, in part, the image / words or image / paint tilt, for me, a pleasure. It’s a shadow, it’s a reflection, the tree has made an image of itself…for no purpose. In the notebook I had written down the dream I had of a house with a tiled white pool into and out of which the nearby ocean flowed. Clear salty water I held my breath to swim in, down to the bottom, when bright starfish and glowing slender eels and vivid fish swam near. In the dream I knew I couldn’t stay, and the fish, too, were visiting this place. There was no fear, in my dream, in any of us, and we were equally at home and not.

day 2 in the archive

2010-07-03T09:46:00.000-05:00

The first day in the archives was thrilling, but the next day was long and not particularly productive-feeling: I had less the sense of having been among the materials than of having touched them, passed them on to the tireless Maggie (who works in Special Collections), who handed copies back: I have a deep stack of Xeroxes and a feeling of dull bewilderment. But that might in part be the result of the kinds of material I was working with: endless reports in which the “significantly increased potential for spillage” was addressed in language kept deliberately flat and then the fervent and energetic (confident but evasive) pitches of those selling ways to address damage they barely admit. In the newsreels the men discussing the likelihood of controlling the blowout flash wary glances at the interviewer, if they look up at all (some don’t) and there’s something refreshing about the official who says roughly: “I don’t need to ‘assess’ the situation—it’s right in front of us—you can look out there and see it yourself.” The blank black fact of the power of the image flattens everything out: what I’ll take away from the long long day will be the centerfold of the dead Western Grebe in Life, one stretched out black bird as if carved roughly from obsidian, slick and still as the oil-soaked sand, the gleaming heaps of oil-slicked kelp. The proposed commissions, the recommended safety measures, numbered ways to remove oil and listed limitations of each method, the recording of incidents…the archive is a resource: it can be mined—but most of the materials I was looking at today seem to be either buried too deep to get at or too impure to access? Oh, I hate that figure. I was working with materials that ought to be the bedside reading of anyone in a state committed to drilling: why aren’t these documents being cited? You can feel the time and energy in ‘em, meetings, discussions, decisions, the authentic effort to understand both the physical difficulties of the task and our own impulses…so why am I pulling out this report from a dusty box? (Why isn’t there a Ken Burns special called “Oil”?) Everything not printed (like glossy brochures for oil removal skimmers and new kinds of boom, or the “Diary of a Disaster” that ran in McCall’s, or the “Report to the President” from 1971) has been manually typed: I’m looking at sad patchy copies, the occasional mimeograph shows up, blue among all the black and white. I wanted to claim that there was too much tension between the images of hatless men standing in a slop of oiled surf, pitching hay into the mess, and the boxes and boxes of reports, findings, advertisements, but at the end of the day the gestures seem if not alike then poised in some mirroring relation. It’s hard to feel that one was vastly more effective than the other: the baled hay, the bound reports, both shaken out over the polluted water. I don’t know where the oil-soaked straw went—the reports went (among other places) into a box. What am I doing here besides proving that we have known what we needed to do and didn’t do it? Someone will say that taking the preventative measures we know we need to take costs too much: as if we were sold a car without brakes and told that brakes are too expensive and really, this was a safe car, and accidents rarely happen but if one did there are these things called bumpers… I’m reading, I might say, blueprints for the brakes that were never installed. I found an advertisement for at least one the private company (in San Mateo) whose business was research into the preparation for and prevention of oil spills—where are they now? Why was preparation treated as a joke? We can’t even talk about the event: I can see that the regulations and limitations California put in place are rooted in the old newscasts and yellowing News-Press articles, in which the 1969 “crisis” was called just that, when it wasn’t referred to as an “Oil disaster,” or a “blowout.” In the boxes were articles about offshore drilling in the Gulf, and about Senator Russell Long’s six-figure oil income, his drilling efforts, and his work to protect the oil depletion allowance. “If I didn’t represent the oil and gas industry,” he is quoted as saying, “I wouldn’t represent the state of Louisiana.” Don’t tell my mother I’m in politics, the wonderful Sandra Reese quoted the old joke to me, she thinks I’m playing piano in a whorehouse.

BLAST from the PAST

2010-06-29T23:12:00.000-05:00

Q. How many workers were employed by Union Oil to clean up the Santa Barbara beaches after the January 1969 blowout?

A: 300

Q: Who were they?

A: Prison inmates from a minimum security correction facility.

Q: How much were they paid for the work?

A: 60 cents a day; with a something extra if there was “an overtime situation.”

Q: WTF?

A: Ask about the protection gear.

Q: What kind of protection gear are the workers wearing in the photographs and newreels?

A: The men are not wearing any kind of particular clothing: long-sleeved shirts and slacks are the rule, and some appear to be wearing sun hats. No one, not even the guy leaning over the pressure washer he's using to clean rocks in the inner harbor, is wearing any kind of protective face gear at all.

Q: WTF?

A: I was hoping you’d ask. Your next question should be “Where are they now?” After that you should ask if the medical records are available…

Bonus:

Q: How many barrels of oil a day were estimated to be leaking from the blown-out well in 1969?

A: 5,000 barrels a day. Uh huh.

Q: Extra bonus answer for all of the above?

A: “Well, bless their hearts.”

“BP offered to pay for the funeral…"

2010-06-26T19:05:00.003-05:00

William Allen “Rookie” Kruse, a successful and admired fishing boat captain in Alabama, killed himself last Wednesday morning—shortly after being, at last, hired to help with BP’s clean-up effort. The words feel cold, language is like a prosthesis, awkward and more than a little alien, clumsily handling these facts. What can be put into words (despite the struggle—more or less active—to be accurate) is not located near enough to the grief and despair that leads to the tragedy. In the area around a man’s unwillingness or inability to stay alive, to go on in the face of the bitter knowledge of how little might be left of the place he loved, and the life, on the other side (if there is an other side) of this there’s the terse phrase those close to him kept hearing (“I’m fine”) and then there’s silence. And then there’s more silence.

The first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season is here: Alex. In movies, well, in older movies, we would see planning for the catastrophe taking place as a few shouted commands on a wind-swept, wave-speckled deck of a lurching ship, for instance. Now the planners stand coolly at podiums, splashed with the light of flashbulbs, quietly pontificating to a comfortably seated audience often made up of those who may not actually ever meet anyone the decisions affect. In the opening sentence of this paragraph “here” means the Gulf; in today’s Times Picayune “Alex” is represented as curved black arrows pointing counter-clockwise over pale circles whose jagged edges signal motion: at this point the storm has several possible tracks. Close examination of the speeches given by those in charge often reveals a strong attention to what will repeatedly by named the “challenges” of their task, meaning we should keep expectations low or perhaps feel sympathetic when this performance of command and control has extraordinarily small results.

The governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, whose election campaign was focused on ethics, vetoed a bill to allow public access to state records dealing with the "Deepwater Horizon incident." The bill had had overwhelming support in the House, but Jindal, who is hoping the state can sue the corporation, has now made it possible to share information with BP and its lawyers while keeping the public in, as we say, the dark. The “event,” Jindal said in his veto statement, “will create long-term challenges for the state of Louisiana…”—one of which (that would be the challenge of accounting for his own failed response) he has, we might say, dispersed. The records are not gone, but their character has been changed—and you no longer have access to the evidence. A friend who went to Dauphin Island last week described National Guardsmen and police in place to keep the public from getting within blocks of the beaches on which the crude is washing up.

The Times Picayune reports that BP offered to pay for Kruse’s funeral, and that the offer was accepted. “A BP official came to the house Wednesday to offer counseling and later sent a chaplain.” I am trying to imagine what kind of counseling the BP official offered: somehow I imagine it had pictures of former presidents on it, but that just might be my failure. The fact of the matter is that whatever that “counseling” was, it was not, it is not, enough—but paying for the funeral pretty much sums up what the corporation seems to (at least potentially) be good at.

Meanwhile the newspapers are slowly coming around: over two months after the disaster the word “gusher” is in use, and the term spill is slowly fading out. “Leak,” is used occasionally. And the chairman of a House panel looking into the “incident” says that BP is keeping members of the panel from meeting and talking with employees and key witnesses.

