some things about portland

• In the coffee shop in which I sit and type, a girl in a Vanilla Ice backpack is inquiring about the price of soup. It's clear she has some money issues. The barista is directing her to a local apple tree. They've spent several minutes now, discussing the quality of that tree's fruit.
• There is a small red tricycle locked to the bike rack outside the Tin Shed.
• As noted on facebook, observed: two men in utilikilts, strangers encountering each other across a busy street, giving each other a thumb's up for their clothing choice.
• There is an initiative to replace some parking spots with bike parking. Laurel explains the theory thus: look how many more customers you can cram into one car's worth of space!
• Two pierced girls discuss pirates at the coffee shop on Mississippi. I roll my eyes, thinking they are part of this stupid punk rock pirate trend, only to realize they are discussing Somali pirates.
• There are traffic signs on the major bike routes around the city. They tell you how to get from one place to another, and also how many minutes it will take you to bike there.
• My local library is in the same building as Whole Foods.
• Older people whiz by you on hiking trails. Younger people knit on them.
• Houses are so personalized that I always know exactly where I am not by the streets but by the houses: the baby pink and baby blue one with the gargoyle, the one with the round upper level porch like a crow's nest, the one with the window in the fence (discovered last night), the one with the tiny palms at regular intervals, the one with the massive acrylic/oil portraits hanging on the outside, the one with the red neon heart visible through the window, the one with the rhubarb garden out front, the tall one on the hill that was two houses stacked on on the other, the one with the giant stuffed animal on the porch, and ours with its rosemary bushes and columnar apples and sign that says Salut.
  

yeah ok i dropped off the planet. but i'm back with muppets.

debate.

safe arrival

We went out of range of electricity, so I haven't blogged the rest of the trip yet. I will soon, but for now, suffice it to say that I made it safe into the city of roses. My housemates painted my room with a beautiful art deco pattern and flowers. There were fresh flowers from my neighbors in a vase on the floor. Walking to the coffee shop today I passed plums and lavender. My car smells like sage. There are rumors of fig and olive trees in my yard. My old furniture is still in use, and the pizza box collage I made at the Providence Children's Museum is still gracing the wall. I'm home.

the buffalo bill roundup

We think we saw every main street in Kansas yesterday, almost. Although the rain prevented us from running around in the tallgrass prairie, we did manage to see a lot of flat land. First stop on the Santa Fe Trail was Cassoday, Kansas, population 131. We avoided the stares of people and even cows who knew we weren't from around these parts. We heard a story about Columbia students taking a greyhound down to Cottonwood Falls, an event which was so momentous that a local newspaper wrote a story about it. Then we ate at a Mennonite restaurant in Hillsdale, Kansas - brisket! sauerkraut! peanut butter pie! Finally, we ended up at the Boot Hill B&B in Dodge City, which in its heyday was part of what my mother always termed Bloody Kansas, and which the brochure tells us was once termed "Buffalo Capitol of the World," "Queen of the Cowtowns," and the "Wickedest Little City in America." We're visiting on a Sunday, of course.

tallgrass prairie beckons

10:16 at the beacon, ny train; irritating hershey, pennsylvania with its chocolate tourist trap; hamburger inn in delaware, ohio; champagne and blackberry pie in bloomington's bryant park; the world's largest ketchup bottle in collinsville, illinois; malteds at crown candy kitchen and a tour of a striated, gentrifying neighborhood in st. louis, missouri; sweet indie rock in lawrence, ks. one dissed "lemonade stand" (coke in cans) and one reluctantly patronized "lemonade stand" (watermelon kool-aid). one shipped suitcase. many cups of coffee. part of the devil's dictionary. part of a geographical history of the west circa 1908. lots of icelandic punk.

photos in reverse chronological order.

indiana farewell

leaving bloomington for the last time tomorrow morning. blackberry pie in bryant park with dear friends and champagne from my cousin on the occasion of finishing my thesis. i'm very sad to leave here. i don't have a home here anymore. the dear house with the green porch swing has a basketball hoop in the driveway. restaurants have closed. dunkin donuts has opened. boxcar books has moved. but the crickets are still out in the twilight. next stop, kansas.

p.s.

