apathetic

I had this thing published, or whatever.

ON APATHY

taking life seriously

I finally started on some very simple puppets. Next up: paper mache.

Exciting puppet related news: Paul Klee has some great puppets at MOMA's Bauhaus exhibit.





& of course, thank you very much to Megan for much help and encouragement on my current puppetry phase.

the best zombies song

READING

I will be reading (for 2 min during the time btwn. 11-12am) at the Poetry Project's New Years Day Marathon. This is a very great day and there are many reasons you should come (just see the list of poets below). Also, the money goes to the PP and there is also food and books you can buy to help support the PP.

ADMISSION: $17 general, $13 students & seniors, $10 members.


Poets and performers this year include Ammiel Alcalay, Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers, Penny Arcade, Arthur’s Landing, Ari Banias, Jim Berhle, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Ana Bozicevic, Donna Brook, Michael Brownstein, Franklin Bruno, Tyler Burba, Peter Bushyeager, Reuben Butchart, Callers, Yoshiko Chuma, Church Of Betty, Michael Cirelli, Todd Colby, John Coletti, CAConrad, Brenda Coultas, Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, Mónica de la Torre, Mina Pam Dick, Steve Dalachinsky, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Maggie Dubris, Douglas Dunn, Marcella Durand, Steve Earle, Will Edmiston, Joe Elliot, Christine Elmo, Laura Elrick, Maggie Estep, Avram Fefer, Jess Fiorini, Corrine Fitzpatick, Foamola, David Freeman, Ed Friedman, Greg Fuchs, Joanna Furhman, Cliff Fyman, Kelly Ginger, Pepi Ginsberg, John Giorno, Philip Glass, John Godfrey, Toby Goodshank, Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan, Stephanie Gray, Ted Greenwald, Tim Griffin, Miguel Gutierrez, John S. Hall, Janet Hamill, Robert Hershon, Tony Hoffman, Lisa Jarnot, Paolo Javier, Patricia Spears Jones, Pierre Joris, Adeena Karasick, Erica Kaufman, Lenny Kaye, John Kelly, Aaron Kiely, David Kirschenbaum, Bill Kushner & Merle Lister, Susan Landers, Joan Larkin, Dorothea Lasky, Denizé Lauture, Joel Lewis, Brendan Lorber, Michael Lydon, Kim Lyons, Dan Machlin & Serena Jost, Filip Marinovich, Chris Martin, Gillian McCain, Legs McNeil, Tracey McTague, Taylor Mead, Jonas Mekas, Sharon Mesmer, David Mills, Rebecca Moore, Tracie Morris, Will Morris, Eileen Myles, Elinor Nauen, Murat Nemat-Nejat, Jim Neu, Geoffrey Olsen, Dael Orlandersmith, Richard O’Russa, Yuko Otomo, Gary Parrish, Simon Pettet, Nicole Peyrafitte & Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Kristin Prevallet, Brett Price, Arlo Quint, Elizabeth Reddin, Evelyn Reilly, Citizen Reno, Bob Rosenthal, Douglas Rothschild, Tom Savage, Michael Scharf, David Shapiro, Frank Sherlock, Elliott Sharp, Nathaniel Siegel, Christopher Stackhouse, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Susie Timmons, Edwin Torres, Rodrigo Toscano, Tony Towle, David Vogen, Nicole Wallace, Lewis Warsh, Phyllis Wat, Karen Weiser, Simone White, Emily XYZ, Don Yorty, Rachel Zolf & more t.b.a.

Delayed

I don't know why, but I never posted that I was asked to do a reading report for the Poetry Project. I was pretty nervous writing this one and very flattered to have been asked.

Robert Gluck & Eileen Myles at PP

Upcoming articles for Vol1:
On Apathy
Review of Not Not Fun's My Estrogeneration, a comp. of all female artists (NNF's first ever)

Lately I've been working on The Bridge. Release date estimated for February. Be on the look out for a reading.