And the IRS, it would be a shame not to mention this, has reminded us that it intends to TAX the money that BP hands out to the communities affected by the disaster: meaning that some chunk of the money to (in the oft repeated phrase) “make the Gulf whole” will go back to the government and, hey, over to Afghanistan, which has extraordinary mineral deposits. Meanwhile the new head of the “oil agency” formerly known as the MMS warned New Orleans area employees that he would probably be thought of as “a bad nickel” because he would be turning up a lot. I believe he is referring to the adage about the bad penny, and he has figured inflation into the image, but it’s not a promising figure: he may be letting us know that we will come to think (perhaps with reason) he’s worthless. He did promise, however, to “change the narrative” of the agency’s reputation by running “a very aggressive PR operation.”

The wind is blowing so fiercely the words we are screaming at each other vanish, on the wildly tilting deck of my imagined-from-movies ship. It is a 20^th century image of heroism with, as we say, legs: it’s the image G.W. Bush meant us to think of when he declared that our “mission” in Iraq (which would continue to destructively unravel for years and years after he spoke) was “accomplished.” Moving the podium to that site was, like the purchase of a Texas ranch as a set for his filmed vacations, an act of PR genius. In the scenario I imagine, however, the ship is not docile in sunlight, far from it: the sky is dark, the vague horizon line violently tilts and a huge wall of water crashes across the space between us, as I cling to…a rope? a door? a lifeboat? hanging on while I wait to be told what it is I can do to help us all survive this. Captain, O captain, I murmur, perhaps, to myself. But the words when the words at last come through, the words are not what I expect. “I’m…sealing…the…records,” I hear the commander shouting, “we…have...to…prepare,” a blast of wind and then a searing white light descends from the sky, thunder booms above us: I miss some words. “What?” I shout, “prepare what?” He waves to me, no, wait, he’s waving to the helicopter which hovers over the listing vessel, from which a long rope descends, a rope he wraps securely around his waist. “The lawsuit,” he shouts back down at me, as he’s lifted away and up….

If the, wait, no, when a storm comes in all the efforts to get the oil (and it is again obvious that that activity, now presented as saving the environment, is BP’s focus) will be halted. The ships will go away and the oil will gush into the Gulf unchecked—though “huge” amounts of dispersants will continue to be used at the source. There is talk of evacuating residents. Small restaurants whose owners will not or cannot pay for imported seafood are shutting down. There was a way of living here, a way of being in and with the world, that still made a little bit of sense: physical sense. Even the drilling was part of that: if Louisiana is, as NPR claims, “wedded to oil” the rest of the country is sleeping with it. Adulterers, as a very smart friend put it. Would you rather go to another country and take their resources, or would you like to protect those you have? Framed like that I can map it onto our relationship with the mall, with our role as consumers: the answer could be that we would in fact prefer not to think about where anything comes from, and our actions reveal our expensive belief that some new junk from somewhere else (got at whatever cost) is just as nice or nicer than whatever it is we’ve been living with… I just want to put on pause for a moment, to appreciate the irony of it, the moment at which the rest of the country looks at us like they can’t believe we want to go on drilling for oil (hello—some REGULATION would be nice, for a start) when it’s clear they want to go on using (but not really paying for) it.

Remoras, or Suckerfish

2010-06-20T09:35:00.134-05:00

The second day of the response workshops on campus was aimed at the scientists, meaning, “the human factor” was no longer in the subject heading and my humanities colleagues were, in fact, not there. I could only stay for one of the two workshops: I had to schedule an appointment to have a weird cough looked at (I have little bumps on the back of my throat, which isn’t sore, I have a mostly dry cough and my voice is sketchy, and I have zero energy, the Doctor had no idea what it might be—or none she was willing to share—and put me on antibiotics). The session I could stay for was titled “the Gulf,” and it would have been worth it for the language alone, but the overview it offered of the situation of the sciences vis a vis the industry is part of the picture of the event (in this place, in this time). To hear, for instance, the location of the disaster pinpointed (“Mississippi Canyon 252”) was a thrill. In part I was excited by the idea of the complicated relation between a place and its many names (and thinking of it as ‘named,’ outside of language, by the living beings to whom it matters, and of how a thing is made by its naming, as Stein says), but I think I was also experiencing the relief of not being condescended to (some of the early explanations I heard, on the news, of how the well worked and how the BOP failed were howlingly, heartbreakingly, absurd…and it never got better, they just stopped or I stopped looking at those videos, in which men twisted straws and struggled to find alternate terms).

This workshop, like the first, was a bit plagued by what I’ll call the We’re-developing-a-computer-model guys, who could also be characterized if not caricatured as Boys (of whatever age) Who Spend Too Much Time In Their Rooms. There’s something confusing about watching an “unfinished” and labor-intensive simulation meant to project what would happen if…--in the face of the disaster that’s occurring. You might wonder why they were not out studying the actual gush of oil rather than constructing these brown vertical lines which so neatly, over the course of 20 seconds, inch up the dark blue screen. But what emerges, as I listen, along with a sense of the more or less interesting research areas of my (never-before encountered) colleagues, is the sense of how reduced and restricted their access is, not just to this event, but to the Gulf as a whole. You need to be there in the room to hear the good news: “Two Chevron drill ships which are study stations are on their way.” You need to learn that the University has no research vessel of its own, and you need to see the snapshot the first speaker shows us of himself, grinning on the Deepwater Horizon’s deck. You need, in short, to get a sense of the way in which the study of the ocean has been physically linked to its exploitation, and to know that, to paraphrase Melville, the oil rigs have been our Harvard and our Yale. In which context the tender terms (“sheen” is now joined by “droplets”) make more sense? This is not to say that those attending the workshop are unmoved by the catastrophe or blind to its consequences: they are engaged and concerned and intelligent and responsive—and dependent on the kindness of not strangers but sharks.

I know, I know: if real sharks had lawyers I'd be sued for that analogy. (And indeed, when I think of the shark--in its tremendous and terrifyingly efficient grace--I take it back.) (Don't bite me.) But the opening sentence of this paragraph is a tilting board (teeter totter, plank) I want to linger on a moment, rocking it back and forth: "if real...had lawyers." The extension of imagination into fantasy I need to take me back to...--and then, back to what? When a shark comes toward me, so I see its face, to we are eye to eye or rather when I am there to be passed over by its swift gaze, either I am watching a movie (or, as a child, Jacques Cousteau on TV) or I am standing, as I love to do, in an aquarium. (O the one in Barcelona, where the floor moves in the tunnel and you glide along apparently under the sea...) There is an experience of the shark, necessary to full understanding, I don't want to have--and while realize I'm about halfway to singing, a la Joni Mitchell, "I really don't know [sharks] at all," and grounding my balancing act on the unmoving floor of the obvious, maybe that's useful also? I want to look at my use of animals as ways to talk about human actions and experience, in part to simply recognize the injustice, obvious as it is, and then to try to get a little bit into the really complicated problem I'll call the pelican brief. But first a pit (bull) stop to say I've been saying--since I watched the hearings--that I watched Joe Barton, apologizing to BP, with the kind of icky feeling I get watching a dog trying to hump its master's leg. If I compare that unfair (to dogs) and yet accurate-feeling figure to my Aunt's reaction to Barton, which involved laughter and the reminder that everyone knows you don't ask for bribes in public, I see the overlap (we both think he's badly trained) and the difference (I have moved his gesture out of the realm of language and what we think of as thinking). When I shift my picture back into alignment with my Aunt's, I, laughing also, reply, He was saying Thank you--which you're supposed to do in public. But when I go back to the way Barton seemed to be almost panting as he spoke, again I've image of a slobbering and urgent canine...

