the mirror stage

this whole blog thing

2011-09-26T19:33:00.002-04:00

Taking another sip of tea and listening to She Keeps Bees, I can say the following as a recap.

It's been about 6 or 7 years since I started this blog. I was pretty religious about it when I started and while I was at Harvard but since then I have had a few lapses in the regularity.

Really there are a few reasons: This started off as a kind of outlet for poetry and also a place to air my response papers and get some intellectual feedback as well as having a gripe about what's happening in the world and my world, mainly my love life.

Now my love life has been up and down like a fucking roller coaster since the time I finished Harvard, but other things changed: working took up a lot of my brain, though I still managed to write a little poetry in here, especially trying out the Ghazal form, which I highly recommend for poets who want to stretch themselves a bit.

Obviously the intellectual stuff went for a bit of a nose-dive: I didn't get stupid or anything, but I wasn't reading nearly so much theory...

I became a Sikh about 2 1/2 years ago, which has been hugely helpful and a really good process.

Now, however, in case anybody's listening, I'm starting my PhD at Oxford University after an absence from academia of about 5 years. AND if that weren't daunting enough, I'm facing my 30th birthday in just a few days. Actually that doesn't bother me much at all frankly. At least not consciously.

And I also got married this year to a lovely man. Which is causing me both joy and pain, I must admit. Mostly joy.

So that's where things stand. I'm going to be checking in more, and like before it will be a combination of intellectual spewings, poetry and some intimate details that you didn't really want to know. I still have my food blog, Les Madeleines du Memoir. I also have a new blog about Contemporary Sikh Identity which is basically a platform for a project I'm doing with a few friends.

There's the trouble though, I guess, about getting a little older, working and constructing your identity...You have to be careful what you say.

I feel like Allen Ginsberg when I say: I want to be frank with you but, America, I don't know how. (that goes for the UK and any other country too). We'll see what I can come up with.

Love,

SR65

Ghazal of Seven Lifetimes

2011-09-26T18:05:00.000-04:00

(for Tarun and Swaroopa on their Wedding Day)

Your steps now, toe by toe, in this spiral called love
Are light but sure. Your feet face forward, your shadow stained the colour of love.
Now hand in hand, holding tight to the newness of each other you
Are undiscovered countries, frontier land lush jungles of love.

What will you find?

Mountains, rivers, valleys, caves and peaks of love,
White water and black. The stirrings of wings, birds of love
Their nests the breadth of your chest. Your heart is pure: do not
Be nervous now, because today begins an adventure like no other.

Now begins your life of love: a sutra of pain and pleasure.

You should know: lovers live in each other, their kingdom Love -
I have seen the roses grow wild by its roadside. In love,
They shine with heat and glory; their fragrance, so sweet and light
Saturates the air as incense fills a shaft of sun. Rain upon them love.

Remember: the house of the world is built of love
Within its walls we bless, fret, sigh and whisper love
We sit by its hearth and open its windows. Beware:
You sow your soul, when your feet stir the alta at its threshold.

What shall you reap?

You can but reap this truth:
Two souls made one cannot be separated
As love from love, cannot be divided,
nor counted, nor weighed;
As you cannot be without yourself.

See that: You are your own future in love.
What you build is yours in the province of Love.
Let it be strong and selfless, passionate and yielding
Let it be full to overflowing, green and vibrant as a grove.

Says the Saint, “Who will unite me with my love?
To him I will give all I own, my very head in this game of love.”
When you hold within your arms the soft skin of your beloved
You hold the world, you hold the Almighty, all pervading, all love.

So hold carefully, and tight. And be blessed in this lifetime, and the next.

The Burning Poem of Intention: Your Plays

2009-09-18T06:16:00.001-04:00

(my first Sikhi poem...draft. Hope I don't say anything offensive.)

*********************************

The Burning Poem of Intention: Your Plays

My mind has been mortgaged to illusions:

I have put chandeliers into a borrowed house of straw.

A hearth in a house of ice.

Blown with flies and dust. I decorate myself with string, with blood, with death itself.

In this dark there is a rainbow reflected. You

Like a diamond gleam in everything, even the sparkle

Of the ice as it melts, the honeyed straw.

They will fall away.

But you… are the sweetest of scents. You permeate

every thing every space every living breath every inter-space

with grace.

Originating everywhere, never fading, constant, clean. Perfect.

Though it sweeps under leaves and over roofs, into lungs and cells, out noses.

Though it folds itself between the pages of books, and mixes with the mortar of bricks.

Though it makes up the blinding lights of stars themselves, we will not smell it.

We ignore this beauty.

We can see nothing, unless we breathe deep the depths of you.

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

I will set this house on fire and step out of its door with love for you.

My bare soul feet clean of the melting “I”.

It will fall away.

The companion that grew with me, inside and without me,

You, are tear and smile. Foolishly,

I had thought you were far away.

This partner, this friend that consumes me with a holy fire

My soul burned towards the stars.

And who makes it cool with no other desire.

You who could drop a match into my very being, snuff and strangle.

You who enter into the deepest recesses of my body without a sound.

You who put me in motion with the grace of your natural moves.

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

I see you sometimes:

You in the cell of a leaf,

in the atom swinging,

in the cold breeze of a derelict room,

in a warm heartbeat,

in a rug on the floor,

a sudden storm,

the sky at night,

the everything.

We cannot describe the gifts.

How then the giver? And

How the giver who is: giver, gift & hand held out.

Every clotted sigh,

every line of every letter on this page,

my fingers, my thoughts: this is all you.

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

Lover who makes me, sister who breaks me: I am lost.

I know that I shall be called into the dark, kicking over a lamp.

I will set this house on fire and step out of its door with love for you.

My bare soul feet clean of the weary, melting “I”.

Cinders and ash will fly up, blue and final

With nothing

The fire will light my road to you.

Ghazal 4 (stone radif, for Hitesh)

2009-04-19T12:57:00.000-04:00

We sharpen, we wane, we pound and crush, we do not move to stand alone as stone

We are altars and baths, garlanded, smoothed, worn with blood, milk and love as stone.

In this house so solid and so cool I listen to songs of solitude but you

Lean against the wall, collapsing like a reggae king: rock-stone.

These are the built foundations of Jah-law and Jah-love.

Our kisses set lips as lime between the stones of this fortress.

Your body, smooth and tight, a seam of gold in a dark, hot mine-

A candle set inside a fist of salt, glowing through that solid stone.

You light my way: your feet cast golden angles like an open door. We lean in, become The acute kissed source of talk-talent, as echoes fly like prayers inside of our stone-love.

But because the firmament is not firm, and the heavens are not fixed, the meaning

Sun will glint between us on a given day when, breath-stirred, the stars align to stone.

We are eternal, yet we wear to dust under the soft touch of children. Our forms reborn, our memories burnished away. We yield to innocence, for time will also visit stone.

Love changes form, as waves carve caves from solid rock and sculpted forms run smooth

But light from light refracts, gold cleaved from gold is gold alone, and stone is always stone.

Ghazal #3, 2nd draft with change.

2008-12-04T13:04:00.000-05:00

There we were, floating on the sea, the tide scrubbing us clean
Of all the loneliness that has now rested back on me, like a crow.

Now I feel dirty, distant from the innocence of a blackboard, unused,
That cold slate taste of chalk we had as kids licking beach stones clean.

But I think of the purity of your sweat on me like rain, the whiteness
Of ancient trees. Some things must be worn into beauty, corrupted clean.

People fold to profane rhythms of the earth, but God shapes this:
We are ambergris upon the water, with time the foul can be fragrant.

The Ghazal opens a pure passion. Numb, lovely, beyond love and hate. A quiet
Sunlit courtyard entered after a long journey, these final steps swept clean.

You stand up naked, brown back shining in the afternoon light, leave me lain
Glistening under the fan. When you’ve wet your black hair who will be clean?

Ghazal #3 (draft)

2008-11-19T04:33:00.001-05:00

There we were, floating on the sea, the tide scrubbing us clean
Of all the loneliness that has now rested back on me, like a crow.

Now I feel dirty, distant from the innocence of a blackboard, unused,
That cold slate taste of chalk we had as kids licking beach stones clean.

But I think of the purity of your sweat on me like rain, the whiteness
Of ancient trees. Some things must be worn into beauty, corrupted clean.

People fold to profane rhythms of the earth, but God shapes this:
We are ambergris upon the water, with time the foul can be fragrant.

You stand up naked, brown back shining in the afternoon light, leave me lain
Glistening under the fan. When you’ve wet your black hair who will be clean?

Year of the Dog. Prose piece from October 2004 I think. I just found it.

2008-10-26T12:36:00.001-04:00

The Year Of the Dog

First of all, I must admit that the prospect of returning to the United States after an absence of 17 years was something I looked upon with both excitement and trepidation… after all, though somewhere deep In my childhood memories I had Nabisco and the Price is Right, Crystal Lite and Bubble Tape, the media maelstrom I was presented with on my recent holiday trips back to New York, and now, living in Cambridge, was of a new echelon altogether. I was not prepared at 8am, for example the Lil’ Debbie commercial where a crowd of children chime in in broken and brassy harmony to persuade each and every one of us to buy pastries called “ding dongs” with the air of demented cherubs. In fact, at this hour the commercial scared me so much I had to turn it off and run into the other room and reach for the radio dial for solace. As we all know TV, not the eye, is the window to the soul, or at least to the superego of a nation: meeting the US through commercials, talk shows, and entertainment news, sitcoms galore, Roll up Roll up! Bad enough for me, an itinerant transatlantic scholar, but I really despair for the mental cohesion of those international students adrift in an alien culture and foreign language confronted by dancing peanuts with monacles and low carb’ bread, (a contradiction in terms, n’est ce pas?). It’s enough to tug at the edges of sanity. And the peanut goes tappity tappity tappity…

In any case…let us illustrate, dear reader, a moment in the chasm of cultural intelligibility: Our Hero (me. I’m writing this, so I may as well take the opportunity to be the hero, eh?) leans back on a bank of red cushions, beer in hand after reading all day (ha!) like any good Harvard student (ha!), to enjoy what the evening’s fine selection of programming has to offer her. “Give Kids What They Crave!” Cut to children screaming in near falsetto…”mine tastes like a cheeseburger!!!”…choruses of mock excitement verging on chemical orgasm as pyjamad ten year olds holler their corporate delight over microwaveable pastry packages of colored filler oozing with synthetic flavoring!! Our hero sits up, beer still in hand and considers the underhanded politics of advertising to children. Mutters underneath her breath…”markets, million dollar markets created out of clogging ten year old arteries,..” clenching her bottle and raising it aloft she decries lost innocence, filled with revolutionary zeal and utters a phrase at once eloquent and concise:

“BASTARDS.”

She settles back into her political armchair, feeling she has accomplished her civic duty in a suitably noble, concise and empty fashion and is now done with polemics for the evening.

And then it comes on, the most supremely ironic placement, the crème de la crème of the talents of blasé commercial programmers…and she wonders, “surely this is a mistake, surely the irony of this juxtaposition would escape no one, or is there some kid at the controls playing with everyone’s head???”…

“Delicious, and healthful! Specially designed New puppy food for a strong digestive tract, good immune system, and healthy shiny coat…help your best friend to live a long and healthy life with a balance of natural protein and carbohydrates, vitamin enriched, and with a real meat taste he’ll love.”

In the moments before the opening strains of the plug for Growing Up Gotti, our hero sits dumbfounded and silent.

“I’d rather eat the dog food.”

Why Not: Living With Indians (Draft)

2008-10-26T11:46:00.002-04:00

The following is a draft of an article that will be appearing on the IIT website, written for my pleasure and the pleasure of others...I'm a guest writer. I also wrote a more focused piece for the IIT newsletter drawn from some of this on why people go or go back to India entitled Going (Back) to India that will be appearing in the Singapore Alumni issue in November. Look out for it! Please feel free to add your comments...they are really appreciated.

Why Not: Living with Indians

Ham Honge Kamiyab

“I mean what sort of message does this send the global community? We’ll be a laughing stock. They’ll only be let go in smaller batches later on… It’s all about politics. Only in India.”

Having just wolfed down a meal in a local Bangladeshi canteen, I stood on a street corner in Singapore’s Little India as two friends of mine loosened their ties and discussed the recent re-hire of Jet Airways employees. And then there was the Nano fiasco.

“Well, at least they’ve found somewhere in Pune, and they did come out quite strongly about the situation in West Bengal.” I added hopefully.

The conversation moved onto other things. All of us are professionals, with jobs, but do we want to manage another business? There’s an opportunity kicking around. Why not! And then inevitably, a note of homesickness enters: “Sometimes I just want to pack it in and go back to India, yaar.”

“Anyway, the jalebis here aren’t very good...too thick”

I’m going to preface this and remind or tell you right now that I’m a Videshi. Yes. A firengi, a non-Indian, and armed only with a limited batch of insights and experiences in what I have seen to be, and know to be a hugely diverse country which few are fortunate to truly know and understand. Personally I’m as lost as anybody else, if not more so.

For a variety of reasons I have a lot of Indian friends with all kinds of backgrounds, though mainly urban. I have an Indian boyfriend, I studied a bit of Hindi and Urdu, I love Bollywood, and I look pretty good in a salwaar qameez, but in the end, I am half Scandinavian, half Italian, and brought up in the UK. At a distinct disadvantage then, to write about India. But somebody asked me to, and so that’s what I’m going to do. I guess they thought it would be interesting. In the end this is just a collection of things that I have learned from and about my Indian friends then, in the past couple of years, and subject to all the usual caveats and fine print.

“I’m not Political”

The first time I went to India was for business, and I ended up getting far more than I had bargained for. In the middle of an MA in Chinese Literature and Arts I spent a summer interning for a regional bank and was posted to Mumbai for just four days. That four days was at the end of July 2005 and because of the terrible floods, they turned into a fortnight.

Caught in those floods I spent a lot of time reading Indian newspapers, both local and national, and bearing witness to the extremely well written and rapier sharp critique of politicians in the area for their failure to prevent loss of life. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. A rhetorical and well-reasoned opinion, and I began a consequent love affair with Indian editorials. So as I started to have more Indian colleagues and friends, the fact that people, especially young Indians, described themselves as non-political was strange to me.

I have cases in point. Firstly, Orkut. Yes, I know it’s hardly a measure of the feelings of the intellectuals of the nation, but it is popular, popular amongst Indians, and popular amongst young Indians in particular. The most common answer for political affiliation on Orkut is “I’m not Political”, and it is markedly different from the kind of thing you’ll see on other social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace where political figures have pages and fan clubs. The thing is, there’s a dissonance here between what’s written and what’s experienced. The vast majority of people that I have interacted with who claim to be “apolitical” on Orkut have extremely strong opinions on local politics at the very least, if not national or international politics. Why is this, I wondered?

Needing a guinea pig, I argued it out with my boyfriend after he had completed a particularly heavy tirade on Raj Thakeray and other local political figures.

“Why do you say that you are not political” I asked, “when it’s clear that you are? You obviously really care about this.”

The response I got was that there’s basically a conflation between being political and being affiliated with a party among young Indians, and especially since a lot of what goes on with party politics is split along ethnic or religious lines, if you want to avoid fist-fights it’s best to stay out of it. Jaane Bhi do Yaaron all over again.

But as Indian cinematic and artistic representations so clearly illustrate there is a tension between saying “Leave it alone, pal” for the good of saving your own skin and acting heroically in the spirit of the fathers of the nation and in participation within the world’s largest democracy despite the odds, even if it means being locked up or hurt. In popular culture one need only hold up the popularity of a firebrand film like Rang de Basanti against the wise council (and funny bits) of Jaane bhi do.

And then of course, political leanings when exposed out of the Indian context are all relative. I was naturally surprised when a very good friend of mine, a moderate, fun-loving Muslim from Kerala out-ed himself to me as a “conservative”. Things didn’t add up in my head at all. I asked him a few questions about religion in school, gay and women’s rights, fiscal and foreign policy to ascertain the depth of my misunderstanding, and discovered that he was probably among the most liberal of my Indian friends. I confronted him with this, and asked how he could call himself conservative. “Well, I’m not Communist,” he said. Kerala is, of course run predominantly by Communists. Lesson in political relativism learned, and the stability of labels suitably downgraded, we went on to discuss the American Occupation of Iraq.

Love, Hate and SRK on the Global Stage

Love and marriage are hugely important parts of any culture, and especially so in Asia. And it strikes me that among modern Asian countries this is especially so in India. Running concurrently in Indian society you have conservatism, eroticism, backlashes, varying degrees of misogyny and feminism. I’m not going to get onto the gender issue, dowries or the sex-education bugaboo because we’ll be here all day. It’s nasty, it’s serious and it deserves its own article. I’ll save that for another time. I’m also not going to jump on the bollywood bandwagon and talk about the crore rupee wedding industry, the glamour and tradition, and the culture of romance in modern Indian life either. Instead I want to talk about something much more glitzy and yet much more mundane: shaadi.com.

One of my best friends, an educated, feisty and independent woman can be found searching for a husband for her sister-in-law on shaadi.com, despite the fact that she herself had a love marriage. And this isn’t casual surfing either. It’s targeted. It’s traditional. Caste, family, education and complexion are all considered. I point out that Shaadi.com is racist. “I can’t get on Shaadi.com”, I say. She shrugs. She herself never thought she would be engaged in such a thing, nor that she would want to stay at home and take care of her new baby for the past year and a half, nor that she would spend so much time out of her day bitching about her colleagues who were predominantly “females” when she did go back to work. She never thought she would find herself doing all these things when not 3 years ago she was to be found in the shortest of short skirts on the back of her DJ husband’s bike. She has become a victim of what we call “householder syndrome”. We theorise that at about the same time as she started lactating all the traditional vedic instruction that she received growing up congealed somewhere in her brain, and despite her continuing predeliction for the bottle-rocket, and an absolute determination to avoid gaining the Indian “marriage-belly” that can verge on the impression of permanent pregnancy, she’s become about 50% more conservative. So it seems that shaadi.com, that high-tech Indian cyber yenta won’t be going anywhere soon.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of my own romance, technology can only be described as my nemesis: India may well be hurtling towards economic advancement but even in Mumbai internet and especially mobile phone networks are so poor that my tender heart-to-heart with my boyfriend in Borivali ends up cut off at “Namaste”. Whether this is part of a shaadi.com style plot to prevent inter-racial marriage or not is anyone’s guess.

“Indians are the most prejudiced people in the world. If there’s no one else to hate, we’ll start hating each other”. From love to hate. The preceding was announced by a US educated Mumbaikar friend after a drunken discussion on Asian politics, and drunk or not, few will deny it. When the green, white and saffron are unfurled, every Indian may be your brother, but when it comes down to it, it’s not just the Raj Thakeray’s of the world who will carve up a neighbourhood by language or shades of brown. Hell, even Shaadi.com does that.

One of the things that unites a people like no other however, and this is true of all diasporas I think, is missing home. There was an article in Times of India some time back about the relationship between NRIs in the US and their home country, which, it concluded, was composed of an ever-fluctuating sentimental parabola of complaint and homesickeness driven by a rich web of factors. Some of these were purely selfish (availability of domestic help and fresh paneer etc.), some more complex and profound. As another friend of mine, musician Angaraag Papon Mahanta says:

“Wherever I go…India pulls me back…I love the human, crazy freedom nature of this land. ”

What we’re talking about I guess, is cultural, the deeply felt pull of Sanskriti, which I don’t want to flatten into a box-sized trope a la Swades, but nevertheless a homesickness that transcends the cultural divisions that typically divide Indian communities, and which I think everyone can see and feel to be real, even among those who have chosen to live and work abroad, and especially in a time of opportunity. What is actually missed may vary, of course. The interesting thing is that, certainly from an outsider’s perspective, this holds true even for those whose families are predominantly settled abroad, and even in the case of those raised in another country: with the expansion of Singaporean businesses into India and vice versa it has been surprising to hear some of my Singaporean Indian friends talking about “going back”.

