Sunday, July 31, 2005

Home

Drove a lot today. Went the long way through the Sierras. The Spaceship handled it just fine, which bodes well for the upcoming Smog Test (we've been studying, but Spacey's not really the academic type). Cooled off in a small, dirty lake by the side of the freeway and almost got hit by a jet ski. Thought some more about whether or not I believe in magic. Was newly charmed by the shape of Joshua trees. Ate dinner in a brand new mall in a brand new town on the edge of the desert. Realized phone charger was still at Squaw, and pulled into South Coast just as Best Buy was becoming good and closed.

It's nice to be home, but I'm reverting to bad habits (one of the first things I did was the crossword puzzle in a LAT magazine that Tia had left on the table) and my Squaw poems are starting to lose that glow conferred by (even mandatory) workshop praise. Must have actual laurels before resting. Trader Joe's?

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

A Problem

If you write poems with HenHen in an Irish Pub every night for a week, you start depending on HenHen to tell you whether you have is a poem.

Tonight HenHen's roommates have joined us, and it's quite jolly writing here. They just played my favorite Irish song, "Whiskey in the Jar."

Everyone's poems are pretty surreal, and I wonder whether that always increases later in the week, although personally I'm actually back in realist mode for tomorrow. I'm finding that alternating types of poems makes it easier to keep writing AND makes me feel daring and experimental.

All-positive workshops aren't as productive as I'd imagined. I'm too easily satisfied (although the "revolutionize poetry" thing from yesterday is just a cliche and not what I really meant; I just tend to think what I'm working on is working better while I'm close to it than after I've been away from it). I want to write lots of poems, and have lots of poems, and I also want them to keep getting "better," though "better" is awfully elusive, and those two hopes sometimes seem contradictory.

The pub is funny. We are now famous to the waitstaff. There are usually two people in the handicapped stall of the women's bathroom, but who those people are change from visit to visit.

What's Hot / What's Not This Week

Hot: Ice Cream Sandwiches by the beach

Not: Six noodles coated in Macadamia Nut Pesto for $12

Hot: Begonias who blog

Not: My unwritten poem

Hot: Poets who pitch to their own teams in softball

Not: Knocking over a famous poet while trying to slide into 2nd

Hot: The clear, freezing waters of Lake Tahoe

Not: Speedos with T-Shirts EVER EVER EVER

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Hats Off to Beer

Oh, writing at (Ye Olde) Irish pub. They're playing the Irish songs we used to sing at the pub in the good old days of winter quarter. I'm trying to write a stanza or two from the point of view of a swallow (or two). Things are getting absurd.

People keep asking us how we're online here, and I'm afraid we're going to blow our cover and the art gallery that's unknowingly providing free wireless is going to catch on. You'll know why if the blogs stop.

I just want to explain that it may seem like we're procrastinating by blogging, but we're actually working pretty diligently here. It's just important to take a break between drafts, because everything seems like terrific, moving work that will revolutionize poetry while you're working on it closely (at least if you're me... other poets?).

A general request: Yes, the conceit of "the speaker" distinct from the author of a poem is often ridiculous. (Clever UCI poet: "I am--I mean MY speaker is--also in a long distance relationship, so I relate to this poem.") But please don't look anyone straight in the eye and say "I don't understand why you haven't talked to your mother in years" or "and then your parents got divorced and your mother dragged you down the hall." If you do, the other members of the workshop may die of awkwardness.

They're now playing Ye Olde Irishe Punke Rocke, and HenHen's poem is already amazing, so we have to go.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Famous Poets...

...are okay with me. They all look so healthy and outdoorsy here, even those who are old and infirm. And they try really hard to be nice to everyone's poems, which has its ups and downs, but which on the whole I approve of. There are some pretty talented people among the other non-famous poets, too, in my (fairly judgmental) opinion. I hope to recruit some for Faultline, but it's a little hard since I feel like an imposter editor.

For some reason, only HenHen and I seem to feel that a bar is the right place to write poetry.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

On the Mountain

All are safely arrived in the craggy, piney wilds. The spaceship acted out again, first in the Verano parking lot and then on the freeway, and finally had to have an emergency hornectomy in Sacramento. It's been sipping ginger ale, eating sherbet, and recovering nicely. Whatever governation Arnold has done to increase efficiency in Sacramento, I have to applaud it, because snip, snip, was all it took to solve the problem.

