Then suddenly I *love* facebook, unfolder of information such as fallen fruit which I’d never heard of before receiving a facebook invite to this week’s nocturnal fruit forage in LA. It seems like local chapters are encouraged, though? Yes? Bay area anyone?

This won’t come mid-narrative for some of you, dear some of you all who deserve my sincerest apologies for talking about nothing else for a month now, that is, the RATS and the OPOSSUMS. Some kinds of rats really love avocados. A nocturnal fruit forage seems like a good step in my rat and opossum self-directed training. Isn’t that what the rats and opossums do? Nocturnal public fruit foraging?

This post is a public update that the opossum catcher came to the house yesterday and set some traps (the catch and release kind). The bait is STRAWBERRY NEWTONS. Most cats I guess don’t like strawberry newtons. 24 hours later there’s nothing in the traps yet. But when the opossum catcher showed up yesterday, he did have an opossum in the back of his truck, trapped at another location. A grown-up, cat-sized one. And so, my first.. sighting? viewing? (Suzanne and I googled “possum” a few weeks ago at my obsessive urging, and wow when that first picture came up it really did us in. Different, but related, I think, to what may or may not be living in the ceiling. I still have a lot to learn obviously.) This story is going backwards or something but I should say somewhere very clearly that I have not been having the easiest time ever with the sounds in my walls and ceiling, my ceiling and walls and ceiling and especially not with the sounds in the wall right behind my bed. At first I thought there were some overactive cats upstairs who only played at night. With many, many rolling balls. Then, when one of these denial-cats fell down into the wall one early morning, I employed, somewhat shakily, a fantasy concerning a glossy disney character who simply wanted the opportunity to make soup at a fancy restaurant. So I have been of course! It goes without saying! Googling opossum, oh, several times a day, ever since it was introduced as a marsupial alternative maker of THE SOUNDS. Opossum + loud noise + wall + babies + mating season + geography. I’m getting there. (to a search string a little wider than myself)

And moving ever closer to an embodied opossum: last week Samantha told me about seeing one at Sulphur Creek and I’m hoping to visit with her and Jonas in May. Yesterday’s opossum was understandably depressed, laying on a bunch of crushed strawberry fig newtons, in full daylight, tired and wishing for a dark corner to nap in. Mary my upstairs neighbor saw him first, unexpectedly, through the tailgate of the truck, and screamed. I forced myself to look but all I could see was the dinosaur-esque tail, so big! and coiled! And viewed through a crack. I almost looked away but didn’t. And then, the opossum ears, so intricate. The tired eyes. And hands.

I learned yesterday that rats and opossums can cohabitate in the same space, raccoons are more aggressive, and the interior wall sounds I’m hearing sound, to the opossum catcher, more like rodents than opossums. I know, information from an opossum catcher could be considered suspect, or something, but this one repeated several times that we must call immediately if we spot an opossum in the trap, as the traps are placed in full sunlight, and sunlight really stresses them out and it’s dangerous if they aren’t retrieved in a few hours. What I didn’t find out yesterday: the release location. So I have no idea where yesterday’s was relocated to. And he or she has not left my mind since, her or his face, so tired, with such big eyes, and a really weird mouth. Also, what happens after relocation? What’s the opossum’s relation to the group? Was it a he or a she? Did it have any babies?

April 27, 2008 * 5:19 pm

I am doing that dumb thing I often get trapped in, where I wait to say something I really want to say, until I have time to really say it in a special articulate (but not precious if that’s what you’re thinking) kind of way. Like this, and like that. I wait until I have enough time to say all around it in a circle, in a diagram, in a connective tissue-text of nested links and breathing all around the thing I am saying. I like to think I try.

But then I get trapped because while I’m waiting I don’t say anything! About the thing, which isn’t in this case a thing.

What it is, and where it’s going, is of supreme interest and obsession all week and weeks. I am getting tired of typing in the url by hand, it’s like that. (forcing me to update the link list soon.)