In some ways this becomes akin to the way that the Chinese diaspora, the “huaren” or “huaqiao” understand their relationship to both “Chinese-ness” and the mainland, despite the fact that in the Chinese case this is often a discussion complicated by the political past and infused with racial rhetoric.

For all the unifying power of homesickness however, the Rajasthanis in Singapore will still mutter under their breath about the Tamils, the Bangladeshis will wonder about the Assamese and I will stand in the corner and stay out of it.

If we are going to talk about love and hate, marriage and class war, then we have to talk about the drama King, Shah Rukh Khan. With a furrowed brow as distinctive and iconic as Elvis’ curled lip, and status to match, it’s not surprising that SRK inspires strong feelings. He’s ubiquitous. A brand. But is he a brand that we like?

Singapore certainly seems to like him: his image in cardboard was stuck up outside of Mustafa’s for weeks in advance of the Zee carnival during which the King himself graced us with his presence. Which, considering last year’s showing at Zee, just goes to show how far the NRI community has come in organizing itself in Singapore over the past year. In fact when rumours initially circulated that “a Khan” was going to be coming to Zee, I and many of my friends dismissed SRK out of hand…”He wouldn’t come to Singapore just for that” we all agreed. We resigned ourselves to Salmaan (sorry Salmaan fans). And then proceeded to nearly wet ourselves when we learned he was turning up. Speaking for myself, the Fair & Handsome bit aside, I am a fan, not quite a screaming groupie of a fan, I’d be more likely to faint in front of Aamir Khan, but a fan nevertheless. And yes, I realize that to many of my more intellectual Indian friends this is all a bit passé. All I can say in response to that is that everyone needs a guilty pleasure, and since I get little to no joy from the US or UK top 40 and Hollywood films are usually a “miss” with me, Bollywood seems to fill in the craving for cultural empty calories that others can’t reach, and besides, SRK is an ur-phenomena to be sure. Like any public figure he seems to inspire a spectrum of emotions, from desire to hatred, but one thing can be said for certain: he’s everywhere. Like God, except that role is already taken by Amitabh Bhachan.

KBC?

And in the words of SRK, and in the light of the credit crunch’s economic impact on India, we might ask: “Kaun banega crorepati?”

As the Sensex does a less than graceful swan dive this week, the answer might seem to be that apart from those people who already are, “koii bhi nahi”. And the fear that the multinationals who lined up to get into Dalal St. are heading back the way they came is solidifying, certainly. But as I think about why people go to India for business at all, foreigners or Indians, it becomes pretty clear that those reasons will more than likely stand over time, and that therefore this story isn’t quite over.

What reasons am I referring to? Up until recently, India was being touted in the international business press as a sort of new frontier for foreign investors. A fast developing economy, with inexpensive labour and significant natural resources…but is that all there is to it? I would say no. Let me preface and say that I am not an economist, but I suggest that there is a link between the reasons that foreigners (whether from other Asian countries or Western countries) go to India and the reasons that multinationals jumped on that particular AI flight: looking for a radical outside, that is, something “out of the box.” When people want to see things from a different perspective, when they want a different solution, whether that’s a “life solution” or a “business solution”, for better or worse, they look to India. It’s a kind of ideological outsourcing, something like Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs’ experiments with outsourcing his life to a team in Bangalore.

This is surely simplistic, and very often ignores the complexities and foment that brings those ideas to the fore, but it nevertheless seems to be true. What will happen and how people, tourists and business people alike, will view the situation if we ever live in a global society that is truly alive to the day-to-day realities of life in many Asian countries including India, is anybody’s guess, but for the moment India exists conceptually it would seem on the knife-edge of possibility and risk, but also as an ideological space.

Let’s connect this back to Angaraag’s reasons for return, and the search for the perfect Jalebi here for a minute. While most Indians I know think that the foreign preoccupation with India as a “Land of Colour” is misguided, visitors, NRIs and traveled resident Indians alike seem to agree that there is an alternative logic at play in India, if not several. This is a place where buckle makers in the slums of Dharavi can sell to Walmart, a man’s life savings in bonds can be eaten by termites while in a bank safe deposit box, and Dalits may actually pay for the opportunity to clean out sewers in goldsmiths’ arcades because they make a mint on the gold shavings they pan out, especially with the price of gold going up. This alternative view is clearly not dependent upon some sort of belief in the country as a land of ghee and honey.

Dalal St. has, at the best of times been the story of global markets, global confidence, and local tug. Confidence however is evidently extremely fragile in world markets in general and especially in India where the rumour that “we could truly be a superpower” was just beginning to be believed.

However, I suggest that for better or worse, the symbolic power of India, as simplistic as it may be, as inaccurate as it may be, does have a sort of un-planned-for reality behind it and will not disappear. And because of that, on the economic front there is reason for hope. I know that as soon as an opportunity turns up, there will be Indian friends of mine who whether they have jobs or not, will leap into the void, and in the most unexpected manner, screaming “why not!” all the way.

I’m just fortunate enough to have a ringside seat.

The Ground

2008-10-22T06:00:00.000-04:00

I love the ground whereon he stands
The ground beneath those shoes that
Walk. Walk him along to work, party,
To beds and beds and beds.

I love the ground whereon he stands.
His love is hard just like it, buoys up
Heads and shoulders, hips, hips,
Thighs and shins just like it.

I love the ground whereon he stands
Each pavement crack a fingerprint whorl
The mark of something past, something
Painful, man-making and man-made.

I love the ground whereon he stands
And his shadow whose belly hovers
Along it with promise of some great
Union between ground and him-

Written by nature and far off down
Past years of cigarette butts and
walking in those shoes to the beat of a
hot heart. I love the ground whereon he

Stands, because silently
It touches him, and me.
Because it owns us both.
Because in those measured
Squares named and unnamed
It is his.

Love Song for a Friend

2008-10-19T06:40:00.000-04:00

Come at your chosen speed, dear one
The door is open.

The hinges flex like your
Palms outstretched
to break my fall.

Such is a love song
For a friend.

Linked in and Locked Down in the safest space
My head on your shoulder
We will gun it, high 5

Into the future
Or the past.

With drinking, shouting, laughing
All the way.

With a yielding to each other
Over time and over again, you
Might be late

But

Come at your chosen speed, dear one,
Because the door will be
Open still.

Ghazal #2

2008-10-17T10:03:00.000-04:00

The sweetness of dates after sunset, the memory of
My teeth in the flesh of your neck, sweet as sugar.

There is no frost in this city to glow quiet
Only broken glass, fractured cubes like sugar.

City light enters in through barred windows to cross your face
Like the sun following as you ran through green canes of sugar

Your wildness in the setting sun sparkled gold, diamonds on
Your lip from my lip transferred, from my glass these grains of sugar.

My toes dug into the white sand on the beach, waves pulled out.
The hand of nature piles up, sculpts men like dust, like sugar.

To dust we may all return, to tombs to life to tombs we
Dissolve like salt in the sea, as stirred in your tea, the sugar.

Now in this city I’m alone, in the quiet, in the noise, days go
Bitter or go slow, go like years too poor for sugar. Or before it.

It’s said that love’s like sugar, there is no sweeter. But a
Meal of sweetness will make you hate the taste of sugar.

Ghazal 1

2008-10-09T13:46:00.000-04:00

Ghazal #1

You say my dreams they will come, they are in my hand
But tell me, how can I sleep when my heart's in your hand?

The big sky is thick with bluish cloud like the quilt
wrapped round your shoulder, clutched in your hand.

The wanderer walks on paths laid by God
Like a drop of sweat skips down cracks in your hand.

Wandering we, in dream mountains, climb
Peaks of my talk and your talk, my hand in your hand.

The plane flies its path its journey prepared
Your journey’s a bird: warm, alive in your hand.

The reader reads in sequence, a line understands
We live in parallel like heart, life line in your hand.

Viet Eats God 1

2008-07-20T07:08:00.003-04:00

My friend Viet: banker, philosopher, student, historian...brilliant when sober, genius when stoned or drunk. Profound thought, extreme intelligence, college in Arizona and experience in the midwest of the USA, Vietnamese cultural roots, bold ambition, and English as a second language (although near perfection). Put all of these in a blender and the following is what you will get.

I give you sayings of Viet from session 1am-7am 20th July.

1) "I never really thought about Africans...."

2) "I tell my friends who have converted, if God's so great, tell him to come here and tell me what's up....we can have a chat."

"I mean even with Buddha, you know... Sometimes I got to temple and I am praying and it's like Buddha, you're not doing anything. You've got to start socializing."

3) On "poking" on Facebook: "You're poking me from the other side of the internet...I don't even know where you are!"

4) "The internet is a highway without exits"

Sentence

2008-07-09T12:38:00.000-04:00

I remember the curve of your back dear and
The smell of your skin when you smoke

People are asking me to make decisions.

And you know as well as I that my desires
Are too thick and wide to pave a straight road
A path to travel.

This is not Oz.
Welcome to the Jungle.

Part of me can’t dance; part of me can.
Part of me kisses someone else.

But my mind always goes back to your
Back pockets and your keychain, your soap.

Your eyebrow cocked.
Your ass on a bar stool.

The last breath of a rotten youth cured.

After sometime of breathing deep a different air
Like some wandering senator on a lost weekend
I realize, as he might never do:

That my fingers are yours, dear
My breath is yours
My toes are yours
And I cry your tears.

My wedding band runs through the net of my veins
Like no simple ring could ever do, it binds me to you.

Here, it is dark and leafy and far from your white skin.

People are asking me to make decisions.

I want to stay here, I want to be with you, I argue with myself
And I’m losing.

But you’re a solid ache that is always with me: I love you as I love no other.

I carry you in my body.

It is a malediction.

It is a kiss.

It is a sentence:

A pulling to a thousand pieces.

Clouds to disappear.

Monsoon to drown me.

We are not apart, and never will be.

Whether I like it or not: it’s love.

why i'm voting republican ;)

2008-06-21T03:02:00.000-04:00

Spread the word!

Six:Ten

2008-06-19T04:44:00.000-04:00

Six: Ten

Your hands were so small.

They surprise me: cold and thin, like ice melting.

Delicately, joyfully handing me a cup of coffee. Free and easy

We

Driving too late at night in this too wide city.

You know, I said,

Love was supposed to save me.

You can’t hide, sweet six, you might as well give up.

It is a lie, it is a truth, and we argue it laughing while someone pisses by a tree.

You’re old enough now to say it with some authority.

And so am I:

Love was supposed to save me.

We wait for it like waiting for a train or a bus
And then it will run over us.

Now, instead, it folds itself like origami:

I can fold you up and put you inside me,

But will you fit in that wet centre, so full of nothing

So full of secrets?

You turn up your own volume, fill out every space

Even though you’re Six, so thin as sticks.

But baby,

Love was supposed to save me.

Now it’s
Just eating me alive.

I want to hide in the crook of your arm.

Shelter between your ribs, behind your too-full-lips.

And you can laugh at my mistakes
And you can make me laugh in turn
And fill me with fireworks
And sweetly swear in the dark
Within me or without me.

Because love may still save us
Like the dawn sneaking up in your rearview mirror

When we are happy, hollow, sleepy,
We shall have to see.

Valentine (for Jason)

2007-03-07T02:50:00.000-05:00

New poem here I wrote for Jason for Valentine's Day...yes, we are back together again, and I am THRILLED.

___________________________________________________

Valentine

The mussel holds a female split.
Trees bend like flesh and branch apart.
The tenderest soul is tinder lit
The sign of all that grows is in the heart.

Boy, eating sugared balm from off my lips
Your shoulders graze soft snow that falls
Freezing freely, then melting in our heat.

That said, the dark whistles tight along you
And sings over your head, close. It is night
In the city, and cold. Close, you should know:

I have haunted your hunting ground complete

Savored the taste of your foot in the mud.
The ankle that drove it in, the muscle and the bone
The rhythm of you repeats, metes out a heavy thud.
You were never alone long, no: I followed.

I am the knight on horseback and the horse and highwayman.
I am the cab that takes you out, and brings you home again. And this
This can be our urban legend. Something elegant
written on a napkin

Or sculpted into ice in a public garden after dark…

A dream of red chambers and black stone.

In the car park there is no winter plum
To bloom red in fragile clots, make polka
Dots in snow: Our gloves are sore from
Frostbite.

We can only admire each other,
Full fine as any brush or branch.

Now, we stand together, and know
The curves beneath the coats by heart

And even without seeing, I know that I am right.

Just as in the orange light I know
That plum is red and snow is white.

NEW BLOG: Les Madeleines du Memoir

2006-07-17T12:39:00.000-04:00

Hiya everybody.

I am posting to inform you all that i have a new blogger blog called Les Madeleines du Memoir. It's a food writing and recipe blog. Anyone who knows me well knows that i pride myself on being an excellent, and experimental cook...now I have an outlet for my recipes and food reviews, a good practise place for journalistic writing, and something to divert me between job applications. I hope you will all visit, comment and maybe try some of the recipes!

love,

SR

evening occult

2006-02-07T00:23:00.000-05:00

THis is what i did this evening

it's gonna be part of the installation at the art party on the 24th

see

Boston Art Party

for details.

Nomad

2006-02-06T03:42:00.000-05:00

Last night I had the strangest dream,
Maybe it’s always been this way with
New buds to push out the old, clothes
Rolled in piles in the white morning
Of someone’s apartment on the 3rd floor.

Last night I had the strangest dream
That the coffee I drank and songs I knew
When I was younger were flowing out
A hungry inch from pinched brush to
Pinched paint brush and pen. Only then

When I slept with him, curled up against
His flat back, smoothing down his shoulder
Did I fall into sleep and dream that
As I get older the dreams keep coming
True. Only not maybe like you expect them to.

Last night, the dream I had was strange.

It filled me up, a cool rush that replayed
In snatched stepping to a pace, as I strode
Down the street I felt it making all time a
Nothing. It’s rhythms compressed light.
The sun of summer beat on my hairline

The snow I knew in piles at night.

In the dream I had I could touch the
Spring he brought with him, so soft,
The swinging of a tree, I could touch
My Christmas party in a room cramped
From living. Beijing factories. Witches breathing.

The thousand times I waited for a moment
With someone
alone.

Last night, when my arms wound round his waist
Covered in a sheet and the smell of paint I dreamt
That I
Was home.

poem for Sabrina 11/20: I wanted to bring you Neruda

2005-11-21T00:45:00.000-05:00

I wanted to bring you Neruda

Something warm, yielding: page by page of vanilla paper a
Soft Something nourishing to your bed
Side. I considered John Donne and dismissed him
Out of turn, too wordy I thought, too pained.

Plath was out of the question.

I wanted to bring you Neruda.
Pages of light and lushness, plants to grow around tickling your toes
In the hospital bed. A forest of loving flowers lifting their faces to
Yours. I pushed aside Lacan and Freud for him…pulled
Volumes from the sunlit shelves bringing up wisps of dust.

He wasn’t by the bed side either
Where I had thought he might sit forlorn with the petals of a rose between
Ivory teeth of pages.

A volume of French Renaissance poets seemed dismayed.

I wanted to bring you Neruda.
But I couldn’t find him in the towers of paper lined up like messy soldiers by
The unkempt sofa.

I brought instead the words of a friend between green stiff covers
Because only a few can speak like Neruda of loves and of lovers
Of friends and leaves and light. I would have brought you Whitman
Had I come at night, but since a cold wind blew down the doors
Numbered in gold on Auburn streets, since the high blue sky of early winter
In purpose had no peer

I brought you Shakespeare.

life, love and morning

2005-11-05T11:11:00.000-05:00

so once upon a time i started something about what had happened in the past year...making the snowflakes fall or something like that. Last night I was sitting in my office, revising for my Urdu test on monday when I decided to re do the calender on the chalkboard since it was fast reaching the very end...we put it up in September with 2 and a bit months of information on there, and now it's November so. So i started wiping away the weeks of exhibition openings, the chocolate tastings, the little marker for my birthday, drew little cartoons on thanksgiving and christmas and began to feel quite odd. Christmas is coming soon! WTF???

Last Christmas i was embittered and tired, still with Will, by a thread. I remember sending a package on New Year's Eve of cds and hotchocolate and other paraphenalia. This was a package that he never received...all the cd cases lovingly sketchd with psychadelic patterns and a card with many kisses. It arrived back to me about half its original size from being around the world and wrapped with rubber bands and tape in June, i think, or august. It was a strange little visitor from the past. And now i wonder what would have happened if he had received it. would it have bought us a few weeks more?

What have I done this year. So many things. When I put the calender up i suddenly felt as if i had done nothing and was met by this gaping vaccum. but actually it's not true. So much has happened. It has to be said that this has not been a year of stellar academic acheivment but it has been a trip, to be sure. Poetry readings and activism, falling into depression, fancying people, falling in love, painting, fucking, writing.

and a partridge in a pear tree.

anyway. Now is the time to work on the CV and life and essays and hope to god it all comes together...but first....i think i will take a little nap.

Exhibition Case/Shop Window/Television Screen: CHina on Display week3: World's Fairs

2005-10-03T19:16:00.000-04:00

Exhibition Case/Shop Window/Television Screen

About two years ago now I was laying in bed watching a late night documentary in a last ditch effort to try to sleep after a night up working, insomniac fashion. The program was called “Travels with a Gringo” if I remember correctly, and was on this occasion concerning our young and very socially conscious host’s trip to a silver mine in South America where a crew of miners daily crawled through tiny darkened tunnels and breathed in toxic fumes that were killing them not so slowly, crumbling away their lungs to nothing, in order to obtain silver for trade. The host and the camera crew duly followed the team into the pits of mountains where they would have to pause to try and breathe and discuss what was going to happen when they couldn’t get into the deposit line anymore. The tale was engrossing, sad, painful, but that wasn’t the part I remember. At one point the mining party and the camera crew that followed were sat in semi darkness in a tunnel deep in the mountain, bathed in sweat and gasping for air, chewing coca leaves while waiting for rocks to be moved so that the passage could be cleared. Our socially aware “gringo” turned to the miners and began telling them in Spanish that this film was going to be shown in Britain, in Europe, perhaps all over the world. The implication, I believe, was that people would see the program and care about their plight…that perhaps the lives of the miner could be bettered. One of the miners looked the camera dead on and said, “Do people like watching this sort of thing over there?”

What are we seeking to gain anyway? Is it a view of lives unraveling that makes us feel magnanimous if we offer a few dollars of aid? What the miner meant, I think, was partially about what the intent was of watching him and his friends struggle and die to eke out a living, what kind of vicarious thrill or sense of Schadenfreude was being enacted, or at least, these are the question that I thought of when I thought about what he had said, but also, why would people want to watch something that is just life? Just real life. Tragic, happy, drunken, confused, dangerous, dirty, dramatic, mundane. This is what made me think of this instance two years ago when considering this week’s readings.