Also, a manuscript is in the works. I've made a deadline for myself of "late summer".
Draft of one poem/drawing for the book:

metaphor

nuzzle this muzzle

reaching for knitting needles,
he finds his toothbrush

these barrels are blank
and come the breech,
darkness

this human body
is my structure

and after the tongue
darkness

for his shirt sleeve,
blankets

one little two little three little jungians

or anima-ted or gender gear


had a dream & you should hear about it. jung was there. jung was there. and jung was there. they told me that in order to climb that mountain, i had to be a woman. i got to the top and found myself a man. on the top of this mountain there were things i could see and valleys were among the most prominent. this made absolutely perfect sense in the dream, because dreams are very easy to understand. then my alarm clock didn't go off but my body knew it was time for work so i went to the office and i had a dream that i was a man on top of a mountain looking down at a woman on top of a valley. i was also that woman looking up at a man on top of a mountain looking down at a woman on top of a valley.

i even went out to dinner. and i was still that mountain man viewing that valley woman viewing that mountain man. i told you this but what you heard was that i didn't believe in eternity. miss-communication is important, so i didn't correct you, although maybe i should have.

Memory Lapse

Is it just me?

Or did Lady Gaga totally reference Beckett's Happy Days?

le genre nerveux

Review of Stacy Szymaszek's book Hyperglossia

I recently reviewed my favorite book of 2009:

Stacy Szymaszek's Hyperglossia

I am working on a magazine. It is called THE BRIDGE.

please submit.

"This is the spirit never born,
the consciousness of life...
the bridge that keeps the worlds apart"
- Brihad Upanishad

I used to subscribe in junior high

CAT FANCY TOO









CAT FANCY ONE

great lakes

Review of Transfigurations on Lap Steel Guitar

This has been a long time coming.


Hopefully there will be more reviews in a week or so.

Work is cleansing. Working on allowing work.

breaking news do do dododododo

we decided it was best to throw out the individually wrapped soy sauce

Watch for snakes.
Watch your step.
Watch for falling ice.
If you see something, say something.
I'll see you later.
After awhile, Crocodile.

raincheck.com

animals in brooklyn make strange noises outside of my window

High Places Interview

I interviewed High Places.

Go read it here.

After reading their response to my questions, I almost wished I could change them, to ask more. These are the faults of the internet, I guess. It made me miss them more than I already do. Their responses are just so positive and I suppose I just felt really excited about a lot of things, about people again.

key deer

vacation over


song: "Johdattaja-Joleen" by Lau Nau
key deer brought to you by the forest of key west

Grouper Review

I'm officially writing for Hex Ed - a journal started by my friend Jason Diamond, whose name is just as good as mine. My first order of (completed) business being a review of Grouper's album Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill.

http://hexedjournal.com/2009/03/27/a-shot-in-the-dark/

Extra Solar, or, Murmur

Listening to the mutter-clang of a bus. Chick-Chick-Braan. The fastest speed to run, faster than, run it. Two people laugh, walk and huh huh; ha, yeah. How should I think them, now that I’ve seen them? I feel like something is off putting. I’m putting something off.

fub, fub, puh,uh. fub, puh, fub puh, uh. Even without aid the pulse is audible. Mawkish, in a way. The hard chestial knock, who may I ask is calling?

What does it mean to ‘look-forward’ in the sense that one says, “I am anticipating.”

fub. fub.

Malcom, you put that down. Don’t touch it, don’t touch it. Voice, far right. Malcom has in his hand a golden figure with a basketball at its hip, the top to someone’s discarded trophy. How should I think them, now that I’ve seen them?

fu, puh, uh

Just because I’m not going anywhere specific, does this deny me the opportunity to wait?
Sense is a gift, we give it to ourselves. Or maybe you feel differently. I’d like to ask, but, you have the wrong the answer.

Must some destination be in mind?

And if so, where do I find it in there?

Stories

My favorite story I tell a man when I really start to like him, and I want him to know that I like him, is the story of my childhood sweetheart. A young boy who delivered newspapers. The Lafayette Journal and Courier. I would be sure to tell him the name of the paper. I would really set this up. I’d say, “I grew up in Indiana, I told you that before, haven’t I?”

