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Today was frustrating. I don’t blog about it much, but I still get terrible RSI from computers. There are two muscles, one in my right trapezius, I guess, the other under my shoulderblade ¬– a teres minor or major? I don’t really know my muscle names ¬– that seize up and then refer knotty, ropy tension down both my arms, in the front of the shoulder and then down into my forearms. Those of you who have known me for some time will know that many years ago I had to stop working for a while because of this, and actually won a worker’s comp case for it. I don’t know the name of my condition, it’s some kind of “myofascial pain syndrome,” but even doctors say that’s not a very meaningful term. Oh well. What am I going to do, not write?

Most of the time when I am sitting at a computer, whether at work or at home, I am in a kind of agony of tension, my muscles contracted into mean little metallic constraints. The situation is only alleviated by not using a computer (like that’s really gonna happen) or by moving around, taking a long walk, or dancing. That’s one of the primary reasons I persist in my dancing despite having so little aptitude for it.

So today was horribly frustrating, you see, I was trying much of the morning to work on a piece I want to send to the Vanitas film issue. I was making screen captures of my Uzumaki benshi and then trying to get them into some format that wouldn’t look too terrible in print. I tried reducing the size, desaturating or grayscaling, upping the dpi (stupid, I know, but a girl’s got to try), and fiddling with the contrast. The last trick seemed to help somewhat, but then I realized that the widget I was using to get the screen captures had left the little finger-pointing cursor visible. Arggh. So I can either not care about that, just lay bare the device, or go through and do the screen captures over again. That sounds easy enough, but it’s so important just to get that right little moment. After doing all this noodling for hours this morning, taking a break only to fix lunch, I was just a bundle of screamy tension, so I went huffily out into the bleak Brooklyn winter afternoon to try to find some poetry and aerate my system.

I walked fiercely down Ocean Parkway and cut over at I think Ditmas, walking all the way over to MacDonald and down along the El to 18th Ave., where I made a left turn and found myself in a little bodega that happened to sell Djarums. I bought a pack of lights on the recommendation of the zaftig, false-eyelashed woman who was talking to the cashier about how Rebecca likes Malik, but Malik is gay, and she shouldn’t get her hopes up. Maybe they can be very best friends, I said.

On my little stroll I took a few pictures, not with my beloved camera, for I dropped it and now the flash doesn’t work, so I took it in to be repaired on Friday, but with my iPhone camera, so I apologize for the quality (since when, I wonder, do I apologize for lack of quality? but anyway), here’s what I saw:

IIRTS RESSED & UNG

Marina’s dress shop. Observe the odd puffy things on the skirt:

and best of all:

E=U=P=H=O=R=I=A

I do love to work on commission. Michael Scharf wrote in asking me to expand on how “New York feels different now,” as I asserted in my list of things I miss. He asked me to include even the most obvious observations on the topic.

Of course New York has objectively changed, particularly since 9/11, although I don’t think 9/11 was the catalyst for my feelings about how the city has changed. I also know that New York has changed objectively in the last few decades, but everyone knows that, and I didn’t come here until 1999, when all of the gentrifying socioeconomic changes were well underway, so I really didn’t mean that.

I was speaking purely about my subjective feelings about the NY poetry scene, which are of course created by my relationship to it, which has changed greatly in my near-decade here.

I remember saying, when I first got here, that the scene felt like a Renaissance court. It seemed to me that there were clear holders of power that one had to sort of kowtow to in order to curry favor. I’m not sure if that was really true, but that was my received impression from talking to Gary, Chris Stroffolino, Mitch Highfill, and Drew Gardner, who were more or less my first points of contact on arrival. Like most poets, they have their paranoiac tendencies (I hope they don’t mind my saying so), and their sociology of the scene very much colored mine, initially. At any rate, I was a newcomer looking in, and everything felt novel and strange (and hence, exciting).

For one thing, I had just arrived here from Japan. My frame of references was different. I felt a little like Rumpelstiltskin. I could talk about contemporary American poetry, mainly but not exclusively from the West Coast, through 1988. Beyond that, all I could talk about was butoh and Terayama Shuji. I also conversed in a different mode, at first. I couldn’t interrupt properly. I couldn’t really be ironic (isn’t that ironic?). And I certainly didn’t get ANY of the pop culture references. Lots of colloquialisms were lost on me, too: I remember Gary used the phrase “don’t go there” in one of his early emails to me and it sounded totally bizarre. I would cringe when I’d hear people say in pizzerias, “Can I get a slice?” Now I say that, too, although I try not to eat pizza.