In The World as Exhibition, Mitchell argues that Europeans and Americans sought endlessly to create a replica of reality, a picture that would encompass all in one imperious and imperial vision. This might also be thought of as a constellation of that “Universe of Symbols” discussed in the introduction to the discussion of the Louisiana Purchase Fair. It also makes me think of how the television functions in today’s society as both of these things, as a sort of constant world’s fair at one remove…pictures encompassing and representing with a conceit of reality by virtue of accuracy, trueness to life, and all this to such a degree that television and cinema like all truly circulating and potent cultural phenomena influences lifes expectations and the way we live, just as Mitchell argues the World’s Fairs altered the epistemological frames, symbologies and view point of Fair goers.

In thinking about our South American miner, as he looks through the TV and into the living rooms, that is, past the digital velvet rope that cordons “us” from “them” something else occurred to me in connection with exhibition and the World’s Fairs. Something about how the “natives” experience the fair, what looks were directed at the specimens of Europeans or Americans, perhaps just “the White Men” in their Native Costumes as they filed past conveniently for view. If the World’s Fair, as the grandest type of exhibition, the crucible of a universe of symbols that allows the existence of a certain sort of cultural order, has a narrative, can that narrative be read against the grain and if so how?

Mitchell’s article about the Egyptian view of the Europeans begins to consider this question, but I would like to know more about how those gazes functioned and how that dynamic worked…what of those Filipino guardsmen who strolled about with St. Louis schoolteachers? What did they think of the fair? What did they think of St. Louis? Or what indeed became of Columbus Chicago? This is one further aspect of the literature produced on the world’s fair as describe in Hinsley’s piece on the Colombian exposition…the extraordinary discrepancy between the scene portrayed and the interpretation given in the literature below in for example the “portrait” of the “turk” and his family. The caption is extraordinarily racist and strange, but even more it just seems so bizarre in reference to the picture. The man in the picture, although he looks posed, looks determined, half looks at the camera with a confronting gaze. The caption seems to be the American photographer reassuring himself from behind the lens as to the jocular, not quite real, not quite serious status of the “primitive” “brown man”…that is…unable to quite make the scene fit a picture by photographing it, he has to tidy up the edges with literature, place the image firmly into a “symbolic universe” so as to render it comprehensible.

All the talk of the camera and cameraman being the ultimate unseen, voyeuristically partaking in pleasures of the screen does raise one important additional point in this connection, however, before we throw up our hands and throw the camera out the window. All too often the anonymous male gaze of the camera is understood to be an imposing and dominating factor, a machine that changes behavior, changes images, renders them up to a (Western) god of photography/pictures for exhibition of a real that undermines the subjectivity of the people portrayed. I want to argue that while it is true that the cameraman often aims to go unseen in a fashion, to be unpresent, and to record people going about their business authentically there is indeed agency in the sideward glance, in the look away from the camera, and inn the getting on with your life that the “subjects” of the photograph rarely get credit for. A look directly into the face of the camera is powerful indeed, but are we so egotistical as to assume that this is the only way in which subjects can b rendered real?

Thus too an approach which does not conform to the requirements of the world’s fair can still be seen as an approach with its own agency and consciousness of power. The Chinese displays are endlessly contrasted with those of the Japanese contingent at the various Fairs of the Fair Fever at the turn of the 20th century, and the strategy employed by the Japanese curators is analysed and understood to be a political one. While it is true that the approach of creating a space incomprehensible to the symbolic order of the exposition did not necessarily serve US?chinese political relations well, the way in which those displays were mounted does warrant attention, in that they represent a different epistemological space, and perhaps can give ideas about alternate modes of exhibition and the understanding of same with regard to Chinese art. It is interesting too to compare the US political stance vis a vis China to former discourse about Japan. Endless articles appear today asking if “cChina is the New Japan?” (what an odd question) and by virtue of the question itself the conclusion is made to some degree, as before, we identify something of the “Yankee” spirit in the entrepreneurial dealing of the mysterious east…”with luck and pluck they may go into business for themselves”

That the “East” and particularly the ultimate other that is still so often constituted by the aesthetics and cultural values of China is still engendered as a market place in European and American pictures of “real” life should come as no surprise in the era of late capitalism, when the “imperial” gaze of the camera has become as ubiquitous for Indian and Chinese tourists as for travelers from the US. Paris, that endless labyrinth of mirrors, and maze of simulacra was host in 1997, I believe to an exhibition of Chinese goods at one of it’s major palais to commerce, Printemps, for example, and such eposition have it would seem, moved from the educational to the truly commercial sphere, or else frayed and bled into the kaleidoscopic pictures of television news. But if we acknowledge that the symbolic universe, and indeed the World’s Fair is, to some degree, alive and well at the dawn of the 21st century in the form of brothel holidays to Thailand, Fox News and the Department Store, what of the exhibition space, the museum. In the series of essays Cosmopolitanisms by Homi Bhabha et al. a convincing argument was made for rethinking the city, walking against paths, zig zagging across squares, walking on the grass in theoretical as well as physical terms. The same principles must be applied to exhibition.

Last week discussion of the trend for nostalgic curatorship was discussed in some of our readings…curatorship that would seek to create an exhibition as it really happened if such a thing can even be entertained. While there must be room for this kind of psychological play too, such a nostalgia would doubtless find it’s dead end in the curatorship of most Chinese art from before the late 20th century, besides creating of the past a picture, a cinematic other to be studied, and of the people who lived it objects to be viewed at a safe distance and with air conditioning. Taste makers, experts have always been at the forefront of defining the category of Chinese Art, or Japanese Art, and this is likely to remain a continuing trend, but to form a sort of heteroglossia of back steps, misreadings, rereadings, and gaps in this visual universe for the viewer to inhabit, and to acknowledge that the viewer makes the exhibtion as much as the exhibition influences the viewer, in a sense to put the viewer on display is perhaps the only way to circumvent the totality of hegemony in favor of personal agency. The viewer become the exhibition as they internalize it and it’s values long after the installation comes down and it’s pieces broken up, long after the Filipinos develop small pox and the “turks” (interesting to note modern usage of that word) are sent home because, after all, “some memories don’t fade”.

There are a great man questions that remain, as I have outlined above, but one that is particularly “beautiful and piquant” is this:

What would an anthropological exposition of Americans in their natural habitat look like?

PAN 9

2005-09-25T21:07:00.000-04:00

last night i had the strangest dream...

New Poem: V for Vaudeville (draft 1)

2005-09-01T15:53:00.000-04:00

The cinema died in celluloid swells that sparked my skirt,
Dyed in dyes that flaked off between my fingers where it made soft roses (hidden)
in the white of my hands. That dye like a butterfly.

From sepia canyons the light wove in throes and fits to hit hard the soft surface of a dirty mountain stream.
Not clean
Like some book or show but filled with mud, silt, sand,
leaves
feces.

I pulled my skirt up and ran the way that dogs do:

To Fro To Fro

Pell mell they say.
Oh hell.
Oh leather.

On the other side I saw the dark coming on like Dor-
othy, the Emerald city.

THERE IS: NO PLACE

Noplacelikethoserubylips noplacelikethoserubyslips
But as the clouds gathered green, I watched the sunset
Of the screen in waves of
Blink ing
light.

The cinema died that night with a one-two punch, a whispered kiss.
Pomp, Romp & Ceremony as I made it down the quiet hall alone, a weary traveller in some solemn steamy dream with no C for Cinema only V for...

The credits rolled a final time in step as, beautifully,
Tragically, with a car chase, a final sigh, a fandango, a top hat scream, dropofblood like a black pearl

(Perfect, never drying)
Cinema lay dying.

A silence. A cut.

It died then, in the moment I found you ,
down the town below
in those theatricals, hands singing like tough birds
Belly like fish, and the eyes of a shorn whore
Vellum Vaudeville reborn in fetish garb:
Oh hell.
Oh leather.

(Mary, Joe and Sade. A rebirth of entertainments gored, gone and dog-eared).

You whiteness, fleshed, no longer flat and light as light as light on screen had been.

You, the new god in stereo with a seraglio of cigarettes, rubbers and loves.

When push comes to shove you will make it XY XY XY: high, dry
the unlikely hero of flesh and blood.

No poison will harm you,
And your fingers burst through the gloves of some high fiction, as they reach through me.

This is not film
This is just Noir
This is not cinema
This is just verite

There may be dancing in the final scene but
That tango will be for you and me alone
For no eyes in space will keep time
When your eye look into mine.

And you light a cigarette in your own style
Forever undirected.

dream brother study 1

2005-08-30T02:24:00.000-04:00

this is what i did today.

Interlude

2005-08-16T14:38:00.000-04:00

making the flakes snow: looking at a year part 1

2005-08-16T12:34:00.000-04:00

there's a suitcase on my bed again.
I am making preparations to leave singapore, and go back to home, another home, again. i ws saying the other night that i feel like if i live somewhere...doesn't have to be a long time, just a few months, but if I LIVE there, i always miss it. that's my failing as a nomad. instead of having the home be inside me so that i never move, the ideal of the floating nomad life, i find that the world is my home...and there is always somewhere that i miss.

A year ago, august was all heirloom tomatoes and purple twilight. i was listening to vinyl with the windows open and a candle. Now i wonder...where did all the fireflies go?

Full of nervous energy
sleeping in the fold out bed, no furniture, new apartment, waiting for shipment, glossy wood floors and a pilow in front of the tv to watch Law and Order while eating roasted veggies in a wrap and a glass of white wine and later, to be sitting smoking on the porch in my towel...i love the feeling of drying off from a shower in the open air...hair up in a towel knot.

somehow the cigarette smoke was bigger before the furniture, the books...i wanted to let it out the back door.

I spent the days wandering around, and sitting by the pit, reading Bai Xianyong, i think...musicians, stilt walkers, madmen, drunks...i found home on the benches, in a movie of ease and elliott smith, the odd hard drunk. THe days were hot, and everybody said hi, you know, everybody said hi. i had to slow down just to go...take your time, miss. take your time.

When things started, when classes started i was walking through Harvard yard listening to tears for fears with the sun coming light, and a mug of joe from home, the co-op carry cup that i had picked up when i joined one august day after going off to watertown with a jar of homemade muesli for Fish and the Fam. I was listening to Depeche Mode that day..my jeans were rubbing out the tune to Personal Jesus from between my thighs. But, anyway, back to Harvard yard. I stepped through this shoal of people, it was the 80s all of a sudden...clean, bright, slightly vicious.

I was filled with love.and still being filled with love for my ex. I never thought i would speak of him as my ex. i was looking to the cleanliness of the wrought iron chairs, their happy picturesque position. and the T that sounds like elliott smith, the Decemberists, the pogues, the hidden cameras. always.

my grandmother died just as the air was getting colder.

and the speech between me and WIll was getting thinner and thinner, but what there was was boiling like tea on a mountain top. I remember he called me one time when fish was over and i had this sinking feeling as i sat in the red phone chair. my feet beat out a tune on the fridge..the words of the fridge poetry between my toes. "winter". "woman".

i took the plane home for the funeral after a week of being dazed. my grandmother had died in the time it took me to make and eat a bowl of oatmeal. I sat on the park bench in the island at the entrance to my development listening to Morrissey's "Our Frank" knowing that something big was ending. and it was even more than my grandmother's life. it scared me to kiss the smell of rot and shit in the crematorium, to cry so hard when i saw my own empty room where i had made love to will the last time. on the cream carpet floor in the summer lamplight. (you see, i remember. I remember the first time too)

in black i drank a black beer in the pub that was grey and low, surrounded by thick fingers in gold rings and hoarse voices and ploughman's sanwiches, everybody thinking of her great knees up, her G&T and her sense of style. her fuss, her jokes, Her sense of duty that was sharp as her photogenic nose.

I came home to cambridge and morrissey afraid that my last 18 years were being pulled out from underneath me.

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

I See Color Bars When I Come

the red sugar crystals on the cake sparkled in the candlelight. I was naked. It was my birthday after all and i was going to eat cake and run around and do my ironing at 3am like the sawn off bitch that i am. But, mate, with a heart of gold.

Halloween i set the fire alarm off and became an unpopular resident. But i went to Rocky Horror anyway in a gothy get up that (reminded me of the good parts of venice, before i woke up smelling like rotting on the inside from the most painful..no i never felt that way again...i washed so hard so long.) and Blue with a gold earring and an old slouch hat walked me home like a gentleman jim.

Sawhain round the table with new friends, a strange mix..a big sweet fairy running around granting chocolate to me and a little girl with dark hair. and my how we drank.

NOSFERATUNOSFERATU NOSFERATU.

i was painting. reading. so excited. so stressed. the snow began. the markets shut..but not without a few trips to buy groceries on fridays in freezing rain...thanksgiving was a haunting of a childhood hotel and thinking that Business Chinese was a drag. it was.

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

here is my heart:, as best as i can explain it.

2005-08-13T14:37:00.000-04:00

for all of you...

An Homage to National Day

2005-08-08T13:15:00.000-04:00

O it is coming.

After hearing fighter jets nearly every day and crazy big groups of soldiers marching and entire highways blocked by files of pristine (as never used) tanks and artillery, Tuesday is finally...Singaporean National Day. yes. I know. You're THRILLED.

So Singapore is celebrating the big Four-Oh and this seems to be an enormous deal (and not without reason, i might add, BUT) it's like kids and Christmas where they start getting excited about the big day right after Haloween...is it almost here??? Is it??? Is it??? the military bouncing up and down tgging the sleeve of the whole island. this is like the big show to prove to all the wives and mothers that when you send your sons off for National Service they do actually learn how to DO something.

marching.

they're REALLy good at it.

thing is, there is a good side: No work. plus...and this has been the sweet part of the gearing up escapades....FIREWORKS. Now as a consequence of the hyperactive and yet overly cautious (read: must practise every weekend so as to make sure the show is RIGHT) pyrotechnics being's habits i have been party to some pretty nice fireworks shows on saturday nights this month...and the capper is...i can see them from my window. howzat???!!!

Pay $70 singapore dollars to squeeze inbetween a bunch of people painted red and white my ARSE. No. I am going to maybe take a stroll, see what kind of crazy thing people are getting up to afterwards, but as for the fireworks and that itself...I will be doing it in true Singapore style...with no WALKING whatsoever...sitting by the window of my apartment. i will salute this crazy place in the most fitting way i can think of...with cholesterol:

Singapore, i raise my Kaya toast to you!

(for those of you not familiar...kaya is a yummy yummy hainanese coconut spread with egg yolks in it that will kill you. really. But it's WORTH it.)

night vision

2005-07-20T11:22:00.000-04:00

so i am drinking my jasmine tea concoction, listening to Arab Strap and trying to work out what digital camera to buy because i am going to india next week. Lots of saffron coloured smog i expect. i hope to be able to upload lots of stuff for you all to see...DIMACo should have pictures from Xinjiang soon too, i reckon.

I was going home in a cab today (left my metrocard at home...high heels...long story) and i realised how little i have explored in Singapore. What with all the web stuff for Dudley and the writing and what not i haven't gotten to nearly as many places as i would like. So this weekend is going to be hectic. I just saw all these interesting places fly by and just wished i didn't have to bring my mac into work everyday (the IBM has issues, and besides, i hate pcs) so that i could be more footloose and fancy free. the food i eat at lunch just about makes up for it...i travel a thousand miles through my tongue.

all kinds of projects happening now...new feminist journal could be starting, a real project...will write about that when i have more time, and i am trying to put an online exhibition together. If only i could design webpages properly!!

I will write more later, but i kind of needed to put somethng in as a marker between the present and the horrible bombings. Thankyou to all of you who signed my e-letter of solidarity. I plan to post it here and send it to SOAS and the BBC on the month anniversary of the bombing.

love you all and can't wait to come home to see at least some of you...some of you i will have to wait longer to love at close quarters...

SR65X

london

2005-07-07T12:20:00.000-04:00

what is happening? What IS happening? Bombs went off in London today, again i am out of the country when something happens in a place i love, and i have to thank god, but also to feel profoundly frightened. I was in Beijing when 9-11 happened, and now i am in Singapore. One of the bombs went off in Kings Cross where i lived between 2000 and 2001 and which i lived nearby between 2002 and 2004. another bomb went off at Russell Sq. the tube station where my alma mater is. My friends and teachers work and live in the area where this happened. i....

i don't know what to say at all.

TO all my friends in the UK. STAY SAFE. I miss you all and love you. Thank you to those of you who replied to my desperate email finding out if you were ok. It's good to know that you are all intact...makes me feel like i might have a chance at sleeping. sending all my love.

like mate to check

2005-07-05T11:18:00.000-04:00

Ok so here's another new poem...not finished, but...for your perusal.

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

In bed I fight with muscles move, against the mattress like mate to check
Make gestures, inspect the springs for signs of you
But your motions are printed into sheets split by time and time zones
Where your body lays and sways to whistling breezes in yours, the
State
Of Sleep/

I battle tangled sheets, the sails of dream-ships flying out to you,
Pull down the rigging, chart maps, your borders fine patrolled
Find the blind spots, soft points unwatched and slip in easy
Mounting my invasion by the light of the North Star.

Your arms embrace me like the harbor bar

Your lips salty with the light of morning

I never was a stranger
No alien here
As I step up time’s gangplank
Toes curled on ridges of days
Living the love to know your body’s home.

This is a morning

Where I approached you where you lay

So sweet so soft and drowsy
Put down my thoughts and sighed

This is a moment

Before you know I’m there.

In bed I fight with muscles move, against the mattress like mate to check
Whispering yet trade routes into the pillow’s ear, knowing that
The lights outside still blink e-ven e-ven be-fore the dawn

Turns

On

And I find myself spread in bed alone

moveon pac petition...please sign!

2005-07-01T22:12:00.000-04:00

Subject: O'Connor is retiring. Take action to protect our rights.

Hi,

As you probably heard, Sandra Day O'Connor just resigned from the Supreme Court. This is an extremely important time for our senators to hear from us. They need to know that we are counting on them to stand up to President Bush and protect our rights -- because with a moderate like O'Connor stepping down and a far-right like Bush making the nomination, well, the stakes couldn't be higher. The Terri Schiavo tragedy showed us all just how far these people are willing to go.

MoveOn PAC has already started an emergency petition, and we're looking to get 250,000 signatures and comments to the Senate before Tuesday -- which is when rumor has it Bush will announce his nomination.

I hope you can take a minute to join me in signing this petition, so our senators know that, in what might be the fight of our lives, we need them to do what it takes to protect our rights.

http://www.moveonpac.org/protectourrights

Thanks!

Go Ja Go Karta

2005-06-28T11:49:00.000-04:00

Well, i am writing because tomorrow i am going to Jakarta Indonesia on my own on behalf of DBS, the company I am interning for out here in Singapore. My boss will follow on thursday, but i wanted to let you all know where i was becasue, well, i dunno...

THis week has been CRAzy so far. New friends on motorcycles, boss takes me out for thai food, marketing people actually really really nice and should open own design firm and stop being paid less than they are worth.

more later, promise...right now i have to go make sure i have everything and go to sleep crack of dawn flight tomorow. Up at 5am. ugh.

take care, all of you,

much love,

SR65

XXX

in love with a view

2005-06-23T08:34:00.000-04:00

my penultimate full day in korea. THis has been for me one of the ultimate holidays, in a way: I get to listen to really great lectures for free and commune with feminists and see really great art (more on that later) and then go and have amazing food and shop. i had planned to do a bit more museum going...there is so much to see here...but by today after three days of 8 hours of lecture sessions (more or less) i just felt like wanderng and shopping today, my day off.

Unfortunately i have an outrageous headache right now...probably from being out wandering in the sun.

