The End of America, Book 5

(opening excerpt; to be continued later)

What I value about America is mass produced black tee shirts with mythical lizard images.

What I value about America is meaningless choices between gas stations and the worthless distinction called “Super Unleaded.”

What I value about America is the waitress in a coffee shop who by my third day of vacation in Palm Springs already knows what my order is going to be, and also the high school boy who works there and who, when I come back for the second time in a day, says, skeptically, “You again?”

What I value about America is any cranky opinion you want to have.

What I value about America is the leaking pump in my toilet bowl.

What I value about America is my ability to comment on the rest of the world without ever having to go there.

What I value about America is that instant when two people in a car sail out over a cliff, look back at the ridge where the police have gathered to watch them die and silver-streaked rocks glint in the sun, and as the car heads towards the ocean below they think to themselves that America never seems so beautiful as when you say goodbye to it.

What I value about America is hard drive crashes.

What I value about America is giving directions.

What I value about America is the way I don’t have to know anyone well.

What I value about America smells like cheeseburgers.

What I value about America is staying with friends for a few days in a house on the Susquehanna River and driving into Front Royal in the evening for dinner because even in the Shenandoah Hills there’s one good Mexican restaurant.

What I value about America is the hawks born in the trees in the courtyard of my apartment complex who think of the apartment complex as home.

What I value about America is lunch meat.

What I value about America is the way freedom of speech means that every organization gets to decide for itself what it’s unwilling to listen to.

And the way that anybody who calls somebody else an asshole thinks they have a right to a response.

What I value about America is going to work in the morning.

What I value about America is the way my whole life I’ve been told what America is.

What I value about America is the constant feeling I have that I never want to talk about America again.

What I value about America is, of course, American cheese.

But only when the slices are individually wrapped. Otherwise they all just stick together.

What I value about America is a woman who sits in the back of the class, says nothing, turns in a decent paper then disappears for weeks, shows up again at last and sits silently for a few more weeks and turns in nothing, then finally e-mails the professor on the last day of class saying “I’ve done all the work, can I still turn it in?”

What I value about America is the way Americans are asked to consider everything in terms of value. And in terms of the value of America.

What I value about America is the struggle between environmental groups trying to clean up the ocean and a corporate push to develop desalination plants to pull drinkable water out of salt water.

What I value about America is that activists hand out condoms, and roadhouse bathrooms have condom machines.

What I value about America is pop music.

What I value about America is the Charleston, the bunny hop, and the mosh pit slam.

What I value about America is all the ways to waste time on the job.

What I value about America is the struggle between sincerity and insincerity.

I value the way, in America, claiming to be sincere can be a way of saying “I have the right not to know what I’m talking about” while claiming to be insincere can be a way of saying “I have a right to feel this has nothing to do with me.”

What I value about America is comfortable running socks.

What I value about America is immigrants working for sub-minimum wage.

What I value about America is tequila and beer specials beyond the Mexican border.

What I value about America is the vision of a future in which one day all of us, no matter our race, class, or cultural background, will be working retail.

What I value about America is the way football season, basketball season and baseball season overlap so that year round, most evenings of any week, I can watch a game that I like at just that moment when I’m too tired to think.

What I value about America is Friday night parties.

What I value about America is oral narratives about its factories.

What I value about America is the fish taco in San Diego and the chicken wing in Buffalo and barbecued spare ribs just outside Dallas.

What I value about America is low fat salad dressing.

What I value about America is the impossibility not only of giving any issue a fair hearing but even of agreeing what a fair hearing means.

What I value about America is the stranglehold of the two-party system.

What I value about America is the meaning of what “is” is.

What I value about America is that equal numbers of U.S. citizens get incensed over an out-of-wedlock blow job and a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people.

What I value about America is greasing the palms.

What I value about America is men who live for the thrill of debate.

What I value about America is innuendo.

What I value about America is jazz, blues, folk, and rock and roll.

What I value about America is that the Duke and the Count and the King are musicians.

What I value about America is the bars and restaurants within a few blocks of the beach where people order tacos and nachos and pizza and beer and margaritas, even the bright yellow creamy Mango margaritas, and through the echos under the high ceilings they talk loudly about football teams and cars and boats and the price of gas and broken marriages and how much they want to get married again, and they show off tattoos and breast implants and wear tee-shirts that advertise their interests and laugh in a way that sounds half like they’re having fun and half desperate, then finally they step out to the parking lot full of oversized SUVs and drive drunk the few miles back to their vacation rentals.

So if you ask me about the end of America and what I value about America, you’ll have to listen to the answers.