I wanted to speak a little about the pelicans or to speak a little about the pelicans as language, perhaps that would be a better way to put it? The Pelican Brief being a ruthless best-seller and popular movie, it works as a little subtitle. What I want to say I also don't want to say or what I want to talk about (talk out) I also don't want to be heard saying? And maybe all I'm going to say will be, after this lead in, mere or sheer formula, as tedious as it is obvious? I can't stand our dependance on those images: I hated the period of waiting for them, knowing (as I knew, from 1969) that a) they were coming and b) they would be effective. (How effective exactly is still a question.) And I should pause to present my credentials: I wept, messily, stormily, at the gym, flopping over on the console of the exercycle, when the pictures of the baby birds in their oiled nest came on TV. I think that sentence teeters well too, don't you? I like the thunk of its ending. The total innocence of the birds, who had signed no contracts and done no deals, their complete bewilderment, and the agony...a hideous injustice made legible by the way they tried the various parts of their bodies; the way each gesture ended early and unsteadily, so that it was clear that each motion marked the discovery of further damage and more pain. The crude had completely coated them, and the nest, and since I don't want to compare that thick sticky brown stuff to something else all I can say is that you could tell it was horrible to wear, unbreathable. (The other comparisons I want to make, to speak of men who were tarred or to use the word "torture," seem compromised.) They were dying..."in front of"--and at some distance from--me. What I want to know is why the images of pelicans elicit tears and the images (fewer but available) of refugees climbing out of destroyed buildings cause a sort of freezing up inside: more terror than pity. Maybe the question is too obvious to even attempt to answer, but I need to dwell with it a bit, unsteadily: I need to both count on the pelican's legibility and ask why a bird in America is (apparently) worth so much more than a bird in Nigeria (to stay with birds a safe moment, not moving to human bodies). I need to both insist that this disaster be taken seriously and I need to seriously examine that insistence in the light of history. I want to know what it would feel like to feel connected equally, caring, across diversity: I have a suspicion that (and here's where the pelicans come in again) fear has to have no part in the feeling and no place in your heart... But because we are stealing so many of the world's resources we are very very afraid: we are afraid like thieves are afraid--craven and cunning. And while I am mourning the death of beautiful innocent creatures, I also distrust the tendency to want to read, there and there only, the effects of our selfishness and greed.

There are scientists, this emerges at the end of the workshop I attend, getting out on the water and getting samples--but "because the samples can be used in litigation the data cannot be released now."
I'm just going to let that sentence sit there: it says so much about how we're "living."

"I could drink my dispersant"

2010-06-17T20:33:00.003-05:00

I just want to make here the sketchiest memo of the moment when, near the point when I left day two of the Baton Rouge protests (this one--even smaller than the first--sponsored by a group called "Love Your Coast"), a tall woman wearing a suit and a fair amount of make-up handed Dr. Riki Ott her card, extolling the virtues of the dispersant she made over the poison (yes, banned in the U.K.) now being dumped on the Gulf. Excuse me...I had a colleague who, before he left the University, had taken to prefacing all comments with either "Excuse me," or, better, "Forgive me," and then, "but..." of course. Forgive me, but my own failed effort was so much a part of the sense of pathos I experienced in the second day of protesting: having dreamed of it for weeks I went to the observation deck of the State Capitol (which another colleague called "Huey Long's Penis") and flew a long black banner, oily black, slickish, while my wonderful partner-in-crime humored me with coded phone calls from the distant lawn. "'Come down'," meant GO: there's-a-camera-in-place-and-I-can-see-you. Bless her: the vast length of cloth snapped in on itself, narrowed, twisted, snagged, collapsed, and generally failed to act as I had imagined it would. Finally (after all my anxiety about the "action") the Nicest Security Guard in the World came and said gently but firmly, Ma'am, you can't do that here (as if I were nursing in public). But there was something in being so high, among the few and completely incurious tourists, trying to make a signal and then just watching the way the fabric filled with currents otherwise invisible... I've been thinking about Marina Abramovic a lot, thinking that whatever else you do with it the work of art should change you (or what she calls the "energy field"). And the cloth, lifted by the wind, gave a vision of the river and town seen as if through black smoke or a veil... I didn't go over to the refinery side (I live close to the second largest refinery in the U.S.: on the horizon it looks like a city); on the local news today I heard that Exxon (who owns the refinery) got a very high figure tax-free loan to expand...oh, and the bill to allow worshipers to bring guns to church is coming along nicely, thank you. The day was again hot, muggy, the straggling but valiant line of protesters, when I came down from the deck, asked me to go ask one of the organizers why they were standing out in the broiling sunlight while most of the organizers were lolling in the shade of distant live oaks. There was folk music, my general dislike of which marks me as not-truly-Liberal? The protest got underway late with an organizer telling us about how great Louisiana was, making a speech (forgive me) I might have enjoyed in a cool bar. Then Dr. Ott was on, passionate, informed, concerned for us and not hoping to be re-elected: her speech was, as the saying goes, "a breath of fresh air." I stopped to thank her before leaving, and so was there when the tall, well-dressed, chemist handed Ott her card and said her mixture was water soluble, adding "I could drink my dispersant...and just have a little diarrhea..." The medical records from the Exxon-Valdez spill are sealed until 2023, meaning we have no access now to the information we need to understand the effects of COREXIT (on top of the impact of the extremely toxic crude), which shares a main ingredient with the dispersant used in hosing down rocks in Alaska: the no-longer-manufactured INIPOL. That ingredient causes birth defects as well as damage to the central nervous system, but the extent of the trouble has been locked away to protect the corporation. "I moved," another colleague said recently, "to New Orleans because the air was better: the water is better in Baton Rouge but the air is better in New Orleans, and you can choose what to drink but you can't choose what to breathe or when..." It's past tense, right now, of course, that better air in New Orleans, and his words haunt me moment by moment like a mantra: "you can't choose..."