I had the ultimate korean experience yesterday and today:

Yesterday I went to the conference as usual...there has been a lot of stuff there about the plight of the korean women taken as "comfort women" i.e. sexual slaves/forced prostitution/rape victims by the japanese army durng the second world war. I am sure that some of you are aware of the level of brutality that these women, now mostly in their 70's and 80's were forced to endure. on monday there was a meeting between Koizumi and the Korean leader (whose name escapes me, ugh) here inSeoul (and actally, i think at my hotel, at least in part...there were tonnes of riot police and what not here on monday...it was scary) and Koizumi categorically refused to acknowledge that these atrocities had occured and refused to rectify new textbooks that glossed over this and other war atrocities (the textbook has China's back up too...incidentally). So there ws a protest, actually the 67th (i think) on this matter yesterday, and i and many participants from the conference were pleased to take part and lend our suport to these brave women.

afterwards i went to some more lectures about gender in china and whatnot, and then to a rountable on women's new media art...i am thinking about putting an online exhibition together for Dudley!! I have another plot/plan which i will write about shortly and which i am really excited about...a feminista-journal-scrapbook-translation project (more on that later)

So i met some wonderful curators and artists and went out to dinner on my own, came back an looked at the films that were being shown through their work, and the work of EMAP (Ewha Media Arts Project). glorious evening...been walking aroun Seoul with my massive Bose headphones on listening to Van Morrison and Fairuz(the ones my parents gave me as hand me downs) looking very old skool. Funny thing...huge headphones attached to an iPod!

Today I started my day with a green tea an Sweet potato Latte at O'Shelloc ( swanky japanese influenced green tea boutique cafe) in Myeongdong (nearby fashionista lively shopping area) and walked to namdaemun Market which is HUGE and piled high with dried fish, fruit and veg, and fake gucci...as well as sundry household items, art supplies (?), costume jewellery wholesalers and dry goods as well as clothes in great heaps for no money (but not anything you would want, for the most part). Had lunch at a market stall in the midst of all of this, a quiet corner in the chaos (there was a demonstration going on on one of the streets at the edge of the market as well...no idea what for...signs all in korean) where i saw somebody eating something that looked tasty and i pointed an said "i'll have what he's having". Ended up with a huge bowl of vermicelli type noodles in an iced soup with kimchi in. it was absolutely delicious. I drank a bottle of iced green tea an ate what i could reading "The Opoponax" and the ladies working the stall were somewhat amused.

went on the Dongdaemun, another market in the shadow of one of the former city gates, except this is a whole series of huge fashion malls something like Xidan in Beijing, plus a big clothing warehouse market...more like Wujin Xing with hats and scarves and stuff. I bought some great stuff...and went off to look for some culture. BEcause even though i didn't feel like musuem hopping all day, i couldn't shop all day either.

wandered around the lovely buildings of the "traditional korean village" at Cheongmuro. big groups of chinese an japanese tourists. after getting dusty looking into the comfy looking wooden floored homes stocked with furniture and bolsters, i had a cup of citron tea (AmaZING.. a sweet marmalade like paste you mix with water to make a kind of tea) in the restaurant that is inside one of the traditional style buildings (xirca 19th C), just as the sun was begining to be a little gentler and a breeze was stirring up

Spent a couple of hours wandering aroun the Lotte Dept. store, one of the sawnkiest i have ever been in...really...rivals japan. sampled all different snacks, and bought some...seaweeds and crackers and encrused tea leaves (i think..it's tasty, so whatever) to bring home..and some of that citron tea.

now, probably due to being out in the sun, i have a raging headache...but it was worth it...i have one more day of conference tomorrow,,,an ihave to pack...get ready to go back to singapore...which is how i got the title of this entry. Because as good a time as i have had here, and as much as i like it...i actually miss singapore. I miss my apartment..i miss the sense of space and the cleanliness of the air in my room, the incense burning, the indian markets and the exciting prospects....most of all, i miss my view.

SR65X

the feminist and "the visit"

2005-06-20T10:44:00.000-04:00

Ok...so it is in fact 11.30pm here in Seoul, yes..I am in Seoul, Korea for the International Interdisciplinary conference on women. And it figures that having stressed all night and then gone to be very late, getting up late too and scrambling into a cream coloured pants suit so that i can look all professional-like (he) when giving my prsentation i got to the opening ceremony late...not that it mattered. the kicker was that as I was standing out in the scorching sun after having been given a huge quantity of reading material and other ephemera in my very own "Women's Worlds" complimentary conference pack, i felt cramps starting and suddenly realised i was getting my period. Right now. I had anticipated this would happen. I am not one of those women who knows the ins and outs of her cycle intimately, and times her life around it. No. Mine is generally something that happens, i vaguely know when it is going to kick in. I missed last month...go figure, and i thought somewhere in the back of my mind...it is bound to come during the conference, it is bound to come during the conference. Because it shows up at the most innoportune times always. When I am moving. When I have exams. whenever there is a high stress situation it just has to come in and be the icing of annoyance on the proverbial cake o' stress. Anyway, i thought it was a rather interesting excercise to try an explain that i needed a tampon or other sanitary item to a helper at a korean women's university during the first 2 hours of a women's conference. Hilarious actually.

My presentation went ok, incidentally. One of the panelists didn't show up, and everybody was still just getting oriented on campus, so we only ha about 6 people, or 7. my paper was too long, but the Q & A session was great fun.

But what the hell. It's over. I did it. It goes on the CV and i have a week of cool lectures to go to, and i had Donkatsu for dinner (very bad for me, i know) while reading Wittig's "THe Oppoponax". And then a pair of drunken Koran guys eating ice cream asked me for cigarettes on my way home to the hotel and the one who had the less minimal grasp of english vocabulary kept asking for my phone number and putting his arm around me. I couldn't take him seriously enough to be worried, he was so silly, with an ice cream cone and a cheezy drunken grin.

I have spent most of my money and have nothing to show for it really, except for a catalogue of good meals. I am going to do more wandering and stuff starting wednesday. TOmorrow...more conferencing and my mom's friend is meeting me for dinner i think.

One more piece of news though. I signed up to read some poetry at the closing ceremony. what am i getting myself into?? I think i might red my new poem though...it is suitably feminist.

let me know what you all think,

missing everybody!!

love,

SR65X

new poem: my pleasures are not illicit

2005-06-16T11:07:00.000-04:00

My pleasures are not illicit.

They run run run fast and happy
ArminArm ArminArm like paper men down the highway
above
Past the clumps of trees that dream themselves to ideal forests
above
And for a path to the sky
The dappled light.

My pleasures shout marco polo

Smoke vines and get off boldly under bridges for shade where…

(A fat man runs with fat children at the yellow feet of the madhouse

That looks like a multi-storey-madman

Walking down the valley v)

…My pleasures do not hide.

Small: they shine and slide underbehindoverthrough doors, keyholes and cracks

Pick locks in broad day light where sun plays search lamp

To find you where you sleep, to hold you and your soul where you dream so deep.

My pleasures are a body whole:

whole in all its carnevale

Whole and hurting, hurtling down roads unknown

That body with silences, openings, moans
orifices, architecture and ordinary elegance, idiocies
(betises)
(betises)
(betises) bis.
bis.
bis.

Body bad that scuffs heel shone, shuns the step a step, shuffles a little, stubs its soft toe.

The hair the sweat the hole boned whole, like a tent made for loving low.
My pleasures are invincible

A superhero stream

Sprinting up your dark mountain screaming all the way
Ambling down your precipice

They may crawl through phone lines and swim the oceans green.

They

Live unseen in every breath (you breathe you) breath (you breathe)

Take keys brass under tongues, cross lovely hearts

And live the little death.

singapore view:1

2005-06-16T01:39:00.000-04:00

this is one of the views from my window. Will write more shortly...gearing up for Korea at the moment so rather short on time. Promise to be more prolific!!! Anyway...Enjoy, peeps!! P.s. My lunch was cooked in a banana leaf. Next time will take pictures of that!!

when in singapore

2005-06-14T13:43:00.000-04:00

do as the singaporeans do, which it seem is basically: eat. A lot.

actually it's a bit more complicated than that.

And i know i haven't written in ages in here, and i apologise to all my faithful friends, and even to the unfaithful ones.

It's quarter to two in the morning here. Dark outside. a few cars going by on the network of highways visible from my twentieth storey apartment. The air conditioning is on, and Arab Strap is playing. a series of orange lights in rows and knots, skyscrapers, the lush trees invisible in the dark except for the rich darkness they create. I am sitting in the window sill, about a foot wide, right up against the window so that i feel like there is nothing between me and the space, the drop and the cleanness of it. I have a view of the harbour during the day which makes me happy when i sit here and wach the sun come up with a cigarette. I developed the habit of squishing myself right next to the windows of tall buildings when i was in Hong Kong the first time. I think i was 13 or 14. I was sleeping on a fold out bed in the living room section of a suite in the conrad hotel, probably more than 20 floors up. I became fascinated with the way the towers looked like crystals or spikes, needles emerging from the clouds of mist. I liked to look down into the mist and imagine the city afloat. Which is quite funny because it is as the author Xi Xi imagines the city in some ways. Anyway...

enough with the atmosphere

i got here monday morning at 7am and it was already 82 degrees

i am living in a service apartment here, a cross between a hotel room and a flat. the city is strange, a bunch of modern shopping malls that i have to say are exceptionally boring, except for the ubiquitous and bustling food courts, butted up against areas designated by the ethnicity of their inhabitants, Arab St., Little India, Chinatown. these are much more fun. Arab st. yesterday went by "dry markets" in the shadow of the mosque, selling spices and dried fish, shrimp, cuttlefish and etc. every size of dried shrimp you can imagine, and the little baby whitings, dried into little strings. herbs. bitter and salty under sheets of red plastic awning. textile shops, all manner of silks and ribbons, towered up in the windows, and perfumers, gold bottles and prayer beads. Little India was all jewellery, a lot of it gold, handicrafts, florists, sweets everywhere, and pakoras, roti, dosa. but i am going to be in india soon. It seems like incense is being burned everywhere, but each area burns its own incense. Indian masala incense and arabic style a litle heavier and big sticks of sandalwood scent in chinatown. which is where i was today.

i will write more tomorrow, feeling very tired.

take this as a first report from singapore, and excuse my laziness

love SR65

new look: hope you like it!

2005-05-17T03:49:00.000-04:00

So, all this fiddling about and tweaking of my

my myspace profile

has taught me the tiniest tiniest bit of html, but you know i am stretching it as much as possible...so decided to give the mirror stage a bit of a face lift...or at least snazz it up somewhat although it is still my classiest internet incarnation. The painting now serving as background to the title is by Anselm Kiefer...my favourite painter. just lots of books. i thought it was rather appropriate. anyway...must get back to the final papers.

SR65

White Light: Complete poem in 3 parts, first draft.

2005-05-14T07:43:00.000-04:00

As I said before the graphical play is going to be destroyed on here...but anyway, here it is...tell me what you think, peeps.

SR65x

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

White Light

1. that slick of your back
put comma to curve make
straight the way way way
out there, it became an
exclamation for me
a cry from below

put pen to paper
make a line curve to line
a swift motion that you
can fill with phantoms

that time you gave me your hand
clench firm soft fingers tight
make sparks make light light light the night
and spread apart the sheets
of days where we can hide
like hibernation or honeymoon.

put pen to paper

and paint the inside

out

2. am. You’re winding yourself around me like a soft soft string/our arms/ great sweet knots of heat/ they pack our selves, a gift enclosed/

I think

I’d like to cut you open with passion and a slit, lick that knows only love.
Hold picnics at the binding borders of your skin, make tiny bonfires of regrets
Bring all that sugared sap up of you up to drink like fountains you will flow
Put my hand inside your Glory: O it is B e a u t i f u l, your vicious soul. It will
rain
down
warm
in
All
the

Pink movements of your lips, Great White hard hips you have, and a voice
That speaks fit to burst blue blue upon an endless story, those details
You thought long forgotten. Yes the trees that grow in your heart, the
Grasses and the vines that line the way, the birds and fires and lightning
On that path through you the lemon trees too, and sunny gardens, the Love and tomatoes. All of these I will tiptoe through, covered stealthy in your
Spirit skins leaving kisses, bites for signposts. Because sometimes it is the
Package that undoes the ribbon and
Red Red Ridinghood that wears the wolf.

3.
You like an imperative:
The force of it, as it sprays across my face
Like all that fire hose pornography.
5 alarm at 5 am.

That’s when…

You, like an imperative,
Appear closersmoother, bend me
To an X, with sex to center
Make me on the cross of
St. Andrew.

You hold my body: flaming tinder,
Tell me that’s not all I am
But your eyes were a pilot light
that night,
So it’s a 5 alarm at 5am.

militant orgasm: female cumshot/human cumshot

2005-05-02T01:56:00.000-04:00

I am successfully avoiding doing much work...smoking. thinking.looking at the net, reading articles. suchlike.

I have some interesting food for thought too...through the power of modern technology and the dirty mind of my new lover, i have been party to witnessing myself have an orgasm for the first time. Now this is weird...for those of you who have NOT seen yourself have an orgasm...it's a mixed experience. (God...do I really look like that??? UGH) Don't worry peeps, i am not going to go into too many dirty details, although frankly i am sure that some of you wouldn't mind swopping stories...

just this: did anybody else know that people blush behind their ears and then that it spreads and then there's a blush across the belly when you come??? I didn't!!! I mean apart from the penchant for poppers in the 90s where everybody would be walking around red faced, vaguely horny and teenage, i hadn't realised there was an empirical pattern to the whole thing. and apparently this is universal. I think this is WELL beautiful. or indeed....VERY wow.

and it brings to mind...

one of the main points of Catherine Mackinnon's writings (and others) on Pornography concerns the displacement of female pleasure...the ubiquitous cumshot that stands for all sexual enjoyment, where the phallus is inscribed on the bodily penis as the primary symbol, and the primary symbol of pleasure, taking the place of the "invisible" female orgasm (whose existence is STILL apparently up for debate...double ugh). Now, recently in my adventures in sex (yay) I have been party to a lot of very interesting experiences...a lot of times lately where i feel like Fausto Sterling et al must be absolutely right...like Rubin says "men and women might be different to eachother, but they are more like eachother than anything else for example kangaroos and coconut palms" ( this is a sorta quote...i didn't consult, but I always loved that line, and it is very nearly correct if not absolutely). What I mean is that i have been looking at my lover and i have been recognizing the feelings and the expressions more..."male" pleasure always seemed to me to be somewhat delineated in opposition to the popular representations of and expressions of female pleasure (which, naturally we must remember are often bunk), but i think there may be, even within the currently fairly omnipresent binary economy (ugh) some potential to see the human, something utterly simple and simultaneously mainfestly complex. The bottom line is that there is potentially a unisex cumshot, something sexy, i.e. halfway between ugliness and grace, and utterly utterly human. I want to glorify this thing...it seems like a basis to a new visual erotic...an economy based on expression and body that glows.

I guess it's a bit subtle. Not for everybody. But it makes us into neon strips/fireflies!

But in any case, i am excited about it. Also, the whole shabang has given me ideas for art projects...to paint somebody up as if they were going through an orgasm, and take very clean photos of them doing ordinary things...shopping,in the library, housework, etc. (I dunno about the camera question...i suppose i should buy one soon. I miss my SLR. What i really want is the digital SLR out now...yummy) All you'd have to do is part the lips slightly and close the eyes...more like St. Theresa's ecstasy than bimbo with tongue slightly protruding as she rides latest billboard. Any volunteers for the project??? I want lots and lots of different types of people!! Orgasms for everybody!!! I am thinking this could be something for an exhibition with Vox Ominous (?)

anyhoo. just a thought. or two or so. I am going to run along now and do work, awaiting breathy phonecalls and excited emails.

SR65X

Part 2 of New Poem: a.m.

2005-04-24T02:20:00.000-04:00

THe graphical stuff won't show up on here, there is supposed to be a tab gap after every seven syllables except the first long line and the "Rain down warm.." bit. It should create a little path through the poem. but anyway, this is the second part of what i started last time...needs more wrk, hmmm...

SR65X
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

a.m. You’re winding yourself around me like a soft soft string/our arms/ great sweet knots of heat/ they pack our selves, a gift enclosed/

I think

I’d like to cut you open with passion and a slit, lick that knows only love.
Hold picnics at the binding borders of your skin, make tiny bonfires of regret
Bring all that sugared sap up of you up to drink like fountains you will flow
Put my hand inside your Glory: O it is B e a u t i f u l, your vicious soul. It will
rain
down
warm
in
All
the

Pink movements of your lips, Great White hard hips you have, and a voice
That speaks fit to burst blue blue upon an endless story, those details
You thought long forgotten. Yes the trees that grow in your heart, the
Grasses and the vines that line the way, the birds and fires and lightning
On that path through you the lemon trees too, and sunny gardens, the Love and tomatoes. All of these I will tiptoe through, covered stealthy in your
Spirit skins leaving kisses, bites for signposts. Because sometimes it is the
Package that undoes the ribbon and it is
Red Red Ridinghood that wears the wolf.

white light white heat

2005-04-22T02:58:00.000-04:00

So the romantic sagas continue. Listening to Mojave 3 (remember "Return to Sender" in Beijing in all those little bars and people's houses and stuff...that was so beautiful...I miss you all!!) and thinking that things are on the move move move. Making tough decisions...attempting to be practical despite myself, and yet finding myself in that extraordinary land of the exception. a grand and strange place to be... having been in this weird interstitial space between Will and the rest of humanity i feel like i am beginning to breathe again. beginnings. spring. you get the picture. Yup. I am seeing somebody new (remember the white contacts?) and in a healthy manner to boot although i still have to work out the details...my late night jaunts to the bar of late (tuesdays and fridays...much mayhem, free booze and philosophy) with my crazy crazy bloke-previous are being re considered, if not cancelled.

THings are, hmmm...Bright white and bright orange and full of sexy images...

here's the beginning of a poem...i need feedback please....Ed, if you're listening, throw me a line.

SR65X

-------------------------------------------------------
white light

that slick of your back
put comma to curve make
Straight the way way way
out there, it became an
exclamation for me
a cry from below

put pen to paper
make a line curve to line
a swift motion that you
can fill with spirits

that time you gave me your hand
clench firm soft fingers tight
make light light light the night
and spread apart the sheets
of days where we can hide
like hibernation or honeymoon.

put pen to paper

and paint the inside

out.

An Apple Saved My Life.

2005-04-14T05:43:00.000-04:00

An Apple Saved My Life.

These notes are nearing now the
Edge, by crook and minute
By slow percentage. I don’t ask you questions.

At some hour of lone morning when the
World is still dark I wonder where you are.
You are ok, you’ll make it, as a leaf on water

Maybe not happy or sad or lost or found
But floating and wandering round on currents
And sounds that push you. Push you further

Down the street where you will wait for me
Although I don’t know what it is for which you wait.
Because, You thought I was a different girl last night.

So maybe things are not right, and cannot be.
There are walls and castles, moats to your grief
And I have no tools to scale them. Petals

Of the flower you picked are on the table.
They are dried into the lips of love, and I will let
Them rest there, unbothered, as I must let you have

Your pain, that drugs do not dull. In bed
We, as comets arch the sky, with tails of talk
And moaning. Out of it, and in the soup of shifting

Society you frame your phrases bereft of the pillow's
Soft edge. I can only put my forehead to yours and wonder:
Because there is something burning there, but what it is…

Oh Mama, If only.