Where I’m from is very important.

He would usually say yes, or maybe sometimes shake his head, no no. “Oh, okay, well I was from a small town. And I would read out on the porch swing every day in the summer. I was an avid fan of mystery novels. It didn’t matter what kind. But I would ride my red bicycle to the library and back with all these good mystery novels in my bag and just plop myself right back on down where I had been.”

and I would go on with all that. Being as quaint and folksy as I could be. This was how I usually was, when telling these stories. These were the stories I kept company. Stories about jumping off the barn roof. Of bare feet and riding lawn mowers. Of watching my father falling out of the tree with a chainsaw, trying to make room for the above-ground pool. These were my stories.

“Well, every day, as I would sit there reading, the paperboy would throw The Lafyette right on to the porch steps. I would pick it up, and sometimes I would wave, and sometimes I wouldn’t.”

It hardly mattered.

“but one day he came up on the porch and he asked me what I was reading. His black rusted single speed bicycle thrown to the side, no kick stand.

His eyes were blue, like two hatching robin’s eggs. His hair was brown, like a peach pit in the sun. Everything about him was like something else, and I showed him the book, and he kissed me.”

and that would be it. The story of my first love. I had more stories about this boy. And the guy I was into would get to learn his name. About his mother, the smoker whose wrinkles mesmerized me, birthing him at thirty.

His name.

How he smelled the night I lost him in the corn field, and sat crying, begging God to let me see him one last time. One last time.

His name.

But, that, too, hardly mattered.

It is true, that sometimes, crying is only for crying’s sake. And I told all the boys that part too. To let them know there was more. That I had more to me since this boy, and that they were just like this boy, delivering papers to my doorstep, asking me questions. Losing me. Finding me.

huh?

Have you ever cleaned a fish?

It is rare, I think, to find someone who knows how to do landscapes. It isn't important to merely capture the scene, but to capture the emotion of that scene. Or, at least, to be able to evoke one. My friend Lance started a photo blog and I think it's pretty amazing. Seems like I've been advertising for a lot of blogs lately, but they all should be read. So here's another.

http://shutteringatthethought.blogspot.com/

are you awake?

I thought then that heaven wouldn’t be some abstract cloudy lounge in the sky,
it would be a grocery store where you don’t have to pay for anything.
Only the person who says “hello”
would be much more attractive,
and would be wearing a much more soothing color scheme.
-Joseph



Heaven


What a place.

Why would anyone
want to be
anywhere?

Here is a shoe.
Wear it.

You have walking to do.

Jean Paul Sartre chose non-monogomy

and so does Kendra Malone, and I think she does a good job getting her point across. She got me thinking enough to at least write this, to help connect what she means to what it means to me. Why I publish it, no idea. Publishing is something I should think more about, I guess.

"For me it is a mutually positive relationship. Unfortunately these are some of the first people to over simplify my occasional unhappiness with the situation. Like people in relationships often are, I from time to time am unsatisfied with the outcome of an affair in an emotional way."

This, I think, is one of the most important examples. In every choice there is always unhappiness, but we are more willing to point fingers when someone else is sad if they do not share our personal views, merely because we cannot understand theirs. This can also be said for people I know who participate in non-monogamy, or any other deviant life style. An honest thing to say would be to say "I don't understand it" and leave it at that, unless you have tried to understand it. Really tried. This would involve not pointing fingers, or hating/judging a person whose act you find to be disagreeable. I guess, you should be pointing fingers at the act, not the person, and the only way to do this is, perhaps, to merely live in a way you see fit, then also choosing this act for everyone. At least there is conviction.

"In choosing myself, I choose man."
-Sartre

no,

it cannot be
that I have never mastered

mastery.

how is it
you do not see my asking

you do not wonder why
you are holding hands

with complexity

Another reading

Sunday, February 22nd
Bar 169
169 East Broadway
6:30pm

featuring
myself, David Miller, CJ Hauser, Nick Henderson, Don Brown,
Leah Schnelbach, & others.

