I HAVE SO MANY THINGS TO WRITE
Thinking about the lyric essay versus the blog post versus the academic essay. I read this Kate Zambreno interview yesterday as a gift to myself for having written 4 more pages for my thesis project. (Writing that sentence made me feel like shit). HAHA MY SENSE OF BEING PRODUCTIVE IS SO UNSTABLE, NOT SUPPLE OR FLUID MORE LIKE BRITTLE. Subject to circumstance. I want to live in my writing and reading but I’m so slow. I force myself to think the days I spend staring into space are funny. Really, they’re not funny, but humor cloaks discomfort. I guess.
I made a list of things I need to write:
(for school)
-THIS THESIS PROPOSAL. 30 - 50 pages of research on heroines, revolution/revolt, voices, making noise versus speaking, the difficulty of speaking, the space of narrative versus the space of the text, epic poetry, the universal and the particular, quotation marks and parentheses, hell-heaven-limbo-purgatory, urban hell, militant fatigue. All as seen in/through Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette and Monique Wittig’s Virgile, Non. I have to make myself look like I have theoretical chops. I have to train myself to write like a French academic. I really just want to write a meandering essay about these texts, interspersed with poems and collages and dramatic dialogue.
-an essay about this performance of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece that says things that Julia Bryan-Wilson hasn’t already said better. I need to address race, nationality, gender, war, sexuality, how we see (or don’t) the way white women cut her clothes, how do we interpret Ono’s flitting eyes and that moment when she almost gives up the performance and reaches for a floppy piece of her cut slip.
-an essay on Anatoli Kouznetsov’s Babi Yar. How he punctuates personal memory with excerpts from Soviet and Nazi - owned Ukrainian newpapers. La parole ukrainienne. What is this text? (a literature of witness, a protest of totalitarianism). How does he work with and around the constraints of socialist realism? I don’t feel qualified to write this.
(personal blabhblah)
-MICHIGAN, because my partner might come, my partner might see West Michigan-GRAND RAPIDS, GRANDVILLE, WYOMING. Ahhh.
-The politics of English language babysitting. What does it mean for me, a white US citizen, to work with an upper middle class family living in a highly gentrified neighborhood of Montreuil (a mostly working class suburb of Paris). Class dynamics: the kids don’t understand that I am working. Gender and age dynamics between a 4 year old girl and an 8 year old boy. The pictures I draw for them, the pictures they draw for me. Feeling guilty about how emotionally attached I am to the little girl and how I am sometimes I am irritated by the boy’s aggressive sense of entitlement.
-That time I went to New York and saw the Laurel Nakadate exposition at PS1. Being a group of Midwestern girls giddy and touched and emotionally overturned. Feeling things for girls I could have almost been very close to. Gratuitous pictures of yourself: how I just now understand why Nakadate’s crying pictures are so important. What is gratuitous, anyway.
- Suicide in the epic. The lake of suicides in Wittig’s Virgile, Non: women who wear purple cords around their necks and strangle each other because they are tired of fighting. The suicides in Dante’s Inferno: souls turned into trees that bleed when a branch is broken off. The harpies feed upon them. Why this is important to me: because I tried to write an epic and it ended up being a cycle of poems about feeling simultaneously absent and hyper present in a relationship, absent and hyper present in the bedroom, absent and hyper present in the streets. But the poems never left the bedroom, really. Claustrophobic. The characters fucked. The characters were poltergeists. Maybe one of them jumped out a window like I have tried to do. It almost turned into a poem about internet ghost towns, web pages of the deceased, but I gave up. A dyke’s suicide.
Nathalie Quintane “pas besoin de savoir son nom correctement pour savoir que c’est celui-là”
"What does it mean when a white female English professor is eager to include a work by Toni Morrison on the syllabus of her course but then teaches that work without ever making reference to race or ethnicity? I have heard individual white women “boast” about how they have shown students that black writers are “as good” as the white male canon when they do not call attention to race. Clearly, such pedagogy is not an interrogation of the biases conventional canons (if not all canons) establish, but yet another form of tokenism."
bell hooks in “Embracing Change” from the book Teaching to Transgress (via bowfolk)
(via femmefag)
feel like shit in public/
/hide in my hair
Vérité et justice pour Amine Bentounsi. Manifestation SAMEDI 12 MAI NOISY-LE-SEC
Solidarité avec les familles victimes de crimes policiers
Pour répondre aux deux manifestations de la police en soutien à leur collègue mis en examen pour homicide volontaire en date du 21 avril 2012
nouvelle manifestation le samedi 12 mai 2012 à 20h00 à Noisy-le –Sec devant le café du Celtique pour dire non à la présomption de légitime défense, stop aux bavures policières, non au permis de tuer. Au sein de la police il y a des flics qui se cachent derrière l’uniforme. L’heure est grave, ça voudrait dire que demain n’importe quel citoyen pourrait avoir subir le sort de ce petit frère qu’on a assassiné d’une balle dans le dos. Ça serait rétablir la peine de mort sous prétexte d’avoir un casier judiciaire, cela deviendra légitime de tirer dans le dos. Mobilisons-nous pour que ces policiers qui commettent des bavures soient condamnés.
