one blurb every other month or so...

Among the things that procedural writing can do is create something that suddenly glitters with a meaning that would have been impossible, or at least difficult, to realize without the distortion of the procedure. Ara Shirinyan’s Handsome Fish Offices with its mashing up of the language of office supply products and tropical fish glitters as such. While office supply products and tropical fish might at first thought seem to have nothing to do with one another, once side by side they reveal the interconnections between global acquisitions, multinational capital, and environmental destruction.

Somewhat frantically reading because I keep losing books or end up unable to move and so need a book in each room of the house. In front bedroom, Samuel Delaney's Dark Reflections; in office next to rocking chair, Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home; Lester Rowntree's Hardy Californians: a Woman's Life with Native Plants, the latest issue of Cabinet; in back bedroom, Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground; downstairs on couch, Joanne Kyger's About Now; downstairs next to chair, Sing A Battle Song: the Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974; on kitchen table current issues of Sunset and Dwell, etc.

From a few weeks ago...

Patrick Durgan's Imitation Poems feels very different from other work of his I have read. At moments almost New York School:
"Yes, but perhaps
this is the moon I stand on, and not my planet.
Is there anything to drink? Who am I speaking
with? Can I come home? Will you have me as I am?
How am I? How are you? Who built the ship? Is it
improper to ask?" You're procrastinating, now. So kiss me.

Ann Rower's If You're a Girl. Enjoying the more NYie memoir ones. Some of the experimental fiction ones aren't for me. Found this amusing because of Peter Gizzi's Artificial Heart: "I wonder if they'll have theories about left heart and right heart, like they do about the brain. I remember when they had to replace the left side of Barney Clarke's artificial heart. I found out that during the surgery he made them play Ravel's Bolero. I also found out it is the left side of the heart that does all the serious pumping. Now wonder they had to replace it. 'Artificial heart': good title" (p.70).

forthcoming Poetry Project Newsletter review:

Heriberto Yépez, a Tijuana writer and Gestalt psychotherapist who has been showing up in the US scene a lot during the last few years, writes so as to push buttons. I remember hearing him read a few years ago at a small liberal arts college. He read a piece that had a man fucking a pregnant woman and the fetus, his son, giving the man a blow job as he did it. I remember squirming as I listened with feminist anxiety to Yépez read this. At the end of the story, it became clear that the man is George Bush and the fetus is George W. Bush and I had that ah ha moment where I realized that my desire for gender decorum had me protecting all sorts of imperial male lineages. Or another story: at UCSC a few years ago Yépez gave a paper in which he claimed “I am Bush” and then, moving from “I” to “we,” he said “Bush is our way to hide we are Bush” (this talk is posted at mexperimental.blogspot.com). If these examples are not enough to prove his provocations, then check out his video “Voice Exchange Rates” (available on youtube) where he has a cartoon image of Gertrude Stein with a swastika carved into her forehead Charles Manson style asking “why do Americans rule the world?”

The Bush as fetus reading really pointed out to me how distinctive Yépez’s work is. It manages to hide provocatively conceptual, decorum defying work behind the mask of conventional and well written realist fiction. His work often appears at first to be one thing (an off color story about fucking) and then he turns it into something else (a pointed story about political lineage). Reading his work I frequently realize that he has got me; he has played with my politesse and made a joke of it.

Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers, Yépez’s first single author book in English (he has oodles in Spanish), is similarly provocative. In terms of genre, it is probably a short novel. It mainly has three characters: two twin brothers and a woman. And the story starts in Tijuana with an attempt by one of the twins and the woman to pickup a failed romance. But really, not much beyond conversation and self-reflection happens in the book and there is much talk about drugs (is the brother using or not?), sex and sexuality, jealousy, and parental abandonment. As the book proceeds, the frame keeps shifting and the narrative is interjected with things like writing exercises, something that might be authorial commentary (“This story I’m reading now was written for a reading.”), and Michael Palmer, Don De Lillo, and Reinaldo Arenas quotes. The novel comments frequently on how it is written in English.

But it isn’t just that Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers is mainly a novel, it also seems to be a romance. But an exploded romance. It starts, as the romance usually does, with the couple meeting up again. And like many romances, which often feature lovers from opposite sides of border disputes, their union is used as a way to talk about relations between nations. At moments the couple represents the north and the south. At other moments it is the US and Iraq: “In every couple there’s a United States and there’s an Iraq. ‘United States’ is the so-called-victimizer. The master that ejects violence. The psy-ops, the war-words, the troops he sends (The Kids!). And then—on the other side—the so-called-victim. The so called poor-little-you. The one that doesn’t deserve the treatment you’re getting, your bad-bad luck, the you-know-who. ‘Iraq.’”

But because Yépez is primarily a provocateur, not a reconcileur, the romance plot keeps going astray and mutating into something that suggests there are no easy and conventional answers to the political questions of today. The woman, in addition to being a former girlfriend of one of the twins, is also part of a threesome in Toluca. The twins, at moments are twin brothers and at other moments the narrative voice suggests that they are an invention of the writer: “I felt like I was two different men, and I started to call that situation <>.” At other moments it is suggested that the whole story, threesomes and all, has been fabricated by one of the twins so he might “have something else in life.” Or the twins really are twins and they, similar to father and son Bush, have sex in the womb and outside it also. In other words, Yépez refuses to restablish the couple, to end with the conventional marriages of the romance.