I skipped the Donner Party Memorial park and passed an uneventful night in my tent beside the beautiful Truckee River (comfortably hemmed in by families in RVs). Then HenHen and I played some early morning slots in Reno and tried not to embarass ourselves in front of famous poets.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

A Smaller Post

I've been having what I think of an introvert attack (thank you, Myers Briggs ), not talking to or seeing people much, which always makes me end up with lots to say and not much of a filter. Hence the recent uber-post. I guess we always have to test the limits of our forms.

Anyway, off to see Howl's Moving Castle, whcih I'm very excited about, and then to spend the week with hippie poets.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

All about Dustin: July 4, Chinese names, tonal poetry

We had a fourth of July Party, at which you will be introduced to the cast of characters for later in the story.

This is my sister, Jane. DSCF1177Her Chinese name is Khang Zhen, which sounds kind of like Jane Cohen, and that's what many people now call her. Someone gave me a Chinese name of Khang and then a word for writer that starts with an s-sound. I think that's really cool and I wish I knew what it was, even though, as I pointed out crankily at the time, it's a little pointless to have a name in a language you don't speak.

In the background is Deitrich, a German nuclear physicist whom Jane met under what I think are subtly hilarious circumstances. It was a cold, dark Beijing winter night, and Jane was trudging wearily through the campus of the university where she was studying (apparently the MIT of China). Suddenly, out of the darkness loomed a giant. The giant approached, and then asked her to have dinner with him. She said sorry, but she'd already had dinner, and then--and this is where everyone should take a page out of her book--said she'd be happy to have dinner with him some other time. He gave her his number, and she--another page--called it. He turns out to be a sweet and fun guy, who later took us, and a whole bunch of string players from the Tsinghua University orchestra, on a long crazy bike ride (during which almost everyone took a turn on his tandem) ending up at a festive roast duck dinner.

This is Brenton, Jane's boyfriend. DSCF1173 His Chinese name is (I don't know how to spell it) Sue Tuen Tuen, and Jane almost always calls him Tuen-Tuen. The name apparently means something like "little rascal," and it also sounds funny when you say it. This is amusingly incongruous because he's sort of an upstanding, serious guy (he's also really fun and generally awesome).

He is one of those ex-pats who is impatient with ex-pat scenes, and thinks hanging out with Chinese people is a much better use of time than clinging to any available Americans (although he's not doctrinaire about this in practice, happily). He's also one of those people who likes to do things the hard way; for instance, when I first met him he had just returned from a couple of days of being totally lost on a mountain because he was trying to find the back door of a Buddhist monastery rather than pay the tourist price at the front. (He literally thought he was going to die of being lost and out of supplies, but he was still able to text-message my sister through the whole ordeal. Cell phones in China have amazing reception. When he finally found a village, the people apparently looked at him like he was stupid and then told him that they had no water, they just drink out of the stream. So he did, and, as far as I know, is just fine.)

Anyway, true to form, he didn't want to find an apartment through the usual channels, so he just wandered around asking people if they knew of anywhere he could live, and that's how he came to live with his roommate, Dustin.
DSCF1175 I don't even know Dustin's Chinese name. Jane gave him the English name of Dustin because he looks like Dustin Hoffmann, and he has now adopted it as his own. He does look like him, doesn't he? Cross-race resemblances are my new favorite weird phenomenon.

Dustin is in Beijing studying to pass the Chinese bar, which is apparently nearly impossible, but he grew up in the mountains of the Yunnan Province near the city of Kunming, where his family runs a resort. While we were in that area, my sister arranged for some of us to spend the afternoon at his family's place. It was an amazing experience, which I want to write about in itself when my sister sends me the pictures from that day: we walked around a village where people had never seen a westerner before, were invited into houses and served bucketfuls of peaches, and witnessed a bunch of teenagers performing their nightly courtship dance (accompanied by a Chinese-banjo strumming kid who looked exactly like one of my 39B students except for the huge peacock feather in his hat).

The whole experience--two enormous meals for six, tons of beer and baijo (a drink nicknamed "liquid lobotomy"), guided tours through the village, two hotel rooms where we kept our stuff and used the facilities for the afternoon, and two cars driving us a couple of hours each way--cost about $200. That seemed like a pretty good deal to all of us, but Jane thought it was weird that it was that much, and was privately worried that the family might have been taking advantage. When we got back to Beijing and asked Dustin about it, it turned out that the reason it was so expensive was that Jane had asked for "the best food." In response to that, they had slaughtered us a goat. They also served us some kind of endangered species, but we can't figure out which dish it was (maybe the frog soup?).

