7 January 2017

Where force is sovereign, justice is unreal. A yellow sign at the corner of Kahekili and the cemetery reads, “Unko Buys Houses / Any Condition.” I thought I saw Uncle Ho in a Toyota station wagon turning right. On my way out, driving a Scion with “Defend Hawai'i” license frame, a tall Hawaiian man wore a small yellow flower tucked behind his left ear. Leo's grandma put her glasses in the microwave for 30 seconds to warm them up. That's a bad sign. What thou lovest well remains. A woman sits in a white pick-up smoking a cigarette while her husband squats on an upended milk basket beside a fresh grave. The baby who lived and died on a single day is remembered with stalks of ginger in a bronze vase. So is Allen, age 17, who died in a car crash in 1999. As if catalogue could accumulate enough feeling to #Resist. As if attention were a form of justice, seeking like an octopus to touch an object before it dissolves. “I want to do something with all this language,” a young man says, “but it feels too dirty to touch.” He signed up for my course in the avant-garde.

--7 January 2017

Syllabi for avant-garde poetries and forms of attention

Forms of Attention, a creative writing course for Honors students:

https://sites.google.com/s/0B1YC3R0_GkAJbDB2NjJUYlNZSjA/p/0B1YC3R0_GkAJckp6LUxrOF9YbVE/edit

Avant-garde Poetries, a graduate level course. In which I completely neglect Conceptual Writing.

https://sites.google.com/s/0B1YC3R0_GkAJTzVuTUNFRXFoNVU/p/0B1YC3R0_GkAJLW5WbTNjNjRlS0k/edit

These are subject to constant flux.

5 January 2017

False greatness must first be despised. She emerged from her Volcano garage behind a matted mutt, one small barrette buried in its fur. “49ers!” she called out, but it's STL. A city girl, she misses the sun and ocean, came home to care for her mother. Runs a grammar group on-line (“when you're feeble, Facebook's great for socializing”) and tells me the word she most loathes is “firstly.” I counter with “relatable.” Radhika said she noticed she'd used a singular noun with a plural verb, like all my students do. Fake arithmetic, it might be called, to go with our news. If you don't like it, pronounce it fake. Or, if you're fancy, call it post-fake. Glibly he says bigly, then shifts on a dime, though he hasn't spent one for decades. The next Secretary of State took a $180M severance package from Exxon. There is no original tweet; they're all copies. The koan shall be “intelligence.” I like it!

--5 January 2017

4 January 2017

Affliction simplifies everything. Whether to write out of agreement or skepticism is not my concern. Jon reacts against the word “roots,” even as I take them to be mental constructs. The octopus lives on a fence-line between body and body's near absence, but when he catches your gaze, he sometimes reaches out one long tentacle and leads you to his nest. As close to aliens as we're likely to get. I vow to eat less tako, read more Marcus Aurelius. At my age, I read wisdom literature more as confirmation than as teaching, yet “to point” is the point of transmission. I point to what you know and then you know it. “It has nothing to do with knowledge; it has to do with fantasy.” As if to cut them in two, not fence-sitting as an “aesthetic ideal,” but as a pointed hole in the crotch. You have a place in my circle, but only after you've been shamed. It's the rite of return that hurts most. The Clintons announced they will attend the inauguration. What is the return to an absence taken?

--4 January 2017

3 January 2017

The nation is a fact, and a fact is not an absolute value. The current events element of this card reports the demise (and resurrection) of the congressional ethics committee. I get to “ethics” after putting in my name and password; definitions keep my words from bleeding. DiCaprio kept acting after his hand was mutilated by a knife. During the re-shoot, he asked for fake blood to replace his own. On New Year's Eve the next president appeared on stage beside Joey “No Socks” Cinque. Joey pumped his fists at the promised end of Obamacare. How's your health, Joey? Catching cold without your socks on? Radhika wondered at the real name for “wind sock”; Bryant insisted that the real name was wind sock. Our friend isn't a real Indian, despite his uncle, who hid his Indian blood by pretending to be Injun Ed. Who will take him into their circle? Can we be forgiven for making ourselves something we are not, when “to be” aligns blood with feeling? Was I less myself when I knew not to believe my thoughts? Or was that the Irish in me?

--3 January 2017

2 January 2016

Loss of the past . . . is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose. In cases of severest trauma, forgetting is gain, a step outside the basement room occupied by foreign fighters or dirty grandfathers. Ecstasy is now used to ease depression. When I told my student I take anti-depressants he said he loved to swallow lots of them with alcohol. He'd tattooed an AA mantra on his arm. Someone told me he sang like an angel. The journalist found a white woman in western PA who couldn't afford her anxiety meds. Her red white and blue cap reads “Make American Great Again”: “finally someone who thinks like me,” she says of Trump. Spends her time on the internet reading stories about how Hillary killed Vince Foster and ran a child pornography warehouse at the back of a DC restaurant. The man who came to “self-investigate” was arrested before he used his semi-automatic. In a video of the Istanbul attack, we see one man start shooting, others duck under tables. A small black and white dog wanders inside the bar.

--2 January 2016

Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/z6ubybq

1 January 2017

A child who, not having meat, asks for salt with which to season it. She wore a billowing white dress, strode up and down Kainalu, less ghost than resurrection. She wrote in eight notebooks, one for each of her children in Utah. The families of those who played softball shared potlucks near her blanket at the rec center. Toilets just flushed and flushed. I took her a bag of Bic pens, but she said they were the wrong color. The man who perched on a mailbox outside Starbucks in LA took the coffee I gave him (he requested milk), then came inside and demanded a fresh cup. “The lady put something in it,” he told the barrista. “Sometimes you realize why they're on the streets,” my friend said. It's an argument they're having in philosophy, the extent to which empathy is or is not a good thing. To feel as another is to be absorbed, to wonder for a moment why you're not out there with them.

"Since feelings are so rare now, they are the most important thing in my calendar." Anna Politkovskaya

--1 January 2017