expansion?

what's expanding is my girth, as i recover from 10 days on the east coast 5 of which were spent sick in bed in the home of my childhood in newton centre MA.
what i'm hoping will expand is vision, creativity, energy, productivity, imagination, generosity, compassion, mindfulness.
the phone rings and i know it's long distance but i'm glued to the screen here...stymied by the fretfulness of available activities, i can always turn to this sort of reassuring diaristic writing, which soothes me.
i don't feel like evaluating dissertation projects, though they're asking me to log on to show i exist...
i don't feel like proofing mIEKAL's novel (i mean right this moment i don't feel like it; what i've read is actually great)
i shd go to the gym but i don't have time b4 i head off to leslie's bat mitzvah party (gorgeous happy-making time at the shul this morning, had a deep experience of my people, though i had no idea what the f*** anyone was saying, except i caught words like "moses" and "egypt" here and there...and the food was great, hence expanding girth etc)
i shd clean my room...
i shd cut 22,000 words from my ms
i shd write another letter of rec
i shd send a condolence card to my mother's friend Pia
i shd...uh, nominate someone for something
argh.
all i feel like doing is...writing in this little space, my comfort zone, and reading yet another bio of iggy, who is also a taurus.
what-evah!
all of these things will get done except the cleaning of the room. who really cares?
so, i feel better, energized, already, having written my banal little confession, sweetly packaged in bloggy pyjamas and sent off to bed in cyberspace.

fin de semestre blues...

sleeping, sleeping, reading silly rock and roll bios, latest was Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, about Phil Spector, who is interesting as a demented diasporoid, and about whom i did a bit of work in a paper on Adeena Karasick...but lots has been going on. First, Renee Gladman and Carla Harryman came to give a reading under the auspices of VG:Voices from the Gaps and the UMN's Institute for Advanced Study. They were terrific; Renee read 2 pieces, one about a woman dying from being hit by a car, losing blood and observing the activity swirling around her in response to the accident, the other a brilliant piece about orientation, disorientation, trying to get from one place to another in a city without using the handdrawn map in her back pocket, just asking strangers and trying to reconcile all the crazy and familiar things people say in response to being asked directions. Carla gave a spirited and equally brilliant reading of 3 of her Adorno's Noise hybrid essays; the first a breakneck speed Acker-esque (in theme if not in style) piece about being fucked/bullied by the President; the second a long piece that ranged over the galaxy system ("McBasin") to a meditation on a fiber-sculpture woman corpse by a woman artist that resonated strongly with Renee's first piece, then...anyway it went all over the place to v impressive effect. The last piece, which was somewhat blurred by a lot of folks needing to leave, was a speedy word-salad pirouette through...can't remember as well. Anyway the house was packed, it was good, and Adam Schrag manned our new camcorder ably. Then the next day Dhana-Marie Branton interviewed Renee really well in the VG basement office and we took her to the VG class where, though she felt it was a bit awkward (she thought she'd be reading from her work), she answered student questions about The Activist, a book that I teach a lot and that Maddy Chakraborty had put on her syllabus at my suggestion (thanks, Maddy). Then we had Ethiopian food and I took her to the Ashbery bridge by the walker art center.
THEN the following night we had our Samuel Beckett 101 Celebration in the English Dept (we missed the centennary and thought 101 sounded better anyway. It was amazing, 23 languages being read (including English), excerpts from Godot, The Unnameable and other yummy Beckett snippets. Here's the playlist:

1. Bulgarian: Stoyan Tchaprazov

2-3. Chinese/Japanese: Leo Chen, Leo's friend Toshi

4. Danish: Ole Gram

5. Dutch: Jenneke Oosterhoff and friends

6. English: Richard Rose
Philip Bratnober
David Bernstein
Kevin Riordan
Richard Rose

7. Finnish: Susan Larsen

8. French: Christophe Wall-Romana, April Knutson and Maria Brewer Pascale Crépon, Amy Kamel, Mira Reinberg

9-10. French/Latin: Robert St Clair, Steve Jackson

11. German: Rembert Heuser

12. Greek: Tom Lewis

13. Hungarian: Maria Bales

14-15. Irish/Korean: Annmarie Lawless, Eunjoo Kim, Jewon Woo

16. Mongolian: Lisa Fink

17. Russian: Masha Zavialova, Sasha Zavialova and Kesh Zavialov

18. Spanish: Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, Joanna O’Connell

19-20. Swedish/Norwegian: Susan Larsen

21. New Guinea Tokpisin: Steve Winduo

22. Turkish: Ayca Ulken

23. Urdu: Bali Sahota

Ryo Yamaguchi made t-shirts saying "I can't go on, I'll go on," which sold out in minutes (i was wearing mine and sliced it up a bit punkish, and had a great time mc-ing) and we had a cake with the same line, plus a huge thing of Jameson's, a six-pack of Guinness, lots of dried fruit, wine, cheese, challah, nuts, chips, salmon, etc., a really great hospitable spread that kept everyone happy, thanks to our generous dept chair Paula Rabinowitz, whose husband David Bernstein did a mean Krapp, bottle-uncorking sound effects and all. The eerie thing was, when he was doing his Krapp, the video From Silence to Silence, which was playing (silently, of course) on the other side of the room showed a famous Beckettian actor also doing Krapp. The synchrony was fabulous. It was really well-organized thanks to our genius loci, our low-key inhouse genius, terri sutton. It was a really high-energy evening, capped off by a mass reading of the last 2 pages of The Unnameable loud enough to rouse the dead. We were, in fact, honoring our spiritual/literary ancestors, and I think it must have made Sam (if I may) happy. it was, as i told folks in an email later, Beckettastic. There were about 75 people there (Paula counted). It's becoming a tradition (last year it was Howl@50 that started everything). Who will we "do" next year? Dickinson? Stein? Sappho? I'm rooting for a chick, but we'll see what the weather brings.

That was last Friday night. Saturday was a party for the MCBA "winter book," which this year was Vispoeology, an anthology of visual poetry concocted, i mean compiled by Scott Helmes, Tom Cassidy and John Bennett, stalwarts on the scene. mIEKAL and Camille came into town to celebrate and for mIEKAL to perform his masterpiece of spam-generated playwrighting, Neologism Hospital Theatre. I got to play Dr. Grace Butts, and the next day or so got the best pseudo-doctor spam name in history in my in-box: Dr. Whalen Bump. Anyway it was a lot of fun getting to be part of the festivities and then partying at the after-party and going for a big sushi meal beforehand.
Then a few days' lull and then the grand finale, dinner with my graduate seminar chez moi, i cooked all day sunday and monday and tuesday, that was really fun: cream of leak and potato soup with CSA leeks and potatoes, squash soup w/ coconut milk and ground pumpkin seeds, cilantro humus, mesclun salad w/ pears, red onion and feta, good cheeses, 2 kinds of bread pudding with whipped cream and ice cream, coffee, roast free-range chicken: they brought: really good cheese and bread, brownies, walnut cranberry pie, cherry pie, cookies, rotisserie and southern fried deli chicken, wine, and other delicious things. They talked about their final papers and read some sample paragraphs. It was exciting and fun and afterwards I've barely been able to move, sleeping and reading silly rock bios, and continuing to look at iggy pop videos online and draw inspiration from his manic creativity and smart id.

live down/noodling around

an offering based on a line of spam from mIEKAL aND

Do wispy clouds give you a different feeling from thick cumulus clouds?

Your tear-stained harp, your cotton robe
the feathered strings that knit you up
do whispers make a different and less cumbersome cloth?

Does the texture get all up in your heart?
What makes an instrument corded or smooth?
How do you work under water?
The amniosis you crave, the gnosis you endure.