New habit: Staying up until 3am talking to Woody Allen movies.

book release & reading - tonight

Book Release/Poetry Reading/Slide Show
Tuesday, February 10th
8:30- ?? (Reading at approx: 8:45-9:00)
Think Coffee - Bowery Location
1 Bleecker St - take 6/B/D/F/V to Bleecker or Broadway/Lafyette stop

for Low Level Clouds - a little black book (made by me) with poems and art based off of the work of Diane Arbus

It being what it is

for my students

Simply put,
I have tried to mention
what it means to come from desk

to chair,

where we are hardly
an indication

of where it is we go


speech
is only evidence
effaced

white,
and then black

the dust of the room
on loan
waiting in the tense
of present.

things you could be doing right now

Reading my friend's blog. "A Long Way" is about Joseph. Understanding is an understatement.

Thinking about Maine. Joseph reflects on Maine in his blog. I had a dream about Maine once. I hope to go there this summer. I think Joseph is right about Maine.

Reading this Oppen poem.

Whatever else is fine.

short list of some things on my mind

please comment with things on your mind

- where is "on" the mind located?
-facial expressions, mirrors, lack of being able to see my own response in social situations and only being able to estimate based on responses from other facial expressions
-memory, time - the relation of the two
-what it means to lose something, someone - identity - how someone can seem dead because the person you knew that person as no longer relates to a person in existence now
- how this is harder than i initially thought, and wonder if id get tired of writing down a note to myself every time i thought something
- mammals

i rarely ever question what will happen when i die

I am glad I have people I can return home to, who really want to know what the hills looked like.


I read the entire collected George Oppen. I read the San Francisco poem in San Francisco and read the New York poems at a coffee shop in Echo Park.

LOW LEVEL CLOUDS

LOW LEVEL CLOUDS!
OUT NOW
BLACK & WHITE W/VELLUM
13 PAGES OF ART WORK & POETRY BASED OFF DIANE ARBUS PHOTOS
E-MAIL ME YOUR ADDRESS
K2GINGER@GMAIL.COM

RELEASE PARTY/READING
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10TH
8:30PM
THINK COFFEE - BOWERY LOCATION

WRITER'S BLOCK

Someone asked me what I "do."
"Write, I guess."
"Oh, like, fiction?"
"No. Poetry."

His eyes blinked slowly, cocky, sure they would open again.

As I write this I get flashes of all the things I have heard people say in regards to other people's writing.

"Trying too hard"
"Too much something"
"Not enough something else"
"Boring, Meaningless, Stupid"

They opened to no resonance - two stones skipping in a drained pond.

juicy

juice: kale, cucumber, celery
side of clementine

Recently I flipped through some book David Lynch wrote about meditation. He was talking about going "down deep" to catch "the really big fish." I thought this was a kind of cheesy way of talking about taking care of yourself in order to create, but it made sense to me. Bell Hooks talks of something sort of similar in Teaching to Transgress, in that a teacher must be self-aware in order to teach - not prone to power trips due to inferiority complexes. I think artists need to live as simply as possible (and I see good teachers as artists). They need to live as close to the earth as possible, with minor digressions into space. Or maybe space counts as earth. Dali Llama talks about everyone being the center of the universe, because to you, that is where it starts from. There needs to be spirituality, or something similar to it, whatever you find it to be. I do not want to tell people how to live, only make an example through myself. Sartre talks about this as well. And I guess I talk about these people because they have helped me form how I see the world, and I'm always seeing it somewhere different. My friend Mary says that books are important, because they help you think in new ways. Maybe that's what I'm trying to say here. Or maybe I'm trying to say to make sure you know what you want, what your body wants, and what's good for you, because then maybe that will transfer into what is good for other people, or something. Maybe I don't know. Maybe I just feel good.

PRODUCTIVITY IS UP, AND UPPING

NEW ZINE LOW LEVEL CLOUDS FORTH COMING. JANUARY, 2009.




THREE GERTS ON ONE SHIRT.



