stephanie barber! it rained most of last weekend here except when it was blue-hued and sun-swept and in perfect inverse logic i rode my bike to chinatown for the brian holmes “continental drift” conversations on the day of most rain while the afternoon of most sun i had to deliver 7 folding chairs to a friend’s birthday dinner so had to drive my car instead. the car got way more use than usual this week, as i spent monday and tuesday visiting a local high school, co-facilitating conversations with a non-biking friend so carpooling instead; then wednesday & thursday dolores dorantes was here from ciudad juárez, to visit otis college (one of three institutions where i’m currently teaching) where we read work in translation alongside the amazing gale force wind of creativity that is the writer sesshu foster. i didn’t have time to borrow a bike to fit dolores’s way-shorter-than-mine legs and in any case, not everyone delights in the 2+ hour each way bike commute between my cypress park house & otis, which is as close to lax as you can get without being boeing. at the high school, jen nellis and i facilitated workshops about live film narration techniques (also sometimes known as “neo-benshi”) with a friend’s high school art class for their unit on media literacy. konrad steiner (amazing instigator, curator, collaborator) calls it “talking back to the talkies,” and of course i can see how this has direct links to media literacy, though lately i feel i suffer from the literacy (or illiteracy) of overwhelm and avoidance—that is, i find myself so inundated with things to research, think about, explore, and investigate that i sometimes feel as if i have no access at all to actual thought about the information i encounter. the “continental drift” conversations began this way, actually, with a collective musing about brian holme’s theorizing (after guattari) “disassociation” as a contemporary manifestation of what marxists might have called “alienation” post-industrial revolution. the atomization of our supposedly “autonomous” work spaces (the way that word—”autonomy”—is valenced in so many—teetering—directions—and its relationship to precarity, in both the negative fear-based sense and in the positive possibility-opening sense) and the ways that “work” invades our consciousness at all times of day and night and whatever else time might become in our information-soaked digitally-produced (and reproduced and reproduced) age. i’m paraphrasing; wonder if that makes any sense. i think this relates to “a generational question.” i suffer the ills of my generation, and yet feel those ills and that suffering as if they were unique to me. which i suppose they are, in a generational, social and cultural way. as for the weather, lately i’ve been collaborating with a visual artist friend, hillary mushkin. we’ve been working on a piece that has to do—partly—with cloud seeding. if you look online in the archives of the “oog” section of the dutch newspaper volkskrant, you’ll see a brief animation we made, sketching out the beginning thinking of the piece. the skies—the very air we breathe and the water that falls (or doesn’t)—are sinister. a permeating toxicity, both figurative and literal, we cannot help but breathe. lately my writing has been stalled in the extreme: a drought of work-work and self-doubt and doubts about the efficacy and aptness of poetry as a response to the difficulties of the world-as-it-is. more on this later. perhaps the hallmark of a poet is inability to write. which perhaps means that the inordinate difficulty i’ve had in responding to your original missive may be poetic, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. do you ever make tiny lawn poems on the little strips of grass found in the middle of cities? something like ari kletzky’s islands of l.a., but with poems?
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