I owe lots of letters and edits and such right now. I'll be in touch soon. I swear.

stay tuned

Now that I'm out of the communications black hole that is The Putney School Summer Programs, I'm going to start posting again. And what better way than to document the great Cross Country journey of 2008! My cousin and I are driving west to my new home in Portland and we're stopping in Bloomington for one last hurrah, in Dodge City to dig up the bones of gunslingers (the same bones the boys used to dig up and shake at my grandma), in Grand Teton to hike and wherever else we feel like stopping.

The road beckons!

vanessa says i should post

And well I should. It's hard to update from Putney, however, because when I'm not teaching I'm lesson planning and when I'm not lesson planning I'm writing evaluations and when I'm not writing evaluations I'm staffing a contradance and when I'm not staffing a contradance I'm playing badminton and when I'm not playing badminton I'm paddling around in swimming holes and when I'm not paddling around in swimming holes I'm watching odd animations and when I'm not watching odd animations I'm getting my students' anthology ready and when I'm not getting my students' anthology ready I'm hiking in the woods and when I'm not hiking in the woods I'm drinking coffee at the co-op and when I'm not drinking coffee at the co-op I'm spraining my wrist playing volleyball and when I'm not playing volleyball I'm demonstrating flamenco dances and when I'm not demonstrating flamenco dances I'm demonstrating castanets and when I'm not demonstrating castanets I'm reading at faculty performances and when I'm not reading at faculty performances I'm watching fireflies and when I'm not watching fireflies I'm eating barbecue from a schoolbus and when I'm not eating barbecue from a schoolbus I'm doing Nathanial Katz yoga and when I'm not doing Nathanial Katz yoga I'm taking pictures of the mountains and when I'm not taking pictures of the mountains I'm petting the newborn calves and when I'm not petting the newborn calves I'm having arguments about genre fiction and when I'm not having arguments about genre fiction I'm making accordion books and when I'm not making accordion books I'm singing tumbala laika and when I'm not singing tumbala laika I'm on the phone with the darling loving giving friends who are helping move my earthly belongings cross country and when I'm not on the phone with the darling loving giving friends I'm weeding and when I'm not weeding I'm applying for jobs and when I'm not applying for jobs I'm trying to get into the ceramics studio and when I'm not trying to get into the ceramics studio I'm driving to Montpelier to eat strawberries with old friends and when I'm not eating strawberries I'm writing letters and when I'm not writing letters, and these are slender moments, I'm reading. So there you have it.

But I'll try to post some writings I've done, some little writings, and some entertaining little things to watch. Here's one. Warning, it's disturbing, highly but I find it incredibly beautiful:

boston originally, bloomington most recently, portland eventually

My mother and I decided to take a spontaneous vacation to Key West to bond, since we're both in liminal spaces - me between graduate school and life after graduate school, Mom between college presidents and close to retirement. It's been the best vacation I've had in ages - the perfect combination of activity and relaxation, doing what we feel like when we feel like it, and serendipitous discoveries. I haven't seen any geckos, but the big surprise for me was how many wild roosters hang out all over this island. Also, I've seen a number of chihuahuas running loose, and I have a theory that the gay men who come visit here lose them and now they run wild in packs, getting ready to challenge the cats at the Hemingway house to a gang war dance-off.

Today was a momentous day. I:

• Saw Hemingway's typewriter and toilet.
• Petted one of Hemingway's cats.
  
• Ate conch fritters.
• Narrowly escaped getting chomped on by a shark in the ocean (for reals!).
• Watched 3 weddings happen simultaneously on the beach.
  
• Went to the Southernmost Dairy Queen.
• Saw a giant rainbow rooster float at the Pride Parade.
  
• Waved to Cuba.
• Took pictures of the zero mileage maker of Route 1 (a road that has deep childhood meaning for me).
• Got caught in several rain storms.
• Watched my freckles surface.
• Watched a manatee-dolphin-shark frolic in the waves.
• Ate Cuban bread for breakfast.
• Read some of Junot Diaz's latest, finally, which is awesome so far.
  