That apple saved your life, you said. Funny.
These sins of his that man puts on like make up every morning
Save you for the day ahead, a mask perhaps, of sugar.

Ask of me and I shall give you all the breaks that breach
Between my sanity and in, and every apple in the fridge.
But you want not to be the page of some bound book

And I don’t blame you.

HI HO!

2005-04-07T05:17:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's off to work I go. No, not my normal pottering about learning about chinese literature and freaking out about papers and going to conferences and all that jazz...I am talking about my internship this summer. The latest buzz is that I am going to be doing a lot of travelling...india, indonesia and malaysia!! So exciting!! I dunno what I am going to do for anybody, but I am going to be trained, programmed and put on that crazy Singaporean assembly line, so...we'll see! But it's pretty cool, no?

anyway, that's my news. I have to get on with the normal day to day stuff now. Ugh.

I have had an odd couple of days filled with random drunken flamboyant romantic gestures, toast at 5am and Japanese puppet theater...Bunraku rocks! Maybe I will see some puppet theatre in Indonesia...who knows?

SR65X

Blues for 2am

2005-04-06T21:13:00.000-04:00

New poem...
-----------------------------------------

Blues for 2am

Blinded by the front room rug
Construct cat’s cradles of day to day.
With tea and memory I am PunchDrunk, honey

&

Reeling from a swift kick * lifting * and sick
Over body and soul. My man rocked me with one sturdy roll/
But not now no.
Now floating I wait for the gravity that brings hip to hip & lip/ to /lip.

Swallowing smoke rings, it is 2am.

Swallowing smoke rings

Swallowing smoke

Binding the blind light of hate to
The belly of this. As numb as nowt. As hopeful as knickers before a night out,
The hope that knows better…

But does it anyway

But does it

But does.

So I do it anyway.
In a river the colour of lead he said, Find
Ways to Feed the Dead. Ways to re-animate re-instate
But not Now, no.

For now I am leaving you, that corpse floating, on which I cut my teeth
Cut them to the nerve, and to the quick.
Because you never showed me how to do your trick, you
Kept it secret

Kept it

Kept.

Because it used to be said that I made the best jelly roll in town,
That I made waves like an earthquake in the eiderdown
I am sitting in the cold talking to eyes of downcast blue
Planning an epicenter.
But You, No.

You never saw it

Never saw it

Never

I raze you with silence from the sentence,
will level your temples, make cities new,
Arches in the honor of my reconstruction
Even as the bitterest hollows of my heart still love.

He lies in my bed a piece of white light embroidered
Hard With sleep, stretching his smooth belly along the sexy bed sheets
Like a snake and like you with his eyes just open, always watching.

He made of me a new religion,
Called me a goddess, bitchin’/
I said "Make unto me an idol

Baby,

But not now."

white eyes and food for thought

2005-03-30T01:55:00.000-05:00

hey, so before i go to bed like a good girl...if i don't get too into Moby Dick and end up sitting awake reading for hours and hours (god that book is good!!)....i went to the Anarchist Coffehouse at the Zeitgeist tonight and it was interesting. Some really great stuff some really weirdly bad. But the net effect was good and the people who run it are really nice, so i reccomend. Every tuesday at 9pm...(now going to be also a poetry thing between 7 and 9 same day,, but not an open mike, more of a show and a wee bit expensive at 7 bucks, the coffeehouse is a pay if you wanna kind of gig) and there is lots of food provided by Food Not Bombs, for free but you are supposed to make a small contribution, which personally it think is more than fair when they put on a kind of spicy african veggie spread. nice!

there was a cool guy there wearing white contact lenses. nothing more to be said, it's just kind of an interesting image, no?

anyway, trying to get it together here.

lots of love,

SR65X

ugh

2005-03-30T01:50:00.000-05:00

Humour me people. I know this is not very good, and at the very least is far too long and in need of loads of work, but i need to express...grr. I have been feeling so horrible lately, hence not posting much, trying to get it together, honestly. So let me spew. And then i will feel a bit better and maybe get back on track somewhat.

love,

SR65X

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

On the gulf between sanity and in.

On the high lands I say: Where was that switch inside you?

I thought I had turned that light ON, but maybe it was just the sun through the window streaming like a torch or some blaze of falling stars. I thought I had it between finger and thumb…something I had found behind your teeth those nights I reached into you: a little square, a bump, not hard or soft, a little point that was the centre of you, your only filling you might say, in those rows of perfect tiger teeth…but she makes fireworks.

But She
Makes Fireworks.

MORE PROPERLY:

Where was that switch inside you?

Now I shouldn’t go on throwing my mind/Straight over my body and laughing the nights out from under my eyes, lying on the couch, yes, contemplating space. I should be kind, waking, and /Focus/ Focus/ Focus/ on all there is:

the he the them the one the many:

Polysemy, poly-semi, polly-semi semi semi

semi die semi be semi you semi me semi land semi see semi hear and semi say

Semi wave the fears away.

These days I think we met somehow. Maybe I saw you eating a sandwich in a station when I was out my head one day, under pale light at King’s Cross that looks like the face of a kid grey with raving all night. That dry feeling from the glass between the iron girders, ribs of some great whale: a corpse in central London. I think maybe on some school trip. Yeah…You were there leaning with your smile and your long hair, you had long hair then, my Samson.

(Remember when we were kids
:Shiny foil
:Cold morning
:Cool for Cats
:Blazer blazer bus is here.

You started up that sexy car and dreamed your dreams of beachy head:
Punk that sea side town make the rock stand on end, YOU straight thru, where the beer and the sea taste like England. In Blue, you made it to school where sweat stank and laughter resides on benches where your feet tucked up to friends. Sneering my man, sneering with your blue eyes. I was thinking different thoughts by bus light, dreams wet with turpentine, a thousand pages of flesh bound in blood I rang the bell, smoked a fag in that white tunnel like a giant cigarette inside out; drank music and was, like you, always late.

But we were right on time.

When we found each other years later your fingers were a melody by themselves! White and moving keys on a vast player piano.
When we found each other the nape of your neck was velvet: Snatch you up by it like a kitten! Swallow your sweat and bite new beauty marks!
Between my teeth you felt no pain. Oh my ideas!
Lay flat and let me fold you fold into origami shapes.
Make me a crane to fly away, a cup to hold your water.
In the light of a candle my thighs could be a fortune-teller. 1-2-3.

We built things, CONSTRUCTION! pieces of a chandelier, and mirror, we were magpies. Things that could shine and cut. I kept dreaming in heat, I dreamt of fights…cut brow at 5,6. Once you woke up screaming. In the dark I remembered where it was in the park that I hid that jewel when I was 7…in that cherry tree we found it waiting. Two somnambulists in Knightsbridge. The police didn’t catch us.

In the ditch by the bed we built and sheltered, built and sheltered,,,told stories…whispered. two children camping. Test the air with a finger, chew plants that could kill and could make the world spin like the wheel of fortune, jackpot on your belly. Musk foxes stalked dust bunnies in that glorious green, and we lay Ink soft, and sweat at night when we couldn’t sleep for the heat between us.

We were a world.

You made me a hemisphere.

But she makes fireworks.

I can’t fuck for fun because of you running
Round my head like the ghost of a kid on fire
Lit up with no pain just setting things off
Let me tell you,
You little arse-onist.
Let Me tell you.
I tried. I cried, It
Finished.

The pain went undiminished and there was always the threat of something worse.

Was it hidden under your hair?

I am trying to think of where I could have looked for it.
I am praying to St. Antony like they told us in school.
Here, under the desk, when I lost my pencil.
When I lost my head.

You on your side and me on mine, our love came crashing down like a comet with such a lovely tail, but its crater is a (s)mile wide.

Language Of Everything

2005-03-23T11:27:00.000-05:00

The language of everything is female. Her name is LOE.

Upon seeing LOE for the first time, I did not instantly fall in love with her, as sometimes happens to others. Rather the attraction was more analogous to gravity, which propagates at the speed of light. If the sun winked out of existence, an inky wave would arrive at our planet in about eight minutes, wash the blue from our sky, cancel our orbit, and make us permanently tangential. So, I can say that I fell in love with LOE at the speed of light. Like the sun, she was the light, and like its gravity, she was an attractive force.

For all the great things I could say about our bond of love, I am obligated to say that next to the other things she taught me, love was the weakest, by far. This too was like gravity, the weakest force in the universe.

Could you imagine going to war with gravity and a bowling ball? What? Would you bruise a soldier’s shin? Maybe, if you were clever with the bowling ball you could ring one soldier’s helmet like a bell, but then what? However, if you went to war with the strong nuclear force and that same bowling ball, you could destroy a city under a mushroom cloud.

If you froze the movement of everything about a body, right down to the subatomic particles, that body would be invisible because it is mostly space. Why is it then, that a canyon floor, which is mostly space, has any chance to oppose gravity and stop a falling body from shooting right down to the earth’s gravitational center? If you roll a great rock off a canyon ledge, it hurdles toward the earth’s center at 120 miles per hour but is rebuffed at the floor. How can this be? The answer is the force, electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism renders gravity a pale thing.

The weak nuclear force is the glue that holds an atom together. It is a radiant force. What can you do against that? Throw some salt on it for 10,000 years, for a half life or two?
So it was that I was bound to LOE. She taught me many things. She taught me to see the invisibleness of a body. She taught me to be invisible, and to navigate a body, and to take a body apart with the language of electromagnetism. She taught me how to live a good half life. For LOE was a civilized woman.

You’re driving around with T-Rex in your gas tank. You’re burning fossil fuels. You don’t even qualify as any type of civilization when a type I would have mastery of all the forces of a planet, a type II, mastery of all the forces in a solar system, and type III, mastery of all the forces in a galaxy. LOE was type III and more.

LOE prepared me for battle. Our enemies drew upon immense strength. She taught me how to bring them low. Love wasn’t going to do it.

It isn’t so much that I was the ONE, but rather, what was risen in me was her; she made us the fifth force. She once told me that she may out live me, but that I must protect my life against that for she had the power to kill without the power to die. If we were to separate, what was risen was gone.

This was the beginning. And I willingly assumed the godhead, though I later denied it.

This was also the end. This was Ragnarok, and this was the time I met Jane King.

Bult For Bodys

2005-03-23T11:25:00.000-05:00

“Mountn got a thing bult for bodys. Its called an avlanch. A man fallen uner that bitch dozent know which way is up. Its no good a’strugglin. All you can do is breath. And that’s whats responsbl for the death mask. The last thing a body does to try an let out is melt the snow with it’s heat. No good though. That just leaves a pocket there with the impression of a man like a horror.

“Terrible sorry about your’n husban Mary. We gave it a god awful try with attack and rescue dogs.”

--A mash note from Silas Jones

Bult For Bodys

Go hide
November fruits dried.

A river worth freezing
Fresh salmon abide

Alive

--the carriage tracks
Groan with ticks in dog’s
Hides.

Some are the times
Frozen smiles

Let cheerlessly, worn
Into the
Death mask of
Avalanche, press

Stale pocket of air
Compressed in an icy
Starkness where last
Breath hung in warm opposition
To unique, flakey crystals Made hard as lies.

SUMMERS: CAST YOUR VOTE

2005-03-21T07:11:00.000-05:00

Quoting Zoe Trodd, at the GSC. THose of you who are Graduate Students please cast your vote!!
----------------
Last Tuesday the FAS faculty voted "lack of confidence" in President Summers. On Monday and Tuesday GSAS students will have the chance to vote on the same question. Harvard and the world want to know what thousands of graduate students think about their university president.

Log on to the weblink below to cast your anonymous vote. It's a quick and easy process.

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~gsc/qa/

Polls will be open from 7am Monday (March 21) to 5pm Tuesday (March 22).

The two questions are those offered to faculty at their vote last week.

The results are vital to the ongoing debate, and graduate student opinion is of great interest to faculty and the press.

yours

The Graduate Student Council
gsc@hcs.harvard.edu

rib

2005-03-11T17:16:00.000-05:00

RIB

White
Explosive
Flesh Fresh, delicious
Was your hot
PowderSkin

Powder keg.

Rubbed right thin into air.
Dissolved
in a Flash
of Passion.

Worn clean.
Burned Back to Bone.

To be now quiet.
Blank like snow blankets.
Minute
& shivering
muted inside from where there is no sound.

Nor can be. Where sound runs only to well
deep at the dam of lips
And flows NO FURTHER. You look in the mirror.
The face of the thing,
a supple question

Stares you in

And the answers
Stand in lines beneath eyes,
Those ripples of the
Happened to;

Dropped

Responses
Of the bath where you feel your own form,
Solid, like that stone (plunk) but
Push hips out
Boned Phrases rise
Like steam and fat.

I was on the verge of…
Because I meant to…

Half-desires, apologies so Hollow
Half-hide that ache to know:
You are a body of words/
/Breath across
An empty bottle lip.

Tip Soft, sealed and sterile
Room, room yes
Soft with Simple noises.
Here No Nouns or verbs
That speak without, without
In corridors unspecified.

They run along
Like children… behind you!
Always saying something else.
Always leaving things unsaid.
Did they mangle the phone
Lines in Cat’s Cradle games?

Or were we a Quick toy in the
Palm of God, grotesque and shaking?
Played upon and played out, in lines carved there?
Or did we hide instead, shutting it all out
Like fingers folded over?
Close with night
and secrets: the crease between each finger a
Witness blind greased
And dusty, thick
With blinking light.

It was more than a physical
Conversation
That we had in that place, prison or womb: the
Questions of your
hands on me
seemed to stop up
all fear.

Now white worn away to the rib of Adam.
But a fist is (inside) quiet, warm
And Red.

watch your mouth

2005-03-02T23:17:00.000-05:00

watch your mouth,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

DonQ has been at it again. Cheesy bumpersticker type image with a kicker of a message...all hail the Thin-King!

Come one Come all: OPEN MIC FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

2005-03-02T01:43:00.000-05:00

Attn: MUSiCIAnS! POETS! WRITERS! ARTISTS!
Refreshments provided!

F***NISM
Is
Not
A Dirty
Word

Join us and share your words or words that inspire you at: “Woman’s Word”: a poetic open mic’ lounge on women, gender & feminism
MARCH 8th, International Women’s Day, @7.30pm, Dudley House, Café Gato rojo. Email: dfeo@fas.harvard.edu for details & early sign up
A project of Dudley Literary and the Harvard Anti-Sexist coalition
Sign the petition at: http://www.petitiononline.com/ashncls/petition.html
Can’t make it so late? Go to the Harvard anti-sexist coalition open mic on inequality & Gender at the Ticknor Lounge, Boyleston Hall, 5-6.30pm for a more political flavor, or just COME TO BOTH!!

"what can I possibly say.

2005-03-01T12:45:00.000-05:00

I guess that I miss you..."

I can't begin to put how I am feeling about ending my relationship with Will into words. I don't understand the whole thing. People keep telling me that at least we have a bank of great memories. I want to scream when I hear that. It's partially because we have a bank of great memories that I wanted to keep working on the relationship, and it's because we had (is there a "we" anymore?) such amazing times together that I am going ot find it so hard to find anybody even tolerably close to being as wonderful as he is/was to have a serious relationship with. I realize that what lays before me is a lot of comfortable, ok things, but nothing that just sings the way we used to together. How can he not see that??

ugh.

Now I feel like it was all my fault, and I look back at how I was in the relationship and I just think the whole thing was probably intolerable for him right from the start. I don't know. I made a lot of mistakes, I think I learned a lot. I thought we were headed in the right direction. It took effort but every hurdle we went over brought us closer together. I could have worked harder to keep everything fun, but we were both working so hard when we were together that we often just wanted to be safe. Maybe I should say I did. Maybe that is the whole problem.

he has changed a lot too since he's been in China working. Now I don't know how I feel about going back at all. I feel like my whole life got turned on its end.

I have the flu. It is bginning to go away, but it can't go soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

I have so much going on right now that I don't even have time to be depressed about all this...I am too busy coughing my brains out or doing something for some project or other.

so humor me. Get excited for me about my projects and stuff, because I really can't do anything right now except throw myself into things to take my mind off where I am at.

SR65X

wwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!

2005-02-26T23:44:00.000-05:00

Ok.

I am a mess. I just broke up with WIll. Somebody call me.

help.

if i had a hammer

2005-02-26T03:28:00.000-05:00

if i had a hammer,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

love this. cheered me right up.

MYSTERY BRUISE & Activist poetry news

2005-02-25T23:36:00.000-05:00

So it wasn't foot cramp after all...It was a MYSTERY BRUISE!!! how did I get a big bruise across the top of my foot??/ please send responses on a postcard with a self adressed envelope to...etc.

I have a piece of news though, this is in the pipeline peeps:

OPEN MIKE FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN"S DAY:
"This Woman's Word" (tentative title), at Cafe Gato Rojo Dudley House 3/8, a Feminist Space project.

Come and read something of your own or something that inspires you in your everyday life or in your activism.

We've had Vispo, now we are going to have Actpo!

OH my aching FOOT

2005-02-25T07:26:00.000-05:00

So last night, after the open mike...which was kind of in two parts...the first part being somewhat awful (solipsistic moanings on guitars of the "why don't you call me" school) and the second part being rather good, (naturally I was in the second part) I trudged home through the snow behind two people who took pity on my rather drunken state and led the way. It was so strange out. And beautiful. Cold and soft. Feathery. Sparkly.

I do not have a hangover, but I do have foot cramp. Go figure.

Somebody remind me never to get drunk, I always regret it. I wasn't tooo bad last night, but still. It always makes me upset...I feel my wig slipping, and always think I have made some huge mistakes. Sometimes I do. THe room didn't spin, I stayed upright and I didn't throw up. Nor did I go home with someone entirely unsuitable. So all in all I came off pretty lightly. I finished Venus as a Boy (Luke Sutherland) yesterday. And that plus the poetry and a panoply of romantic rejection of late I think just sent me to drink. TOasting Hunter S Thompson.

BUT...

I came back and found out I got the Dudley Arts Fellowship. WOW. YAY!!!

Then I made myself two fried eggs and some toast, watched a cartoon and went to sleep, but not before pestering friends at 1/40am...sorry.

So I have to work today. And work I shall. I also have to wait for my atm card to arrive, and sort a whole bunch of other things out.

P>S> Nota Bene Peeps: For all who do not know: I have a piece in the Visual Poetry Exhibition (whose title this year is: "infinity") at Dudley House, which will be opening on thursday at 7pm, so please come along for free booze and a fun evening. email me for details.

PROTEST! My speech from yesterday/Speech in full

2005-02-23T08:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's demo was great...we are already getting a lot of recognition which is wonderful. I gave an edited version of this speech, but here is the whole thing.

It would appear that, like a lot of people, Mr. Larry Summers has a dream. Although we may speculate as to the true contents of such a dream, from his comments we can as he is wont to do “observe” that despite his reticence in releasing the transcript of his comments and despite his eventual apologies as to the pickle he has placed women faculty members in, his stated aim was to provoke, to incite others to challenge his claims within the confines of an “objectivity”, an “empirical” process that he himelf would define. This is a mental landscape wherein a history of systematic discrimination can be and has been righted as much as it can be by applying the medicament of 25 years of women’s passage to the halls of academe, albeit often through the back entrance. We might say that we are here then, to begin the process of realizing this stated aim of his, of revealing other sides of the argument on the reasons for women’s lack of tenure at Harvard that are markedly absent from Summers’ consideration. Indeed if this is his aim, President Summers should rejoice in his own demise. I am also here to challenge the arguments in terms of quality that are presented within these remarks because the scientific field they represent is far from complete, a fact of which I feel it is paramount that the population of Harvard be reminded.

