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Loud clattering of can By co-living sub-tenant
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Sarah Hurwitz has a Zen “don’t know” before-thinking enlightenment moment on a hitbodedut retreat. I love this.
That’s all I could say: “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I was saying that over and over again until I said, “I don’t know, but I can’t do this alone.”
It was a moment of openness, of some surrender. I was so astounded that I started to cry and I thought, “I don’t know what that was about.”
Warmth in my chest as I hear her vocal audio bits through my WH-1000MX4s.
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Tu B'shvat
Having made the journey from the front yard to the back, beneath the weight of the second story where morning light was filling rooms, I was comfortable with the progress of our adolescent wildflowers. Then, between the backdoor and backfence, light filled me up. The poppies are stubbornly refusing to bloom. Mild flakes of disappointment crawled up my temples. For a moment I considered the preposterous notion of watering the Redwood Tree. There, erect and looming, concentric symmetrics, wheels of blades spiraling over our rental house. Me, corrected, sighing; sharing the embarrassment with the pointed bamboo that have lived partially in the Redwood’s shadow. I decided to step into this shadow. I gazed up into the vortex of leaves. You don’t need tepid municipal sink juice. (But I’ll get some for you, over there beyond the glass. You potted co-dependents that dot the interior landscape, scrubbing and smoothing the nervy corners of brutal Puritan design. You little fuckers, in comparison.) I remember where Dottie scratched your delicate conifer skin, loomer. When she was given a chance to roam wild. Too few moments with that champion, I miss you.
I push on that spot with my imagination from a mile away through this keyboard, where Dottie, me, Redwood, and microbes have a chance encounter on earth in space. I’m reminded of one time I tried striking the Redwood. The way that you do as a martial artist who’s curious about surfaces and transfer. There had been a sharp, uneven slap from the sketched conifer texture, unwilling to participate. Or unnoticeably. More impenetrable than cement, completely full of form. Not the satisfying feedback of leather wrapped compressed textile. There are few living things that are so dense to human body sacks, I suspect.
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Guy outside Ritual Coffee on 5/27/24, I had a hot chocolate inside
The guy in combat boots with adorned with a skull. He’s reading Love In the Time of Cholera, headphones crowning his head into a phone call. He’s got coffee.
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Seung Sahn's Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, and chat with Seraph and Marshall
Good morning
A man came into the Zen center and dropped ashes on the Buddha.
One hundred and fifty years ago men put metal penises in the earth and started burning fuel in earnest, beginning to fill the atmosphere with ash.
There are other men, same same men, who claim “Buddha is everything.” They are very strong and will hit you if you say otherwise. How do you fix their minds?
In a stroke of brilliance, I piped the morning meditation’s Zoom call audio through the Sonos. It’s quite silly that I’ve taken so long to figure this out. The Morning Bell Chant is now screeching across Clifford’s vocal chords.
Felicitous: pausing the onslaught on my geriatric iPhone’s speakers eliminated the rheumatic gargles and burps.
Good evening
There was a moment yesterday, around the routine crepuscular slide, when Seraph mentions how the diaspora broke us. (Sambal moves around the gums.) We broke, to assimilate. We discontinued mentions of the moon cycle’s importance in our rituals. We cleared the forest from the imagination. My chest balled up. I could cry. It had been a tough Sunday already in one of those classic disorientations of a fleeting weekend. Just as a week or two of life pressures edged to the pinnacle for a breath and place to lookout with a panoramic view. (I’m thinking of the top of Bernal hill.)
I don’t love the language of broken and fixed because it’s hard, phallic. It makes me think of split wood. (I have too many planks, not enough logs to build Atul’s workshop!) My own notional machine of my mind body conjures gushier platelets. Like a pre-cum immured into being across a white plane with a left-to-right, slightly downward stroke of a palette knife squishing a wave of paint across a plain surface. I love the way paint breaks. How air bubbles create a torn moon surface. Within this mode perhaps I’m become dabs and waves. Uneven, partial, preparation for art, art substance, also a soothing transitioning item from globular mound to wave. So that’s why it’s hard to feel broke, or whatever the reverse, some architectural rebar. Nonetheless, the near-tears I felt at the invocation of brokenness are a clear indication that the door has been shut on joy before.
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The kind of extro, outside RItual coffee on Valencia
Being around people Benching just outside the coffee shop Heads pointing down Talking Tap clink Passersby entering and exiting Entering and exiting is the point
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Machinery: Eva Hesse, her machinery
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From Amy Kurzweil at The Ruby in San Francisco on February 29th, 2024
The room was cold. The light a little caustic. Acoustics wan. From the back row I had to squirm to the side to see Kurzweil’s full face. Like 17 people there, maybe? Intimate, secret, and in on it. Rugged cool!