There was a lot more, but I can't remember now. Tomorrow we're going kayaking and hopefully we'll see sting rays and egrets. We'll be making our way back tomorrow night. I'm hoping for one last ocean swim. I left my phone in Connecticut, so if you've been trying me, sorry. Then it's Vermont on Thursday and Portland after that.

Really, I recommend everyone go to the warm ocean after moving. I did yoga in the warm water and my sore muscles feel much better. Pictures when I get back!

dilly dilly

I was googling Bloomington to try to find more pictures of the flood-ravaged downtown (water up to folks' knees!) or information on tomorrow's predicted severe whether when I came across this news story. Somehow it seems to perfectly encapsulate one aspect of Bloomington to me.

small town part II

There's a sweet little cafe in town, Neannie's, where I like to go for brunch on occasion. It's in my neighborhood, not "downtown" like most of the other restaurants, and thus attracts a decidedly older, more local crowd than the undergrads who frequent many of the other spots. Sadly, shortly after the new (young!) owner bought the business, her landlord decided not to renew her lease, hoping for more money from an office. Nearly every time I go I get the Mediterranean quiche; although I'm not the hugest quiche fan, the spinach and kalamata olives in this quiche are surprisingly delightful. Seriously, it's easier to find good Tibetan food in Indiana than good Italian or Greek. So I ate at Neannie's yesterday and as I was ordering, I lamented to the owner/server that I had unknowingly eaten my last of her delightful quiches. She promptly ran into the back and gave me the recipe. Her recipe. On an index card. With her handwriting. Torn out of a recipe box. What a nice thing to do for a relative stranger! It made my day. I can only hope she has it memorized and not that she's never going to make it again.

another boring romantic that's me

I never thought I would live in a town as small as this. As I was walking to the Farmer's Market this morning, Sonya and Mike drove past and picked me up in their little car. We shared a brief chat until they dropped me off across from the wildflowers of the market. Inside, I ran into Michael playing upright bass, Danny buying strawberries, and my thesis director all wild-haired and summery. On the way home, I ran into my hair stylist, taking down the "no parking" signs he'd made out of poster-board and stuck up in his windows to ward off the Farmer's Market crowd. He used to cut hair for John Cougar Mellencamp and his model wife (who live in this small town), and now he cuts mine. Cheap and amazing. Yesterday I turned on WFHB, Bloomington community radio, and who should be the DJ but the director of the Creative Writing program. I recognized her by her voice. She played the new Portishead. Whenever I do anything outside, such as holding class by the art museum's red doughnut sculpture, or tacking up signs for a yard sale, multiple people call me later to say that they saw me. The local bar really is the proverbial place where everybody knows your name.

It gets cloying at times, and I'm definitely ready to move on. Still, I'm so grateful, now that it's ending, to have known what this life is like. The kind of self you inhabit in a small town is as real, but in an inverted way, from that you inhabit in the anonymity of a big city. In the latter, I feel isolated from the buzz and thrust, and therefore myself in a solitary, observant way. In the former, you are forced into being yourself, because you are always apt to run into someone when you least feel like performing. The trade-off is that, since you get those sides of others too, there's only so much resentment you can feel about being caught in your dirtiest shirt or weeping in public.

And when you begin to notice that half-chewed corn husks or cloth flowers begin to appear regularly on your porch and lawn, you can't help but imagine that the person leaving them is well aware exactly for whom they are intended.

though i said i'd go before us and show the way back home

Vanessa is leaving tomorrow morning. I've been cleaning all weekend, except for a few hours late night during which we had a spectacular meal at Restaurant Tallent, the local haute cuisine slow food organic food restaurant. Pictures of our meals as soon as I dump my camera's contents into my computer, but let me just say that it included a strawberry rosewater "milkshake." Afterwards we saw the new Indiana Jones, which was campy in all the right ways and thoroughly enjoyable. That spitfire Karen Allen was so much fun and we agreed that Cate Blanchett can do no wrong.