WE MADE JUICE, AND THEN WE BAKED USING THE PULP.

finally finished

Sometimes the words are hardly words at all - almost words - almost what I want to say. Sometimes I feel like I'm speaking something foreign - inhospitable and unkind. My mouth moving, unjustly related to my eyes. My tongue sunbathing, lazy at the roof of my mouth. So much of communication is hardly cognizant. What did I mean, and how did you mean what I meant? Everything lost in some sort of odd translation, the dictionary unable to calculate the individual's past.

No truth. Or something.

I finally finished this piece. I have been working on this since the summer. It says something to me and I am happy. I want to hug my friend Joseph. Sometimes I don't write him back for weeks at a time. My actions. My mind. My mouth.

A Long Way

All I have are the letters.
My memory of the drives we would take only that, only memory. Which never seems enough.
Now, I have his letters.

Remember that time we followed the ducks?

Like a hallucination, I watched the road as if in a fever, sweating out the trip from Ypsilanti back to Kalamazoo.

I looked over at him. His profile a flickering fire. This is why they call silence heavy. The aftermath of voice. Of clutter and murmur. I could feel the system at work within my body – the nerves shooting off, blood, and matter. In silence it is all you have, your body, and it is hard to know what to do with it.

I had a dream about Joseph last August. He asked me to sit in his lap, an intimate gesture, a trust. I held his head in my hands and stared.

I got a snorkeling set and I swam around looking at schools of fish and everything else that’s underwater. It’s like another world that I’ve never really explored or saw before.

He wanted me to follow him. And I did. It was night, there was fog, and it seemed like a movie. He asked me to get on a bus with him. And I did. I looked out the window, and it ended.

…the pressure was too much for me to handle, I couldn’t go down far.

His death smothered my morning. A divination. I could call him, and his roommate would answer, and there the news would be. There it would be.

I would sort my emotions.
Pair them up.
See how it felt to tie two together.

I couldn't handle his mortality.

I’m trying to stay on track.
I’ve also decided not to ever second-guess things I initially think.

Handling my own mortality is easy. Or, at least, I can say it is. I thought about my plans for the beach, and hoped the sun would dry me, eliminate the water weight, and as I floated in the ocean, I couldn't help but think of Joseph snorkeling in his very own Atlantic.

So much different than my own.

I could see him there, below the water, solitary and observant.

These are the three ghosts I saw that one night in May.

A lot of times buildings or houses are haunted but I think that people are also haunted too. I think that’s what I am.

It made sense, for him to like something like that.

I didn't want to cry, not the beach. I swam as fast as I could until I couldn't keep my breath.

How loud living can be.

We are made mostly of air and water. I thought, we are the ocean.
Expansive, salty, prone to unpredictable undertow.

I need to always be expanding outwards, but I find myself stuck somewhere in between most of the time.

I called him on my way to work.
To make sure.

He answered.

His voice, the pensive "hello."

There, on the other line.

A very long way away.

I need to always be expanding outwards…
To be forever expanding outwards.

Construction. I had to drive on the shoulder; it awoke the gravity within us. We pulled over to get gas, neon lights and red vine licorice. Sugary details of the Midwestern landscape, we grew chatty away from the cowless fields, the shopping centers.

I can remember music. I remember this. But, what we said is lost somewhere. The cause of our breath, insistent on not committing to anything.

Remember when we went to the John Cage performance at that Catholic Church in the woods? That organ was the best. I remember driving back with all that snow falling…

I remember.

I wish I had more.
The dream. The car ride.
I want everything.
I want to be back in Michigan, back at his door. Back in the snow.

What is it, to have?

and the same thing happened last winter when we came into each others lives so randomly. I like to believe that there’s something more than random chaos and someday we’ll see how everything is connected and let out a long meaningful AWE…

I ruined a batch of cookies that night.
I remember.

What is it to have not?

I like to believe, too.
I like to believe a lot of things.

I feel like I’m trying to build a life out of scrap paper and when I step back and look at it, it looks interesting and fun but living it doesn’t feel completely real.

I don’t know.

I guess relationships are only important if you want them to be.

Maybe that was it, Joseph.

I don’t know.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I want to expand onto everything and be everything.

It makes perfect sense if you say it that way.

Right?

family family family