Look deep into this nog. It will tell your future. 2009!

I have strongly encouraged some of my students to get guide horses. Guide horses wear shoes! But my students want guide dogs. You have to get a new guide dog about every seven years, but guide horses can live for forty years! They need fresh air. NY Times: Creature Comforts .

Bear Parade

A lot of good html books on that site by Tao Lin, Matt Rohrer, and more. You could probably read them on your phone.

SF Readings

Monday the 29th
Lily Brown & Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Gravel & Gold (store)
Wine
7pm at 18th and Treat Street
3150 18th St
San Francisco, CA 94110

Tuesday, December 30 promptly at 7:00 PM, $2.00
Hotel Utah
500 4th St
San Francisco, CA

Featuring: Melissa Benham, Alan Bernheimer, Brandon Brown, Xochi Candelaria, Norma Cole, Sarah Anne Cox, Del Ray Cross, Brent Cunningham, Donna de la Perriere, Steve Dickison, Stacy Doris, Steve Farmer, Gloria Frym, Susan Gevirtz, Rob Halpern, Javier Huerta, Scott Ignuito, Andrew Joron, David Lau, Joseph Lease, Dana Teen Lomax, Bill Luoma, Laura Moriarty, Stephen Ratcliffe, Barbara Jane Reyes, Cynthia Sailers, Leslie Scalapino, Lauren Shufran, giovanni singleton, Suzanne Stein, Chris Stroffolino, Elizabeth Treadwell, Stephen Vincent, Alli Warren, Chet Weiner, Rob Wilson & more!
hosted by David Buuck & Small Press Traffic.

“A paean of love” — he was writing to a girlfriend
American gangster movies and British war films
Noise within silence

“Words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other”
“Such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea"
Written out of “very cold anger"

The adjective Pinteresque
as a byword for strong and unspecified menace

Realist
Between “primitive rage” and “liberal generosity"
All studies of the unreliability of memory and the uncertainty of love

“I don’t go away and say: ‘I have illuminated myself. You see before you a changed person,'"

For inexplicable reasons, invite a homeless man named Davies
To share their quarters and to act as a kind of custodian
Political maneuvering, fraternal love, spiritual isolation, language as a negotiating Weapon or a form of cover-up

A stage version of his film script for “Remembrance of Things Past”

“The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.”

Nor were the problems limited to the nation’s midsection.

This reading really scares me. I won't even show you the poster, which is even scarier. But you can see it for yourself here. However, I am glad I finally found it. Thanks Clay.

Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation present
San Francisco Poetry Spectacular
an off-site event coinciding (but unaffiliated) with
the 2008 Modern Language Association convention

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28th from 7-10:00pm
the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street, San Francisco
FREE and ADA accessible to the public
Co-sponsored by Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation

Over 60 POETS reading (just) 2 minutes each: Aaron Kunin, Alan Bernheimer, Aldon Nielsen, Andrew Osborn, Barrett Watten, Bill Howe, Bill Luoma, Bill Mohr, Brian Kim Stefans, C.S. Giscombe, Carla Harryman, Christian Bok, Chris Stroffolino, Dale Smith, Craig Perez, Dan Featherston, David Buuck, Dennis Barone, Donna de la Pierre, Durriel Harris, Dodie Bellamy, Elizabeth Hatmaker, Etel Adnan, Jasper Bernes, Jeffrey Robinson, Javier Huerta, Jeanne Heuving, Jennifer Scappettone, Jerry Rothenberg, Joe Amato, John Emil Vincent, Joseph Lease, Joshua Clover, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Julian Brolaski, Kasey Mohammad, Kass Fleisher, Kazim Ali, Kevin Killian, Kit Robinson, Kristin Prevallet, Lisa Howe, Lisa Robertson, Lorraine Graham, Maxine Chernoff, Michael Davidson, Norma Cole, Paolo Xaiver, Patrick Durgin, Paul Hoover, Philip Metres, Rob Halpern, Sarah Schulman, Rusty Morrison, Standard Schaefer, Stephanie Young, Stephen Cope, Suzanne Stein, Timothy Yu, Tom Orange, Tyrone Williams, Walter Lew and more!

Poets in Masks! Refreshments! Books! Books! Books!

Books by the readers for sale from Small Press Distribution.

Man is totally blind, successfully navigates obstacles using vision (scientists think)— watch

apparent total absence of a striate cortex, the visual processing region

his brain was otherwise healthy, as were his eyes

no evidence that the patient was navigating by echolocation, the way that bats do

(so it wasn't auditory space perception)

the same African doctor had emotional blindsight

when presented with images of fearful faces,
he cringed subconsciously
even though he could not consciously see the faces

It may be hard to read, but this is a short article about my dad, a tour guide at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. That's him at the top of the page.

The Crashaw Prize for Poetry

Salt is delighted to announce that the 2008 winners of The Crashaw Prize are:

* Jared Stanley Book Made of Forest (USA)
* Tom Chivers How to Build a City (UK)
* Abi Curtis Unexpected Weather (UK)
* Ailbhe Darcy Gone Fishing (Ireland)
* Jamey Dunham The Bible of Lost Pets (USA)
* Ian Pindar Constellations (UK)

Congratulations Jared!