It might be stretching things a little to read Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers as a romance. So perhaps another way to think of this book is as an equivalent to the “I am Bush” statement. I remember a friend angrily claiming that he was not Bush, that he had not started the war and neither had Yépez, after Yépez’s talk. But Yépez’s point was more subtle and multiple. It suggested that involvement in the oil wars extends beyond individuals and nations. It rejected lefty narratives of US exceptionalism (the sort of assumption that the US is so exceptional that it does horrible things all on its own; that other nations have no involvement) and first world passive guilt. It pointed to the ties between the US and Mexican government, the complicity of US and Mexican citizens. It rejected the idea that anyone could be innocent of anything. Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers does similar work as it suggests that our personal romantic relationships carry wars in them. (This is a diversion but it is also striking how this book does not fit easily into US definitions of “border literature”; yes, Yépez, like many writers of the border, moves between Spanish and English but the book is fascinatingly devoid of “local” markers and descriptions, ethnic exceptionalism, nationalism, etc.)

Although part of me wants to keep returning to the romance genre because the book does end with a collapsing and exploding couple of sorts for Yépez ends with 9-11 and the twin towers: “The two planes not only announced the end of an era, but they also showed what was happening inside our lives. I read 9-11 as the crumbling of two people together, as the failure to stay next to each other, standing. And one tower was Emily, and I was the other tower, the first to fall. And then one tower was my brother and the other tower was me, and we both were destroyed by the world. And one tower was my father, and he became dust, and other tower, my mother, and she became a scream. And the two towers were love.”

from Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist:

The open world!...The scent of fresh-mown hay is in my nostrils; green fields and forests stretch before me; sweetly ripples the mountain spring. Up to the mountain crest, to the breezes and the sunshine, where the storm breaks in its wild fury upon my uncovered head. Welcome the rain and the wind that sweep the foul prison dust off my heart, and blow life and strength into my being! Tremblingly rapturous is the thought of freedom. Out in the woods, away from the stench of the cannibal world I shall wander, nor lift my foot from soil or sod. Close to the breath of Nature I will press my parched lips, on her bosom I will pass my days, drinking sustenance and strength from the universal mother. And there, in liberty and independence, in the vision of the mountain peaks, I shall voice the cry of the social orphans, of the buried and the disinherited and visualize to the living the yearning, menacing Face of Pain. (p. 487-488)

Made deal with C that I would agree to put in small grass area in backyard if he agreed to help me figure out how to use laundry water and rain water from roof to irrigate it. Reading, thus, to figure this out.

Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. Lots of great paragraphs that list connections between plants, insects, etc. This describing a garden that mixes radishes, dill, calendula, lettuce, parsnips, cabbage, and bush beans: "The fast growing radishes cast shade, which keeps the soil moist and cool. This protects slow germinating seeds--particularly the parsnips--from the desiccating sun. Strongly scented dill and calendula will confuse insects searching for tender young radishes. Dill also hosts tiny predatory wasps that attack cabbage loopers. Cabbages, which grow through the fall and into winter, protect the soil from erosion by heavy rains. Beans add nitrogen to the soil. The variety of leaf shapes and root depths minimizes competition for sun, space, and nutrients." (p. 145) Throughout this book long paragraphs of lists like this that attempt to get at systemic. I'm loving the writing style.

Brad Lancaster's Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands: volume 1, Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life and Landscape. Less lists, more enthusiasm: "Once you start putting this information to work, every rainstorm could pump you with so much excitement and wonder that even if it's 3 am when the clouds break you'll be running outside in your underwear to watch your landscape soaking up water!" (p. 19)

Thinking about berms, nitrogen fixing legumes (and wondering if interplanting with bamboo out back will get it to grow higher and finally do the work of blocking out looming apartment building next door), gravity and the slope of the backyard and if gravity would be strong enough to push collected water through drip irrigation.

Mail came in late afternoon yesterday with Gary Sullivan's latest Elsewhere. Having finished it an hour later, frustrated that it wasn't the collected New Life. Wanted more.

Then found this in Grand Piano 3, which also came in mail, from Kit Robinson section (reading it at 2 am feeding):

Resistors, condensers, transformers, contact leads, dashpots, timing devices, insulators, solenoids, resistance grids, governor tension sheave assemblies, bearings, car and counterweight buffers, car and counterweight guide rails, top and bottom limit switches, activating cams, compensating equipment, hoistway door interlocks, top trucks, hanger rollers, operating linkages, leveling and encoding systems, lobby fixtures, emergency lighting, communication devices, remote operating and signal equipment. Bing: "Going down." It was the beginning of the end of the industrial age.

The Vietnam War bequeathed to Silicon Valley a boatload of radical characteristics: the sense of continuous emergency, the sense of no higher authority, the dependence on improvisation, the endless hours of engagement, the exhaustion and fatigue, the intensely combative mentality, the sacrifice, the camaraderie.

Between the twin fevers of 60s radicalism and 80s Reaganism, the 70s was a catastrophic time of heightened contradictions permitting of no satisfactory release.
(p. 116-177)