The Last Picture Show

2010-06-15T21:43:00.003-05:00

After the small, or oh shall I say select, protest on the steps of the Capitol today (organized by a group called "Murdered Gulf" and the Southeast Louisiana Shrimp Alliance) I paused it. I went to bed—where I am now, typing this. The day was hot and though it was muggy and a storm threatened, there was still a flat glare off the pale steps on which Huey Long had had the name of each state and the year of its entrance into “Union” inscribed. We were given little flyers set to be used as fans on something like popsicle sticks, tongue depressors actually? The black & white image is of a tiny, skinny, androgynous–looking little white person holding up fistfuls of what I realize only now must be a net. It looks sort of as though he / she has come out from under the ocean as if the stained Gulf w/ its single stalled trawler were a collapsed tent. Three black bombers circa WWII fly overhead spewing billows of what the single white word at the top of the flyer informs us is “COREXIT.” Feet splayed out in boots much to big for his / her feet, the figure looks up, expressing the trepidation of a guilty child. The words at the bottom of the page read “PLEASE DON’T POISON ME.” It’s the please that gets me: that’s Louisiana—always polite, always, as a friend says, “apologetic.” Please. The unfailingly good manners of those who have ceased to expect anything (except, as the Bible promises, to “inherit the earth”). I paused the day and watched The Last Picture Show, which I had never seen. The real sounds in this room as I type are (from the nearby freeway) of unceasing traffic and the breathy sound of the turning fan beside the bed, and cicadas from somewhere behind the house. But in my mind there’s still the raw squeal of that un-oiled screen door to the pool hall in the movie: that jagged shriek and then the slap of wood on wood as the door bangs back into the frame. There’s that scouring wind in most of the scenes so that the few moments in which the figures are not hunched, not clutching (almost wringing) their hands and lowering their faces against the gusts seem like mercy. The air is usually full of skittery bits of dead leaf and whirling dust: gray on gray in the black and white that acquires, as the film goes on, an extraordinary range and depth. It’s a dead place in which the two or three joys are known and numbered (cars, booze, and “pussy”) and the opportunities for the poor are limited (the oil fields or the war). (The rich can play around and then go off to college or “Dallas,” where there is, we—stuck in the POV of the poor through most of the film—guess, rather wistfully, probably a lot to do…) I put everything on pause: the woman with the bullhorn reading us the whole of what was at least a five-page single-spaced letter from a Shrimper to an elected official, the pleas to stop the use of the dispersant (the use of which is, we were informed, banned in the U.K.), the repeated messages about the difficulty the fisherman working on the clean-up crews (having no other source of income now) experience in either getting or being allowed to wear the appropriate protective gear (respirators are the biggest issue, and the threat to fire workers who want to wear them was recounted by more than one speaker). The marked absence of shrimpers and fishermen who were supposed to be at the protest but mostly stayed away: the word is that their contracts w/ BP stipulate they will not talk about what's going on. "Talk to the WIVES of the fishermen," someone yelled, at one point. The children who had been brought in to make the plea not to have toxic chemicals dumped where they are living, the organizer of the protest discussing the ingredient in the dispersant that leads to birth defects in animals, reminding us (through the buzzing bullhorn), “Well, people, we ARE animals.” I know, there’s something a little bit amusing about that, isn’t there? We clapped 11 times again, for the eleven did rig workers, and we bowed our heads for the Pelicans. We chanted “EPA, EPA, make Corexit go away,” as if it were a magic spell., we asked not to be poisoned. Please. When I woke up this morning I went to the news and found out what the President was likely to say later in the speech we were told was (because of the room in which it was taking place) important. Now that record exists. He’s still calling it a “spill,” and the analogy is “an epidemic.” On the capitol steps we heard BP called “Liars and murderers.” The phrase from the president’s speech I’m clinging to is “long-term Gulf Coast restoration plan.” What is it? I'm also holding onto his words about clean energy as a kind of promise (put the solar panels Reagan took down BACK on the White House). I paused the day: I stopped everything for Cybil Shepherd’s cold, tight, almost unbearable beauty, for the slap of a screen door in the nowhere of Texas (I detoured there, when I drove down here to start teaching, stopping to buy books in the town Larry McMurtry had purchased) and the sound of a sputtering motor. I stopped the day to be with the lean and hungry face of the oil-worker who doesn’t seem attached to anyone or anything (except his custom billiard cue): the guy who comes in to the rich man’s house to pass on the message that “that well came out all right.” He’s screwing the bored, sad, boozy wife of his boss, and then, once, the slutty daughter—but we can not see him as slutty or sad or sleazy, he’s too mean, he seems dangerous. Other things that matter in the movie, friendship, memory and love (and the memory of love)—just hints actually, which have to do, which (because that is all we are allowed) have to be enough to get by on. Why am I apologizing to you, “Ruth” screams, finally, at her strayed and returned, grief-struck, weak-willed, lover, “why am I always apologizing?!” She’s hurled the coffee cup her hand shook too much to fill and the coffee pot also: black grounds spatter the top of the white ice-box, the “Philco.” He’s mute, the returned hero—he holds out his hand to her, he interlaces his fingers with hers. Are those who “never made it” sorry they never made it, he wondered, earlier; his hopes have seemed, throughout the story, so constrained the question seems reasonable. When we first see and hear him (“Sonny,” played by Timothy Bottoms), nursing the dilapidated pick-up along, we know how little he’s going to have to get by on. He’ll end with only one good eye. Why am I telling you? You know how it ends. “Never mind son, never you mind.”

yes--you've seen it: but it actually made me smile...

2010-06-12T11:16:00.002-05:00

The Human Impact

2010-06-11T19:46:00.001-05:00

The first of three workshops today at the University (let’s use the definite article, no name) on the subject of the University’s response to what I’m trying to train everyone within hearing range to call the “Drilling Disaster.” It’s not a spill (repeat after me), it’s not a spill, but a “Drilling Disaster,” involving what a canny colleague (invoking the history of oil) calls “a gusher.” Ready?

“Deepwater Horizon Drilling Disaster, day 53—no sign of a stop to the gusher.”

Thank you.

The workshop started off with an over-long presentation by software designers enamored of their “Cognitive Information Management Shell,” which was a “Complex Event Processing Engine,” or in plain English a warning device. The system they envisioned would do what the humans involved in the tragedy failed to do: a computer (with no dependents to support, no loyalty, no ambition, no denial) would analyze the data (chunks-of-the-blowout-protector’s-rubber-shield-coming-up-from-the-well, for instance) and…yes! Produce MORE data, which (in their bright vision) would NOT then be disregarded by the boss. It won’t surprise you to learn that things got very much better from there. Faculty from a variety of disciplines spoke of the research they were already engaged in or planning to do and what quickly became apparent is that everything about the discussion here is framed by Katrina and its aftermath in ways that might not be completely visible to the rest of the country (from which perspective, I sometimes fear, the state looks something like a cross between a homeless person and a drama queen—but in America anyone in trouble is somehow doing it on purpose, right?). The refrain this afternoon, as faculty members got up to speak about their areas of expertise and study, was a medley of “hadn’t really recovered,” “hadn’t come back yet,” “never returned to the pre-storm levels,” “still suffering the effects of,” and (but this one comes up everywhere) “had just been taken off the endangered species list.” Today’s workshop was focused on “the Human Impact,” but a visiting ecologist mapped out what humans have the hubris to call ‘the bottom of the food chain’ in ways that were alarming: post-hurricane what’s thriving are invasive species (in other words the planet doesn’t forgive, “forgiveness” is mutation)—it would be folly to pretend that what’s happening to, for instance, the ants in the marshes isn’t part of “the Human Impact.” (The point is to see the oil before it hits the birds: to do that you need to look over the edge of your own element.) One of the most compelling aspects of various proposals was a really useful clarity about what one colleague called the linked identities of the state: fishing and oil. Now, he said, and the allusion is too good not to air, it’s as if Mr. Hyde is killing Dr. Jekyll. But the schizophrenia bound to take over or become intolerable now as the identities fight for survival, is just being exposed, not invented. It’s very very American, and it’s deep, and it’s old, and it’s pervasive. Moving ahead from the Drilling Disaster is going to require acknowledging both identities. (A brilliant anthropologist working on the links between oil and culture reminded Jazz Fest devotees that the event’s sponsor is Shell.) The opening presenters, I’m sorry to say, fled when their elaborate plan to “detect and analyze” drilling problems automatically met with a less than luke-warm response. The system was already in place and working, they informed us, on a golf course, where it allowed a targeted watering response to the problem of dry grass, and, they huffed, We are already talking to the National Science Federation. But the question of money, in the course of the discussion, came up more than once. When I saw the picture of the oil-rig-with-sensors on the screen (oh, you know this was a power point) replaced by the image of the golf course I may, I confess, have laughed. I’d been thinking about having sensors attached to my arm as I poured, say, wine, into a glass, and then sensors built, say, into the glass as well, to say when I was pouring (and drinking) too much. It just seems so…obvious. But maybe we ought to be thinking in terms of the kinds of obvious boundaries we build in to other treatments of addiction? Gas pumps where you can only pump so much at a time, for instance? Ration cards? And (I always come back to this) very very very expensive gas. No one knows yet what will come out of the Drilling Disaster, I mean, in terms of hope. The bad news grows and grows, and the only good news that’s even possible to wish for is a change in our behavior. In memory that first power point presentation becomes more and more charming: they were looking for money, of course—they were selling a plan that would help us to bypass our own greed.

Magic Acts: "Visibly Oiled" or "Pending"

2010-06-10T10:16:00.005-05:00

BP is coming to the end of its ability to collect or interest in capturing all the oil coming up through the device they fitted on the broken pipe, and now their plan, announced yesterday, is to start burning it off, after having (through a chemical process) turned the oil into a “fog” that “burns without visible smoke.”

Although there are evidently images of and scientific knowledge about the massive “plumes” of oil under the surface of the water, we-the-peephole are not allowed access to those images and the company is still denying the existence of the oil we can't see.

A report comes in from a beach where tarballs are being gathered that the way it works is this: one person, using a kind of tongs, picks up the tar ball and puts it in a plastic container. That container is then put in a plastic bag and the bag is sealed, and set back down on the beach. Then, supposedly, another person will come by later and pick up the evidence—but hours go by and there’s this thing called “tides” and, yes: the ocean is taking that oil, now wrapped in further layers of petroleum product, out: where it will float to some further destination and rupture. (Merry Christmas.)