Dustin was also involved in one of the most fun experiences I had in Beijing. We went over to Tuen-Tuen's neighborhood for dinner one night, and, to our temporary chagrin, it turned out that Dustin and their third roommate (Jong Lien, or something like that) were going to join us at the restaurant. We were chagrinned because they don't really speak English, and my sister had been trying hard not to put me in situations where I couldn't understand what was going on.

After a lot of chwar (meat on a stick) and pijiu (beer), though, the conversation turned to poetry. Dustin and the other roommate started reciting classical Chinese poems, and then Tuen-Tuen translated them (with great skill and fluidity). I wish I could remember what the poems meant, but it doesn't really matter because they obviously lost a lot in translation. In the original, they were just incredibly gorgeous. It was by far the most moved I've ever been by listening to the sounds of poetry in a foreign language. Maybe it was because I had been steeped in the sounds of Chinese for a few weeks, and so was attuned to them even though I didn't understand them, but hearing those poems made English seem impoverished for not being a tonal language. There were such intricate patterns in the way the variety of tones played over the regularity of line length, and they were absolutely clear even to a foreigner's ear.

After that, I recited "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" (the most "American" poem I could think of) and watched Tuen-Tuen struggle to translate lines like "He gives his harness bells a shake." Later, after I taught Jane "This Be the Verse" on the subway, we thought maybe I should have recited that one instead, but I think not. "My Papa's Waltz," anyone?

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Coming Attractions

I have been mulling over a few different posts that I will write up in the next couple of days. More posts than poems in the pipeline, the hopper, or any other of the metaphors Cullen (my boss at the Atlantic) used to use to talk about how the magazine wouldn't have room for someone's piece: dangerous.

The posts will be about:

Dustin, Hoffman and otherwise, and Chinese poetry
The Great Wall and a rabbit under a palm tree
Our friend the exchange rate
Antler (Head of the Class) and magical thinking
The Myers-Briggs test by the sea

They will include pictures.

I am still on some variant of Beijing time (which I conceive of as being nine hours behind, but on the next day; my mom thinks that's a nonsensical way to understand it, but I am really bad at time changes and have to go with what works). This is D-Day for getting onto a normal schedule (do other people's families use that expression, or just mine?), so no more writing now. But more soon.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Thank you, Sean!

The car horn mystery is at last solved. What happened is that the foam insulating the metal beeping mechanism wore down, so slight changes of temperature can set the thing off. Or something like that.

It happened again tonight. It was defeaning, but I didn't hear it until a nice Verano man came to my door in a little cart to tell me he'd been getting calls about it. Luckily, Sean from University Mobil had figured out the problem and told me what to do to stop it, so I was able to zip right over to the car and pull the horn fuse. Instant silence, then cheers.

Unfortunately, I can't just keep the fuse out all the time, because the geniuses at Mazda put the brake lights on the same fuse as the horn. So pulling the fuse is going to have to be part of my turning-off-the-car routine, and I'm going to have to reinsert it every time I want to drive. Rebuilding the steering wheel is apparently a big process and expensive.

I think I'm okay with this, but it's the first real weirdo quirk my car has aquired, and it does seem a worrisome sign of age. I mean, I know the elderly need attention, but Spacey, we love you! Do you really need everyone in Verano listening to you in order to feel noticed?

Monday, July 11, 2005

Mosquito Loathing in Beijing

The temperature in Beijing is approximately 1,000 degrees, Farenheit. Right now two very nice Chinese men are in the apartment trying to fix my sister's air conditioner, which has for the past several weeks been creating small oceans on her new Ikea chair.

Earlier today, we went to a high-powered AIDS-activist meeting, which was held in a Pizza Hut. That is, my high-powered sister attended the meeting. I ate a strange-tasting coffee ice cream pie, and tried to read Paradise Lost. My sister's boss is a very young, small Chinese man in spectacles. His cousin, who created the NGO's website and is therefore known to us as the internet slut, was also there.

We had a lot of trouble finding the Pizza Hut. The problem is, it's hard to say "Pizza Hut" in Chinese. The concept, like many others, such as waiting in line, just isn't there. There are many uniformed security guards who looked like they could be asked for directions, but actually they are fourteen-year-olds from the country who are so short they have to stand on pedastels. They don't even speak Putonghua (i.e. Mandarin), much less fast-food-chain. Sometimes they march around our apartment complex in formation.