So now I'm bleached out and exhausted and listening to the 4-hour mix I made for V's road trip. My house is an echo chamber with the furniture gone. My library and bedroom are full of everything I own. Leaving has become at once quite real and quite unfathomable.

i will miss soma

Overheard: "I ate some gator and it was pretty good."

yard sale days

V called me both Anne of Green Gables and Pollyana yesterday, the former when I was rhapsodizing over the moon, hanging full and white in a pinkishly blue twilight, swooped across by bats. The latter when I was opining over the unexpected merit of yesterday's yard sale: seeing stuff I've toted around idly for years walk off with people who loved it more than I ever could. A few of these:

• The hot vintage dress with the beautiful floral print that doesn't fit right went with a sweet hipster girl.
• The cheerleader doll altered so that her uniform reads "punk" goes away with a polite little girl who helped her young friends find their own spoils.
• The futon -- my first long-term post-college bed -- to an English PhD student.
• The green velvet throne chair to another English PhD student I randomly see around all the time but haven't ever officially met.
• The hot shoes and yellow shirt I never wear to my friend Sherri.
• The little red wok and pretty bowls I bought in Providence right after college to my mentee in the CW program - a young Mainer just post-college herself.
  
• The necklace from the Silver Dragon to the beautiful woman with the facial tattoo who has waited on me often at a local cafe. Her stunning child with a chest of pirate booty slung round his neck and cascading curls wandered around wielding Chris's curtain rod like a sword.

All in all, it was a pretty good day. Not as bustling as we'd hoped, but satisfying.

soon i will never have to listen to the bakehouse girls again

A gaggle of sorority girls congregated near V and me as we tried to work today. Girls like this come to this cafe all the time and are rude to the waitstaff, loud and overbearing, mean to their absent friends, and generally disruptive. V and I exacted our final revenge by riffing on their outbursts over gchat. Here is an excerpt of our mockery. It's sort of found mockery if you will, since most of the language came from the girls themselves. If you would like the whole text please see her blog. I warn you, this is entirely gratuitous frustration born of four years of dealing with overpriveleged 20 year-olds. Please do not think the less of me:

VM: they are SO RUDE here

me: oh my gawd

2:18 PM VM: I like asked for a sandwich with no fat in it

and like this turkey HAS FAT

like WTF?

me: OH MY GAWD you ARE SO OPPRESSED

VM: I know, right?

vegan cocunut curry soup over rice

I'm at Rachel's Cafe, where I've never been before. If I were going to stay in Bloomington I would come here all the time. Some kind of local theater production is about to go up and festively dressed children are standing about while a young man is shouting "yay" at regular intervals in that monotone of excitement peculiar to gentle nonprofiteers.

Please go read Mary Austin Speaker's wonderful article and ogle Kramer O'Neill's starkly lush photo essay for Last Exit Magazine, "Remains of the Day." The collaborative piece explores an Altoona, PA Taxidermy Convention.

Good News

Laura Van den Berg's story "Where We Must Be" from Indiana Review 29.1 (my first issue as Fiction Editor) has been selected for inclusion in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008! Marjorie Celona's "Y" from IR 28.2 has also been selected for the same issue. Congratulations Laura and Marjorie!

poor boys and pilgrims

I'm back from Oklahoma City. Tracy's wedding was beautiful and moving. On the way, V and I stopped at Graceland. On the whole, it was sad mostly because it felt so real, so lived in. Even though Tim Gunn would say that he questioned the taste level of the designers of Graceland, and everything there is so over-the-top it, what was most striking was how clear it was that people had actually inhabited the space. Paintings that seemed done by someone's uncle in the vicinity of ceramic chimps. A kitchen range that seemed used across the hall from green shag carpet. A carport that looked like anyone's carport. Vanessa and I remarked on the racial stratification of the employees - the inside workers were predominately white, the outside predominately African American. After leaving Graceland we ate some tasty barbecue and later stayed in a small town in Arkansas where people stared at the road from seas of belongings under shelters and packs of dogs slept on the yard of boarded up elementary schools. Here are some of the striking patterns of Graceland.

green leaves open their fists

Almost all of the work is in. The MFA band, Steven! and the MFA hip hop group, Funk Attack, played their final shows, in a raucous revel. Then I got sick. I've still got 35 finals to grade, but after that I'm officially transitioning. Next week I'll be on the road to Oklahoma for a wedding. I plan on stopping through Graceland. However, I will not be visiting Elvis Jumpsuits All Access. There's a lilac bush blooming near my house. I typed the word "lilacs" into a word pronunciation tool, but it would not pronounce it. I still don't know whether "lilux" warrants teasing but "bar-rette" is apparently a-ok. Last spring in Bloomington!