“Paper is pleasurable.”
“My life for a while was in pages.”
“My visual secret is that all my characters look like me.”
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Two drinks max or else
The bartender at Berreta is asking if I like bitterness and I answer yes. At this point I’m open to interpretation and open to interpretations. I get Cynar, a hefty portmanteau that smoothes out my technologies of resistance across the bar plane. An incubation space for monsters. To the right of my glass, an open challah bag is a gaping hole.
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Sunday Prayer before heading to altitude
Saying no to Lucy Ives everywhere and hitchhiking Leather Blvd. sipping cool aid
Kita anak-anak keren
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Hangry
Can you eat here
Can you get food here
I can get food here
I will get food here
This place is too expensive for you
I will eat at this place
There is another food for you over there -
Relationships in this economy
“I didn’t realize what we had.”
He couldn’t see from the view, from within his stomach. His nerves are too high.
Well, brother, you work full-time; overtime, frequently, because it’s only a five-day work week. Your hands are full cutting a path through what the racists made today.
And brother, your Yeezies are barely scuffing the stacked monomers. Where did you come from? There are dicks the size of city blocks clouding your view. Same-day tsukumogami are drilled into the soil and rock and you trip on them.
You weren’t taught to realize her/they from the muscles between your shoulder blades, reaching behind you to turn it around, reaching in all four directions like a somaticist. Need I remind you that we only had one chance to spin the title track. (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud). You barely perceived the record pops, blocked from view. And the time that remained didn’t leave us one breath to talk about the sound before the rich were on the ballot again.
Written at the kitchen counter. My overcooked omelette lays on the cutting board. The sangha relaxing down into the sunrise and into memory.
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Kelsey Blackwell's Race and the Body: Why Somatic Practices Are Essential for Racial Justice
“Racism is a visceral experience” - Coates
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“Including the body…towards social justice…is the primary path forward” - Blackwell
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“We focused our efforts in the wrong direction…white supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains…it lives and breathes in our body.” - Resmaa Menakem
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“The only path forward requires dismantling who we think we are.” - Blackwell
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“The body…says, this is true…this is happening…this is honest.” -Blackwell
“Few skills are more essential than the ability to settle your body.” - Menakem
{ This one. A superpower. Also, settle your body vs settle on your body or your land vs settle an argument. }
“There’s a saying in Guinea that ‘knowledge is only rumor until it’s in the muscle.'” - Blackwell
“Rocking, humming, and making physical contact with each other…” - Blackwell
{ Sitting, bowing, chanting, walking, eating, cooking, cleaning. To retreat, to practice. To leap like a tiger while sitting. }
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Class warfare on Duolingo 🌹
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Goings on about town: Iowa teen grew 7,000 pounds of veggies, then gave them all away
Over morning coffee, mixed with used iron goddess king tea leaves. Questions about things in paper.
kopi pagi tambah daun teh raja dewi besi
Why ya why ya why ya why ya why ya wanna why ya wanna
- Some people just have acres of arable land lying around to play with
- Why didn’t Lauren work with her family to give this land back to indigenous tribes? In 2022 tribes finally won 7 acres back after 200 years. If the Schroeder’s gave back their 2 acres, they would increase the footprint of sovereign native lands in Iowa by 30%.
- What happens if Lauren loses interest in this project? Or goes off to college? Will the people served by the food banks and other orgs she’s supporting suffer as a result?
- How is hunger an issue in a heavily agricultural state?
- Is this an acceptable form of child labor, especially with her two siblings also working with her?
- I wonder if Lauren offered the unnamed domestic violence survivor a chance to help with the project and give her kids a chance to grow their own food again.
Why did Dr. J shave his beard and mustache?
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Modern cities are inhuman: Vol 1
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Le Guin on write what you know
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I slept pretty well last night
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From the hunter to the tactical tornado. Man and his-story!
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Book review: Event Factory
I’m not sure how far Gladman’s fantastic Ravickian worlding has spread beyond cottage literary, artistic, and critical conclaves. She reached me by way of Lucy Ives' article on the “weak novel” (after listening to Ives on a BISR’s podcast paneling the same topic). (I’ve since bought almost every book Ives mentions in this article; I’m on a rapid tour of postmodern anti-novels.)
I’m curious who would fancy this book. I loved it. But I love a good ontological drift through space-time. Are we meant to be reading the artifactual record of the protagonist’s survey? Nope. Maybe? This isn’t the same kind of world-inhabiting, context-laden ethnography that frequents the beginnings of book parts and chapters in sci-fi and fantasy volumes. Well, perhaps it is a long opener as the first of many books.
What feels most real is that Gladman’s text is constantly in question.
Dorothy (the publisher) leaves far too much margin.