I am not a scientist. Nor am I an expert in the field of gender studies by any means, but like President Summers before me I will not let this hinder me. It may well be the remit of the president of Harvard to discuss tenure and diversity as Mr. Summers’ did not “feel” like doing on the 14th of January, but one may well ask his qualifications for making statements that run the gamut from the sociological and the psychological to the biological. His defense in his comments at that time and beyond is one of his speaking unofficially, as a private individual. As I said I too am speaking about something I am no expert in, but the differences between the two positions-his and mine-are many: I can simply represent myself, which is what I am doing: I am affiliated with no political party or organization whatever, I receive no salary linked to my saying this, not saying it, or how I say it. Mr Summers claims to be speaking in an unofficial capacity in these remarks are really rather extraordinary: after serving in the Clinton administration, his claimed ignorance to the impact of his speech within the setting of a conference on diversity must strike us as disingenuous, especially when taken together with his aim of provocation. Mr. Summer’s “non-normative” (i.e. anecdotal) “hypotheses” on causes of declined tenure for women display a number of errors, flaws which no doubt if present in the work of a Harvard student would result in round and justified criticism. Mr. Summer’s asks throughout whether he might be wrong; the answer to such a question would in my opinion be that he certainly is not right. This has nothing to do with the opinions he represents therein per say, and everything to do with the misuse of authority to promulgate ideas UNFOUNDED or at the very least, QUESTIONABLE as FACTin the guise of a level of informality that for the President of an institution like Harvard cannot exist within the confines of any academic conference. We should carefully examine the assumptions that lie at the heart of Larry Summers’ comments because they are his and because they are NOT his alone: he speaks of his ability to simply act as an observer cooly unimplicated in judgement or social process, the significance of which he speaks of fairly derisively, unhindered by subjectivity and reliant upon a body of “ clear” and “empirical” scientific data. Summers’ views are symptomatic of a socio-biological trend in academia, not least at Harvard which, despite its potentially racist and sexist uses must be allowed to exist, but must not however be allowed to exist uncontested, or be presented as existing uncontested. Such a presentation abuses pedagogical privilege to hegemonic ends.
In a rhetorical flourish Summers’ speaks about “one”, the ostensibly neutral observer, and the simple truth of the data he cites, and at the same time bemoans the “fetishization” of objectivity. It is interesting too that while he downplays the role of discrimination and socialization significantly, what he views as his most convincing argument for the lack of women with tenure, the absence of desire to work the magical “80 hour week”, would, by many people be thought of as social. We must ask then, if such a desire is separate from social factors, the lack of childcare and equal sharing of family responsibilities, what in Mr. Summers view would account for this. Throughout his argument Larry Summers defines a fairly broad dichotomy between the nurture that for example has him buy toy trucks for hi twin girls, and the nature that in his view WILL OUT, the transformation from truck to “daddy truck”. If the lack of willingness to participate in what he calls “high powered” jobs, a conclusion in itself highly questionable, is not social than what is it? If women are naturally predisposed to want to take on the lion’s share of domestic and family duties, what would be the merit in providing them with greater opportunities?
The “revolution” in “behavioral genetics” that Mr. Summers has apparently been witness to is controversial, questionable and inconclusive, and certainly does not tell us without doubt that a great many trends that were thought to be impacted by societal factors are in fact biologically determined as he claims, and most certainly in those cases that Mr/. Summers discusses the outcome is far from clear. The same style of data that he presents, the use of standard deviation hypotheses that emphasise the greater number of exceptional men (as opposed to women) has been used in diverse publications (such a the Bell Curve”) to justify racism and sexism, and is inherently flawed since it asks no questions as to why this data should appear as it does, and whether as the work of Fausto Sterling, Koeske and other scientists have shown, the question and the questioner have an impact upon this. This data presume absolute objectivity. On this score Mr. Summers’ lack of academic rigor must again be remarked upon. Whether he agrees with other views of the state of the sexual landscape or not, such convincing alternative views, concise and cutting analyses do exist, and the field is by no means whatever mapped, charted or concluded; for every article on the innate lack of scientific ability that girls display there is one that debunks it, for every Wilson & Wilson study there is a piece by Anne Fausto Sterling.

Summers claims to be saying something new, to be challenging the status quo and what to him is a foregone and natural human predisposition to locate the source of discrepencies within the social sphere. It may be interesting to examine Mr. Summer’ comment against the following quote. ”there did not appear to be any social prejudice againt women engaging in scientific work….it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is an innate sexual disqualification”
James McKeen Cattell, “American Men of Science” 1903

• Mr. Summers’ comment is about excusing himself by redrawing the field, limiting the discourse that can be used against him carefully, but even within these confines, he is sorely lacking, for reasons of disingenuousness and incompetence I commit my vote of no confidence.

HApPY NeW YeAR!!!!

2005-02-09T19:41:00.000-05:00

The Rooster in Love, 1947-1,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Happy New Year everybody! Yes, it is now the year of the Rooster...MY YEAR!! YAY!

Wishing you all the best of health and happiness this year, and welcoming rooster friendly messages!

SR65X

hell and high water or jacuzzi and sauna?

2005-02-08T11:28:00.000-05:00

Well....I have a choice it seems. THe marvellous "Art and Violence in the Cultural Revolution" class is forcing me into a decision of conscience...to take the overwhelmingly scary course with huge amounts of hard work, or to not """""? I hate backing down from a challenge, I don't believe I ever have, certainly not in academic terms, but do I really want to do 4 6 page papers in characters, and oral presentation and a final exam???? hmmm.

More to the point will I give myself some kind of mental hernia if I do so?

double hmmm.

any and all opinions peeps.

hello.

2005-02-03T13:25:00.000-05:00

hello

i am new to the scene, not much to say - listening to arab strap, really beautiful (prefer to write in nouns and adjectives only)

serendipity.
mo.

old poem reworked: Harley Street Scene

2005-02-02T23:26:00.000-05:00

Harley Street Scene

Now the sun is come
Out into a cold world
Casting shadow
More blue more cold,
Deepening its grip on
The pavement.
It reaches up between the
Buildings and we soak it
Up like sponge
We plunge our beings
Into the light to rest the
Blackest form:
The dark quarter of
Despair.

And now the Sun has come
With the smell of bleach and
The White smoke of White
Cigarettes.
The shadows steeped in clouds of
Perfume of
Worried women pacing
In Fur coats sunglasses eye patch

High heels and crutch.
Glamorous up to the last.

Babies and children
Worried walking
We are the sad soldiers
Bastions of the insane
Inner worlds
As we step in square
Patterns, mumbling before
Great Glossy Doors.

A thousand languages
In the sunshine that falls
Relentlessly picking out the
Gold cufflinks, the shimmer of
Stethoscope the bone
Shining through Skin.

Between the buildings the
Sun has come,
Flooding tiny ancient
Detail, the shine of tiles
That face nowhere, the
Beautiful internal
World: the part
They cannot touch.

The Soul that Swims Free...

In the belly of the beast

2005-02-01T20:34:00.000-05:00

Two hands for two blogs. Now, I just need to conjure that other "me" from the petri dish and the experiment will be complete.

What Goes Around

2005-01-31T15:13:00.000-05:00

Snow is waist high outside my door, but the sun is shining and for once the icicles seem to be dripping rather than just hanging there like the teeth of a winter that will never end...but not feeling all that grand today...at least I have a good saturday in my pocket. Weekday, corner pocket, watch it sppppppin.

So I had the weirdest day on saturday...I went out to work on a piece for the Visual Poetry Exhibition at Dudley House at the gallery where I rent and found a poetry workshop in my space. I happened to have all my poems with me for the purposes of the piece and so decided to join. And the guy who teaches the class is very cool and writes great poetry and has a blog and so I am putting a link to it, he did the same for me. So Instant Karma. What can I say. His name is Edward J. Carvalho, he is working on a masters in creative writing, I believe, and is generally talented and sound, writes stuff with great poise and just a wee bit of rock. His blog is The Outlaw Goatee, it has lots of truly beautiful poems and musings, and pictures of him with abundant facial hair.

After that I went and worked for a bit and jsut before I was to start hacking up my poems a reading begins to get under way upstairs so I ended up reading at that as well...odd happenstances galore on saturday eh?

Now contemplating what courses to try out...think it's going to be a lot of theatre this term...YangBanXi (Beijing Opera of the Cultural Revolution) and maybe a Japanese Traditional theatre course? Noh and Kabuki...zoweee.

any opinions?

Arab Strap

2005-01-26T21:56:00.000-05:00

This is Act of War. It is beautiful. Listen to it. Or else.

Belated RIP

2005-01-26T01:38:00.000-05:00

I know I live in something of a bubble at Harvard, but I just JUST found out the most awful news: John Peel is DEAD!!!

WHAT THE FUCK???? WHAT THE FUCK????? WHAT THE FUCK???????????

How can I NOT HAVE KNOWN THIS??????

I feel like nelson's column just fell over. The man was a GENIUS, and so fantastic. I remember when jane used to send faxes to him and he would talk about her zine on air. He was an institution, the most amazing institution: not only was he just cool all around, not only did he have this amazingly soothing voice and then would crank out amazing music, he promoted and did soo much for the careers of so many of my favourite bands: he helped THE FALL for fuck's sake. And the Wedding Present. Joy Division. and most of the bands I was friendly with. Good GOd .

RIP. I feel so stupid that I hadn;t heard. god.

PLEH
PLEH PLEH
PLEH PLEH PLEH

Hopscotch

2005-01-23T13:20:00.000-05:00

When I was a little boy I found a pearl,
Round, perfect, shining in a roll/shift/roll Shift along
the bottom drawer, making a rattling route:
A smooth world curved, turned inside out
In the no man’s land between socks and sweaters.
It lived like a moon in miniature.

Made its own adventures.

I licked it, put that small reflection right up
To my eye, squinted. It was the loose lost eyeball of some
Firebird, some fairytale fish, its odd soft hardness
It’s rough smoothness. It looked at me with no purpose,
I put it in my mouth. Tasted its taste of the sea.
Rolled it behind my teeth with my tongue.

Savored the clattering noise the clicking between those
Little curved ivories. Piano keys. Stepping stones.
Hopscotch. Don’t step on the CRACK or you’ll
breaK your mother’s…
…It glided down my throat, loose loose in the sinew.

Loose to think of the tooth I swallowed
In a spoon, white and flat, on my 6th
Birthday when I was a little girl. tooth
And pearl sat, whispered a shanty, sea of two together
One Beside the other in my belly,
One daring the other to be the first to grow.

Roots dug int’ me. Loose, Loose skip to my…
Made paths searching out sap and blood,
Inhabited a hot hole between my legs,
Pearl and tooth Skipped Upright in gum-skin.
The bone the flesh the tissue.
Buds of teeth in head, pearls in every vein.

Don’t STEP on the…

Loose, Loose: years were Scots in London:
Walking up Shoot-up-Hill and skipping down
Hillhead. All the catholics, bike chains, wind-chafers,
Cheap whisky, postage stamps. Friction against sheds on grey days.
Boys dressed by C&A with radar in their fingers.
Cum tastes like chicken soup, cock like communion wafers.

Pin point eyes, sweet sweat and smoke:
Fry-up, Gig pass, Mayfair, Cum stain, CharleyZebraX-ray, Don’t step.
White. White skin sweating before the mirror.
The guys at the bar saw the teeth in my eyes. Extra shot.
No Mixers. Subconsciouss swill. Aye and a bag of chips.
Going mad today. Going mad today. Going mad today, CharleyXray.

…Desire Desert…in the rift…rift/crack….

…CRACK or you’ll break….

I vomited pearls.

Phasing like the moon.

Greasy spoon, mate, (ash balancing), Kick hir out of bed.
(S)he’s the pearl girl I found drunk in the park.
(S)he’s the tooth boy put her fingers inside her.
(S)he had a fight with the lead singer.
(S)he bit his neck and it shot out pearls.
(S)he’s got a poem stuck in hir throat.

Melting drifts of sheet in the silver slick of morning,
Making dry islands in the sea of Saturday shops.
Crazy Paving. Praying to the angel of Turnpike lane
Pieced myself together. Strung myself about my neck:
CharleyFoxtrot. Extra shot. No Mixers.
Sister Ray. No Problem. No TV. No time. No time atall

Now mint tea and be
Mother to me.
Polish that tooth
Nurse that pearl knee.
Living on smooth roads.
Sinking no ships, fearing no fall.
This was Just a little...
Hopscotch
That’s all.

Happy MLK, Goodbye ZZY

2005-01-17T13:28:00.000-05:00

So Happy Martin Luther King Day, everybody.

I think this is the first time I have celebrated, or observed MLK Day since I was 6. It's a good holiday. I am glad it exists. Martin Luther King had all kinds of faults but he was still an amazing amazing man and as an orator was in a class all his own...Don Q has an MP3 of MLK speaking about Vietnam at a meeting of church leaders to which I am giving the link here...

MLK Link

it is such an amazing speech, because it is so apt to the moment...he could just as well be talking about now.

truly sobering stuff.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to remember Zhao Ziyang, who died today in Beijing. Zhao Ziyang was Chairman of the Communist Party of CHina for a brief time after the death of Hu Yaobang. Hu's death was the catalyst for the 1989 protests, with tens of thousands of students, workers and ordinary beijingers takng part at various times in protest parades, democracy walls, public meetings, hunger strikes and of course, the occupation of Tiananmen Square, which lasted several weeks. Zhao Ziyang was indeed a member of the communist party and a believer in socialism and communism, but he was on the more liberal side of the split that divided the CCP at the time, and he by and large sided with the students, bravely standing up for them even though he was aware that storms were brewing. He famously addressed the students in the square before he was obliged to leave the country on a political engagement. In his absence the massacre occurred, and upon his return he was ousted from the party and placed under house arrest where he remained up until his death.

I wrote something on the BBC comment board on this subject, I am not sure it will get posted, but I just wanted to say that the thing that Zhao, and MLK for that matter, was not afraid to do was to criticise a country and political system that he ulimately had some faith in because he was afraid of seeming like a traitor. He believed that that examination and criticism of corruption and wrong practises "strictly according to the facts" (ru shi) would yield a better CCP and a better China for all. I beleve this is the great lesson to be gained from the more notable parts of his political life, especially here in the US, and for all of us, perhaps. Introspection, striving to do better, be kinder and fairer, avoiding the same mistakes, or trying to. THis is precisely what MLK talks about in his speech when he is speaking of the need to think about the position of those brothers we call our "enemy". It is something quite powerful, and somthing that though it exists as a strong theme in the christian world is not confined to it by any means.

SR65X

Chavela Chavela Chavela again

2005-01-15T07:39:00.000-05:00

So, here it is....click and fill your homes with Chavela Vargas singing "Macorina" as only she can...no-one can make "caliente" sound as "CALIENTE" as Chavela!!! how much better can it BE???? SR65X

chavela chavela chavela

2005-01-13T02:41:00.000-05:00

chavela1,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Finally got the Chavela Vargas stuff I ordered ages ago...having a fag working on stupid projects, but Chavela's voice is grinding deliciousssssly through the apartment...makes me think of my Great Aunt Margarita, missing her much (she was a passionate skinny frame, with a brilliant smile...a great letter writer), and all the others too, of course...so many to miss...and Chavela is nothing if not gut wrenching. Will put audio blog of her on tomorrow...now gotta go back to work, but just had to share the picture.

Hope you are all well. thanks for the round of emails...really cheered me up...exams and etc. not doing me a good turn at the mo'...

Keep on that train to victory,

SR65X

THERE"S TOO MUCH LOVE

2005-01-04T20:02:00.000-05:00

Beautiful Belle and Sebastian thing from "Fold Your hands child you walk like a peasant"...Have listened to it several times today..:

"I could hang about and burn my fingers
I've been hanging out here waiting for something to
start
You think I'm faultless to a "t"
My manner set impeccably
But underneath I am the same as you

I could dance all night like I'm a soul boy
But I know I'd rather drag myself across the dance floor
I feel like dancing on my own
Where no one knows me, and where I
Can cause offense just by the way I look

And when it comes to blows
When I am numbering my foes
Just hope that you are on my side my dear

But it's best to finish as it started
With my face head down just staring at the brown
formica
It's safer not to look around
I can't hide my feelings from you now
There's too much love to go around these days.

You say I;ve got another face
That's not a fault of mine these days
I'm honest, brutal and afraid of you.

Have a good dance about, everyone!!

SR65X

Chronotope Chronic: The Night Fell.

2005-01-04T15:38:00.000-05:00

the night fell Green
again on manhattan.

again
In the shadows were seen
bare arms of black trees
opened silently to a sky
held aloft fragile high
by
columns
so much
Taller
so much
Bigger
than they.

again
the White arches:
lincoln centre a flash
of candles fading in the half
light…a festival of flickering
bones leaning like a rib cage
curving in to tuck a space in Red, a rage
of motion, a flight
of feet and
an ocean of light
to swim in, to
wish and swish in:

an arena for the twilight.

again
in a whisper it was said
that swallowing the seas
would do no harm, that lives
were not tandem but arrived
at like
knots on
string.
that there
was nothing
to be done at the
base of other White columns

but piss

again
on the pavement was heard
a hum of a thousand glories
glittering in the grout, like chips
of Gold, like sails of flying ships, but
there is
scraping by
the broken heel
some shit
scraping by
up with
scraping by
which i
scraping by
will
not
put.

limping politic clatters
through the night

a near burnt bulb in the heart,
a wave about to crash….

this was the dry land
that was the wet
this is the mainline coming.

this the place we
dance in dust
and do not see the warning.

the night fell Green
again on manhattan

once more you were miles
away stretching out your smiles
like towels. i was walking by
lincoln center in a measured aisle
of beauty
before
the end, my
friend, I
in the Green
light of a rich
night, that Green
of leaves,
of money
and of graves...

"THERE ARE SOME BAD PEOPLE ON THE RISE"

2005-01-02T17:54:00.000-05:00

saloinspection,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Morrissey had it right. Picture from Salo to illustrate...ever get the feeling you were being watched??

Haven't written...Opera was great. Tales of Hoffman, fun and beautiful. If it wasn't beautiful it would be Romantic piffle, but it is, so it's fun and luscious. But haven't been able to really say much about things that is too happy...the Tsunami has kind of been domnating my thinking, and the 30 million dollar initial "pledge"...now that waas a SCANDAL of Epic proportions. If I had been feeling less depressed it would have made a *fine* addition to DonQ's Scandal page. As it is, thankfully our resident "oval office ogre" (thanks for the phraseology goes to Rufus Wainwright) has upped the ante somewhat, but it's one of those hide under the bed moments, I think. I was watching CNN this morning and found out that Colin Powell is again being rolled off to the area of crisis. They ALWAYS send Colin Powell...he's the resident Brown Man, I think, getting all the messy sticky diplomacy stuff that I thought being president was supposed to be about. Not to say that there is anybody more qualified on the current staff. But of course Jeb's tagging along to represent White America in his fine figure of manhood, so all is not lost!AAAAgh. The whole thing is a farce. Harvard activism on this is happening, but everybody is still away on holiday, so...

Donations to Medicins sans Frontiers...what do you think? Most of you are more knowledgable about links ties and arrangements between charities and corporations/governments than I am, so. We sent some cash to the Red Cross, but I dunno...there's no way to fathom this.