RDV SAMEDI 20H- RER E, arrêt Noisy-le-Sec, depuis Paris : départ GARE du Nord-Magenta ou Saint-Lazare-Haussmann
Source: http://atouteslesvictimes.samizdat.net/?p=868
——
Notes in English (TRIGGER WARNING for discussion of police violence)
I am mainly posting this to try and get people in Ile-de-France to come out for this demonstration against police violence. But I’m also thinking that maybe I should translate some of the information about what happened since there appears to be so little in English. Even in French, there aren’t a lot of articles out there that aren’t obviously fucked up (most sources I’ve found try to paint Bentounsi as a deliquent, coding their racism with reactionary language).
A brief summary : Amine Bentounsi was shot in the back by a police officer on April 21st. He had been under an arrest warrant since 2010 because he didn’t return to a prison in Châteaudun following a period of leave. Three police officers approached him by foot in Noisy-le-Sec (a Northern suburb of Paris) while a fourth watched from a car. The latter shot him in the back as Bentounsi tried to run away. The police have tried to spin this as “legitimate self defense.”
Since the story broke, both the Front National and Sarkozy have come out in favor of legal measures that would essentially bail out police officers who commit acts of violence on the job. While Hollande hasn’t flat out supported these same measures, he is in favor of giving police officers who commit violent acts administrative protection that would prevent them from losing their salaries. (If you can read French, you can get some more direct quotes from Sarkozy, Hollande and Le Pen here)
Bentounsi’s sister, Amal Bentounsi, has been very vocal about the police violence that her brother faced. She’s talked about her anger over the ways in which the story of her brother’s murder has been manipulated to political ends (particularly since this happened right around the presidential elections). I found a few statements from her here: she says that she feels her brother’s murder was premeditated and that the police had killed him twice— “once psychologically, once physically.” She is also working on a book about her brother.
Further reading (in French): La peine de mort a été abolie, pas la mise à mort: Retour sur l’exécution d’Amine Bentounsi
Feel free to message me if you want me to translate excerpts or to summarize any articles you might find.
Tadeusz Kantor’s Wielopole, Wielopole. In Polish with French subtitles.
File under: “Understanding closed spaces OR how do bedrooms work”
I AM “ENJOYING THE EMPTY SOUND OF THE VOWELS.”
as in:
“trusting the vowel sounds that rise in the mind”
“the whole body trusting the vowel sounds”
-Allen Ginsberg lecture on vividness and close observation in writing
Ginsberg argues that grounding the poem in “minute particulars” is how one keeps the writing from becoming too solipsistic. A really Blakean/objectivist position that he relocates onto the body. See: his discussion of Anne Waldman’s “Uh-oh Plutonium,” how she took the rhythm of one of her “voices” and made it song. Ginsberg believes in a certain kind of discipline. Grounding the poem in the natural object: this is how you train the mind to perceive more vividly. He talks about stepping out of the body to observe the workings of the mind. So wait, a state of mind is in fact the mind working itself AND the material around it?
To what extent do I believe that I am capable of looking at my own mind? Why do I take pictures of myself? Sometimes I’m just a bust.
if you are in philly or nyc, you should go see my friends read
1. Tonight in Philadelphia my friend Genji will be reading at the Kelly Writers House. He’s going to be reading from some recent manuscripts and talking about alternative spaces for poetry and poetics. He also told me that he’ll be selling/giving away small zines.
Event details:
Thursday, April 26, at 6:00 PM in the Arts Café
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
No registration required — this event is free & open to the public
GENJI AMINO co-directs a summer school of poetics outside of Santa Fe, NM. As this year’s junior fellow at the KWH, he organized a pair of talks around poetics and ideology entitled Philadelphia Lawyer (clever, shrewd attorney). Recently, he has been in Paris organizing a reading series and participating in the poets and critics series of conferences and other readings put on by double change (more info here: poetscriticsparisest.blogspot.com). He has published poetry in adj noun magazine and Mouvement, has an interview in Jacket2, and has work forthcoming in Open Letter.
2. aaaand if you are in NYC, you should see my friend Debbie Hu read with her friend Cat on May 3rd at 8:30. It’s going to be on a roof (!)
More event details below:
i am reading poems in new york with my friend cat (@trying2endacct) a week from tomorrow!
debbie and i are reading in brooklyn
we are reading unpublished work and work composed for the occasion
date: thursday, may 3, 8:30 p.m. (reading will begin around 9)
location: 88 starr, brooklyn (near jefferson st. on the L)
"To maintain their power, dominant groups create and maintain a popular system of “commonsense” ideas that support their right to rule. In the United States, hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are often so pervasive that it is difficult to conceptualize alternatives to them, let alone ways of resisting the social practices that they justify."
Patricia Hill Collins (via wretchedoftheearth)
(via lazz)
views from an apartment on the 5th floor
working at ju’s place alone while he is out running errands. blah blah productivity. yesterday was basically the same. in the evening i ended up smoking a lot and getting really into the copy of apollinaire’s caligrammes i took from his mom’s bookshelf. i guess that was sort of unproductive but also not.
paper writing tires my eyes so i keep doing exercises like “journal with your eyes closed” or “turn off all the lights and babble to yourself.” i end up masturbating 9 times out of 10. i don’t know why my blog writing always sounds so serious because i actually think this laziness is pretty funny.
i should probably share this picture of chantal, who over time has torn a hole in the gauzy part of ju’s curtains so she can shelter herself and sleep by the window at the same time. 