I mean, I was in Japan a hell of a long time and during very formative years (24-35), and I arrived here under very bizarre circumstances, never having lived in NY before, and having only spent a week with Gary in the flesh before moving in with him (and, for a little while, with Chris as a roommate). I remember in the first couple of weeks being afraid to walk around the city, just like a Japanese tourist.

All that being said, the formations of the crowds at (for example) the Zinc Bar (and parties, and other spaces, although maybe not St. Marks, which continues to feel for me like a church) from 1999 to, say, 2003 (not sure if that’s the delineator, but anyway), seemed to me almost utopically intimate, and quite unlike, in terms of a shared poetics, what I was able to experience as an expat in Tokyo. The atmosphere also felt looser and differently engaged than what I remembered from San Francisco in the 80s, less like an austere display of intellectual plumage and more playful, even kind of familial. I loved how the audience at the Zinc Bar in particular was practically right up against the reader, even though it was an awkward space, ergonomically (although not as awkward as the old Double Happiness, which was also, incidentally, an intimate-feeling space). Book parties at the now-gone Teachers & Writers space also gave poets a lot of friendly mixing time.

It’s funny, but I hadn’t thought about the extent to which physical space affects the social formations of poetry. Now most things happen at the Bowery Poetry Club, which is a narrow and distancing space that doesn’t, because events are so rushed in a little window of time, necessarily foment intimacy. I think the new Zinc Bar is beautiful, ideal really, and could be something quite wonderful if more people would actually go habitually and make a core audience. I remember some days at the old Zinc Bar, Gary and I would be like 40% of the audience, and we went really regularly. We should have got a medal or something.

If I compare NY to my trips to San Francisco, where readings so often take place in people’s living rooms, I feel very sorry for this city indeed. Poets need lots of leisurely, playful, friendly time together, and readings should be packed with people in not-very-big spaces. That way the poet gets a lot of “chi” (energy) from the audience and the room starts to sort of vibrate.

Perhaps for us, the flarflist has become that “not-very-big” vibrating space? As more poetic activity (for us, anyway) has gone online, the less there is non-virtually? That could be one difference I feel.

I didn’t mean by my statement that “New York feels different now” to simply telegraph angst. For one thing, I certainly don’t feel like an outsider looking in anymore as I’m very often likely to be the one curating an event I’m interested in. I feel very happily connected to so many brilliant people here, perhaps more people of more awesome stature and achievements than I could ever have dreamed of knowing. So I’m grateful for that.

I suspect many of my feelings of “difference” could simply be connected to my age. Friends have children (O but I love when Safi or Coco are around at events), obligations, wearinesses. (Or they have moved out of New York for better employment and standards of living?) There are very likely other poetry scenes going on in NY right now that I’m not privy to as a near-elder (I thought it was PMS, but now I’m hot-flashing: god, this bridge-age is terrible). It’s like maybe I’m seeing everything through bifocals now and so it feels different? I don’t know. Mike, what do you think? I know you’re not here right now (or are you?), but I’d love to hear your perspective, especially as a recent (future? I think I’m confused about where you are) expat.

Other New Yorkers? Your thoughts?

Make sure to read the comments on this.

The following quotations all come from Mady Schutman’s A Fool’s Discourse: The Buffoonery Syndrome, which I first quoted five years ago on this blog. Their relevance to my practice should be obvious. Thank you Mady, you rock.

Her excessive visual presence both disguises and disclaims her assigned absence within the social sphere…. in her overstated assumption of the mask of femininity, she indicts the very power politics that her body economy suffers. She plays the clown.

[Charcot’s] “leading ladies,” whom Sarah Bernhardt studied and mimicked in preparation for her tragic melodramas, were praised for being sublime comediennes…. the… swollen language signified how both hysteric and clown magnify and slander our concept of the ordinary. For instance, both exercise a curious belabored gait that comments on the meaning of ground, of support: astasia-abasia (the “hysterical gait”) is a walk in which the patient appears to be trying to fall. She performs it only when she knows she is being observed: her deliberate performance of instability is as much a commentary on her condition as it is the condition itself….. To stand firmly would be to acquiesce to a stature stipulated by a social gaze that is both overdetermined and hostile. To falter is to take another ideological position or “standing,” one that is hopeful in its deliberate unsteadiness.

The very nature of spectacle makes “a spectacle of inappropriateness” oxymoronic. Spectacle itself is an act of self-mockery, a replacing of subjectivity with something so grand, so oversignified, as to suggest hypersubjectivity.

The word “mask” comes from the Arabic word maskharat, meaning clown or buffoon. And the “buffoon” means “to puff.”

…[I]n order to be liberated from the powers that speak for me, I must become all they bid me to be. I become the joke that torments me.; I am the phobia incarnate.