(to be continued)

Kate Durbin reading at Agitprop in San Diego December 4

Agitprop Reading Series, in North Park, now has a blog where you can get information about past and future readings.

Kate Durbin, a fascinating young poet who has one of the most unique and stylish stage presences around these days, will be reading at Agitprop this Saturday night. Fans of the gurlesque should especially take note and come out. The evening also features an art opening celebrating a new website by Susy Bielak.

For more details, including how to sign up on the mailing list and receive future announcements directly, visit the Agitprop Reading Series Blog.

Agitprop Gallery
Saturday, December 4, Reading 7pm, Art Opening at 8pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              619.384.7989      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Importing Facebook to My Blog: Facebook Aphorisms 2010 (excerpts)

 

 

In my ongoing transition to a world of Multiple Platforms, a lot of my written social and aesthetic commentary this year has been in the form of aphorisms (and sometimes anti-aphorisms) potentially meant to become Facebook status updates, although many never do. I find myself writing more of them than I would ever put on Facebook as well as writing ones that, because of their content, I also wouldn’t put on Facebook.

So in the spirit, or perhaps anti-spirit, of putting blog posts up on Facebook, I’m now putting some of these Facebook status updates (some which never otherwise appeared) up on my blog.

And I might put up more of them later.



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Dear Humans: Why should animals be friendly to you?

There’s a fine line between being laid back, repressed, and depressed.

I have the habit, probably bad, of liking people who like me and thinking they must be smart and have good taste.

Too many people would like individuality for themselves while granting only sociology to anybody else.

Either art, literature, and music have profoundly changed your life or they haven’t. Where do you stand on that issue?

The unending conflict between social norms and exploratory ideas in art and literature.

It felt a bit like being decapitated.

Today’s peace and quiet is neither.

Anything could become a cliche, but only some things already are.

Given your interests, I suggest you start doing documentary and skip the poetry part.

Your radical selfishness is actually just the same old selfishness.

Too many poems try too hard to imitate poems.

Too many poems try too hard to be poems.

Your music sounds so relaxed and precise that it seems like anyone could do it, except no one else can.

The guilt and trepidation that always comes with being exhausted.

Slang phrases like “my truth” and “relatable” try to pretend that a person’s subjective impressions are objective conditions by which other things and people must inevitably be measured.

Another one of those model husband turns out to be brutal asshole problems.

Enforced optimism imposes a culture of wishful thinking.

What is your interpretation of the phrase “settle down”?

Creating an anthology called The Generalized Grump: The Art of Criticizing Everyone While Saying Nothing Much. No trouble at all finding 800 pages of that.

My authenticity comes from being neither from the good or the bad side of town.

I like the writing of many sad, desperate poets, but that doesn’t mean they should be made into heroes, which would be, of course, to romanticize.

Too many people want themselves to be complicated and the world to be simple.

In this country, where many people construct fantasies about how much the government controls them, many people also fantasize about how much power to change anything the government actually has.

Overheard on a plane: “They’re from San Diego, so they don’t know how cold San Diego is in May.”

Intriguing detail from Gettysburg: 1863 newspaper editorials from London, Chicago, and even nearby Harrisburg making fun of Lincoln's "silly little" address. Ah, reviewers (and I'm one of them).

There are degrees and differences in poetic disjunction. It’s not just “two things that don’t match.” It’s how they don’t match that counts.

Saying that “politics is stupid” is still part of politics, and part of what makes politics stupid.

See You in Portland?

I’m going to be in Portland this weekend, from Friday November 5th until Monday, and reading in the Tangent Reading Series on Saturday November 6th. If you’re anywhere near Portland, consider yourself invited.

Then, after traveling south to Eugene and Ashland during the week, I’ll be back in Portland for a second weekend, from Friday the 12th until I fly out on Monday the 15th.

I hope to see any of you who are there, and please be in touch.

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Poetry reading featuring K. Lorraine Graham, Kevin Sampsell, and Mark Wallace

Saturday, November 6  7:00pm - 10:00pm
Open Space Café
2815 SE Holgate
Portland, OR
  
The Tangent Press & Reading Series is pleased to host a cross-genre reading of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction on Saturday, 6 November at 7 PM. Portland-based writer and editor Kevin Sampsell will be joined by Southern California writers K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace. The event will take place at the in Southeast Portland (2815 SE Holgate).

www.thetangentpress.org/readings.html
Admission is free.

Kevin Sampssell is the author of the short story collections, Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets. His newest book is the memoir, A Common Pornography. He has been the publisher of Future Tense Books, a micropress, since 1990.