Tiny poem from Aracelis Girmay's Teeth:

FIEL

Love me, love me with two hands & no rearview.

half buried, half free

The visitors have come and gone, the Breakfast at Tiffany's shower has been thrown, the thesis readings have been executed with great success, and I'm left mired in papers (queering primitivism in Wallace Thurman's Fire!!) and exams (French!) and syllabi (my own version of a graduate Intro to Cultural Studies course). So expect a little less of me for a short while.

In the meantime, send your prose poems and short shorts to Indiana Review's 1/2K Prize. The illustrious, hilarious and unsettling Russell Edson is judging. Yee-haw.

private publics (public privates?)

Fascinating photo essay on latrine graffiti in Kuwait and Afghanistan. Apparently photographer Steve Featherstone has another essay on the same subject in A Public Space 5, if you want to go out and get a print version.

who knew indiana could be such a funky state?

Check out the audio from the funk reading over at the IR Blog and you can pretend you were there getting funkified for yourself. It was a pretty amazing night and the earlier panel, which addressed themes of history, memory, race, music, and much more, really demonstrated for me how coming up with new rubrics can jog floating ideas into place or dislodge the stale ones. There are some photos up on the blog too. My little summary of the four readers:

Aracelis Girmay is a wise and attentive woman, and I'm digging her book, Teeth.

Tyehimba Jess among other talents, plays a mean harmonica.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a delicate, but hilarious, bird.

Patrick Rosal is my new literary crush. Man can rock a mike with joy.

Up there's Abdel Shakur, master of ceremonies, mad genius behind IR's forthcoming Funk Issue. Photo credit: Ben Weller. I hope he doesn't mind.

save the date

I have two collaborative poems with the incomparable Tracy Truels coming out in Subtropics in May. They're from a series of Accidental Death poems we've been working on; collaborating with Tracy has been a complex, provocative and restorative experience. If you haven't seen Subtropics yet, you should check it out. They're relatively new, out of The University of Florida and edited by phenomenal writer in his own right, David Leavitt, and they've already published some amazing people. I'm honored to be in their pages!

Here's the plug for the issue from their website:

Subtropics 6 will be out in May—a double issue with two covers! Featuring stories by Jacob M. Appel, John Brandon, Nadia Kalman, and Celeste Ng; an essay by Timothy Cook; a novella by Peter Wells; and 41 poets, including Peter Cooley, Averill Curdy, Richard Kenney, John Kinsella, Kathleen Rooney, Reginald Shepherd, A. E. Stallings, G. C. Waldrep, and Suzanne Zweizig. In translation: poems by Tomaz Salamun and Hai Zi, and a story by Ricardo Silva Romero.

a small observation

The hyacinths are out, perfuming the streets of Bloomington.

why words matter

This is so depressing. Do a little search on thesaurus.com for "man" and for "woman" and these come up as the first results:

MAN
Homo sapiens, being, body, character, creature, earthling, fellow creature, flesh, folk, human, human being, humanity, humankind, individual, mankind, mortal, mortality, person, personage, populace, somebody, soul, species

WOMAN
Mrs., babe, bird, bride, broad, chick, chicken, companion, dame, debutante, doll, gal, gentlewoman, girl, girlfriend, inamorata, kitten, lady, lass, love, lover, maid, maiden, mama, mate, matron, miss, mistress, moll, nymph, old lady, paramour, partner, pigeon, rib, she, skirt, spinster, spouse, squaw, sweetheart, tomato, tootsie, virgin, wife

Aside from the obvious ways these sorts of reference points construct our understanding of gender, there's some real muddiness going on here. Seriously, since when is a "mistress" the same as a woman? A "virgin"? Someone needs to get re-educated on the definition of synonym.