When it's very hot, it's good to drink a lot of pijiu: beer. That was one of the first words I learned. It's very unalcoholic, so we've been drinking it often and in quantity. If you want it cold, you have to say "bing de." Although another word for cold is the same as the word for two.

My brilliant sister memorized "This Be the Verse" on the subway, while an American dude giggled every time we said "fuck."

Tomorrow: a Great Wall adventure that the guide book says shouldn't be attempted in the summer heat. Right now: mosquito annihilation and then "French food" for dinner.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Sisterkins

My sister and I were saying to our mother a couple of weeks ago that we are either--I forget which--80 percent the same, but the 20 percent that's different is REALLY different, or else the opposite, 80 percent different, but the 20 percent that's the same is REALLY similar. The point is that the differences and similarities are both kind of extreme. We used to tend to think of ourselves as opposites, but in a lot of ways we've converged as we've gotten older. For one thing, we look a lot more alike than we used to, now that she's no longer blonde and I wear glasses. A weird British man recently thought we were twins. That's odd, because she is about four inches taller than me, but the family resemblance is pretty obvious.

We also have a psychic link. Often all I have to do is tap my head and she knows what I'm thinking. It's kind of uncanny. Today we accidentally wore almost the exact same outfit, down to the fashion-questionable red bra straps showing underneath a purplish-brown tank top (it's painfully hot in Beijing, and good taste has to fall by the wayside).

On this trip, I've realized that I enjoy noticing our similarities, because my sister is so cool that it's nice to think of being like her. I've also realized how great it is to have a sister, to have shared so much with someone that your minds just kind of work the same way.

If you get a chance to spend a month hanging out with your sister, I highly recommend it.

Sunday, July 03, 2005

An Imaginary Exchange with LOC

Background: LOC: professor. Taught poetry course for which I wrote a seminar paper on Marianne Moore. It was a big deal to write a seminar paper, especially because I wanted to use it as my writing sample for PhD applications. At the beginning of the quarter, LOC said it was her policy only to comment on seminar papers that were turned in on time. At UCI, because of the ten-week quarter, incompletes are the norm, but LOC is against them and punishes them by withholding comments (a policy that conveniently cuts down on her workload). Fair enough. I worked really hard, and to some extent sacrificed my other classes, to get the paper done before I went to China. Feedback was very important to me what with the writing-sample thing and all.

So a little while ago, I got this email, sent to the four people who wrote seminar papers for the class:

"I'm very sorry about this but I didn't have time to write end comments on your papers--just marginalia (and submitted grades, of course). I had to get some revisions done for the publisher before I left--in a half-hour or so--for Ireland and France. Since I've already heard that you are going away, I feel less guilty about you because we can talk about it and your earleir paper as a MA paper when I return--I resume work on Mon 25th July; ditto for anyone else who wants to talk it over."

And now I would like to respond:

Dear LOC,

You are probably not reading this, but perhaps you are. Because I may need a recommendation from you and so find myself dependent on your goodwill I feel unable to criticize you to your face, but I want you to know that this email is not okay with me. Not getting an end comment is not okay with me. We had a deal! I took your class seriously, and you should have, too. Do you think no one is listening when you set the rules? Do you think we go to grad school just to twitter around?

If I had known you weren't going to comment anyway, I would have taken an incomplete and actually prepared for my 24 hour exam in my other class. I would have graded my student papers before I got to the airport. I would have found out the pharmacy didn't have my malaria medication sooner than 20 minutes before I was supposed to leave for China.

When you have control over other people's lives, you have the responsibility to be consistent and keep your promises. It matters. We understand that you are fallible, like everyone else, but we notice how you treat us, and don't automatically excuse every failing. At the very least, even if you are rushed next time please make your email of apology coherent. Okay?

Sincerely,

Sarah
Non-Expert on Marianne Moore

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Today's Forecast

Human inhabitants of apartment in Beijing: Jane, Sarah, Koobie, Peng Laoshi.

Non-human inhabitants: Juneau, Brown Dog, Turtle, Antler, ugly tuffets (4), bad Chinese wine (2 bottles), big bottles of Chinese beer (3), pirated Six Feet Under episodes (about 100), Apple laptops (3), turtle-shaped teapot/printers (1), random people's stored stuff (about 10 cubic feet).

Broken things fixed: phone, internet, mop.

Broken things too traumatized to come home like a good Spaceship: car.

Ipod songs shuffled through: 131.

July 4 plans: Great Wall.

Paragraphs written of sisterkins's kick-ass op-ed: 4.5.