The Face Transplant

Arne Duncan, Schools Chief From Chicago Is Obama’s Choice for Education

Why is NPR supported by the Department of Homeland Security? In the past few weeks, I hear that every morning. Don't they both run on federal dollars? Some Minnesotans are wondering too.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2008/12/why_is_the_department_of_homel.shtml

Get Local SF Mission Holiday Block Party Tonight

The really crazy thing is that a lot of places are giving discounts if you bring in your unemployment stub (see below). Wow! It's a new era (all the time). I will be looking to buy and resale your unemployment stubs, so please let me know if you have one to sell.

Do really long posts jam up your RSS feeds or whatever thing you use to follow blogs? I should start doing that, imposing order on my reading and ignoring habits.

-Claire

What: A celebratory evening of shopping, drinking and eating locally.
Where: From 14th to 24th streets between Mission and Dolores.
When: 6-10 p.m. Tonight

Gold

Somehow for the first time, the list of Golden Globe nominations, the winter movie awards season, reminds me of a program I found on the ground for a high school play. The names, the things they do only exist in my imagination. I don't have any sensory or emotional connection. And I haven't cared much, but I have sometimes, and I've thought I had to see movies, wanted to make movies. But this year the only movies I've seen that appear in these lists are Milk, Wall-E, and Pineapple Express (James Franco was pretty good in that one--good catch Golden Globe people). I even forgot to see Batman.

The television list bores me too. True Blood is pretty good, and I like a few of those TV shows when I am incapable of doing other things (see Lydia Davis's "Television" for great thinking about television), but "Gossip Girl" really is the best show on TV partially because of how low and high it is at once. They even made reference to Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (which put me in the theatre for some wonderful hours and a couple of short naps this year). And they should be recognized in some kind of list.

I used to watch a few movies a week but not this year. And it feels different this year. I'm not a part of things Hollywood! Draw me back in. Make me a part of things. I don't really care about these crappy intellectual movies. I'm more interested in those 15-year old Disney star's Myspace pages.

Uhh. This is a dumb post but I'm just trying to write anything.

Lame Websites for You and something about chimpanzees

I was tiredly doing research the other night for a post about bad websites, lame things on the internet that you might not know about. The first one is the Your Scene, Strange but True, Weird Warnings page on the L.A. Times website. Readers/viewers can post their own photos of weird signs.

After viewing all 359 posted photos, I conclude that there are 3 categories of weird/humorous signs. 1) Signs displaying poor English translations; 2) Signs with graphics that surprise the viewer, often found on trips to foreign countries; 3) Odd combination of circumstances causes a sign to be funny (ie. a falling rocks sign has fallen down, rocks all around it).

The website it poorly organized. The photos are small and hard to see. There are obessive users who have commented throughout the 359 posted weird warnings. Some users have accused others of photoshopping their weird warning signs. YOU could LITERALLY spend hours on the site! And I do not recommend that.


I'm reading Jane Goodall's autobiography to my students. I like how hairy baby chimps are except for their ears and faces.

Check out the James Turrell skyspace at the DeYoung. It's called Three Gems. It's in the sculpture garden down a path. Follow the signs. Anytime is good, but dusk is better.

We took some holiday photos. We're saving the best one. You can't see it yet! Don't you think this looks like a nice home for a teenager who's been recently separated from a family in Nebraska?

I found a tripod in my house.

I'm holding the new Forklift, Ohio, Issue #19 . The cover was shot at. It's really nice. It's not always really nice when things are shot at.

Oh, the band I was thinking of was Subtle. And now I hear about Clouddead.

Oakland band Why? are my current favorite poetical musicians. Their album Alopecia is what I've heard so far, many times, and it's so various, it reminds me of the Gris Gris, another great Oakland band who I guess have broken up. I think there is another band in this category in my mind. What was it Jenny?

Anyway, Why? Check out the music, the words, or the website: Anticon Records .

Also, everybody probably likes them already, but Tapes and Tapes.

Follow this link: http://www.hemlocktavern.com/prog_guide.php It might look like a program guide for the Hemlock Tavern, but think of it as a really cute collection of photographs and art. I like the photos taken of bands almost enough to start one. Maybe I'll start with the promotional materials. That sounds like a sweet weekend plan.

Your friend,
Claire

Awwww...the streets on November 4, 2008

Poems=Art

MFA Exhibition: Michael Parker and the Changing Table, 1968 – 2008 – 2048; an election week public activation

I'm going to have a few poems in this exhibition printed in neat single-page books my sister designed. If you're in Los Angeles, check it out. If you're crying in Los Angeles, check it. If you're in Los Angeles on Thursday, be received.

November 3 - November 7
Reception: Thursday, November 6 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Graduate Fine Arts Building & Roski MFA Gallery
3001 S. Flower St., Los Angeles, California

One part of the show is the Changing Table; a table top curation with somewhere between nine and twenty yet-to-be-finalized contributors.