Because it is on the move, it is making itself and I am pretty sure we’re all invited. I am totally sure, in fact. What I’m trying to say is:

OPEN SPACE.

Most times it is better to let something say for itself.

Also, thank you to Manjula for the chocolate but especially for pointing to the nest cam. Leave it up, like she said, on your desktop. At first the mom wasn’t there. When I looked again, she was.

April 25, 2008 * 3:44 pm

There is a bag of, what else can I call them but rusty, chocolate chips in the kitchen on the third floor and everyone appears to be eating them. I hardly see any actual everyone, ever since the fire inspection decreed all doors must be kept shut for some building code reason having to do with a fire corridor, but the chocolate chips do disappear. When I have seen people I am not exaggerating at least three of them have quoted to each other or me: “April is the cruelest month.”

April 22, 2008 * 12:14 pm

Not doing anything here for a long time and then doing something here felt like a reverse equivalent of the I Am Ending My Blog post.

I always have to talk about it.

Basically I am avoiding work. I had forgotten that luxury’s contour.

Received:
“Hello from LifeLock” “End Identity” (theft)

March 25, 2008 * 9:59 am

An interpretrive constellation, or rubric, or image-object-cultural-product-citizen’s mailbox-exhibit-net I’ve been caught in this week:

the scene of neighborhood cash handouts for votes in Brillante Mendoza’s Slingshot

Ben Metcalf’s satire “Why I Pay My Taxes” in the April 08 issue of Harper’s

the Economic Stimulus Payment Notice that arrived by mail, under which qualifying individuals including possibly me could receive one time payments of up to $600 for doing nothing more than filing a 2007 tax return

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Everything heard from inside the near-constant backdrop of Britney’s “Piece of Me” and 50 Cent’s “I Get Money”, the two on a repeat loop the last few months. I’m with Jclo, “Piece of Me” is the song of the year (admittedly I listen to only ten songs every year + whatever’s on KMEL, these are overlapping categories)

I keep thinking about “Piece of Me” as some version of claiming/being married to the game. But to agree with Jane again, in a song with lyrics “entirely designed to confuse the question of who is speaking” it’s equally unclear who is married to whom. How does the autoerotic life of money circulate in matrimonial form? I mean, as ever, but also, how much is that dowry in the mirror? Or she’s the game she’s married to and also the product that game revolves around. In the string of tabloid (is tabloid still a term?) titles claimed in the song’s chorus, only a few are specifically meaningful: “Mrs. oh my god that Britney’s shameless” yes, but “Mrs. she’s too big, now she’s too thin”? When was the last time anyone said Britney was too thin? It’s not about her, it’s about the forms she played child bride to. The too fat/too thin line sounds a lot like wish-fulfillment, or idle fantasy: “well, I could have done it like the Olsen twins” which would be to do it exactly the same way. No getting outside of. Mrs. = Mrs. = Mrs. Finally the who’s married to whom question doesn’t really matter- it’s a bad marriage, she’s stuck in it, enthralled, and so are we, which is part of why it feels so recognizable.

It’s not her ass we want a piece of, exactly, it’s the revenue or at least the disposable income. Internet says her monthly pull is $737,000 - not sure if that’s before or after taxes - and she has no savings. (Britney’s version of 50’s track might be: “I spend money.” But I don’t even know where to begin on the compare and contrast of these two songs.)

The kinky part is how Britney seems co-committed, devoted even, to driving up the market value of her image via seemingly self-destructive acts. Every act against the frame she’s committed to generates more money for others, whether it’s the head-shaving moment credited with a definitive shift towards iconic pop-freak status, or beating a paparazzi’s SUVwith her umbrella. (The SUV, post-attack, was immediately put up for sale on ebay and then pulled off after bids reached $30,000 - maybe to accrue? The ‘victim’ of the attack estimates he made $400,000 for video and photograph sales of the incident.) Every act a gesture, re-absorbed and distributed as cash.

