Thanks, Asheville.

It's difficult to appreciate how large this painting is.  Probably five feet tall, and oil.  Someone spent A LOT of time on this, and I love it.  Like most hilarious things, it's hard to tell if it's sincere or a joke.  I don't know the artist's name; it was in Spiritex downtown.  If I were rich and eccentric, I would buy it.

Broadside for Maxine Hong Kingston

Hey MHK fans!  Blue Barnhouse is printing a broadside of one of Kingston's poems, at her request.  The design is below.  I cut it from a sheet of heavy white paper with an exacto blade, all in one piece.  I started by drawing the image and blacking it out with acrylic, but it didn't satisfy; I needed something more... xtreme.  The final product will be midnight blue on silver paper, aka, the shit.  Some will be signed.

 

 P.S. For admirers of gorgeous long silver old lady hair (I know who you are), take a look at this picture of Maxine *swwooon*

minisculology

What do you do with the fact that, if you wanted to be thorough, you would have to use up your entire life to explore one miniscule thing, say, the lifecycle of the monotropa uniflora?

Which means that all the other miniscule and major things would have to pass you by like whales under a swimmer, in darkness, as mysteries.  And it would still be unlikely that the monotropa uniflora would have unrobed itself for you.  What do you do in light of this?  Where do you take your hours, the strength in your limbs, the open eye in your brain, to satisfy yourself?

Remember that time I tried to be a train conductor?  Here's a recap of the hiring session:

HR lady had a cheese blintz fixation, and the first hour of the orientation was dominated by increasingly dire predictions of our future in train conducting.  One little known fact is that trains, much like dobermans, can smell fear...

...and will act upon that.  If you aren't "truefful" to yourself, if, for example, you did not wear your seatbelt, or did not really mean it when you prayed, the train may CUT YOU IN HALF (they really said this).  It's like the final scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy and the bad guy have to pick the real holy grail, and the bad guy picks the wrong one and gets eaten up by maggots and rot and blows into dust.  Sobering, folks.  Also, not for me.  And for our hours of early a.m. misery, they didn't give us so much as a cup of coffee, hence my wistful tracing of the carrot nipple I brought in my pocket.

Anyway, on Monday I begin a different job, a job which has risen from the ashes of my transportation industry career dreams on warm gentle winds: hot air balloon launcher.  I know!  So much better than being a train conductor.  Wish me luck.

P.S. Sally, these drawings are very inspired by the ones you used to do in class.  Thanks for showing me that coping mechanism.

Dreams and Sour Grapes

The night before last I dreamed of a woman with seven vaginas arranged vertically down her middle, multiply (-plee) pregnant and a highly popular prostitute.  Last night my wayward soul must have inadvertently entered a swimmer at some foreign, perhaps English or French beach, scaring the swimmer's friend and causing other beachgoers to believe she had lost her mind.  One shocked old man in red flowered swim trunks stands out particularly; he stared at me when I buried my hands in the sand for stability.  I reeled my soul in asap when I realized the mix-up and lurched into the kitchen for water.  On an unrelated (?) subject, I decided optimistically to attempt the ivory tower of grad school.  As with any tower, the approach to this one begins easily but becomes totally dismal when you get to the tower part.  I registered for the GRE.  I looked for scholarships, because nothing is happening without generous moneys.  Would you like to know why I am prepared to resign myself to a life of sometime babysitting and quail egg-peddling?  This is a sample awardee.  Please do read it:

Skroch graduated in 2009 with degrees in Political Science, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, and African Studies. She studied at Université Gaston Berger in Senegal. She was the recipient of the Abraham S. Burack and F. Chandler Young Awards for outstanding research abroad for her year-long fieldwork examining local resolutions to violent civil war in the Casamance region of Senegal. She has worked with international students and refugees in various capacities, with a dialogue and reconciliation initiative in Israel and the West Bank through the QUEST Program, and as a Soliya Connect Program Facilitator, using new media to mediate dialogue on relevant political and social issues between young people around the world. She worked for Wisconsin Public Television as a documentary editor and transcriber, was interviewed on NPR’s Here on Earth about her experiences, and presented a thesis on dependency theory in the Congo at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Violence. Post-college, Skroch was a Fulbright Scholar in Morocco, researching post-conflict democratic transition via the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, while also interning at a medical rehabilitation center for torture victims. She grew up in the Philippines and Wisconsin, and speaks French, Arabic, Moroccan Darija, and Wolof."