Hours: Monday-Thursday 10 - 6, Friday 10 - 2 (with a 24x7 window panel)

call a phone number for radio stories

If you have a Blackberry, maybe an iPhone, maybe a Google phone, or some phone that is also the internet; if you need the news read to you by National Public Radio; if you have lots of extra phone minutes; if you ride public transportation, you are going to be really happy. You are going to be really happy because you are so much like me, except you have a lot of phone minutes.

Go to www.npr.org from your mobile device. Next to the stories, there's a button that says Call. Push it, and your phone asks if you want to call the number. Call the number and you can hear the radio stories, one by one. It's pretty sweet. That's what I was doing yesterday when the cops came onto the BART train and arrested someone in the seat across the aisle from me. I was glad I looked busy.

I also recommend using speaker phone or headphones so you don't hurt your brain like I do.

books and stuff, now that people taught me

Hot off the Lame House presses,
Franklin Bruno's new chapbook Policy Instrument
is now available for $8.00 postpaid.
Policy Instrument is hand-bound and printed in a limited edition of 200 copies. Cover art by Dietmar Krumrey.

To order, visit Lame House

-----------------------------

From Flim Forum Press

The Alps
by Brandon Shimoda

www.theplacethereof.blogspot.com

ISBN 978-0-9790888-2-7
144 pages, 7x9
$14 (+ $2 shipping & handling)

to purchase, send $16 to:

Flim Forum Press
PO Box 549
Slingerlands, NY 12159

or to pay w/ credit card:

www.theplacethereof.blogspot.com
www.flimforum.blogspot.com

California Audio Voter Guide

I think the audio voter guide is useful to anyone who likes to listen to things that might be dense to read. Everything is read by a human. If you don't live in California, check your state's web resources for similar options.

You can access an audio version of the Official Voter Information Guide for the November 4th election on the California Secretary of State's website. There are two versions--the whole voter guide as a Zip file or individual sections of the voter guide as mp3 files accessed from the Table of Contents. For each Voter Proposition on the Ballot, there are separate files with the Official Title and Summary, Analysis by the Legislative Analyst, Arguments for and against, and Rebuttals.

Audio Version of the Official Voter Information Guide (separate files):
http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/audio/

The entire audio version of the VIG is available for download at http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/audio/en-2008pg.zip

A flaw in the model I perceived was the critical function in the structure that defines how the world works so to speak

"You find a flaw in the reality…" said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman-just as Greenspan picked up the thought.

"A flaw in the model I perceived was the critical function in the structure that defines how the world works so to speak," Greenspan said.

he was exiled by Augustus (my favorite emperor)

I'm not turning 30 yet, but as one of my students writes, "I don't mind what the future brings." Regarding a conversation we were having, my sister sent me the following. I like how Augustus is her favorite emperor.
---
This is the book I decided to read in preparation for turning 30.

Ovid: Metamorphoses

He was a Roman, but the stories are mostly from Ancient Greece. Also interesting: he was exiled by Augustus (my favorite emperor) for a terrible crime which was never revealed. The Metamorphoses is a very very long poem comprised of stories about characters transformed; Ovid had hoped it would redeem his reputation and enable him to return to Rome.

Battlefield

Gina Myer's new chapbook Behind the R is now available from ypolita press. You can order it for $5.00 on the website . $5.00 is good for hard times.

Enlarge the graphic! It is genius. The letters are tiny. (I found it at SF Denmark Events Digest. )

LCB says, "If I had my own geography of circles there would be four and they'd be Aesthete, Ascetic, Marxist and Hippie. Maybe I could replace Marxist and Hippie with Anarchist and have only three, which would look nicer (Overlap categories TBD)."

Send me more circles! Mine is coming soon.

Does anyone know how to make alt-tags for images work with blogger's crazy HTML?

How to Make Your Blog Accessible to Blind Readers

I need to read that.

Halving Money for My Half-Birthday

I'm forty and a half.
With a thirteen-year old's
hair telling me I'm not
forty and a half.
Half fifty-five.
Half fifty-six
minus a half.

A Child

It fell from the tree.
Fell in my mouth.
I chewed it; it was a dry leaf.

I rested by the sprinkler head.
It fell on my arm,
was a mossy limb,

circulated bugs.
It was a cloudy stream
with rock parts. Sweet tea

and bourbon jar.
Sleeping off. Sun’s far
but the shade tree

but the light’s much.
Strong
above the tree.

I like
Issue 1 .
Check out the other Claire Becker:
Clair Becker.

PAIN


It is from Alaska
that we send those out to make sure that an eye
is being kept on

this very powerful nation
Russia because they
are right there



WITH THE IMPACTS OF CLIMATE


change what we can do
about that as governor

I was the first governor

to form a climate change to
start dealing

with the impacts


--partially courtesy of Maureen Dowd there on the media

Boo for the Bailout Bill! The current version. The passed version. Where's our government ownership stake?

Alex told me about The Great Schlep ! This is genius. My grandma lives in Florida, but unfortunately she can't vote.