The documented wildlife (turtles, dolphins, pelicans and other sea birds) is mostly dead: read the reports. (If 500 are found 400 are dead.) And yet many of the reports, while admitting much of the wildlife was “visibly oiled,” still end by stating that we do not yet know the cause of death. (Could we thoroughly immerse some BP executives please—just to have a control group?) According to the Associated Press some “Health Officials” (un-named) have said that "people should stay away from the mess but that swallowing a little oil-tainted water or getting slimed by a tar ball is no reason for alarm." As a bright commentator notes: the numbers we have are just the numbers we can get: we don’t know what’s dying under the surface of the water and more than one report has claimed that BP is removing dead birds and other wildlife—just getting the evidence out of sight.

The incidences of journalists being refused access to sites (including public beaches) and events (visits to impacted areas made by government officials) remain extremely high: there is a constant background sound of complaint and it’s clear that the control of their image remains BP’s top priority. You don’t really have to wait until they pay out 50 million to an advertising agency to see that. Meanwhile BP is warning clean-up workers not to talk to journalists.

An established ecologist tells me about intimidation, threats, and having samples confiscated.

The company had, as we now all know, no disaster plan in place: just vague promises to protect “otters” and “sea lions” (none of which reside in the Gulf of Mexico) and the name of a wildlife expert (listed as the go to guy in their 2009 report) who died in 2005.

There are reports that BP has discouraged clean up workers from wearing proper protective gear as well as claims that workers could be fired for wearing respirators. The original link for the announcement of OSHA's position on this (a PDF of June 8 including the information that "Respirators can present serious health problems") (!) now leads to "error message #404."

When the oil washed up on the beaches in Louisiana it was characterized as “chocolate” or “caramel” colored; when it hit the Florida beaches the shade was called “rust.”

A little history from Jim Brown's blog...

2010-06-10T09:56:00.000-05:00

2010-06-06T11:58:00.003-05:00

2010-06-06T11:57:00.002-05:00

some vocab (Subsea documents)

2010-06-02T09:25:00.002-05:00

The "sheen," remember the "sheen"? That slick (stretching over 600 miles way back at the end of April) on the surface of the water, spreading gleam of oil bubbling up that actually could be read, did get read as a sign that, in the words of one academic (a scientist, by the by) we had "dodged a bullet." Just the click of the safety coming off, though.

Then, “Blowout Preventer”: the name a working description of a part that failed. Like learning that someone who was murdered had been accompanied by something called a “body guard.”

Before it was the BOP, before there were ROVs.

When “boom” hadn’t yet ceased being a sound.

Later (but not later enough) we’ll have hearings: it’ll be “joystick,” “pressure,” and hello, “chunks of rubber.” Then “insertion tube.”

The regulators were “in bed with” (literally and figuratively) officials in the companies they were supposed to oversee: they were doing crystal meth they were watching porn.

Remember all the talk about currents and winds keeping the oil offshore? All that hopeful whistling.

Then “tarballs.” Then rumors of what was referred to sometimes as a cloud but mostly as a plume of oil. Under the surface, then not quite as much under the surface and then on the surface and then on the beaches, quickly “closed.” (As if a beach were a box you could shut the lid on.)

A “spill,” finally some people are beginning to notice, implies a limited amount of material. When a water main breaks, for instance, you do not call the plumber to say you have a “spill.”

Heading toward the top kill and the junk shot; the latter’s mad collection of random refuse now referred to as “Loss Prevention Material.” Like the panicked fishermen looking for whatever jobs are being generated by this “disaster” or (trusty term) “crisis,” I’m just glad to know BP’s got some creative writers on the payroll.

From the beginning there were complaints from the media and the scientific community about restricted access: until Markey made them turn on the live feed ("the live feed") we might say that the disaster as a whole was mostly “closed.” The soundtrack: Please continue to hold.

The other night I heard an educated older woman call our planet "endlessly forgiving." As the body is in its fierce desire for mere survival? "If I gouge my eye out, if I cut a couple of limbs off," Philippe Cousteau declared, speaking about the______, "I'll survive, sure, but...."

It’s still being called a sheen, as the oil heads toward Florida. It’s June. This sense of trying speak against an immense weight of what feels like a desire not-to-know. Relieved at crucial moments by the sense of another's understanding: the quickening effect of shared interest and apprehension.

The immense costs of our lifestyle. I was in an airplane thousands of miles above the earth writing “immense costs of our lifestyle.” Each time someone says "No offshore drilling," I shudder, thinking, Unless you mean no dependence on oil you mean drilling somewhere in this world… Either we break the dependence or we go early but not early enough to our sticky, foul grave: taking everything in the wide world down with us in our clumsy blind crawl.

A part of the work of the poet is to protect the language, not as in police, but to be the caretaker of language, this magical invention for communicating shared feeling and thought. People, SHEEN is "a soft luster on a surface." The word is being used appropriately only in this sense: the word is being used to shine us all on.

"HEART OF FACT"

2010-06-01T09:05:00.005-05:00

(movie in the link); many thanks to Marthe, Britton & Alison...

from
The Sea and the Jungle:
"The sea does not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute and dark desolation is not raised to overwhelm you; you disappear then because you happen to be there."(26)

5/25/2010 (the live feed)

2010-05-26T22:58:00.002-05:00

The silence the murk the glaring light and occasional disappearance of all images in a cloud of gushing oil and debris. The glare of work lights on metal claws opening and closing. Close-up of a sort of robot golem whose face seems to be a caged fan: expressionless unless seen as worried. Or I am worried. The fan still; the fan fluttering into motion and a brief blur of blades seen behind the cage and then the fan—again—halting, then going—and the POV rocks gently away. The background always the same: a rich dark brown green. The jerky movements eloquent: someone far away from this scene is trying to do something. The analogy that come to mind is to one of those arcade games where a wickedly hooked but ineffectual metal prosthesis roots among the tumbled bodies of fluffy animals and other bright toys, usually seizing too much to hold onto, or swaying up empty. Late at night in complete silence far away watching as if it would help, my watching. Watching as if watching were praying, as if my eyes could help guide the arm that looks mysterious and complicated (tendon and sinew of gleaming metal) and high tech but acts, finally, when it can act, when (after many tries, many almosts) it bumps gently into the correct hole, very much like a screwdriver. “Arm” that seems to, withdrawing, sketch a jaunty wave. My paranoia is intermittent but intense: when I’m not thinking that we ware going to find out that fixing the leak was fairly easy (and they could’ve done it weeks ago) I wonder if what I’m seeing is on the bottom of the sea-floor or in an fish tank on a sound stage. (We do nothing, in this country, better than creating illusions.) But I’m also invested in the success of the endeavor so (to make a bad pun) deeply, I feel tender toward the robots to the point of identification. Blueish low-tech-looking body of whatever it is we are working on and around (is it the “blow out preventer”?): “Monitoring the Damaged Riser” is my given title. ROV. I just want to stay down here, watching: it’s what I’ve wanted to do and where I’ve wanted to be for over a month—since I learned the well under the exploded rig was leaking. Why the long wait? That extended period of pretty much acting as if the border between air and water marked a real border of visibility and the limit of understanding is still unexplained if not inexplicable. It was as if a sort of Jungian symbolism writ large (see: consciousness is above the surface…) held sway over not just the industry and the media, but the public at large and (strangest of all) not just the national but the international scientific community. It was as if we were acting like children, all of us, small children who know “there’s a monster under the bed” and can’t bear to bend or kneel down even to snatch a glance? A flawed analogy: there was something really nasty under the bed in this case. And while there was this weird reluctance to confront our fears, we weren’t slow to hit the area with poison while looking away. (Probably the records of how much dispersant was used—and do not even start w/ that “we were too busy to measure” mantra: under it I can hear the sound of paper shredding—will give us some idea of BP’s actual estimate of how much oil was leaking.) All I’ve been able to think about and to imagine during these weeks is the monster: the huge and increasingly toxic shadow trailing its long strands of what looks from the surface—all those images—like blood or else just (and I never want to hear this word again because we used it to excuse inaction) a greasy “sheen.” But (here’s a little lesson about denial) the use of that dispersant made the flood of oil into the gulf more horrible even as it became harder to see. All I wanted, from the beginning, was to see (like everyone I collected the flyover images and played that 15 seconds of gushing oil and gas BP had finally released again and again; Cousteau’s recent—at last!—dive into the oil was a physical relief). But what I really wanted to see was this, exactly: someone working toward sealing the leaks. For a while after I clicked on the link for the live feed there was nothing but an empty screen and a note warning me the feed would not always be available. When the almost square screen appeared, dirty green and completely, at first, unreadable, I felt like one to whom a vision has appeared, perhaps in a dream: all I wanted for the image not to vanish, but to stay with me.

monitoring the damaged riser

2010-05-25T20:56:00.004-05:00

a mile below the surface the delicate ernest clumsy mating of robots
cut as if by a young new wave director w/ a pash for soviet realism
is that a little bit of rope in your articulated claw
or are you just glad to see me

I want the version with commentary

BOOMING 101

2010-05-24T13:49:00.000-05:00

The Story / when the shit hits...