Wolof, huh?  They can program machines to do some pretty amazing things these days.  All that boring human stuff like food, sleep, sex, tears, failure -- gone.  Maximum efficiency.  Fuck me.

My own CV has the stale flavor of a life crisis and seems to be saying, "You're old enough to know that if you ever want to get off food stamps: ITT Tech."  Nonetheless, can I show you a funny thing I made?

Malediction

You wise men and your hideous, oppressive unities, your eternal progressions, regressions, fractals, and universal laws, pure and empty as a fresh condom.  When I see your gnostic, patient smile, glassy, thousand-year fisheye stare, I shudder.  I throw myself behind Satan and say, "better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven!"  Swallow your enlightenment like the tongue of a paralytic -- you have settled, mummified in your high seat without even the quickening of maggots or the thrilling odor of bacteria.  If you, preacher of the ONE, the GOOD, all-seer, all-knower, benevolent puffy-lidded lord, are the gatekeeper, keep your nation -- of order, of fascistic columns, serendipitous coincidences, providential meetings, holy numbers, asymptotic lines.  May they rot you through and through like ingested fiberglass, like rigid diatoms do flies.

Oh sweet, wild life, keep me from wisdom.  Gift me with confusion and disaster.  Crush my kingdom.  Undo me.  May I never believe.  May I never ascend to enlightenment.  Give me no powers of persuasion.  Give me sex, accidents, paroxysms of terror, early morning light, swarms of insects, unruly fruits, flowers, thorns, poisons.  Impale me with unlooked-for ecstasies.  I adore you, life.  I scream in adoration, hatred, joy.  Take no prisoners here.

A hard place to be, like Kabul in winter.

Like most of us, I've spent the last decade swimming in a buzz of war words, political yammering, and combat footage that could not be less engaging.  I have never paid any attention to it.  I have been vaguely critical, but only vaguely.  If I have ever felt anything, it was skepticism and futility.  I have never started or entered any conversation on America's wars.  If I have complained, it was only about the things that touched my rights, like the Patriot Act.

I signed up last month to teach an Afghani girl English via Skype.  I had (have) mixed feelings about it.  I knew almost nothing about Afghanistan, despite attempting to keep up with geopolitics.  Afghanistan was like a movie you hear everyone talking about, so you never bother to see yourself.  But I felt obligated to know something about Farida's milieu.  What was it like to be her?  I studied the geography; I tuned in to the chatter.  Almost immediately I was tempted to pull out of the program because I felt I was just another gullible idealistic American being do-gooded into furthering imperialist neoliberal aims.  But I think knowledge is essentially, well, not good, but catalystic.  Who's to say what Farida will use her English for?

I've read a lot of books on Afghanistan lately, most of them showing their ideological seams at some point or another.  The most succinct, fair, well-researched, and deeply felt, and the one I recommend to anyone who has the time and emotional energy to invest in considering some profoundly disturbing insights into American foreign policy (I mean existential crisis disturbing), is Kabul in Winter by Ann Jones.  I am sorry to say that whatever corrupt, depraved, avaricious schemes you can think up (and a lot you probably can't) are facts of life in Afghanistan, thanks to American taxpayer billions.

The most shocking thing I have learned (which may be common knowledge I somehow missed) is that the present war in Afghanistan is an outgrowth of the proxy war fought by the US against the USSR.  From Carter to Clinton, the weapons the Taliban use now are weapons WE gave them to fight the Soviet Union at any cost to the life and freedom of non-combatant Afghanis. This is such an old story; it's repeated all over Africa and Latin America ad nauseum.  But it is one I had to dig for in the case of Afghanistan and which I never recall hearing from mainstream American news.  It gets even better!  For decades, the Afghan mujahidin were referred to as "freedom fighters" by US politicians, and Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers."  So... the men who flew planes into the World Trade Center are the moral equivalent of Washington, Jefferson, and Hancock, according to the once and future king of the Tea Party.  With doublespeak like this, maybe they fucking are.

I would like to beg everyone who reads this note to research, to care, to dig deep and speak out.  But I know what an exhausting, heartbreaking thing that is, and we all have more immediate battles to fight.  I would never have gotten into this unless I had to.  But if you think of it, if you are curious, if one nice spring evening on your porch with a glass of tea you get to wondering... don't stop.

"The developed country does not, as Marx thought, show the backward country its future; the fragmenting countries show the integrating ones the dark side of their common present.  The violence and decay of Afghanistan is the reflection...of the violence that created and maintains our security." Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System