I'm been having some nightmares about oversleeping on election day and not opening the polling place. I have to be there at 6 AM. I'll probably be too nervous to sleep at all.

Save This Country, Missouri

Hey Kansas Citians, October 8th is the LAST DAY you can register to vote in the November 4th election!

If you currently live in Missouri, but you're from Kansas, you CAN vote in Missouri. Switching your registration is not hard.

Simply download and print the application from this website OR fill out a simple form to have the application mailed to you, but don't delay! You can get one mailed to you if you click here.

I think you can also find applications at the library and DMV.

Missouri might just go your way...polls show a near-tie between Obama and McCain.

I passed my pollworker exam, and I might be running your neighborhood polling place if you live up the hill from Dolores Park. See ya there in November.

I think it's fall in San Francisco right NOW. Midwestern-style dark clouds, brown and orange leaves, light breeze, 85% humidity.

Timothy McSweeney is devastated and lost

David Foster Wallace memories above

and below a postscript in the New Yorker.

Some Pomona friends have commented on the McSweeney's site. I don't remember him well. I tried to take a contemporary fiction class with him his first year at Pomona, my last, but it filled up. I went to his office hours to try to get in. He told me I could sit in the interrogation chair or the tippy chair. I sat in one. The class didn't have room. That was fair. I worked in the English department office, library, etc. I ran into Wallace at night in Crookshank Hall. He would be using the office, putting things in mailboxes, taking things from mailboxes. He often wore shorts.

But it's not him I remember (or don't) as well I as I remember the experience of his brain on the page. I remember the companionship, talkiness, the hallways, the drone. I read Infinite Jest throughout a semester abroad in Madrid. I read it after lunches, after napping after lunches in my tiny floral room, after staring at canvases, after staying out 'til morning and waking in the afternoon, after reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.

I don't know what to say. I'm trying not to delete my recollections. Read the books? Read DeLillo.

I thought saw a scene from White Noise today on the highway. The kind of rubbernecking where your head bends down.

I'm also thinking of you, English department, and I hope you are alright.

PALIN
PA IN
PAIN
pain

My most frivolous thought currently

It's pledge drive time for my two local NPR stations, KQED (88.5 FM) and KALW (91.7 FM). This interruption—voices saying nothing instead of voices saying choreographed things—that I wake up to daily, almost drives me crazy, and combined with some other things like election anxiety and work-related stress, that's not good.

I have a beautiful dream involving silence. Instead of the pledge drive, they turn the radio stations off. And they tell us once maybe or mail us a postcard, fly a small plane with a banner, put a notice in the newspaper: no more of your local NPR station until we've collected enough money to run the station. Start sending money in now, and we will turn it back on when we have enough.

If that takes two weeks, that's normal. If it never comes back on because they don't receive enough money, they'll have to try a different strategy. I'll just keep checking those frequencies to see what's up. They could do a lot with empty frequencies.

Michiko Kakutani on David Foster Wallace (Dave Wallace).

Reginald Shepherd's Obituary link

It's been a bad year for life.

David Foster Wallace, Writer, Is Dead at 46

Awful awful.

He did wonderful things for a lot of people I know.

"Woman burns brush in a barrel." (Accessibility)

The new iPod Nano finally has some built in accessibility features for the visually impaired. You can enlarge the font size, and you can operate the menus with your voice. However, there are only 2 settings for the font size, Standard & Large! I can't imagine that's sufficient. You can also now use iTunes 8 with a screen reader. Why did it take so long?! The baby boomers are going to demand accessibility all over the place as visual impairments start to set in, and that's going to be great.

I have students who use iPods. They just play them on shuffle and skip what they don't want to hear. I also have students using text messaging who guess what the messages say.

Anyway, people don't really use Macs in the blind community. My friend, a technology expert, hates them. I think there are a lot of holes in the way things work.

We tried using Google Chrome with Jaws, a very mainstream screen reader, yesterday, and we could not do a thing. Jaws only read the address bar and wouldn't tell us what was on the screen. Google Chrome also wasn't working with some standard keyboard commands, since it doesn't have a menu bar. I hope those things get worked out.

I keep meaning to check if this blog is even accessible. And now I remember it's not. I need alt tags on my images...I think that's what they are called.

Happy Birthday LCB!

Thanks for letting me perch on the edge of your bed
for most of your years.

I can't figure out which website they're using currently, but Books & Bookshelves, at 99 Sanchez Street in San Francisco, is selling tons of great small press poetry chapbooks, full length books, and journals as well as beautiful unfinished bookshelves and other furniture. If you're a small press, you should get in touch with them so they can carry your stuff. They also have a new reading series. If you want more information, I might be able to work a little to get some hard facts.

In other news, I got stuck with a broken down van, 5 students and 2 teachers for several hours today outside the Palace of the Legion of Honor art museum. Then I went straight to my 3 hour class on teaching math and made origami fish. Oh man. Human.

Nico Alvarado-Greenwood sent me this link to a very nice blog piece about my work: mm/dd/yyyy . Thanks guys.