EDIT: The folks in my Harlem Renaissance/Black Arts/Negritude class laughed at me for getting all up in arms about this. They said I'd been listening to Black Power talk all semester and now this was my moment to get riled. It was pretty funny.

blackberry, blackberry, blackberry

I would like to hire Robert Hass to read to me every night, and it wouldn't matter whether good dreams resulted or nightmares. He could even talk about environmental stewardship. That would be ok. Today he read my old-time favorite poem of his, "Meditation at Lagunitas." It was fun having him in Bloomington the day he won the Pulitzer, and it was fun hearing him talk like my LA roommate about being a Californian living in the Midwest, delighting in seasons in silly ways like having fun scraping ice off windshields.

I also saw Okkervil River tonight (whose singer was way more Wiley Wiggins and way less Northern Exposure John Corbett [Chris Stevens] than I'd expected), and while they did not play my favorite song ("Red"), they did kick some ass. Howlin Rain was good too - they brought out my inner hitchhiker. And I got to have one of those fun cross-generational moments where you exchange eye rolls with a sixteen-year-old girl because the asshole drunk skeezy superfan dude who's shaking his fist wildly and bopping like crazy is about to take one of you out. I'd been rolling my eyes at -her- all night for her cell phone recording/photography, so it was nice to have a moment of feminist companionship.

Also, since I haven't yet posted about the Funk Reading, I now owe you three posts. Tattoo, sex worker's art show, funk reading. And a promotional post soon to come.

i don't sleep i dream

In unstable times in my life my psyche always decides to turn itself up a notch and provide me with the strangest, most unsettling dreams. The kind of dreams it's hard to wrench yourself out of, whether they're good or bad, because they're so consuming. Lately I've had a spate of these dreams, and it's hard to know whether to be grateful for their vividness or to be frustrated by their disruptiveness. The other night I was climbing a cliff away from a beach, when the cliff turned to sand and I was grappling with the root systems of wildflowers trying to climb it. I was also explaining to someone the story of JFK rescuing the crew of his PT boat with a coconut. A couple of nights ago I was in some fascist country that was a mixture of Nazi Germany, Japan and North Korea. I was breaking into a militarized building with a few friends in order to dig up the graves of people we'd once known. For some reason, I had to go through this process several times in order to clutch the decomposing body of a loved one in my arms. Last night I was being accosted by someone in scuba gear. I'd really like to wake up feeling well rested for once.

spring break cincinnati!

My friends and I are such nerds that we drove to Cincinnati last weekend to CRASH A CONFERENCE. The panel was on fat and sex - interrelated topics that my friend Sonya is working on. We rocked the one panel we attended, asking the incisive questions that the discourse lacked, and then flounced off in our fluttering skirts like some kind of Western heroes who bounce into town, stir things up, and seconds later are in the wind. It felt good to put my MA work to some use. While at the Hilton, we poked our heads into the Hall of Mirrors - the hotel where the conference was held was attired in lovely art-deco garb, down to the arches over the conference rooms, each of which embodied a different Greek style - and admired the baroque excess.

After we left we went to a vintage store called Casa Blanca where the owner, Hollywood, who seriously doubled for Hollywood from Mannequin - aw yeah, 80's conspicuous consumption in its heyday - styled us in absurd getups that involved neckties as scarves and underboob belts. Then we ate ice cream that Oprah says is the best ice cream in the country. I've also eaten the red velvet cake that Oprah says is the best red velvet cake in the country. If only I could eat them together, it would be like being at an Oprah birthday party.

real live girl

My friend Tanya makes fascinating video art that explores the borderlands between the public and the private. In a culture obsessed with reality and authenticity (see my Peggy Selzer post), her work manages to both exist autonomously as art and to self-reflexively critique the modes through which we perform and embody our lives. One of these days I will ask her whether I can write the essay on her art that I have brewing in my head. All this to say, Tanya's uploaded a bunch of her videos onto this website: http://tanyabezreh.blip.tv. Some of them are recordings of live performance pieces she's created and some of them, like the DIY Holiday Musical, are self-contained "films." Go check out her stuff if you get a chance. She also blogs. Whether or not you think analytically about media like I do, you can appreciate how cute and endearing Tanya is, and admire how her work manages to be both joyful and candid, whimsical and analytical. p.s. I stole that image from Tanya's website.