2010-05-23T17:10:00.001-05:00

"The story is a critique. It is meant to contribute to a discussion of future choices. That is my conscious meaning in retelling it." (Bruce Boone, Century of Clouds, p. 8)

My Aunt hopes the oil slick will move up the east coast, as far as Martha's Vineyard: "they have articulate, educated bloggers there..." (subtext: It Will Be a Problem When It Gets to Where There Are Real People)--she is not the first (nor the last) person I'll hear give some variation on this theme--when it gets farther North... There's some point at which (Mason Dixon line? further?) outrage at the huge gushing leak of crude oil into the Gulf--in some potent form--is imagined as beginning... And action.

Friday there was the page one picture of the dead pelican in a plastic garbage bag (carried off the beach at sunset as though left behind by some more than usually destructive day-tripper) and today the descriptions and images we've been waiting for: eggs and nest coated in brown ooze, nervous oil-soaked birds...

I want to say something about the ineffective boom (on the surface) and the failure of the imagination. Did you image containment? The oil staying safely away? Elizabeth Bishop: "think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed." ("Little Exercise")

Since I lost my mind...since I became political...since I woke up...I fell, I mean I feel so isolated...I mean...

I love the way the word "chocolate" has reappeared in the accounts: I can't help but think of then Mayor Nagin's (post-Katrina) "chocolate city." Now the crude reminds reporters of "chocolate" and "brownies." It's as if (it's the South) even our disasters were somehow deliciously sensual...

When I think of the long road trips, dual, first to Cocodrie (& LUMCON) and then to Port Fourchon but not (and I may never forgive myself) Grand Isle, I think of emptiness and silence--as if the landscape we moved through was a physical manifestation of the desire not-to know.

"I can't take," a poet comments on facebook, "any more bad news: I'm watching episodes of project runway now..."

There's the sound of the wind in the nearly empty research facility, so loud it sounds like an experimental opera: whaaaaahooohhhhh...

On the sun-baked oyster shells at the staging facility, guys dressed for a desert war, and the oil company employee who seems possible to talk to--who seems to want to talk...and who will call (when I get home) to say he's divorced, he's been away for two weeks, he hopes (pausing to describe the shrimp boat creeping down the bayou at dusk) I'll come and visit him "some night..." He told us some "crazy cajuns" had poured "waste oil" on shrimp he had to keep nearby ("smell that?!") as evidence: "they ruin it for everybody else."

The idea that this is a performance of some kind: Blanche DuBois--the symbol for too much emotion, right?

At a fundraiser (okay, well, it was a party for something else and then they tried to make a fundraiser out of it and really that wasn't exactly working out) last night I met a guy who started talking about going through this "forty years ago" and I got all excited (as Berryman would say) like. I thought we were going to talk about my hometown, but he's going on about Tampa. (Today I looked up Tampa: 1970 & 1993.) I didn't even know...and I'm into my we-changed-the-world: birth-of-the-environmental-movement groove and he says (it's a single sentence) Yes and so we moved into Nigeria and Chad... At which point it all goes Joycean for me--epiphany-ville. Because suddenly I see all that gorgeous powerful "outrage" as another kind of white flight: suddenly I see the wonderful community and consciousness (I treasured) as leading to the wars (war and war) in another "Gulf."

I mean we washed the birds and we worked together and we didn't, after all, change much of anything about our dependence on oil--we just insisted it be moved...away...to places we cared less about. Some bodies...some places...matter less than others. If you aren't engaged (by) with the injustice of that, if you aren't interested in what happens to bodies, to beings, across the line of difference...then what?

So that Get Oil Out (GOO) meant...just exactly that? Out: away (abject)? Hey, it's not "chocolate" coming up from the sea floor...it's the good shit: it's the shit.

Patches of green grass in the blue water, the faint smear of mauve across the as-yet-living marsh, the desire of each person we encountered to believe that this, too, would turn out okay--and pass...

In Chauvin we stopped at the the sculpture garden made by the outsider artists Kenny Hill (alerted to its existence by Zack Godshall's documentary, God's Architects). There (among other images) the life-sized, oil-black damned walk, or crawl (there's one very Kiki Smith-like figure) on a black walk, leaving their paler footprints behind them, leaving behind them these little foot-shaped absences where they have peeled the horror up onto their own grief-struck bodies as they go. The inscription on circle around the artist's self-portrait reads, IT IS EMPTY.

5/21/2010

2010-05-21T17:51:00.001-05:00

The tough, sunburned and kind policeman assigned to "escort" us onto the closed beach is a native of Louisiana and--like everyone we've talked to--he begins by being generous to the oil company. Variations on I guess they're doing their best have been a constant refrain on this trip down to the dissolving edge of the state (LA loses a football field's worth of land, I heard, every hour) where the oil is finally coming ashore. But that defensiveness or generosity always breaks down as we go on talking, and in this case so far that it takes me a moment to understand that the officer is crying, as he lifts his dark-to-the-point-of-opaque sunglasses for a second to run a finger under each eye. "This is nothing," he says, "--we can scrape this off--but...," and his voice catches, "now it's in the wetlands..." He'd been talking about how hard it is to see oil close the beach he'd played on as a child (and relaxed on with his own children), as we drove down past the cleaning crew to where the splashed out crude that came ashore yesterday clots and pools. The dispersants mean the stuff isn't acting like oil normally would: it's a weird reddish brown color and more soluble. Along the surf there's a line of what looks like cheer-leaders' pom-poms, shiny bursts of fluttery stuff used to soak up some of the oil. Guys who were in hazmat suits yesterday have given up the protective attire in this damp heat: yellow rubber boots and gloves are all that's left, paired w/ blue shirts and pants, as they stuff oiled pom-poms into plastic garbage bags. (Where will those bags go?) If you haven't called the white house comment line yet, if you haven't taken the time to make a call or write a letter to express your concern (if not outrage or despair) then I suppose you, also, are thinking like the cheerful waitress at the cafe in the Marina who bit her lip and brightly assured us that "God will clean it up," or you're like the worker at the staging ground who started his answer to my question about the disaster with "Wahltellyatruth, I think it's over-rated." Or maybe you're just, like BP, too busy. Or you are feeling silenced by a despair you don't even want to face. (The latest news is that all the water sediment and samples of marine animal tissue are being sent to a laboratory BP has ties with: TDI Brooks-International.) At the end of every road to the water, guards in desert fatigues or parked police cars, lights flashing. Yesterday, our escort tells us, the surf came in brown, today it's breaking white again, but there's this evidence, puked up on the sand. (Why aren't there live cams on the cloud underwater as it moves?) In the air there's a wobbling line of brown pelicans, going after mullet at the mouth of the polluted bayou; before we turn to drive back to the lot where I left my car, where the dump trucks are loading earth for the dirt barriers the Governor's asked for, the officer says bitterly, "It feels like being raped."