Hey LL and the rest of us: Don't despair. Even Sarah Palin supports Obama according to a recent interview. Check it out: Palin on Obama in the New Yorker.

By the way, I'm using Google Chrome to write this. Whoa.

Check out Ammon's rad t-shirt, mousepad, wall clock, and button design while I cry a lot about Sarah Palin.

Update from Trafficker Press, which recently unvailed its home on the interweb.

Jared Stanley's The Outer Bay is now available!

"From our bay to yours for $8."

I've read it, and you will want to. Juicy late summer reading for your afternoons.

Selfishly working to improve oneself.

"Some Americans identify themselves as Irish, whereas others say they are Americans."
-found in textbook

Satellite Telephone

That's a photo of the journal Satellite Telephone posing as a face. And the photo is backwards, and the mirror is what you get. Anyhow, it's a magazine put out by Robert Dewhurst. I have about 10 pages of stuff in there. There is a typo to correct. In the poem, "San Leandro," "I bought friends" should read "I brought friends." It's not me in the poems though, so I don't know. Maybe she did buy friends. Maybe I wrote that. Maybe I changed my mind. Is that why Typo is Typo? Also there's a little "stars" for "stairs" action which I wish we could do in real life.

Here's information from the website. Lots of great stuff in there.

"SATELLITE TELEPHONE is a small, irregularly published magazine of poetry and fictocriticism, born in Portland, Oregon, and since on the move. It's second issue (Spring/Summer 2008) came out today (July 23rd), and is pleased to feature new writing by: CLAIRE BECKER, LYNN BEHRENDT, ROBERT DEWHURST, FANNY HOWE, KEVIN KILLIAN, RODNEY KOENEKE, CHRIS KRAUS, DOROTHEA LASKY, SAM LOHMANN, KIMBERLY LYONS, SIMON PETTET, CHRIS PIUMA, ARLO QUINT, DAN RAPHAEL, HANNAH SAYLE, KYLE SCHLESINGER, FRANK SHERLOCK, and SUSIE TIMMONS. The artist-writer GOODY-B. WISEMAN drew a beautiful cover.

"The magazine is xeroxed and staple-bound, with silkscreened covers. It costs $7, postage paid, and can be purchased below with paypal. Copies _may_ also be found in Portland at Reading Frenzy; in Los Angeles at FAMILY; in Washington, DC at Bridge Street Books; in Amsterdam at Boekie Woekie; and in Germany at the Cologne Kunstverein. Or, like the first issue, #2 is free as a trade for mail art or other zines. You should do this. Email the editor for his current address."

This summer I went camping for my summer

I'm back to work now as are many of you probably. It's kind of sad to have time go quickly, be back to work, feel the gulf from Saturday to Saturday. Because so much happened—you moved your body to and from a place so many times, but a little piece of garbage sat waiting to be thrown away, and it didn't get thrown away. And a whole week went by. And a sweater sat soaking to get a stain out. It sat for two weeks in the water, not disintegrating perceptibly.

It's exciting too, and maybe even though the job seems harder you're doing it a little better because one thing you learned to do last year comes easier. I'm sad and excited which manifests in exhaustion at the end of every day. My goals from last new year's are met (moving to city, riding bike), so the next four months I can use to file and mail things and update this blog when I'm not working. And drink less, be less social, reverse my previous new year's resolutions.

I had up a very unflattering photo of a French horn, but I took it down because it didn't go with the very flattering landscape of my blog. In its place, here is my sister and me at Laura Ingalls Wilder's house.
I used to play the French horn, and it was wild.

There's a lot of other stuff I've been meaning to put on here, like the Frank Stanford Literary Festival, some chapbooks I got in the mail, and Satellite Telephone magazine I got in the mail.

More soon!

Did I ever mention that the new episode of Rabbit Light Movies is up? I'm one of them up there in a hotel tower looking down on railroad country in Lincoln, Nebraska. Don't judge me. I'm pale and tired and reading the title poem of this blog. It's called Human Is Animal, Animal Is Back. That causes a lot of google searchers for, I don't know, human and animal sex, to end up here. Shit, that mention's going to make it worse.

Lauren Levin's excitement about Link+ on the Mrs. Maybe's Seance Blog reminded me of the mystery of my stolen (and according to the library, paid for) graduate thesis. It was one of my first posts on this blog. I'm kind of glad because I don't have to steal it myself in the future. But really, who burned my thesis? You can search for it on Link+...

Bruce Conner

I missed it for a while, but Bruce Conner died. Here's his NYTimes obituary. Maybe my sister can remind me, or my upcoming trip to Kansas City. Was there some of his art at the Nelson?

The S.F. Chronicle had some interesting stuff:

"In 1967, Conner ran for the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. He described his business or occupation as 'Nothing. My qualifications for said office are as follows: The light of the body is the eye; therefore when thine eye is single, they whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is dark, they body is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.'

"One campaign speech was a list of desserts, reports the Bay Guardian. The artist/candidate received 5,228 votes."