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books), and her visual work has appeared in the Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium, and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels. She lives in Carlsbad, CA, with her partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. You can find her online at spooksbyme.org.

Mark Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a short story collection, Walking Dreams (2007), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). Forthcoming in early 2011 is his second novel, The Quarry and The Lot. He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

My Cleveland-Chicago-Racine readings

For those of you in the Midwest, I’ll be giving several readings, some also featuring other writers, in the following locations at the following times and dates:

Cleveland, Ohio
Thursday, October 14
9 p.m.
Jean Brandt Gallery
1028 Kenilworth Ave in Tremont

Kate Zambreno and Amanda Rosanne Howland Davidson will also be reading.


Chicago, Illinois
Saturday, October 16
7 p.m.
Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, 2nd Floor


Racine, Wisconsin
Sunday, October 17
7 p.m.
Gallery B4S, 613 Sixth Street
event hosted by the Racine Public Library

Jennifer Karmin and Tom Orange will also be reading.



Notes on the other authors:

Cleveland:

Kate Zambreno lived, wrote and taught for many years in Chicago before moving to Akron last year. Her novel O Fallen Angel, which won Chiasmus Press' "Undoing the Novel" contest, depicts a triptych of an American family during wartime. A collection of theoretical essays stemming from her blog “Francis Farmer is My Sister” will be published by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents series in Spring 2012. She is currently teaching creative nonfiction at Cleveland State this semester.

Amanda Rosanne Howland Davidson hails from Canton and now lives on the West Side with her husband Scott. She has just started the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Cleveland State. For many years she has also been active on the Cleveland underground music scene, playing guitar and singing in the band Dead Peasant Insurance, which has toured widely throughout the U.S. and since 2004 issued nearly a dozen limited edition recordings on cassette and CD-R releases, most recently Cleveland Scum Skulls on the Pizza Night.


Racine:

Jennifer Karmin’s text-sound epic, Aaaaaaaaaaalice, was published by Flim Forum Press in 2010. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run spaces, community centers, and on city streets across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya.  At home in Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools.


Tom Orange currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. A poet, critic, and saxophone player, his recent work appears or is forthcoming in Court Green, Primary Writing, The Word at Peek Review, Rock Heals, and The Poker, and in the Slow Poetry anthology that appeared on Big Bridge.

My Readings in Portugal and Galicia

If you just happen to be in Portugal or Galicia (northwestern Spain), I´d be as surprised about that as I would be about your ability to attend my readings there. But who knows? You can't make it if I don't invite you, so consider yourself invited.

On Tuesday, September 28 at 6 p.m., at the University of Coimbra (top picture), in Coimbra, Portugal, I'll be presenting my work at the Faculdade de Letras. My university, California State University, San Marcos, is celebrating its 20th anniversary (1991-2010) this year, which makes it almost exactly 700 years younger than the University of Coimbra (1290-2010), Portugal's first university. It's my second reading at the university in Coimbra. My first was in the 1995 Second International Meeting of Poets, which brought writers to Portugal from all over the world. For anyone who doesn't know, the University of Coimbra has long been a crucial European center for the study of literature.

On Friday, October 1 (time still to be determined; I'll update as I learn more), I'll be reading at the University of Vigo (seen from aerial distance; second picture) in Galicia, the northwestern edge of Spain, a region which has a very different history than the rest of Spain and sees itself as very much its own separate place. The University of Vigo is a new and highly energetic university and has a well-informed faculty very interested in contemporary literature. I've never been there before and I'm excited to be going there.

I'd end by saying that I hope I'll see you there, except that seems unlikely for most of you. So instead I'll say, so you there or somewhere else, some time soon, I hope.

Jumping Ship

I’m flying to Europe tomorrow morning and will be there until early October. After spending a couple of nights in Belgium, I’ll be in Portugal for the majority of the trip, splitting my time between the city of Oporto (top picture) and Monsanto (bottom picture), a Portuguese village in the mountains and which has medieval roots.

I may not find any time to blog during this period, but if I get a chance to put something up now and then, I will. And I don’t know how often I’ll be available on e-mail, so please don’t be surprised if there are any delays in getting back to you.

In the meantime, my longtime colleague and friend Tom Orange might put a guest blog post or two. Tom and I agree on many things but may differ on others, and all views he expresses are his own. I hope you’ll engage him in discussion if you’re inclined.

This is the first time in my life that I’ve not worked or been in school in the fall, and I feel a sort of pleasant, falsely romantic sense of shirking my duties, jumping ship, and traveling to unexplored lands.