Fucking Blog World

So that no one thinks I'm nonchalant about the blog-world due to my inactivity of late, rest assured that I do still read your blogs and think "wow, wouldn't it be nice to post as often as I have a thought, especially in clever and cryptically short sound-bites (or Silliman-length bulleted tomes)". Then I think, "fuck those people man, I bet every last one of them has a desk job or an academic job". There should be a different blog calendar for people in the trades, so that if you blog like twice in a month you're still a highly frequent blogger". Not to say desk jobs aren't work, certainly teaching comp to freshmen was no walk in the park for me, but there's considerably more access and incentive to dick around in blogosphere when you've got one of those. All right, enough kvetching, time to blog.Almost every artist I know seems to be dreaming up a grant, writing a grant or, in some lucky cases, spending a grant, right now. I have mixed feelings on this, given my one horrible experience actually being involved in a "successful" grant (good news is, you got the money, bad news is you have to figure out how to spend it). The best things they can do is green-light an existing project that maybe would have floundered or never found an audience without cash, or, more sublimely, get people to think on ridiculous scales of performance or broadcast that probably aren't realistic even with the grant but make for better concept anyways: Theater suspended from container cranes at the Oakland docks (do not fucking steal that idea just because its on a blog and blogs are cheap- that shit's fully gonna' happen), cognitive research proving that learning to recognize harmonic progressions will make you a better cook (I couldn't make this shit up, but my brother can), guerrilla silent opera on the streets of SF's financial district. This is all particularly funny to me because, unless your grant's in the bag already, you can pretty much give up, as all that money is in the process of disappearing as we speak.


Before forgodot hit, there was some good back and forth in the poetry blog and list-serve worlds about how the ongoing collapse of late-late-capitalism might be a good thing for poets (even non-Marxist ones). CA Conrad especially has inspiring things to say about this. I want to run with this notion, especially because any dollar-valuation of poetry is by now, and will henceforward remain , a bad joke. Now that all the money's fake anyways (just heard on NPR, as reliably bullshit a news source as any, that there's at least 4 times the dollar amount of the GDP written as insurance for bad debts that are now themselves turning into bad debts- WHAT THE FUCK!), we can give up tying our economic activities to our artistic ones completely, or at least start phasing out of this. We should also start working fewer hours because it's all just subsistence work anyways: there's no such thing as retirement, home ownership, job security or any of the other beacons of the middle class idyll. Let's just ask to be paid in sandwiches and wine and take the afternoon off and hang out in the park and write poetry. That notion is quickly becoming way less absurd than continuing in normal cycles of production, given how fucked capital is (and that statement is descriptive, not normative).

Of course, the real kicker is that both myself and my employer have way more contracts on the books right now than last year and I'm certainly going to be working 60-80 hrs. a week until Christmas, so who the fuck am I kidding about poetry in the park. And I'm sure I should be thankful about the economic fortune of having places to plug my labor into, and a body that can still labor, but somehow I don't quite feel all warm and fuzzy about that shit.


Regarding forgodot, I will make only one andendum to the comment I made to the buffalo list: that the computer poems are the preface and the real text is the commentary we're all producing (which, I believe, Erika Staiti is archiving as we write it). The computer might have created the 'poems' and falsely accredited them to you, but you are actually writing the comments about the poem, so you should think about that writing and ask yourself which of the two, falsely attributed poem or rightly attributed commentary, is more interesting, readable, poetic, etc. If the computer wins, it's your own damn fault, and there's no lawsuit gonna' fix that. Also, where is Brian Kim Stefans in all this?


I want to talk about baseball, but my team is long out and I don't care about any of the ones in the running (though secretly, perversely, I would enjoy an LA-vs-LA series, and I also like to see the Phillies doing something, if only because they're in one of the A's former towns and they're perennial underdogs). My wish list for the A's: Fremont declares bankruptcy, is designated a superfund site and succeeds from the State of California; more players with facial hair; more black players who can run- Rajai Davis was the most exciting guy to have on base the entire season, and he has a class attitude. I can do without these corn-fed honkies who spend half the season on the DL, year in and year out.

I genuinely like Huey Lewis and the News. This seemed like an aesthetic revelation to me, while I was doing a final clean-up-and-get-the-fuck-out of a kitchen remodel and singing "If This Is It" over and over again. He moved to my hometown after all the hits were done and would show up at benefit softball games and he could hit his ass off and even hustled around the bases. I also recorded a free-jazz record in the studio he vacated. I am historically, aesthetically and spiritually linked to Huey Lewis. Can you even wrap your mind around that shit, motherfucker?