Start the backward trajectory of limited choices as technology takes us the other way

I tried writing down every thought. I thought it would be a poem. It was fourteen pages long. I've got to work at the fourteen pages to find the poem—like finding order in the chaos in nature. Finding math. Figuring out ferns. But the poem might not be there. Or it has to be there somewhere, but I might not ever go in there to find it.

I've been trying all day to put words to a scary bleak dream. I was at a version of the house where I grew up. Everything in the yard was dead. My mom was gone, and my dad telling what I needed to know about the house before he left. He was standing in the yard watering the dead things with a hose. And sometimes my dad was not my dad. He was my friend who just moved away.

I'm supposed to spend more time alone and get things done, but is there something sad about getting done that you're meant to do? Balance. Only temporarily have I ever achieved that.

Do you think that you should get paid to do what you want to do, get money from the state and be a poet? Maybe we shouldn't all have to be teachers? My housemate thinks that if that's the case, then he should get paid to be a sailor. I say Yes. But he believes in work. They're both work. Poems can turn others into poets, and that's for the good of society. Can anyone prove this empirically with a longitudinal study?

What if we each spent all day on the basics instead of being extreme specialists? Healthwise, isn't that what they're saying we're supposed to do?

Paris Hilton's Response to John McCain

Available soon from Traffiker Press, the thing you see on the table: Jared Stanley's flapping open chapbook, The Outer Bay. It is sure to be an excellent read. To get it, you're going to have to send a check to Andrew Kenower probably.

On a side note, I am wondering if anyone has watched the cancelled HBO series created by David Milch, John From Cincinnati. It has many of the same actors and speaking styles and sometimes music as Deadwood. I recently finished it, after getting stuck in the middle for a while. It was alright, way better than many things.

Tonight maybe I'm going to see The Exiles, 1961, which looks awesome. And I'm now going to try to go swimming. Goodbye.

That's a treasure of a photo (of treasures) from my trip.

I missed the fact that Rabbit Light Movies #7 went up a while ago! I was too afraid to watch the video of myself reading and avoided it. But here you go, friends.

Rabbit Light Movies--Episode #7

John Keene & Christopher Stackhouse, Juliana Leslie,
Johannes Goransson,

Sasha Steensen, Michael Rerick, Claire Becker, Anthony Hawley,
Mary Jo Bang,

K. Silem Mohammed, and Matthea Harvey.

Rabbit Light Movies Link

In a related note, Hasbro company is really stupid to attack Scrabulous. They're only making Scrabble more popular. Scrabble is the only trademarked board game with such a high level of popularity, according to the book Word Freak. It can't last! I personally have travel scrabble and a Braille version from the fifties or sixties. So how is my playing Scrabulous hurting Hasbro?

Copyright is stupid. Publishers also make is a lot harder than necessary for blind users to download the e-text of books, so they can be translated into Braille. I've read that people are starting to download textbooks illegally. Totally understandable. People like physical books and will never completely stop buying them. People who have enough money (or parents' money) to buy a $130 textbook will do it. I get mine from the sweet Link+ system at the library. Other people can read them on the computer screen.

By the way, I've been reading on the screen lately, and I have a really good suggestion: make your font way bigger and lean back in your chair. On a Mac, you just hit the Apple key with Plus.

Music festival on Treasure Island. Is that real? DON'T CLICK THIS LINK

REMINDER

Artifact & Small Press Traffic present...

Sawako NAKAYASU
Lauren LEVIN
Jasper BERNES

Saturday, July 26, 2008
6PM Doors/6:30 Reading

@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

$5 suggested donation

Salt launches The Crashaw Prize for the publication of debut collections of poetry

CAMBRIDGE, UK (Salt Publishing) – The UK’s largest poetry publisher, Salt, has launched a new annual award for debut collections of poetry. The Crashaw Prize will be awarded to up to six new writers each year. Authors must reside in the UK or Ireland, the USA, or Australia and New Zealand. Winners of the Prize will be published simultaneously in the UK, USA and Australia each summer.

‘We want to continue to support new writing talent, but more than this, to draw attention to really first rate collections from poets both young and old,’ says director Chris Hamilton-Emery. ‘This prize isn’t about money, but about global publication in both hardback and paperback, and offering considerable publicity with one of the world’s leading poetry lists. We hope it will provide a platform for emerging writers to build their profile internationally and to look towards a long term relationship with Salt. We remain committed to breaking new talent, nurturing it, and finding readers for the best new writing.’

For more information visit http://www.saltpublishing.com/prizes/poetry/crashawprize.php

Check out this amazing slideshow from Sunday's New York Times Magazine--The Young Women of the F.L.D.S.