Christmas Gift Part 3: Binary Counting

2004-12-25T14:02:00.000-05:00

Binary Counting

A simple thing: “This is me, this is mine”.
And all done.

Two become one
and a two.

My fingers are shining in a halo
Lamp in the still of the turning
Groaning
World

O

I remember my feverish dreams of Mexico
Orange peel scent in the sweat of a virus
In the Red of blood the hibiscus blooms.

I remember a future of records and wine
In an elegant lone ness a cigarette poised
A one by one. A two by two.

My perfume coiling up in snatches like
A song long lost and my eyes fixed on
Horizon
Haze

I remember I was to be loved. In my
Most white lone ness I was to be a loved
One by one. Two by two.

I had a dream of myself as my mother.
She in natural shine and blue inscribed eye
In the heart of things I was her powder.

A one and a two and.

I am sitting in an hour of many hours
A night of many nights, a ship on the
Crest of
Time.

I am wrong and always will be.

O

A one and a one and a one and a one….

Christmas gift part 2: Dot

2004-12-25T14:01:00.000-05:00

.

Don’t be a dot. tonight
Be a line lion I can lead
On a leash around the town to
Describe the edges of your form in footprints
Twisting about you like a licorice stick

Say Grr baby.

Do not be a dot dot: tonight
Do not ask me the meaning of “Our Frank”
Talk make me sweet in pushing the punch of
Your content and hot to the answers of your
Circular questions.

Say Grr Baby.

Do not be a dot dot dot…

Tonight we’ll pretend we have
Finite ends, firm means and motives,
I’ll pretend I’m you and you can pretend you’re Me.
As good as any
In a flash as hot as dark.

Christmas Gift part 1: Story

2004-12-25T13:56:00.000-05:00

As my Christmas Gift to you all I am posting 3 new poems...including a "Christmas poem" that follows. I hope you all have had a good and warm time...I are getting ready for a huge Lasagna dinner, and enjoying the quiet. much love SR65 X

------------------------------------------------------------------
STORY

She was big as can be, you see
Heavy and tired, with him
Kicking all night

The trip to see the taxman

To pay up and be counted

We started off as two
And ended up as three

The census was confounded.

“Is this my crown?” she screamed

She was so young then

He was so good. He walked along and let me lean
I was heavy and tired, with him
Kicking all night

A pain ran through my body,
From hands to feet and back,
And a ring of sweat beading round my head
Is this my crown? I screamed,

Now that’s a joke.
And us not yet married,
But not til then…

We started off as one and ended up as two.

I can’t remember so much anymore but…

But not til then…

We looked for somewhere to stop.
And me with a Nile inside about to break and wash
Up our little fish, our little lamb.

It was too late, no one would take us,
We sat in a barn thinking of what to do.

Joseph chewed a straw.
Then he was so young.
His hands were still soft,
And I loved every inch
Of flesh that held the
Best of souls.

Not til then did I know, for sure for
Certain…

When he finally came, and it took many
Hours I lay on the straw in my gore
I looked into the face of that body

The most beautiful face in the world

She looked into the face of that body the most
Beautiful face in the world, and was silent.
I wondered what she was thinking.
Then we were so young, so moved about
So shuffled and shifted but in the light of God
We thought, In the light of God.

He was so small, so pink in the warm night
I looked at that part of myself that is a miracle,
I thought, “This is my glory, this is my crown
This is my burden, this is my pain.”

I guess all mothers think that.

manhattan mania

2004-12-22T22:18:00.000-05:00

oh well. Home again home again. On Long Island safely ensconsed in something like a christmas snowglobe, feeling ok, ate a big slice of my favourite vanilla meringue cake at dinner, but also strange/ wondering why nobody's been writing to me...ho hum. Out to dinner today and saw a terrible musical...won't go into it...Christmas with the fam' has it's various rituals...some good some bad.

cookies good. musicals (especially modern ones), generally, bad. Going to the Opera after christmas though...and that I am looking forward to...OFFEnbaCH: TALEs OF HOFFMAN, WOW!!!! so exciting! i love the Opera, haven't been in over 4 years. haven't been to the Met' in about 12 years! SNOWFLAKE LIGHT FIXTURES....twinkle twinkle.

but now I need to do some work, and think about things.

Christmas is kind of eluding me this year. we walked by the tree in rockefeller center, and past windows bedecked and layered on 5th Avenue, and it kind of didn;t do much...maybe i am jaded. Which would be a great pity. Actually one of the things I value most is wonder. Or maybe it's just missing those I love. You know who you are.

SR65

wo shuo: Yazhi Zaijian!

2004-12-17T02:53:00.000-05:00

So the wisdom teeth are out...I have a face like a 6 year old chipmunk, and I didn;t get into the Vagina Monologues!! Can you believe it!!

anyway, just wanted to say goodbye to my teeth. and my wisdom, perhaps.

more later, when not full of codeine.

SR65X

When Lips Speak Together....

2004-12-13T08:21:00.000-05:00

Apologies to Irigaray...it seems like I am always apologising to her actually, even though I disagree with her on so many things...actually while I am at it I will apologise to Kristeva too even though I hate what she says becaus I am so nasty about her in every class at every opportunity, and it's nearly CHristmas and I sholdn't be mean...I son't want to get a lump of coal for being a bad feminist....anyway...I am here announcing that I auditioned for the Harvard production of THe Vagina Monologues yesterday, and it went quite well...I am hopeful...so everybody keep your fingers crossed...maybe one day you'll see my name in lights....the lights of Loker Commons! GLAMOUR.

much love and lips.

SR65
X

The British Embassy

2004-12-11T23:42:00.000-05:00

Firstly, Hello to all thoose here whom I have not met, hopefuly one day we might..

So, Yesterday I went to the British Embassy Christmas Party (By the way I live in Beijing if any of you didn't know), I had mixed feelings as I walked in to the Pub inside the Embassy (the only embassy with a license to sell alcohol, says alot about English society), indeed it was a strange experience which after a while as I was being given mulled wine and guiness became beautifully surreal. There was a curtain drawn across the stage when the manager of the Embassy, this realy straight no nonsense guy, poked his head out and started singing the monty python song "I like chinese", the curtains were pulled back revealing three rotund guys dressed up in traditional chinese dress performing to the music in absolute perfect time. It was beatifully offensive, I'll have to try and find the lyrics and post them on here.

I havent quite digested what exactly was going on there in that bastion of Englishness, but whenever someone would say something that normaly would have made me feel like an unwanted misenthrope in England (should I be not offended when some one asks me "who the fuck are you?" just because they're drunk and irish? I don't know, I'll let you know the answer when I've worked it out) I was quietly reasurred that outside the walls of this building (classic 1960's foreign concession style) these confused feelings of nationhood and identity would quickly evaporate for me, but perhaps not for them.

Anyway, national identity looks all the more ridiculous when it's isolated and slightly defensive and indignant, that, I found quite empowering actualy. In any case, I think I've been hanging around with too many Canadians as I was told I had a North American twang to my accent, Ah well, I think there is something beautiful about having the people you love around you affect the very way you speak, not that its true though!

Practical Theater: Identity, Role and Acceptance in Stone Butch Blues

2004-12-10T08:35:00.000-05:00

In the novel “Stone Butch Blues” and the accompanying pieces we have looked at this week we have been exploring the practicalities of living as a “Gender Outlaw” that we had begun to examine in “Boys Don’t Cry” we are facing issues of class and race, and moreover, again coming upon the practicability of living “without” norms, or normativity. I explored a lot of the issues of binary replication in classification of lesbian groups, and the need for solidarity that simultaneously arise for individuals treated as gender outlaws and so here I will be further examining these issues alongside the personal story created for the character Jess Goldberg by Leslie Feinberg in this novel.

This is a bildungsroman in the true sense. It talks about the layered and painful development of its protagonist Jess Golberg through h/her violent and in many senses circular trajectory through a working class life in the US and indeed through variously gendered and sexed bodies, and through the conceptual mire of gender itself. From the outset Jess is looking for home, a home within hi/herself and in a community of others who can accept her, as is exemplified by her childhood encounter with the mirror, or h/her early life in the company of a group of Native American women, and indeed, h/her early propulsion in the New York state bar scene. He/She seeks a harbor of recognition and safety represented in h/her dreams and daydreams in the form of a hut, a gathering circle, or a ring. Again and again we see the symbol of the circle manifest itself, whether representing a unity of workers, of butches, or an acceptance for a new body, or indeed the safe home offered by the arms of “high femme” (who at certain points embodies a kind of motherly ideal, interestingly), which in the end is the feature to which Jess is most attracted, regardless of “sex”. And it is striking that throughout the novel despite the evident and painful search for individual identity, the “type” as a group, a home, a locus of solidarity remains fairly strong. Jess strives heroically to create and recreate, to build and rebuild a home around and within h/herself, to nurture and be nurtured. But the strong association between femme and home between “wife” and home remains remarkably stable considering the precarious path jess walks through the gender minefield, as does the character and ideal of butchness, although that it seems that that is subject to more change than the former. These signifiers have a purpose: Edna is attracted to the qualities of “Butches” for example, the “butch heart”. In h/her reaction to h/her evident placement within a continuum of evidently fairly interchangeable butches and her striving for a lineage of the butch as is exemplified in h/her need to search out Butch Al, Jess aligns herself with a set of characteristics, a stereotype constructed inside Lesbianism itself. The political and emotional necessity for this tracing of a butch family tree for Jess, even though in the end he/she in many ways has transgressed even these boundaries, is understandable and evident. But again we must ask what the effect of such fixed binaries of “butch/femme” are within lesbian/gay groups…we see the horror with which Jess reacts to the relationship between two butches, in many ways echoing homophobic discourse, and we are faced with the consequences of a perpetuated politics of symmetrical complementariness along what truly are gender lines, now having been removed from their presumptive biological foundations. It is not my intention here to belittle the efforts of our resourceful and engaging principal character, who, after all stands as an example of an experience that in many ways is widespread. I believe however that it is precisely the aim of Leslie Feinberg in writing these situations into the novel that we should question the distinctions drawn, as Jess h/herself does in the end, even as we revel in the Kerouac-like “beat” and beaten grace of the Butch. We must conclude that in all events Jess walks a tight rope between an idealized trajectory of “self-realization” whether itself believed to be innate or in socially informed and socio-economic pressures in h/her journeys through gender, and that in any and all events he/she is engaging in a self-making practical theater of which he/she is at various points extremely conscious.

The novel itself, as well as being a document of development in the fog of gender war, is a sort of confessional. We are party to the most intimate and painful moments of Jess’ existence…the humiliating and horrifying rape, menacing beatings, private doubts and public embarrassments. The responsibility of the writer to create a relationship between the text and reader that is not engaging, or relying upon a sort of gender exoticism is extraordinary, and in fact Leslie Feinberg manages this well, we become a sort of lover to the character… We stand facing the image of the little girl in her father’s suit. It becomes our image and that of our fantasy, just as it is for Jess…we are made so intimately sympathetic to Jess that we cannot but identify with h/her, and in effect we are thus allowed to act as femme and “melt the Stone”. At the cool climax of this record of intimacies, at the end of the novel, we again find ourselves in within the circle… catapulted into a confession-within-a-confession that echoes the letter that begins the novel…and into the effects for the protagonist of a self-conscious confession before the crowd. Judith Halberstam speaks in her articles of a need to find a new language to describe the erotic life of the butch, the erotic life based on giving pleasure but remaining resistant to it oneself, what she actually identifies as a catalogue of “negative” sexuality based on “what is not done”. In fact this is the ultimate contradiction at the heart of the condition of being Butch with a capital “B”: in the moment that one admits, confesses, lets flow all that has been inside into discourse, in some senses one ceases to be a Stone Butch. However we view the political effectiveness in this sense of Jess’ articulation of h/her condition in public in the final pages of the novel, we are confronted with the joy and release it provides, and the perhaps necessary redrawing of
Jess as an individual in relation to categories of sex and gender within and in fact beyond heterosexual norms. Perhaps that is the ultimate endpoint of the ring.

Punctum/"You are my sweetest downfall"

2004-12-07T04:02:00.000-05:00

It is after 4 in the morning and I am listening compulsively to Regina Spektor...this is "Samson". I am sitting in a pool of white light cast from the lamp on my desk and smoking a fag, making a spotlight in the darkness like a lighthouse on the sea off the South Coast. Thinking about something I read of Judith Butler's new book today...the idea of relationships, of love or mourning, passion, as an undoing, an unzipping of the soul, where we sit beside ourselves in abject ex-tasy or horror. I am sitting at the centre of the ennoument, wondering what is happening now across town, what boats are floating across the sea and what birds are picking through crumbs many many miles away. Light is spreading across the hazy clouds high over head. Peaceful sleep is sneaking in and out of the eyelids of 3 in an upstairs apartment, snacks are being eaten in bed by the light of a quiet cigarette, the cat is sleeping between a couple in Texas, weak sun is coming through the kitchen window of somebody's basement flat sparking off all the pots and pans, and the workday is dragging itself into its final waltz in a classroom and an office.The ends of the threads of my heart are spreading themselves out at 4am, at 4am we are all connected.

You are all my sweetest downfall.

Listen to this and find a quiet centre in your heart.

SR65X

the italian icon

2004-12-05T02:20:00.000-05:00

scaryMichelepastaface,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

So I know Dimaco is going to kill me for putting this on, but I couldn't help it, it's the ultimate italian stereotype...I think Dimaco's friend who came to visit in London took the picture and set it up so that his parents wouldn't worry that his italian-ness was being corrupted by living in the UK so long. "Here Mama, don't worry about me." So I think we should all get our wife beaters on, smother ourselves in Parmigiano...grano baby grano, and bring out our inner italian in honour of Dimaco as a fine italian man.

Ciao!

fairylights

2004-12-05T02:16:00.000-05:00

fairylights,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

I am tired...what, more work???
watch me slump...fag in hand.
But note well my new fairy light halo...Aren't they great??? getting ready for the holiday season...have had discussions about Yule, Xmas and Hannukah today, so I know that the season is upon me.

Also it's fucking freezing which is usually a good sign.

Will I ever get to bed??

V

2004-12-04T22:43:00.000-05:00

Show and Tell: Drag/Passing/Performing/Being

1. Drawing the same circle a thousand times: Repetition and Synthesis

This week we have been exploring the idea of performativity in a number of different contexts and valences (hereafter referred to by the synecdoche V), the extent to which performativity constitutes identity, or fails to as the borders of same escape the edges of the performance necessitating repetition. Further some of the texts and film we have looked at explores conscious performance and the implications on that on the necessity of the subject to “pass”, without revealing any split between their assigned sex and assigned gender so as to prop up the conceit of continuity between and within the two categories even as its logic undermines the very primacy of the original. Judith Butler posits a link not only between all gender and drag, but also between repetition and constitution, in effect concluding that gender is a kind of spell made true by repeated incantation, a mantra with no original form that both is and does.

2. V for Vicious

Implicit in the idea of this mantra of gender/sex is the idea of passing, for though, as the film Boys Don’t Cry (and countless other examples) shows there are members of the gender/sex continuum whose process of “passing” is more acute, more dangerous, practically violent and filled with trepidation, we all “pass” to a lesser or greater extent, and not only in terms of our physical appearance. Indeed it is perhaps less of a case of “womanliness” as masquerade as it is “personhood” as masquerade, where, however the mask and the face are part of one another, as I have argued elsewhere. In semantic groups, in grouping within groupings we reduce the variety of the individual as a flow of social and biological into logical and workable groups for better or worse, and this fact becomes particularly noticeable in those places where our own logic shows its multitude of flaws, and disrupts the epistemological net upon which phallogocentricity is supported. These more potent points of confrontation between the conceit of the natural and the (not-necessarily-self-identified-as…) subversive performative, are perhaps the very loci of which Butler speaks where there may be a “political imperative to use…necessary error or category mistakes” to reuse names that divide sharply… like “gay” and “lesbian”, “butch” and “femme” but I consider that it can be a thorny problem; essentially we face the perennial difficulty of using such dichotomous logics in attempting to disrupt them, we try to keep a subversive hand on the wheel, though the road ahead seems straight, but that is not to say that such terms are not useful at times. Processes of thought, modes of expression are all converted for acceptable use within dichotomies of “pro” and “anti”, “left” and “right” within which we may or may not feel comfortable, indeed much psychotherapy whether focused on the sexual strata of psychoanalysis or on cognitive behavior is about learning to “pass” comfortably in society. To return to the idea of gender in particular, as an aspect of this self-constitutive process, and to the parallel concepts of drag and passing, first let us consider what is involved in drag, in dragging. Whether we are seeking to emulate the “male” the “female” or a vision of ourselves, constituting oneself can always be seen as a process of becoming the other, since the ideal is the mirror image, the imago and thus not the self, but a vision entering into the realm of desire, and therefore, ultimately, an impossibility. Thus to a degree we are all cross-dressers, perhaps. But in the process of acting a “gender” or “type” this process becomes more obvious, and the potentials and pitfalls of the dressing, the drag and the detail are revealed. In repetition, as Butler argues, we can see the self, or impossibility of a Self balking at a label, so that the label like some band-aid on a swimming child’s knee needs to be attached and reattached to cover the wound where move, change and growth is happening. In fact, this re-iteration of category is, even in those who willingly conform to heteronorms, obviously and evidently unstable…a person’s vision and presentation of themselves is in fact expected to change over time, as age and experience of various kinds act upon us, and we upon them, but the limitations of this expected to change are interestingly closed off…for someone to seem to become less or more masculine or feminine, if moving “away” from their proscribed sex ( a sex that is socially inscribed and constituted in this other to which they move) would be considered unacceptable or suspect, as can be seen in the attacks on the perceived “masculinization” that occurs in menopause as Anne Fausto Sterling explores it in Myths of Gender. In the repetition, and the inability to produce a stable definition, or even a truly reliable copy, we can see the potential disruptive and creative force within the layered gender. We can also see how the effect of this incantation is to make it seem natural, and internal, because in fact, it is no more external than internal, it is no more other than self, since as indicated above the other and the self are linked across a fluid chain. When “re-performing” a “gender” or “type” however, certain other problems come to the fore…although such performance may have disruptive power to the idea of the primacy of the natural as implicated in gender performance, the cluster of concepts around the gender remain fairly fixed, and the dichotomy is repeated. To act like a woman, even for a man remains to be ladylike, emotional, and concerned with personal grooming, among other things, so to be a woman still carries this baggage with it, clearly. Thus although the being of a woman may have become disengaged from a “female” body per se, what it is to have a female body and to be a woman is still circumscribed within the focus of the performance…the “real” that is striven for but that is precisely not real. While it may be true that there is “no proper gender, a gender that is proper to one sex but not another” in practical terms, in problems like the “urinary segregation” spoken of by Judith Halberstam et al. we see that the unstable perimeters that circulate sex, gender and self are constantly policed through a network of hegemony, and that they are policed precisely because they are unstable, and it is for this reason that drag may at once signify a valence that is v for vicious and a v for victory in both directions.