How can you play with those ice-manacles on
How is your heart spread out like an orphaned glottule
What do you do when the red line appears under your word, at your feet
What is this impetuous flight into the volcano’s molt

Your thin shift aflutter
Your torn-string heart
Your feathered feet
Your dying voice

Your silver chains
Your bereft throb
Your bleeding mask
Your fallow melt
Your gallows smile
Your hollow cloud

rock star

Earth is my rock/star, melting fire and stone. When Chris Funkhouser remarked that Thich Nhat Hanh was a "rock star," i felt like, oh no he isn't, he's the exact opposite. But of course Chris is right; Thay gets up in front of thousands of people, gets his ego out of the way (if he has any left after all these years of discipline) and channels pure compassionate, life-giving energy. When I watch powerful music performances, something is also being channeled, something more human: creativity, sexuality, spiritual yearning embodied in a variety of modes: anger, lust, passion, joy, cynicism, etc. A good performance is a condensed version of what it is to be human. Watching Iggy's "Passenger" on youtube brought this home to me in an anguished and joyful way; you see the gamut of emotion and exhaustion, duty, disciplined performance, seduction, sweetness, despair, maskedness, etc., in a compressed time/space that is exceptionally powerful. What do Iggy and Thay have in common. It seems a bit absurd to even ask the question, but the way life and death interpenetrate, and the desire to calm desire...iggy my rock of gutterality, thay my star of aspiration: iggy my star incandescent, thay my rock of stability.

ah, sunny but brisk

wind is up today, but in a little-ripply way rather than a big-waves way. the treetwigs are stirring vigorously. i burned my kale for the 3rd time last night, i just can't seem to get it right. what will i try today? cukes and red pepper salad, can't go wrong w/ that, nothing to cook on an unfamiliar electric stove. what is the etymology of "stove" anyway. i'll have to check but am afraid to leave my post here in blogland to check lest i lose this little passage, humble as it is. the cape is so mobbed in august, i miss the beautiful desolation (angelic, even) of the winter months, but it's paradise anyway. i wonder how much i'll have to weed my garden when i get back, after a month of dereliction...esp the polygonum and the stuff that comes up between the paving bricks on the walkways, oh and the garlic chives that take over everything...well i will have plenty of occupational therapy in the weeding mode when i get back, and i've got something already on the loom, plenty to do. xo for now! md

"your training is to enjoy every moment of your life!"

that is what thich nhat hanh said to the kids during a dharma talk at the retreat i just got back from. I will be taking it to heart, so stay tuned. today i got up early and ate my breakfast looking at the still still sea. so amazingly beautiful, with imaginative cloud formations constellating and reconstellating as they moved with fat purpose across the sky in a counter-intuitive direction. it was alternately cloudy and sunny throughout the day, now pretty cloudy but fairly still and heavy-leaved air, in fact entirely overcast so one can't speak properly of individual clouds but a white-gray wash across the whole of the sky. A few twigs laden with green twitch with anticipation of the next big thing, the raindrop or little wind gust headed its way. all aflutter with excitement, contained in serenity. Life is quite beautiful. I got my ms in the mail today, wow, i haven't quite taken that in, better not to, i guess. nothin' i can do now, it's just past 5:00 and the mail's gone out. love to all, md

caped weather

overcast but so mild and windy, humid, the paper in the printer gets all wavy after just half an hour's exposure to the cape air. lush lush lush, with fat unripe green concord grapes growing wild everywhere. proofread 400pp ms again, and again found plenty of errors, wish that were plenty of eros. mairead byrne will come up sometime in the next few days for lunch and chat abt poetry etc... that'll be nice. i'm so close to providence but rarely get down there, time slips by here...picked up a pound of mussels for dinner last night, they were -bummer! -kinda boring. wonder why. i've never had boring mussels before. the kale, on the other hand, just sauteed w/ a bit of onion, garlic, olive oil and water, was divine. and the mushy peach was redeemed by a few drops of honey and some of the real-but-fake-ish light-cream whipped-cream-from-a-spray-can left by the previous visitors. ah, mushy peach were paradise enow! the night before, dinner w/ celia and jerry brown's son and friends from london, jeffrey/kit baked a divine pasta dish w/ red peppers, organic ground lamb from mike brown's farm, and a bechamel/parmesan crust that was to die for. i had 2 helpings, and was reassured to learn from my sister that the leading diet experts recommend one meal a week reprieve. well that was it, as i also had a slice of mango-raspberry pie with aforementioned fake-ish whipped cream for dessert. that's it for now, folks. i can't go on i'll go on...xo, md