One of the sweetest bands of our time
playing in our city:

ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI at Cell Space, Mission Creek Music & Arts Festival
Saturday July 19, 2008
2050 Bryant St
San Francisco, CA 94110

* ariel pink's haunted graffiti(LA)
* anavan
* late young
* rainbow arabia
* hecuba

doors at 8 show at 9
$10 before 10 $15 after
presale $10

Readings, Complaints

There are tons of readings coming up...uhhh. Are you on Facebook? Sometimes I wish I wasn't. That's the most dramatic thing I can say right now. The most! Summer school is kind of a drag. Teachers make bad students (or whatever). I'm a teenager in my afternoon house. Anyhow:

2008 Bay Area Poetry Marathon
curated by Donna de la Perriere & Joseph Lease

Saturday, JULY 19, 7:00pm

BIN RAMKE * MAXINE CHERNOFF
GILLIAN CONOLEY * D.A. POWELL
CLAIRE CHAFEE * CHAD SWEENEY
DAVID BLAIR * LORELEI LEE

at

THE LAB, 2948 16th Street (@ Capp), San Francisco
*1 block from Mission BART stop*
$3 admission


The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand

Sunday, July 20 2008

Anna Moschovakis and Dennis Somera

LIVE! // 6:30PM

21 Grand
416 25th St
Oakland CA 94612

$3--$infinity sliding scale


Artifact & Small Press Traffic present...

Sawako NAKAYASU
Lauren LEVIN
Jasper BERNES

Saturday, July 26, 2008
6PM Doors/6:30 Reading

@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

$5 suggested donation

I've been on vacation for a while. I'll be back soon. I miss you.

Fertile discussion among Lauren Levin, Jared Stanley, and others is happening on the Mrs. Maybe blog, Mrs. Maybe's Seance. I cannot read white on black at 12:18 PM on Tuesday. But check it out if your eyes are strong.

Goodbye to Clay Banes's reading series at Pegasus!

-I didn't make it to the last few, but I made it to quite a few.
-Standing behind the reader on the balcony, staring at the wheelchair lift when the room was crowded.
-Or in the proper places, staring at the Earth stickers on the chairs.
-Awe at the excellent excellent roster of readers.
-Looking at all the internet books in a real home on the shelf there.
-I don't really like HiTek Burrito.

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand

Brent Cunningham and Gina Myers
The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand
Sunday, June 15, 2008
416 25th St. (at Broadway), Oakland
$3-$infinite sliding scale

Library news. At SFSU, and probably elsewhere, you can search the library catalog, find what you want, and send the title & call number to your phone in a text message for free! That is amazing.

I am sure the Braille makes it sooo much easier to find!
Braille Blank Notebook
You know what would be even cooler? A HANDMADE Braille Blank notebook. Don't be fooled; this Braille was made by a machine.

I don't know if you're into Fecal Face, the art website, collective, gallery thing. But good old Josh was finally pictured on the labyrinthine website last week.
Bronze @ Harrison Street Warehouse (5.31.08)
You gotta scroll down for a while. He's not one of the main figures; he's behind an elbow sitting on the raised floor. It was a good party. Bronze is my new favorite live band. They're playing tonight at The Knockout.

No more Poetry in Motion on the New York subways is truly a SHAME!

SHAME!

Don't forget to vote if you can today. In San Francisco, crazy things to vote for (like ending rent control (statewide) and punishing moral turpitude). Vote unless you think I'm an idiot for wanting us to vote. I'm probably missing something. Your ideology is probably more developed than mine.

On the back of the Voter Information Pamphlet, it says my polling place is wheelchair accessible. Then it is stamped: "5% slope." So much about life here is determined by hills. I often regret living even on the edge of one. They made my polling place uphill.

They made the Regional Transit Discount ID card office in a place it could take hours to get to, with an entrance in the middle of a rocky, disintegrating parking lot with no sidewalks and hazardous tunnels entrances nearby. Right next to it is a polling place.

He reminds me of Carlos Weider, but in a good way. Tao Lin Store

About

Check out that rad Puerto Rican campaign poster: it's Hillary Clinton, but I wish it were me.

new coen bros' movie trailer

Things I Just Found Out About

AGGRESSION

A CONFERENCE ON CONTEMPORARY POETICS AND POLITICAL ANTAGONISM

PRESENTED BY SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC

MAY 30 & 31, 2008

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
While a triumphalist rhetoric of community and collectivity has frequently accompanied the narratives of alternative literary scenes and practices, the purpose of this conference is to instead explore the myriad ways in which consensus and community become challenged and/or untenable, and to produce fresh opportunities for rethinking poetic theory and practice.

Organized by Chris Chen, Cynthia Sailers and Stephanie Young.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
FRIDAY, MAY 30
@ Timken Hall, CCA San Francisco campus, 7:30

Cynthia Sailers gives a talk on Group Mania and The Criminal Mind

SATURDAY, MAY 31
please note: all Saturday panels will be at the
CCA Oakland campus

11:00-12:30, Macky Hall, first floor
The Internet

2:00-3:30, Macky Hall, first floor
Community Histories

3:45 - 4:00, Nahl Hall
Viewing: SUPER-SOLID

4:00-5:30, Nahl Hall
An Ethnic Avant-Garde?

7:30 PARTY AND READINGS
Readings from Tyrone Williams and Bhanu Kapil. Hosted by David Buuck. Directions/map to David Buuck's house will be available at the conference, or email: smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

Thanks for the photos Megan.