The Junk Shot (one month in)

2010-05-19T14:40:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the blowout on the “Deepwater Horizon.” April 20-May-20: the gushing fountains of oil on the sea floor essentially untouched. While BP keeps claiming it’s just too busy (talking to lawyers?) to measure what it keeps calling a “spill,” the scientific data strongly suggests we’ve all been the victims of a deadly shell game—not yet over. As our attention was focused on the various efforts and technologies the oil company mobilized (all of which were shamefully primitive) the extent of the disaster was kept hidden and the problem (larger and more dire by the hour) went unsolved.

We’re too busy to take safety precautions, we’re too busy to do it right, we’re too busy making money to share information with you, we’re too busy…--as if we were children, “we the people,” shooed away from the table…

I sent the following letter to the local paper—which sat on it for a week (waiting to see if BP would manage the tiny “insertion tube”?):

A Modest Proposal

The environmental catastrophe in the Gulf is now far too large to be simply BP's problem, or even just Louisiana's. While the oil company is clearly at fault, the decision to let the executives "ponder" and "mull" consequences they should have been required to anticipate is causing a national tragedy whose bad effects will be felt for generations. Surely there are experts--in the world at large if not in America--who have put some effort and thought into considering an effective and swift response to a disaster of this kind? Why aren't they being flown in (now)? It is unconscionable to leave responsibility for swift healing mainly if not solely in the hands of those who caused the harm. The analogy that suggests itself is laughable: it is as if we were depending on the mugger to set down the knife and act as our surgeon, or as if we considered the rapist as the person best qualified to give first aid and effective counseling to his victim. If this is the way we are thinking, perhaps we should go further. I suggest that (as we've learned that fur forms an effective oil barrier) we all donate our pets to form a--briefly--living boom of furry bodies in order to halt the advance of the oil, meanwhile removing the former state capitol to lower it into place above the leak on the sea floor, and finally staunching the beach with the various T-shirts printed with caring slogans--there have been so many produced since the explosion! Evidently feeble gestures are all we are capable of--a little intentional surrealism should at least be amusing. Seriously: the oil doesn't stop gushing at five pm or slow down on weekends--and it's way past time to try to make fumbling guesses about ways to contain the catastrophe. Clean it up, America. Get some experts here from wherever there still are experts...--we can't afford to wait while you (continue to) send in the clowns.

After the letter above was published, colleagues of mine at LSU (and a local reader who sent me an e-mail) were quick to inform me that the best minds in engineering for a project of this kind are in the employ of the oil company, therefore if only company experts are informed and involved, that’s fine. And when all those company experts in their wisdom can come up with, when they deign to consider stopping the flow (at some point in the future, meaning, whenever they want to), is a proposed “junk shot,” of “old tires, rags, and golf balls,” that must indeed be the best possible… (Maybe when you accept highway dividers as your best levee system some possibilities for social critique close down?) THIS IS THE BEST WE CAN DO?!? We can’t do any better? Really? In 21^st century America it’s gonna be about rags and golf balls? But the most sophisticated version of the argument above is sophisticated indeed, it goes like this: don’t I know that the only experts with real knowledge about drugs are completely owned by the pharmaceutical companies? Do I think there is anyone else who knows anything worth knowing? Do I still believe there are any objective experts? (The tone here is “Oh little girl!”)

Actually (leaving aside my certainty that there are scientists, like those who analyzed the video of the leak, who are not on the payroll), those taking the drugs often have very important knowledge to share—it usually comes out late, however, in the form of a lawsuit. And often the legal, social, financial recognition of the knowledge comes much too late for those who learned the truth or brought it to our attention—and what recognition there is goes to the grieving heirs. As the vast clouds of oil—still gushing—enter the gulf-stream, taking out swaths of the food chain, causing irreversible damage to the environment, there are already witnesses in trouble. Part of our trouble is to recognize them before they are gone.

As usual, the images most often turned to are those that have worked before—which don’t work now. This is not about the one brown pelican in the car-wash of blue-gloved volunteers… We imagined we’d get our “hook” that way, didn’t we? We were waiting for those images: thrashing black gleaming birds, dead sea-turtles… But the company knew that was our hook, too: so what they took care of was the appearance of the oil in the highly visible element we inhabit. Underwater, where we can’t easily see it, in a world many of us don’t feel much connection to, expanding dead zones of oil and the dispersant (more toxic and less effective than others on the market) made by a company BP has ties to…because they were not “too busy” to miss the chance to make another profit off their vaunted and ineffective clean up effort.

Each day there’s a widening ban on fishing: more ocean area given up to the admission of the catastrophe. We should have images (from submarines) of the pollution in the water—what we mostly have are maps and outlines, images of depictions of the increasingly large area of apparently poisoned water. Around that, a shadow of distrust: as the admission of the extent of the disaster slowly grows, those beyond the edges of ban already find their catch won’t sell. (Lack of confidence has a cost: why does it take so long to understand that?) Meanwhile the focus is close up on the face of a man who survived, there are endless replays of the explosion, Rachel Maddow gets snide about our apparent lack of understanding of “the whole gill thing,” various parties get lawyered up (if they weren’t before) and the President of the United States seems merely increasingly peeved. “He must be really afraid,” a friend murmurs on the phone, “it must be that the government is so completely in the pockets of the oil companies that to challenge the way this is being handled would cause a coup….” Who will represent the communities of fishermen now referring to the time post-Katrina as “the good days”? Who will represent the coral reefs? (Get your cameras IN the water, please.) Who will speak for the importance of the body and the planet? Who will go down to deal with the increasing crime and violence in communities killed off where the fish are killed off? How will you make this better? Money is not the only answer…—money will not erase a death or even replace the loss of the planet’s health on which our health depends.

There should be an international body, something like the UN (but dear god, better) to oversee all events of this kind. There has to be an understanding that it’s a shared and shrinking globe whose resources (and powers of recovery) are limited. There must be objective experts not “too busy” to take the long view, who can think about our children and our children’s children, who know that our lives are linked to those of the other species left to our very untender mercies, people whose vision is not limited by short-sighted greed.

Please join me in calling and writing to ask that imagination and intelligence be applied to this problem, and that all information be gathered and shared. You are invited (by life--not me) to be part of the world: please attend.

"marine snow"

2010-05-15T20:50:00.010-05:00

for letters: White House FAX 202 456-2461

pictures (link)...

2010-05-15T12:03:00.003-05:00

As Jon Woodward put it: "This is the result of competition..."

The number for the White House is (202) 456-1111.

"Divine Beings"

2010-05-14T21:45:00.004-05:00

You've all got the news, right? You're following? You know now that it's more like 50,000 barrels of oil per day leaking up from the sea floor, or--as the media puts it--"an Exxon Valdez every four days."

I'm an Egyptian, my Mother kept saying, last time I saw her (it was her little joke) I live in de Nile.

What does it mean to think about this? To try to think about this? The tacky substance more than one viewer has likened to blood in the water...

Maybe you're telling each other your dreams, or you're celebrating the end of the semester, you're thinking about the garden or watching the news which is mostly not about this: apparently, although the disaster is still unfolding at top speed, a lot of people have moved on. The images are weak ("tar balls"?!) and the blame game is boring. There are status updates to follow and--on TV--"Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" The Sex & the City sequel is due.

We. Are. Fucking. THE. Only. Planet...down here--...hello? Hell-ooooo?

The dispersants being used on the ongoing leak ("spill" was never a correct term--why is that word still being used?) are highly toxic, that's about the ONLY thing known about them. The EPA has approved the use of these poisons although there is no clear understanding of their effects.

In the yoga class the instructor primly read to us from the wisdom of some upper middle class white American woman, someone enlightened, someone who'd come to understand that it's all (everything) about our MOOD.

When the Coast Guard guy came on the radio saying that (it was part of the news around the hearings, because rather than fix the problem the issue is who is responsible meaning financially responsible) "everyone who owns a car is guilty," I nearly--I was driving--hit the brakes and pounded on the horn. I wanted to say No I didn't agree to this, I was furious, and had a feeling of transparency, as if everyone one the road was listening and would (when I slammed on the brakes and pounded on the horn) know...