The story can hardly get going since getting past “Hello” is nearly impossible. It’s some kind of language issue. But also architectural, since the built world is in some kind of crisis or revolution. Something really bad is happening on Ravicka, and we don’t get enough for a complete analysis. What’s maddening is that the locals seem to brush it off. But it’s not a total wash in the yellow. There are wonderfully concrete and vivid moments of the Ravickian world. It’s not simply abstract for abstract’s fancy. There are stakes here for Gladman. That’s what makes this anti-novel of sorts hard to dismiss. We oscillate between a strong foothold and floatation. Personally I find it seductive-enough.
Is Ravicka even a faraway planet at all? Could other worlds be close, not worlds away?
There are also gestures that feel fresh and exciting, partly because they are given so much room. Is this record incomplete? Were parts intentionally left out? Were they lost? Did they never happen? Sex with strangers. Music is important. Underground civilizations. Dancing is important to speak. Writhing to speak. Unlikely inter-species/cultural collaborations. Going to and waking from sleep. Sleep is important. Obvious love lost, longing. A book that de-centers the written and spoken word, somehow, while concerned with it and the slippage of translation; including awkward encounters with native speakers and their disinterest. Gladman’s person is put through tenderness and saddening separation with every encounter.
This is a small book that you cannot breeze through. But it is pleasure book bound.
Reproduced from Bookwyrm
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Book review: The Hospital Ship
Bax evades a typically satisfying narrative arc for recondite reprints of medical texts and war-time dispatches/memoir peppered among a minor smatter of pro forma obligations to a novel about people surviving large-scale tragedy. But readers should consider this as a book at play with the conventional. Albeit a spirited one. All aboard.
I suspect this is will be either a quick read for you, or you’ll drop it quickly into the gift bin. When the story pokes through the fog of secondary material, you enjoin the nerved doings of hospital staff aboard a large vessel skirting the edge of some broad-spectrum of disaster. The healing process for the ship’s patients, the interpersonal affairs of the staff, an encounter with counter-cultural politicos that attempt to take the ship as a commune.
Aspects of this world on the verge will feel familiar to the overwhelm of our the early 21st century. This makes the Hospital Ship more timeless than not. It’s impossible to determine if the catastrophe(s) are manmade or other, viral, psychological, climate, war, …. A world in crises, multiple, unknowable crises converging – autism in children, mass crucifixions, general depopulation.
Scenes of sex and sexuality are numbered in this book. The fleshiness, cigarette smoking, feels well-situated to the 70s. Some second wave feminism woven through; although I felt it was oddly (perhaps lazily) retrofitted in the form of Sheila’s brief, monochromatic biography. Kinda shoved in there. I’m not convinced Bax was pushing the subject of women’s lib radically, at least any more radically than mainstream Leftism of the time. But maybe that’s part of the play – what is the correct rousing politics in the face of amorphous, multi-faced threat.
The fleshiness ages ok, although a bit trite and verging on cringey because the character perspective is always cis-dude. Was the narration of a Vietnamese prostitute healing, with literal sex, a former Wall St. banker stuck in a psychological malaise a refreshing take? prosaic? satire? for the times? I’m not enough of a comp lit scholar to understand the context. How, Euan, the main character, erratically responds to the process of intimacy and sex working it’s magic is fun. Especially as the book explores his difficulty with achieving lasting, satisfying sex and love with Sheila.
Overall enough intrigue as an example of early postmodern sci-fi, still-relevant themes, certainly a romp of prose. But not for everyone, I suppose.
Reproduced from Bookwyrm
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Collected turns of phrase: Vol 1
“wish embroidering” - Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs
“the air quicken before rain” - Robert Glück, Margery Kempe
“His ears and tongue felt carbonated” - Samuel Delaney, Troble on Triton
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I watched Eastern Promises last night and this morning
And Donnie Brasco
And The Departed
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My soft animal body in the family of things
Passing along this Mary Oliver poem shared by Nate Mullen last week at the Metaspore Symposium in San Francisco. One of his white lady heroes. It’s the least my soft animal body in the family of things can do.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things. -
City Pop (Vibes) Immaculate Delusions
It’s a bizarre aesthetic and rhetorical leap from Richard Mayhew’s Delusions to the similar strong chromas, hues, and deep values of Japanese City Pop album art. But how many colors are there in the world. Every visit to SFMOMA I drift to Mayhew. Into his drives, spirals, through landscape that “reclaims the wilderness for the dispossessed” for indigenous and Black planetary citizens, family. Paint deluge over the prospector. Disrupted manifest logic which makes way for the land to announce itself. It’s wild how this painting ushers your gaze forward and back.
But onward to Just Enough™️ aesthetic relativity for my mental leap and a drift through space-time.
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