I think I had a successful foot surgery on Thursday. They sliced from my big toe down past the first metatarsal joint. I have some screws holding bones together in two places. I should be able to get around by myself in the next couple of days--on crutches. My bandage won't come off for another week and a half. I won't wear real shoes for a month. My surgical shoe is navy & white.

So if you are looking for me, I'll probably in my house. I'll try to be reading and writing. I took some photos of my crooked foot. When my foot is all better, not painful, and straight, I can get my crooked foot tattoo. This would be a tiny drawing of my old crooked foot placed on my new straight foot. "Foot" is something. "Food" is something. "Good" is something. "Goot" is nothing.

VOLT ANTI-WAR READING
Friday May 30 @ 7:30 PM
Pegasus Books
NORMA COLE
MOLLY ALBRACHT
MAXINE CHERNOFF
PAUL HOOVER
AULA KONEAZNY
JOSEPH LEASE
RUSTY MORRISON
DENISE NEWMAN
DONNA DE LA PERRIERE
LESLIE SCALAPINO
STANDARD SCHAEFER
MARJORIE STEIN
BRIAN TEARE

For Senate, Clinton (Bill)

Red Hook: December

We had not expected it, the whole street
Lit with the red, blue, green
And yellow of the Christmas lights
In the windows shining and blinking
Into distance down the cross streets.
The children are almost awed in the street
Putting out the trash paper
In the winking light. A man works
Patiently in his overcoat
With the little bulbs
Because the window is open
In December. The bells ring,

Ring electronically the New Year
Among the roofs
And one can be at peace
In this city on a shore
For the moment now
With wealth, the shining wealth.

-Joe Massey reminded me about this Oppen poem called Red Hook. For you LCB.

A nurse said Happy Mother's Day to me

Please notice the new blog title photo. That's my wonderful mom in my backyard in Kansas.

Dolores Park Movie Night
Soylent Green (1973)
Thursday May 8th, 8:20 PM
or somewhere I saw 9:00 PM

Street Fair. We are having a street fair, with food, garage sales, and neighborhood comraderie. It's on Fair Oaks Street (between Delores and Guerrero). The street will be closed on from 21st to 26th streets, and we will be selling stuff. It's this Saturday, May 10th, from 9AM - 4PM (I think). If you know me and want to come over and sell stuff, let me know.

Have you heard the Charlotte Gainsbourg's album 5:55? It kind of reminds me of Histoire de Melody Nelson, her father Serge Gainsbourg's great concept album from 1971. I've also been really liking She & Him, Volume One with M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel. Her voice is really awesome. Sounds like old country sometimes, and I think some of them are covers, nice warm covers.

1 draw canes with each kind of tip
2 draw a slanted cane with all kinds of tips surrounding it
3 at the top of the page will be the words CSB news flash last issue with the date
4 put the little tips in a row in the middle of the page above that will be the heading
5 beneath the cane tips will be the words last issue at the very bottom with the date

"At least according to legend, the “events of May” — the strikes and disturbances that convulsed France in the spring of 1968 — began at the movies."

Forty years ago, 1968. All those things in one year: student revolution in France, student revolution at Columbia University, assassinations, elections. And forty years later we have some student protests in California over state tuition fees, which go up significantly each year. But we might expect a lot more to be happening, just more happening.

Read this maybe: "Cinema, for Godard in the ’60s, was an art of the present tense, which meant that an individual film was not a framed and finished work but rather something more like an essay: provisional, disjunctive and almost by definition incomplete." I love that idea of an incomplete thing, an essay, a try. Doing that again and again. And protests and poems both might embody this model.

Possibly unrelate: you may have heard about this compendium of taco truck information on Morning Edition yesterday. It's pretty rad: Yum Tacos! One of the things I miss about Oakland is Fruitvale and taco trucks.

Kate Greenstreet's new chapbook This is Why I Hurt You is available for pre-order from industry press Lame House here. You may as well pre-order it because then you won't have to order it.

Up there, you're looking at something I look at, a fake piece of cake.

Finally I'm an industry poet! According to this review of my chapbook Untoward.

Pulitzers, in brief:

Poetry: "Time and Materials," by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins) and (...)

SPECIAL CITATION: Bob Dylan, "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

Good year for the Bobs!

From Slate.com: When Poetry Meets Politics

KANSAS CHAMPIONS!

Basketball!!

Left Facing Bird , a journal made in six hours, yesterday in Montana and all over, featuring 100 writers, helping us write. This is a photo of my own left facing bird, friend of the pigeons watching me sleep.

1 how the islands were formed
2 how some of the plants got on the islands
3 how the islands get worn down
4 how seeds got to the islands

Few Students are Proficient Writers

I agree. But the good news is a poem from Jot:

How You Could Get to the Moon

To get to the moon you have to charge a Leo. Then you have to buy a fox. The last dog you need is a mountain. You will need that because you can't breathe in airport because there is no dirt. So don't forget to wear your mountain. Good luck beautiful

Nature ISN'T Boring