1.
The not-smoking, while still a semi-symptomatic, full-time activity, is getting way easier. Or, there are new symptoms every day and some pleasantly surprising. Like how the smell assault IS the world in–it’ll sound hokey, what comes next but–all its complicated glory. Car exhaust is so messed up. There is a lot of barbecue and it smells so good. (70 degrees this weekend and I didn’t get a single day off? but even THAT was ok, it was *interesting*) Then there’s something, too, remarkably like getting off on–this part will sound hokey AND weird–presence? It’s to do with stillness. I am not a very still person. One or two modules of such in the fabric is unsettling, “in a good way!” I’ll confess to at least one weekend moment-experience, which Haleh Hatami accurately identified as Bugs Bunny-derived, where a stranger (or worse, dear friend) becomes like a walking carrot or cigarette, one cannot see the person anymore, they are only a cartoon of the nictone delivery device they have become, if one could just snatch that thing out of their mouth and into one’s own! I didn’t, though. What else. Oh, the chocolate, the chocolate. Thus I cannot fall asleep and am getting up ridiculously early for a walk and still feel better than ever.
I guess I still think “what did I just say?” but in a new way.
2.
The only thing that could make me wish something (what?) about AWP is Anne’s photos. (Amy’s, too. That one of Mairead Byrne w. her daughter!) But then with every text representation my body says we’re glad, glad not to be, have been, there. In other AWP news, I missed out on Andrea Baker’s “i-don’t-get-awp-book-give-away”. Another thank you for making it so that I didn’t have to go: Joshua Clover has posted two talk-drafts from Atlanta here. (”content on the side”, scroll to d/l of the month.) Now if someone could just fill me in on whatever ineffable thing it was that Alice Notley said, ok, also what Heriberto is saying in that photo where Brent is on the panel with him, and, most painful of all, tell me more about the Pussipo reading I missed.
3.
Shampoo 29.
4.
Myung Mi Kim and Sarah Anne Cox reading last Friday night. Oh, man. This #4 a placeholder. How I have never heard her read before and how important she is to bay area writers esp. my peer group, that old sense of being out of it, and then grateful to encounter writing at ‘ right’ moment, which is pretty much whenever one does — would like to talk mostly about the moment of polyvocality —
5.
Juliana thinking about Under Albany. Me, too, again, esp. reading The Grand Piano, part 2. If part 1 could be said to be ‘about’ love, then 2 is ‘about’ place/geography, ‘the city’ — sorry for all the quotes — what I’ve read so far is working hard to deal with the question Barrett Watten poses at the end of his section (and his is the first section in this installment): “What would it mean, that this outpouring of poetry took place in San Francisco? Where is that City now that we are, in fact, dispersed?”
The City of course is the Factory (second? third?) but it’s also The City, there it is on the cover: “San Francisco, 1975-1980″. Or the moment where psychic (developmental) geography overlaps with land. Street names. Apartments. Bars. Schools. People and groups of people and these people on the move are what makes it, everything, so complicated.
Have I said what delightful little objects these books are?
Kit Robinson I Remembers it up in part 2 (and took on 3rd person in part 1, can’t wait to see what he does in 3) how dreamy is that? Shortest sentence of his section is:
I Remember “17 Reasons Why”.
Thinking about all the ways that sign has been engaged, in its preciously-ready-made, and gone now, nostalgic way. How Kit’s way might be the only way to engage it now. (Coming as it does among other sentences, like “I remember after work at the Oakland Bulk Mail Center at 3 a.m. riding my bike from Potrero Hill to the Haight to visit Lucy Rideout” and “I remember taking Ted Berrigan to my dentist in Berkeley for an extraction. My dentist recognized Ted from Buffalo.”)
I suppose what I mean is that Kit’s sentence engages a ’secret’ or ‘insider’ city, in a net of sentences working with others, many others, and places, many places, in some of their detailed details. Then also the sign, even or especially in its monolithic and veiled way, is also ‘available’ to many residents of The City, not just those who (that) are now dispersed – if they (these other imagined residents of the City, not poets?) were to read The Grand Piano –
I *so* wanted the play about that sign to be better than it was.
But Kit’s sentence trumps that entire show. And it had some serious players!
Which is what brought me back around to thinking about Under Albany, and Albany:
If the function of writing is to “express the world.”
March 5, 2007 * 11:29 pm
March 6th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Yeah, “delightful little objects” for TWELVE NINETY-FIVE — and there aren’t even any pictures! I picked one up in Unnameable Books the other day, sort of fondled it, and then felt the radiation of its expense.
San Francisco is a place with light rooms that still feel damp and there’s not always that much street noise so people tend to be more (more than here) contemplative. Also, the ocean breeze is bracing, torquing the thought processes.
March 6th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
If you can subscribe to the series it’s cheaper ($90, so $9/book, right? math?) although who knows how subscription works now that the first two are out.
“the radiation of its expense”
so much everywhere all the time!
although you’re right, very little street noise, almost none where I sit, but just as none of the ocean breeze.
March 15th, 2007 at 4:33 am
Gordon — expect a package from me!