Women and animals are seemingly trapped in a place of endless misrecognition where they cannot gain access to symbolic space or to a re-cognition that proffers verification in a discourse of power.

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of masochism infers the process of “becoming animal.” A deal is made wherein one’s submission and contractual subjugation release one from the constraints of the law; lawless ecstasy results from the performance of one’s humiliation.

I am suspicious of the angry woman. I am weary of the discourse of female pretense as power when delivered in progressively verbose waves of new feminisms. I’m bored with futile attempts to redeem vapid, anti-committal postmodern ambiguity and obscurity from its entertaining but safe epistemological theories. Instead, I let precariousness and speculation riddle my body.

…Cordelia and the fool merge in the king’s imagination, and in their becoming one he realizes, as we have known all along, that they signify the only thing that should have mattered.

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Boots of Tisa Bryant and Chris Kraus

Just back from the Belladonna “Elders” series, this one featuring Tisa Bryant and Chris Kraus, whose “I Love Dick” I reread recently and mentioned on this blog. In this series, a younger writer chooses an older writer with whom she feels a sense of connection and lineage, and they introduce each other, read, and then talk afterwards.

Some have expressed discomfort with the use of the term “elders”; others, like Kathleen Fraser, approve of its use and how it evokes “elders of the tribe.” Barrett Watten apparently wrote to the curators to ask why they were structuring the readings by influence and not by movement.

I don’t know how I feel about it, particularly as I am in that weird space where I am neither an elder nor a youth. I do think that if I were asked to be in a series of this type as a “younger” writer, I have no idea who I would choose, especially among women writers. Though there have obviously been many who have influenced me, I don’t think I could single out any one as a kind of matriarch or aunty to me, and I feel like positing such a relationship would be oddly oppressive. Carla and Bernadette are the only two who come to mind that I would even consider, but I’ve turned out to be quite clearly distinct from them both. Really, if anyone fostered me, it was a number of collectives or movements: generations of Jews, the Romantics, the Dadaists, the NY School and the Language Posse, not to mention my own dear flarfkindred, where the influence is multidirectional and nonhegemonic. Beyond that, I guess most of my influences are nonliterary, and anyway irreducible to individuals, no matter how many individuals I ape or admire.

I wasn’t uncomfortable with the relationship on view between Tisa and Chris. I thought it was beautiful, actually, and the threads of connection were clear and interesting. They both write a complex opaquely subjective intellectual kind of fiction/essay/prose, they are both profoundly engaged with the visual, they both proudly occupy the margins, make the margins their centers. They are engaged, energetic readers.

I loved what Chris wrote about Tisa in her introduction: “We are constantly curating not just our lives but the texture of our consciousness.”

There was a funny moment in the Q and A afterwards when, after Erica Hunt had asked the readers to distinguish between canon/ lineage or influence/ movement when Eileen Myles dubbed Tisa and Chris as “New Feminist Imaginaries” because they create new spaces to inhabit via their writing, and Tisa said, smartly, “You heard it here first: New Feminist Imaginaries!”

OK, I have to go to bed so I can wake up early to attend my birthday tomorrow.

I suppose it’s still PMS, in addition to the contracted feeling of winter and impending birthday, but today’s theme is things I miss. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate what’s present, but I’m having some kind of hollow fearful feeling around the things I am missing.

I miss Bolinas, that little field on the mesa just above Agate Beach where I found the wild strawberry. I can’t forget that flavor, more like a strawberry than any strawberry I had eaten before or have eaten since.

I really miss my first boyfriend.

I miss hanging out at NeverNeverland in Shimokitazawa with the Davids, drinking Oolong-cha.

I miss Stephanie’s blog; I recently wrote and told her so. I missed it so much I started reading its archives.

I miss the crowds at the Zinc Bar when Brendan & Douglas were curating. The new space is better, but NY feels different now.

I miss my cat Nikolai, although there’s nothing wrong with Dante and Nemo and I love them both intensely. I do miss their kittenhoods, though.

I miss The Farm, where was it, way down at the end of Army St.? It’s not called Army Street any more, is it. And I miss the Deaf Club, where Zippy Pinhead once copped a feel, and The People’s Temple, where I would sit on the stairs and split a bottle of Jack Daniels with my juvenile delinquent pals.

I miss my bedloft in Sausalito that later became a bulb box in Bolinas.

I miss learning about blues and gospel at Shasta school.

I miss the really tense, gray atmosphere at 80 Langton St. in the 80s, and my weird asymmetrical haircut at the time. I miss that reading of Clark Coolidge’s of The Maintains I think it was accompanied by piano. I miss going to what was the restaurant, La Fiesta?, afterwards with the poets. La Fiesta?