It's been 6 Exxon Valdez "spills" already since 4/20. A friend reminds me that litigation on that puppy lasted more than 20 years. Litigation. Money. Do you speak another language? Do you speak clean ("potable") water? Do you speak "food chain"? Does the word "ecology" mean something to you?

And irremediable damage...

The news reports keep lapsing into language that is unintentionally hilarious (or I'm just hysterical): the videos were "leaked" (get it?), "the situation is fluid." The front page of the local paper has the exactly right picture, today, an image more telling than these words: in the foreground there are workers in protective gear walking over the sand of a Southern beach as if they were exploring the moon--some terrifyingly hostile environment. In the background there's a black guy with a pole, fishing in the surf as usual...

It isn't raining here the way it usually does at this time of year. There's a weirdly constant high dry wind.

The important wisdom that was "shared" (I'm sure that's the phrasing) with us all in the yoga class was meant to help us to recognize all the difficulties we encounter as learning experiences. Those who seem to be in the wrong are actually Divine Beings, sent to help us on the way. It was all I could do not to stand up from the inversion and scream Oh, tell that to the fishermen, take it out to the Gulf... Well let's hear it for the executives at BP, Transocean, and Haliburton...

Asking the oil companies to clean this up is like asking the rapist to supply first aid and counseling to his victim, pull up his pants and man (get it?) the crisis line. Wanna fiiiight? I recall a childhood toy (Larry-the-Lion!) asking, when you pulled its string. On the next pull the same cheerful mechanical voice asserted, I'll protect you!

A friend notes that the reason gas prices are not going up is because it is the one thing that could possibly actually move us to anger--and (potentially) action.

Dispersants and containment are the rule where we live (in denial): chemicals, silence, skimmers and booms. We're burning it off, we're breaking it down, we're holding on to the video, we're pointing our fingers, we're saying things like "Well anything with fins or feathers will get out of the way of the spill..." We're calling it a "spill." The heavy police presence in Plaquemines Parish. The repeated assertion that the water pressure at those depths would crush a submarine...but not a camera, evidently, or a pipeline...

Could you work that divinity? How about calling your representative? And the White House? Please?

I know you know--I'm not talking to you but (as if this were a window) through: please please please be capable of a sustained and uncorrupted attention. Please. Now.

2010-05-14T21:06:00.002-05:00

"The situation is fluid..."

2010-05-10T22:20:00.003-05:00

Free T-Shirts

2010-05-09T00:01:00.002-05:00

In sun-dappled Lafayette Park a straggle of well-meaning people have gathered for today’s Sierra Club-sponsored “rally,” meant to convince BP to “Clean it up": it being the oil-spill from the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The explosion happened on April 20^th(Hitler’s birthday, anniversary of the Columbine shooting—I know that ‘cause I lived in Colorado); this is May 9^th. The day is lovely—New Orleans is having a little spate of perfect weather before summer makes a filthy sauna of the South. There are various more or less impassioned and speakers, and then music. Everyone who signs their name to a card to petition BP to deal with the leakage of 5000 barrels of oil per day each day into the fragile eco-system of the Gulf over the last two weeks and counting is given a free t-shirt. The t-shirts are a baby or powder blur and those already wearing them look like U.N. officials or, as the U.N. officials are called in the splendid and bitter movie No Man’s Land, “smurfs.” The color doesn’t scream “non-violent”—but that’s because screaming would be violent, right? The color politely clears its throat and suggests, insistently, that the wearer is Not a Threat. The color, in other words, says I’ll go peaceably Officer if not I didn’t really mean it. It’s the same shade as the eyes of the Tulane student I pause to chat with, a young woman as earnest as she is confused, as vague as she is urgent. Distressed that her peers were more interested in getting drunk (it is the end of the semester) than getting political, she allows that she is uncertain of her own ability to continue to care. The discussions, she complains, between Democrat and Republican, are just too “polemic,” neither side is really listening to the other—that is her excuse for listening to neither. She’s changed her major, she tells me, but I don’t ask from what to what: the effort it takes her to articulate the tired sound bite leads me to fear she's in the Humanities, and all I want is to escape before I find out exactly where. If you sign your name to the little card you will not only get a free t-shirt, you will be entered into the “raffle” and have the chance to win other prizes. Stay and enjoy the music, I’m advised by several polite blue-shirted young people, good luck in the raffle, they smile.

I grew up in Santa Barbara: forty years ago I learned what an oil spill is; I saw the emergence of GOO (Get Oil Out) & the birth of the environmental movement, seared into memory is the image of sticky black sea-birds (gulls, pelicans, cormorants…) writhing on the tarry sand, their slow-motion bewildered gestures, attempting to clean themselves as they were dying. That spill, I realize now, washed its harrowing consequences up on the doorsteps, as it were, of a populace as well-heeled and visible as it was interested in images: Santa Barbara was a bedroom community for Los Angeles, and those who owned beach houses had friends in, if they weren’t themselves just up from, Hollywood. Add to this the fact that the class lines (and it’s only today that I ‘got’ this) meant that those who worked for the oil company and those who lived where the oil was washing up had few ties. All this is reversed in Louisiana. The oil is washing up, first of all, in wetlands you need a canoe and then a Cajun guide, probably, to get to: we’re talking an intricate, fragile, and uninhabited landscape—rich with life you don’t see or think about until it’s on your plate, or, not. And this is a state where there is—every year in Morgan city—a “Shrimp and Petroleum Festival” (I tried to go the first year I lived here, but heavy rains meant the roads were impassible, at least for the little CRX I’d lose to Katrina the next year). The famous or infamous “Who’s your Daddy?” culture means that human relationships are as intricate as (but less fragile than) the landscape, and the general poverty means that fishermen and oil men (and I use the gender intentionally) feel for and with each other. To really think about the spill, you will want to take a look at the old documentary Louisiana Story, you will want to consider the amount of money the oil business pumps into the economy, read at the “neighborhood news” newsletter Exxon sends out each month, and go to the “Aquarium of the Americas” in which the major exhibit, the largest tank, labeled Gulf of Mexico, shows fish swimming, living, and interacting in their "natural” environment, that is, at the base of what is clearly an oil rig.

In the green shade beneath the live oaks in Lafayette Park, another young woman (addressed as “Sunshine” by an acquaintance), urges me to sign a petition to let the President know he should rethink his intention to open more areas to drilling. Uhm, I say, isn’t he in fact doing just that? Yes, but (she’s adamant), this will show him we’re serious! Petitions, she informs me, have been proven to be effective, politically—though when pressed she admits it would do more good if I wrote a letter and sent it. So why aren’t there people here set up to get letters written, signed, and sent, I ask. (It’s as far as I get, but it’s just the start of my questions—why aren’t we marching would be the next one.) Her face goes hard-eyed and tight-lipped as she explains that the purpose of this rally is to "raise awareness," and I think we’re both grateful for the arrival of a friend of hers, offering a different t-shirt, only extra-large available: she can wear it, he tells her, as a dress. I ask if he’s seen the spill (yes), and if he knows how I can get out to see it. He takes me to his leader, a scruffy older man in a baseball cap, cramming popcorn into his mouth with the hand he thrusts out to shake. His group has ties to a “hippie redneck” with a boat and the anger to “break the blockade”—if I have the necessary funding (I never find out what that would be—it’s a price too high, evidently, to casually name). Through kernel-flecked teeth he tells me he knows the dead birds are being hidden, since people might get the idea—if they saw a dead bird—that what’s happening could lead to “dead humans.” He sneers as he says this, and his faded blue eyes snap with contempt not for the projected self-interest, but for those who’d take so long to wake up to it. When we’ve established I don’t have the funding the conversation is pretty much over, though I spend a little more time at the rally, chatting with mildly disappointed media types. There’s more than one mention of a “gag order,” though those I talk to have differing ideas about who the “they” would be in the sentence “They are imposing a gag order,” and more than one person doubts the existence of said order. In PJs coffee I run back into the guys with the information about how to hire a boat: these edgy, secretive movers and shakers, I discover when I’m home, are members of a facebook group.