2. The Insightment(sic) to look

In her article “Decking Out: Performing Identities” Butler speaks of the content of this interstitial space between and inside self and sex in the following terms...”Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely that which does not appear and that which to some degree, can never appear”(p.25). The tensions between the unseen nature of this realm and its status as part and parcel, and indeed centre to an economy of desire is at the heart of both the creation of sexualities that run along a continuum in relation to social sex designation and sex object, and to the contradictory desire to see what is not there, that is found in the bathroom drama described in Halberstam’s essays, and in the dialogue of revealing, both violent and “voluntary” that takes place in Boys Don’t Cry. In this film the audience is made party to a series of revelations on the nature of Tina/Brandon’s “Sexual Identity Crisis”, we are put in a position to see the line of cleavage, to his menstrual drama, and to his forced confessions. But in the end though at times we are in intimate and sympathetic relation to the character, we are party to his undoing, we are implied in his rape, and are forced, like Lana to look at his genitals which have no bearing whatever to his conception of himself. We are made culpable and our gaze is involved in a visual rape that prefigures the physical rape to which we are also invited. To add insult to injury perhaps, we are then presumed to have seen the truth of Tina/Brandon’s sexual status as a woman, a lesbian, as is evidenced by the lesbian lovemaking seen, where Brandon takes on an incongruous female role , which seems preposterous, (a result of his being taught by the phallic eye and the rape, perhaps a “true” role?) especially in relation to his nearly immediately preceding rape. The rape, the necessity to rape as a punishment for transgressing gender roles is in fact a site of the more violent aspect of this afore mentioned policing of gender. The rape, the use of the penis as weapon, seems to be the only way in which the characters, in this film can regain a sense of the importance of this organ after the true castration they undergo upon discovering that Brandon does not happen to have one. This castration is absolute, rather than physical or phantastic, because it reveals the true semantic distance between phallus and penis, and the import or LACK(sic) of same, in the organ in the making of masculinity.

4. VVVVVVVVVVWV
There are many more questions to be asked about the nature of identities that, like Brandon’s self describe within the binary dichotomy of male and female even as they challenge them. The objects of desires, and natures of desires can be seen to create a multiplicity of different identity formations within the realm of “gay” and “lesbian” in a way that can be an effective tool for reflecting the reification of desire in the heteronorm if they can be excised in part from dichotomous schemes of their own, so as to highlight the constitutive and synthetic functions of repetition and to allow perhaps some basis for practical movement on these issues that so violently impact the lives of many.

"Us":by Regina Spektor

2004-12-03T01:22:00.000-05:00

"We're living in a den of thieves...rummaging for answers in the pages."

New music...the album,"Soviet Kitsch" is great, something that I got recently after hearing it on local radio...for all you voyeurs out there (and I know you're out there you gorgeous perverts... you tell me!) keep an eye for Regina wherever you are, and enjoy.

more later,

SR65
X

Puerto Rican Doggerel (Trad.)

2004-12-02T20:08:00.000-05:00

Se murio Lola. Lola died.

Que Lola? Which Lola?

Lo lamento. I'm sorry.

Que mento? Which 'mento'?

Mentosan. Mentosan.

Que san? Which san?

San Germa'n. San Germa'n.

Que man? Which 'man'?

Manati'. Manati'.

Que ti'? Which 'ti''?

Tiburon. Shark.

Que ron? Which rum?

Ron DonQ. DonQ Rum

Que Q? Which Q?

Cubo 'e [de] agua. Pail of water.

Que agua? Which water?

Aguarra'. Aguarra'.

Que ra'? Which 'ra'?

Rabo 'e mono. Monkey's tail.

Que mono? Which monkey?

Monopolio. Monopoly.

Que polio? Which polio?

Polici'a. Police.

Que cia? Which cia?

Se acabo. It's over.

Que bo? Which 'bo'?

Boca Chica. Boca Chica

Que chica? Which girl?

Chicago. Chicago.

Que cago? What do I crap?

iiUn mojon asi' de grande!! A turd this big!!

Neruda: poem of the day///

2004-12-02T10:16:00.000-05:00

So the morning was rather beautiful today and this Pablo Neruda poem came into my head...visions of verdant crepescular plants and memento mori et al. what follows is a spanish version without accents...sorry, and then a translated version, which I am not one hundred percent certain about...any suggestions welcome, that;s what you get from th inernet, what can I say.

Anyway, Enjoy,

SR65
X
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CABALLO DE LOS SUENOS

Innecessario, viendome en los espejos
con un gusto a semanas, a biografos,a papeles
arranco de mi corazon al capitan del infierno,
establezco clausulas indefinidamente tristes.

Vago de un punto a otro, absorbo illusiones,
convero con los sastras en sus nidos:
ellos, a menudo, con voz fatal y fria
cantan y hacen huir los maleficios

Hay un pais extenso en el cielo
con las supersticiosas alfombras del arco-iris
Y con vegetaciones vesperales:
hacia alli me dirijo, no sin cierta fatiga,
pisando una tierra removida de sepulcros un tanto frescos,
Yo sueno entre esas plantas de legumbre confusa.

Paso entre documentos disfrutados,entre origenes,'
vestido como un ser original y abatido:
amo la miel gastada del respeto,
el dulche catecismo entre cuynas hojas
duermen violetas envejecides, desvanecidas,
y las escobas, commovedoras de auxilio:
en su apariencia hay, sin duda, pesadumbre y certeza.
Yo destruyo la rosa que silba y la ansiedad raptora:
Yo rompo extremos queridos: y aun mas,
aguardo el tiempo uniforme, sin medida:
un sabor que tengo en el alma m edeprime.

Que dia ha sobrevenido! Que espesa luz de leche,
compacta, digital, me favorece!
He oido relinchar su rojo caballo
desnudo sin herraduras y radiante.

Atravieso con el sobre las iglesias,
gallopo los cuarteles desiertos de soldados
y un ejercito impuro me persigue.
Sus ojos de eucaliptus roban sombra,
su cuerpo de compana galopa y golpea.

Yo necesito un relampago de fulgor persistente,
un deudo festival que asuma mis herencias.

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

Needlessly, watching my looking-glass image,
With its passion for papers and cinemas, days of the week,
I pluck from my heart my hell's captain
and order the clauses, equivocally sad.

I drift between this point and that, absorbing illusions,
converse in the nest of tailors:
sometimes the voices are glacial and deadly-
they sing and the sorcery goes.

There's a country spread out in the sky,
a credulous carpet of rainbows
and crepuscular plants:
I move toward it just a bit haggardly
trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade
To dream in a bedlam of vegetables.

I walk between origins, beneficient documents
chopfallen, dressed like a natural: I want
the spent honey of deference,
the sweets of the catechism under whose leaves
drained violets drowse and grow old;
and those bustling abettors, the brooms, in whose image,
assuredly, sorrow and certainty join.
I plunder the whistle of roses, the thieving anxiety:
I smash the attractive extremes-worst of all,
I await a symmetrical time beyond measure:
The taste of my spirit disheartens me.

What a morning is here! What a milk-heavy glow
in the air, integral, all of a piece,
Intending some good! I have heard its red horses
naked to bridle and iron, shimmering, whinnying there.

Mounted, I soar over churches,
gallop the garrisons empty of soldiers
While a dissolute army pursues me.
Eucalyptus, its eyes race the darkness
and the bell of its galloping body strikes home.

I need but a spark of that perduring brightness,
my jubilant kindred to claim my inheritance.

____________________________________________________________

in frame

2004-11-29T04:29:00.000-05:00

in frame,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Ok, so I am frustrated with Roland Barthes and Kristeva...(oooh, she makes me MAD), and I am writing about confinement, incarceration, ranting and silence...so I put myself in a box...sort of, jsut for fun

THings are better...I can;t believe what a big difference it makes just feeling more cheerful to my work and everything

I don't even mind that I have a stupid amount of work anymore. I guess it's social conditioning Harvard style.hmmm.
Human beings can get used to anything, huh?

XXX

J'AI RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC VOUS by George Brassens

2004-11-26T23:17:00.000-05:00

The fabulous and naughty French songster George Brassens sums up my mood when waiting for an SMS date...Recorded from my mom's old vinyl (hooray Mom!!) from the late 60's, so crispy, but warm, huh? I am rying to promote George Brassens here...go out and find some...he seems pretty damn near forgotten and he's sooo cool. He writes with humour and passion about 10 minute love affairs beneath umbrellas, escaped gorillas raping judges, lovers on public benches, being hauled off by the police, feeling like a puppet to love, falling in love with the shape of a flower in the skin of a cow. I love him, I hope you all will too.

translated Lyrics:

My Lord the sun
As I do not admire him much
Takes away his fire, but I don't give a damn about his fire
I have a date with you
The light I prefer
Is the one from your jealous eyes
All the rest leaves me cold
I have a date with you

Monsieur my landlors
As I have wrecked everything
Kicks me from his house, but I don't give a damn about his house
I have a date with you
The residence I prefer
Is your rustling dress
All the rest leaves me cold
I have a date with you

Madame my housekeeper
As I owe her too much money
bars me from her table, but I don't give a damn about her table
I have a date with you
The dish I prefer
Is the flesh of your neck
All the rest leaves me cold
I have a date with you

His financial majesty
As I do nothing to his taste
Keeps his gold, but I don't give a damn about his gold
I have a date with you
The fortune I prefer
Is your heart of tinder
All the rest leaves me cold
I have a date with you.

got thanks?

2004-11-24T23:53:00.000-05:00

Folks, this is the first Thanksgiving I have spent in the United States since I was six, and I think I am ready. I have planned how to avoid Sport on TV, my parents have a plentiful supply of indigestion aids, and i am set for turkey heaven.

I am currently in the Sturbridge Host Inn in Sturbridge MA, where we used to come so often when I was a child, for holidays with my brother and all, and also when I would come up to Boston for surgery. We would always stop in Sturbridge and try to relax, swim in the superbly 80's pool, which still exists, and play arcade games, and eat muffins in front of the fire. THe fire is now electric and purely "decorative", (bastards) but the place is much the same. A bit more decrepit perhaps, or maybe it's just a matter of perspective. But they do have WIFI, and that you've got to love/

I am wishing all of my friends a Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are. I am not sure exactly what the whole thing means, especially since I am not doing what I normally am doing at this time...making italian sausage stuffing with my brother and in the kitchen of our London house, and getting ready for a weird day. My Dad would put the turkey in the oven uber early in the morning so that you wake up to the smell of meat, whch is really strange, I think, but kind of exciting. My mother makes amazing pumpkin pie, and I really love pumpkin pie, I can't even tell you how much...so yummy...with whipped cream and nutmeg! We always had a big dinner party to which all my parents' British friends would come and I would occasionally bring a few of mine. This would be the day on which I would be a pseudo American, just by virtue of the fact that I was more American than anybody else there except my parents, of course. Plus the Ubiquitous Priest, and of course, my Gran who is now gone, sadly, she would normally be hovering around, having taken the principle of a holiday that is pretty much purely about eating to heart, making sure that everything was being done exactly as she wanted, and being a fantastic fussbudget generally. I miss her so much. My father would invariably have some kind of loud, obnoxious and filthily conservative discussion at table. I remember one year it was on Thanksgiving that Margaret Thatcher got ousted from parliament...my brother cried. help. I was too young to really understand, I just felt bad, cause everybody seemed so upset.

I remember too the first year Will came to my house for the whole affair...we turned up with a big bouquet of flowers for my mom, and I can remember being so proud to have him with me. And so pleased to have someone to conspire with in a "pinkosubversive" manner. Oh I pledge allegiance to the f(l)ag! (thankyou brad epps.)

So here I am, away from my little room in Cambridge and trying to fathom out what Thanksgiving is all about, and what horizons I am to keep my eye on now. But I was writing this to say to all, enjoy the break, and much love and I send my thanks to whatever powers that be for giving me the friends that I have and the friends that I have made, and the strength to be where I am doing what I am doing to which you all have contributed. much love.

Thankyou!

X

nice doohicky I picked up from lady_babalon on LJ

2004-11-24T23:49:00.000-05:00


tea is love
brought to you by the isLove Generator

SNO

2004-11-12T22:16:00.000-05:00

It;s been snowing here almost all day...the first real snow of the season...I can't believe winter's here already. Normally snow makes me really excited and childlike, especially when it actually sticks...and we've got about an inch on the ground. But I got a kind of depressing email from my tutor, I have shitloads of work...I'm stressed, my skin is terrible and I'm generally kind of down. And I don't have anyone to share the snow with. I'm snowed under. I'm experiencing extreme academic anxiety, and I think my IQ is going down every second///Help.

Ballad of a Mapmaker

2004-11-07T04:13:00.000-05:00

What is the lay of the land?
How does the land lay, and
How does it lie? I am making
Taking notes now when I walk Out
Humming in the canyon
Between waking and sleep,
On empty streets with only
The wind as my companion.
The light is cut in logical squares
And All the soft darkness that hides my
{My (invisible) } friend
They weave the web of sense the
Geography of wakefulness
The deceit of what could be.

The trees swing in that breeze, swinging with dancing like tangoing privately
In the cold. Lost in thought, not seeing that they are seen
Doing
A little striptease
(bend then, stand straight as compasses) as the leaves
come
down
to
warm
their
feet...
They
at last
Stand Nude

Vulnerable and wholesome.
Frightened and thrilled
Waiting to be touched

By starlight, by moonlight, by a child’s hide -and
-seek -hand

And how does this land lie?
In the rustle of a paper bag in the park
In car horns and coded traffic the flashing
Light. In breaths and tones on telephones…
Light.
You ask me what it is that I am doing> what games nowadays?
I tell you I have become A CARTOGRAPher

Making sensual maps of the city streets
Walking a sentence around this town
With steps like words
Hiding from the punctuation of the road.

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

This poem has a lot more graphical play than it seems to have here...sorry, it won;t let me do it on the posting.
Any questions about that, just ask me.

SR65

X

I think this about speaks for itself-quoting Lady Babalon

2004-11-05T22:47:00.000-05:00

TO all those on the mirror stage...again I am quoting a very astute person from LiveJournal for the purpose of better understanding. How does this election affect the average American you might well ask...well....Average we can't help you with, but American, we can certainly try. Lady Babalon wrote this in a fit of justifiable rage, but I think we all benefit from her rapier-like wit. Thanks for letting me quote you, Lady Babalon! Again, if you are interested in having a look at Lady Babalon's blog which is filled with strange dreams, occult divinations, weather gazing and black humour, go to:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/lady_babalon

muchos besos

SR65

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

Dear America,

How do I hate you? Let me count the ways...
I hate you for your unquestioning hatred and fear of dear friends and family of mine, and your eager willingness to deny them equal human status, which extends so far as to excuse people who violently beat them to death for merely being who they are by saying "Oh, they felt threatened, they couldn't help themselves."
I hate you for your eagerness to jump to war as the first solution for everything, and to rabidly defend your war leader even when he has been proved over and over and over again to have been lying about the reasons for the war, the difficulty of the war, the length of the war, the numbers of innocent people killed in the war; the goals of the war; and the benefits you will receive if you just give in and join his army.
I hate you for your knee jerk reaction to the word "liberal" as if it meant "baby raper" instead of someone who feels all people deserve an equal chance and has a somewhat different view of how things should be run than "conservatives".
I hate you for your willingness to use Christianity as a club to force through any law prohibiting adult consensual behavior, thereby making the nicer sort of Christians feel guilty if they don't go along with it and giving great energy to the asshole wanna be theocrats who are multiplying at alarming rates.
I hate you for your craven running and hiding in fear and being willing to give up every liberty granted you in the Constitution without a fight just because the television tells you your life will be better and safer that way.
And I hate you for your sheep like insistence on voting for only two candidates, despite the fact that you almost all admit you don't like either one of them, instead of fomenting a national revolution and en masse voting for a non Republicrat. Your easily won compliance virtually assures they will do nothing to change their policies which are slowly dragging us into fascism, an impossibly huge national debt, and a deep economic depression.
This is a democracy - you came out to vote - and you made yourselves the mockery of the world with the idiocy of your choices.

I hereby renounce you, America - I am no longer your citizen, I am a free person. I will take part in no more of your rituals other than the ones you threaten to imprison me for if I avoid them. Take heed that I do these things only under great duress, do not take them as a sign of happy good-citizen-like compliance. I will subvert you every place I can. Your nation's government is a worthless sham and not worthy of my support or respect, and neither are you.

Those who have actively worked for human equality and real political change may exempt themselves from this rant (which almost certainly includes most of you on my frineds list). But if you are anti-gay or pro-Bush you may go away now, you aren't wanted here. You aren't just part of the problem, you *are* the problem.
Now excuse me while I work out a bunker mentality for my family, whom apparently, most of America wants to destroy...

political piece/peace by SophiaSerpentia

2004-11-05T21:06:00.000-05:00

Dear all on the Mirror Stage...I am posting some writings by very clever friends on another blog that I think may be especially interesting to those of you outside of the United States...THis one is by SophiaSerpentia a friend and Massachussetts resident who writes on LiveJournal, who has kindly allowed me to quote her here and provide you with a link to her blog which contains much spiritual searching and musing of the divine, philosophy, ephemera and politics, if you are interested please go to:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sophiaserpentia

Enjoy, much love,

SiRen65
------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, John Kerry said some pretty words in his consession speech about how we need to heal the divide between us and try to be nicer. It's not going to happen, and here's a few reasons why.

1. For many of us who are opposed to the war in Iraq, this matter is not a question of policy, not a matter of taxes and budgeting to be debated rationally. We believe that the war in Iraq is an unspeakable evil being perpetrated in our name.

2. The Republicans have no reason to start playing nice because they're winning. They consolidated their hold on the House of Representatives by creating gerrymander districts in Texas so severe, a federal court has ruled that they may well violate the civil rights of millions. They won the governorship of California through a campaign of misdirection. They sent out mailings in rural areas claiming that Kerry wanted to outlaw the Bible. Before the election they actively discouraged people from voting in New Hampshire and they worked to invalidate the registrations of many voters in Ohio and elsewhere. Sure, the Democrats have done their share of dirty tricks, but not on nearly the same scale.

3. Social conservatives in this country are not united around their support for something, they are united by their fear and hatred of people who are different. They speak of "defending marriage," but if that was truly their goal, they would focus on the people who are having trouble staying married, not the people who want to be able to get married. We who are queer did not start the culture war against us, but we have no choice but to fight it, as viciously as we must, until we prevail, or at least to a standstill. We are outnumbered and outgunned; our very lives and happiness are on the line. It is not reasonable to ask us to be "reasonable" in the face of organized hatred.

4. The very freedoms that fundamentally define this country are being threatened in the name of "defending" it. The cure (if indeed it is a cure; it has yet to be demonstrated that the loss of civil rights makes us any safer) is worse than the disease. This last point is actually aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, who have been united in their assault on basic American freedoms, and is the main reason I did not vote for the candidate of either party

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

Any of you on my friend's list who voted for Bush, I have a few questions. I'm really, really curious.

1. Regarding those claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The specific WMDs Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair claimed to have detailed information about, but which simply and plainly did not exist. You know, the "weapons" we said we wanted to keep out of the hands of terrorists so much, we started a war. Those claims either represent gross incompetence, or are blatant lies. What I would like to know is, what are you telling yourself about these claims that made it possible for you to vote for Bush?

2. Speaking of keeping weapons out of the hands of terrorists, what about the weapons and explosives in Iraq which really did exist, but which were left completely unguarded after the invasion? America is not safer now than it was before the invasion of Iraq. The security situation, in fact, is much more grave. Do you really find that acceptable?

3. Why should any friend of yours who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered ever speak to you again?

4. Please explain, using your understanding of economic theory, why you think it is good for America to continue to widen the gap between rich and poor in this country. For extra credit, explain also why we are better off working for Wal-Mart than keeping the high-paying technical jobs which now belong to workers in India or China.

sophiaserpentia