A fairy tale: you go to punch someone in the face, in your dream, and instead of making contact, coins and shoes and flowers and face cream and designer samples and starbuck’s drinks and cars come pouring out of your hands. Your skin is very bad, someone says in an online forum, about the photo taken of this event.

That Atlantic Monthly feature on the paparazzi who work Britney with their digitals (linked above) is semi-super interesting. This idea of the old paparazzi v. new, or that Britney often re-stages photos which went badly the first time around. The “Piece of Me” video might be the most extreme example of this re-staging: the crotch shot as power move–in heels, stepping over the photographer–the reproduction of doubles in beret, spy-style, eluding the press, as if she could, suggesting there’s a delineation between the backstage and performance/image-making area, and that she’s in control of the moving border between the two.

I was going to point towards a video of the song remixed over many ‘actual’ Britney image moments, umbrella-attack wearing no panties shaved head baby in lap and all, but it’s been taken down.

March 24, 2008 * 10:03 am

Oh, it goes, it goes.

Time, I mean! Also the flu, finally. About to erase the calendar and begin from scratch (March).

Several and many thank yous to the publishers and writers who sent me copies I am reading them now of:

work #1 (david horton’s terrific new zine. I have a few extra copies if you haven’t gotten it yet.)
Shiny #14 with the purple cover
Area Sneaks
Unbecoming Behavior, Kate Colby
Red Shifting, Aleksandr Skidan
Dear Body, Dan Machlin
Complications, Garrett Caples
kadar koli, issues 1 & 2

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Recently added at Deep Oakland: Samantha Giles, “A Force to Separate”

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Also recently reading again Chris Nealon’s “The Poetic Case”.

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Thank you Dana Ward for pointing to critiphoria 1 !

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Woodpecker and hummingbird and helicopter noises via Kevin Rolston and Ron Palmer.

February 23, 2008 * 1:57 pm

SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC POETS THEATER 2008

Please join us for two nights of plays and performance, featuring new work by writers and artists, along with new interpretations of Poets Theater classics. This is our annual fundraiser, so come out and support SPT – there will be wine & refreshments, raffle items, video, books, and all sorts of festivities to go along with this year’s batch of plays and performances…

FRIDAY JANUARY 18, 7:30pm:

“The Obituary Show” by CA Conrad
“Up in Arms: a scene at Tense Borders” by Mary Diaz
“INARMS” by Arnold J. Kemp
“a fierce vexation of a dream” by sara m. larsen
“Yoda in His Youth” by Dana Ward
“RJ: Romeo and Juliet (from The Code Poems)” by Hannah Weiner, dir. Suzanne Stein

FRIDAY JANUARY 25, 7:30pm:

1980s POETS THEATER REVIVIFIED: THREE PLAYS REXAMINED, REANIMATED, & RESTAGED

“Particle Arms” by Alan Bernheimer (excerpts)
“Third Man” by Carla Harryman (excerpts)
“Creative Floors” by Kit Robinson

And stay tuned for news about our Poets Theater Cabaret and other upcoming events, through our website and our new blog.

Unless otherwise noted,our events are presented in:
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco

see you there!
David Buuck, Cynthia Sailers, & Stephanie Young
PT08 Co-curators
Small Press Traffic

January 12, 2008 * 3:26 pm

Back from the land of alpine, where - to start? Some time was spent debating colors of night sky via Peter Pan for a wall mural in one 17-month old’s bedroom. Where one was alive. Where snow - this time last year - still not making it to the new museum. Where weddings. Where hot toddy. Where Erin Morrill. Where superchurch service by video proxy. Where one is not really meant to sing along with the music, rather, admire the figures who mediate screens with guitars and, uh, tambourines, shaking their heads in one variety of demonstrative, exemplary religious experience. Where on the plane ride back thank you like stars of glitter paint on murals Ron Palmer, for handing me Blanchot’s “Space of Literature” several years ago now:

The Image

Why fascination? Seeing presupposes distance, decisiveness which separates, the power to stay out of contact and in contact avoid confusion. Seeing means that this separation has nevertheless become an encounter. But what happens when what you see, although at a distance, seems to touch you with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch, when seeing is contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself upon the gaze, as if the gaze were seized, put in touch with the appearance? What happens is not an active contact, not the initiative and action which there still is in real touching. Rather, the gaze gets taken in, absorbed by an immobile movement and a depthless deep. What is given us by this contact at a distance is the image, and fascination is passion for the image.

What fascinates us robs us of our power to give sense. It abandons its “sensory” nature, abandons the world, draws back from the world, and draws us along. It no longer reveals itself to us, and yet it affirms itself in a presence in space. Separation, which was the possibility of seeing, coagulates at the very center of the gaze into impossibility. The look thus finds, in what makes it possible, the power that neutralizes it, neither suspending nor arresting it, but on the contrary preventing it from ever finishing, cutting it off from any beginning, making of it a neutral, directionless gleam which will not go out, yet does not clarify–the gaze turned back upon itself and closed in a circle. Here we have an immediate expression of that reversal which is the essence of solitude. Fascination is solitude’s gaze. It is the gaze of the incessant and interminable. In it blindness is vision still, vision which is no longer the possibility of seeing, but the impossibility of not seeing, the impossibility which becomes visible and perseveres–always and always–in a vision that never comes to an end, a dead gaze, a gaze become the ghost of an eternal vision.

Of whoever is fascinated it can be said that he doesn’t perceive any real object, any real figure, for what he sees does not belong to the world of reality, but to the indeterminate milieu of fascination. This milieu is, so to speak, absolute. Distance is not excluded from it, but is immeasurable. Distance here is the limitless depth behind the image, a lifeless profundity, unmanipulable, absolutely present although not given, where objects sink away when they depart from their sense, when they collapse into their image. This milieu of fascination, where what one sees seizes sight and renders it interminable, where the gaze coagulates into light, where light is the absolute gleam of an eye one doesn’t see but which one doesn’t cease to see since it is the mirror image of one’s own look–this milieu is utterly attractive. Fascinating. It is light which is also the abyss, a light one sinks into, both terrifying and tantalizing.

If our childhood fascinates us, this happens because childhood is the moment of fascination, is itself fascinated. And this golden age seems bathed in a light which is splendid because unrevealed. But it is only that this light is foreign to revelation, has nothing to reveal, is pure reflection, a ray which is still only the gleam of an image. Perhaps the force of the maternal figure receives its intensity from the very force of fascination, and one might say then, that if the mother exerts this fascinating attraction it is because, appearing when the child lives altogether in fascination’s gaze, she concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment. It is because the child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating, and that is also why all the impressions of early childhood have a kind of fixity which comes from fascination.

Whoever is fascinated doesn’t see, properly speaking, what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance. Fascination is fundamentally linked to neutral, impersonal presence, to the indeterminate They, the immense, faceless Someone. Fascination is the relation the gaze entertains–a relation which is itself neutral and impersonal–with sightless shapeless depth, the absence one sees because it is blinding.

December 31, 2007 * 2:46 pm

Eileen Myles / Cinema Cabaret / Redcat Theater, Los Angeles / 12.3.07 / PART 1

December 11, 2007 * 1:39 pm

Eileen Myles / Cinema Cabaret / Redcat Theater, Los Angeles / 12.3.07 / PART 2

December 11, 2007 * 1:29 pm

Eileen Myles / Cinema Cabaret / Redcat Theater, Los Angeles / 12.3.07 / PART 3

December 11, 2007 * 1:18 pm

There is a rooster in my new neighborhood. I have just begun to remember this during the day.

The tweeting of beets as they roast.

December 9, 2007 * 8:51 pm