I miss having my hair bright orange, as recently as three years ago. Two years?

I miss this particular pair of boots I got in Japan and wore completely out. They were burgundy with waffle crepe platforms, round toe, just above the ankles with a lug-sole. No one, no one makes boots like that. They were perfect.

I totally miss karaoke boxes. I miss hearing enka outside or at karaoke and not just in my iPod.

I miss these mentaiko omelettes I could get at this one place in Shimokitazawa; I think they mixed the mentaiko with mayonnaise. It was creamy, Served with shredded cabbage. Divine.

I don’t mean this as a creative writing exercise, I really do miss these things. I think I might also miss creative writing exercises, though. I miss the period I went through when I could never be so guileless as to write something like this.

I miss growing tulips on my veranda. I miss having a veranda.

I miss it being any season but winter. Winter can suck my ass. I really miss tree leaves.

I miss all my lovers except one who should be expunged from the record.

I miss all my Halloween costumes, even the ones I only remember from photographs, like when I was two and I was a clown covered with big polka-dots in primary colors.

I miss last weekend already, and it’s only Monday.

I miss the whole-wheat crust pizzas at the Resh House in Tam Junction where Uncle Vinty played with Pamela Polland and the Cockettes dropped in with their eyelashes and doily-patched jeans.

I miss the experience of eating artichokes being something new, like it was when I was seven.

Gary walks in and says to say I miss him, too. I miss writing to Gary. He reminds me that I’m missing the Preston Sturges movie that is here waiting for us from Netflix, so I will stop this ridiculously indulgent journal entry, which could go on infinitely, I guess, and go watch it, even though it will probably make me miss the 40s, even though I wasn’t even born yet.

What do you miss?

You have to admire Michael Kelleher’s winter project.

He is “fondling” his books!

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A Sunday morning, Dante being especially cute, dashing through the apartment like he’s on a rampage, letting out little myows and ending in these crazy tumble-pounces. Gary has five Hong Kong DVDs piled up in front of the computer, he’s googling them and deciding which one to watch, I’ve eaten fried eggs with shoyu and furikake, there’s a powdered-sugar dusting of snow on everything outside. So much winter still to be got through. I don’t approve of the winter, I detest it, what’s the deal with it, make it stop.

My 45th birthday arrives next Wednesday with neither a bang nor a whimper… more like (nods to Lorraine here…) an insistent humming. Is there still time to turn the plane around? (nods to Nick here) Or to seduce the pilot? (nods to Sharon) “Don’t worry about things you can’t control.” (nods to my stockbroker)

Out in deep Astoria last night to celebrate Melissa’s 40th. Sitting on Brandon’s couch with Drew, Katie, MacGregor, & Gary watching Melissa’s home movies from her babyhood and also Brandon’s movies. I have asked Brandon if he will be my guru and teach me how to make movies like his. I liked the scenes of the crazy lady with the crazy frizzy hair. His movies make me uncomfortable to be human, and I like that. Drew said that the scenes of cable-access poetry readings made him feel depressed about being a poet and full of self-loathing. In a circle, we discussed this, Katie and Brandon and Drew and Gary and myself; they wondered how did this aberration, this poetry thing, happen, and wouldn’t it be convenient not to have fallen into it. I feel differently, and rue all the bourgeois things in my lifestyle unconnected to poetry, but perhaps that’s just my upbringing.

Delicious canolli at the party, and I don’t even like canolli. Did I spell that right? On the train home, Gary was iPhone-bowling. On the train there, with Drew and Katie, looking at the rows of passengers all with their white earbuds. Earbuds, earbuds. There’s a poem in there somewhere, having to do both with developing foetuses and postmodern alienation.

Yesterday’s reading was Carolee Schneeman and Tony Conrad. I showed up a bit late but did see most of Carolee’s film of her performance piece in which she made a giant apple pie for the audience, addressing, among other things, the theme of “the good breast.” Tony Conrad read what I guess was a video scenario that was kinky in content but so flatly told ¬– the analogy with Burroughs kept coming up, later ¬– that it was IMHO about 110% de-eroticized. Sexual descriptions not from a subject position are invariably boring.

I skipped a couple of diary days, didn’t I, well, it’s not my resolution, I’m only piggybacking. Gary can tell you about the lovely dinner at Rob & Kim & Coco’s. I only want to add how fun it was to be on their couch with all of them AND their hound dog Walter AND their cat Fella. How cozy! And is there anything on the planet COOLER than Coco and her sitar? I think not.

PMSing, so furious today, sitting at my desk eating Calimyrna figs, cashews, and almonds.

Working on the new curriculum, making lists of “suggested activities and assignments.”

What’s the matter with people. Really.