One side or two?

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ONE SIDE OR TWO?

by Billee Sharp


On Friday night Pixieman and I drove down to the Ferry Building to pick up a friend I hadn’t seen for twenty years and he’d never met. As the Amtrak link bus barreled into sight I spotted Sophie by her signature immense fro. When she came down the bus steps towards me I had one of those moments: the kiss dilemma – would it be one side or two?

Using powers of deduction augmented with background deets courtesy fakebook I figured I should be prepared for the French double style, this because the lady has worked in theatre and is technically foreign ( her family came from Germany to England in the Thirties) I was wrong –we did the easier, more English, one cheek peck and hugged more convincingly.

Social etiquette seems a dreary and old school consideration but while we live together in our huge societies and in our local communities our social terrain will continue to be raked over and rightly so. The kiss dilemma is obviously a frivolous example but operates on a number of levels: most nuance has a social relevance and where I come from (England) kissing both sides is posh, or foreign and likely both. Our West Coast sensibilities seem to allow for an easy-going interpretation of customary practices, we pick up on the language and gestures we like and adopt them readily. Sometimes too readily, I fought a long teen battle over the ambient usage of bitch and ho but I’m invigorated by their prolly and the ubiquitous bro. I’m veering into linguistic semantic territory now which must be Sophie’s weekend legacy as her dissertation, on linguistic something-or-other and Battlestar Galactica has been covering a modest third of our kitchen table for the last couple of days. In our house, this is good social etiquette: if you are staying here, find a space to do your thing and this works well.

The only questionable point of social etiquette in my last few days was the conversation I had with a Seventh Day Adventist on Easter Sunday, I wonder if I offended him. I didn’t mean to, but everything I said made him look like he was either going to hit me, vomit or have a seizure. I was being really nice too, really gentle and explaining how I had this perspective on all religions having the same divine aspirations. He cut me off right in the middle of my spiel about how we’d brought our boys up to recognize Jesus as a very cool teacher , he made that ominous wince I mentioned and then quoted Jesus-from-the-bible: nodding sagely and resonating he let everybody there in the kitchen at Mamsan’s know that Jesus said I DO NOT COME IN PEACE, I COME WITH A SWORD , there was an aside about cleaving the truth but the crazy downer bible quote had me spiraling. Seventh Day dude went on to reveal that Jesus had also said that when all the nations are howling for peace that is when some sudden bad shit will be coming down (not exactly his words but apocalyptic tattle of the first degree) I told him that I thought it was really sad that a Christian guy like him was so pessimistic about humans and our potential to live in peace, maybs that what Jesus meant I added—that when all the nations were doing that howling for peace maybe the sudden change would be apocalytically good , something like the consciousness shift we so badly need to improve planetary well-being. Seventh Day dude gloomily listened to me recommending Buckminster Fuller to him for about three nanoseconds and our exchange tapered out over the arrival of a banana pudding.

For me the wretchedness of the exchange was the wide gulf of understanding that was between us over a perceived equality of religions, but I don’t think it was bad etiquette to talk religion on Easter Sunday, Jesus, I believe, would’ve approved.

The etiquette that seems to worry me most is what social parameters exist online. This interconnectivity we have with media and information exchange has to be discussed openly and keenly. Cyber-bullying is unacceptable and the culture of fail.org seems basically incorrect. When we use real-life material for  gratuitous entertainment we need to examine our values again. When shocking viewing can  be had at a click it is not only children at risk,  desensitivity is not desired. We make our own world online especially through social networking, last weekend we had consternation over “adding” Granddad, my son didn’t want Pops to be mortified at his photos. Gradually we are discovering what over-sharing means and how being connected to friends is not necessarily what we experience as we like & tweet & comment.

Eco etiquette is always on the social correctness agenda I realized as I forced myself to do the right thing and practice Clancy’s eco dishwashing regime this morning: wash everything with soap and then rinse everything in just one bowl of water at the end.

But back to the kissing: I just messed up a two cheek kiss with visiting techno hero Thomas Fehlmann – “I can’t believe I did that” I said after planting a clumsy smacker on his nose, “ I’m just writing about kissing and social etiquette”

“Never mind,” he said, “ Its worse in Switzerland – they do it three times.”

JACK HIRSCHMAN

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Jack Hirschman photograph by Marco Cinque.

THE AL-MARBID INTERNATIONAL POETRY FESTIVAL

March 23-25 in BASRA, IRAQ

by Jack Hirschman

When Agneta Falk and I were invited, a couple of months earlier, to participate in the Festival, we were eager to do so notwithstanding the dangers because we had been in email touch with Sabah Jasim, an Iraqi poet and comrade since 2006, who had translated poems written by both of us. It was Sabah Jasim who I invited to the San Francisco International Poetry Festival in 2007 and who was cruelly refused entrance into the U.S. (after 23 days in Damascus, Syria, where he went to obtain his visa, he received it on the last day of our Festival in San Francisco, though Kareem James Abu-Zeid, a brilliant young translator of Arabic poetry, translated some of Sabah’s work and presented it at one of the Festival’s venues.

So there was the meeting between us all at the Basra airport where, after much bureaucracy, Aggie and I received our visas for Al-Marbid. We finally met Sabah in person and drove with him and two other poets, Furat Salih and Thamir Sa’id, to the Golden Tulip Hotel, a very modern structure, where we met Mudhafa Al-Rubai, the organizing overseer of the poets invited from other countries. On the way in we’d gone through a couple of checkpoints and noted that a car proceeded ours in which two at least and sometimes three armed Iraqi security forces were ever present. The same would hold for the large modern bus which carried all the guest poets to different venues: we became accustomed to the sight of soldiers with kalishnikovs or handguns leading the way in cars, and guarding the front of the Hotel. Basra had been “secured” some time ago by the British and American forces. But all of Iraq is still a war zone and security is very heavy.

At the Hotel I was asked by Thamir Sa’id to do an interview, in which Dr. Adel Al-Thamary translated the questions to me, which were largely about my views on Poetry.

Next morning the poets all piled into the bus provided by the Ministry of Culture—which had organized the Festival under the direction of 34 year-old Aqeel Mindlawie—and we went into Basra to the Petroleum Cultural Center Hall, a vast domed-like workers’ Hall where, after ceremonious speeches and an extraordinary dance ensemble called the El Basra Group for Public Folklore Arts, which performed breathtakingly with women drummers and male dancers, the poetry readings began.

The poets read a couple or three poems each. Iraqi poets often read in dramatic style with great expressivity and sonority. At each of the three-day venues there would also be included the guest poets from other countries. I read two poems on that first morning,—“Path” and “One Day”— with Sabah Jasim reading the Arabic translations he’d made, after I read a brief note of solidarity concluding with a “Long Live the Iraqi Poets!”.

In the large space in the rear of the auditorium—tables laden with books of poetry and prose, large art and photo exhibitions, and many people interviewing the poets for news- papers, radio and television. The Iraqis are hungry for communication with the outside world—it was a central underlying theme of the Festival. Indeed, on the second day Agneta Falk gave no less than seven interviews after she read her poem on Israel/Palestine, “O Hate”, and the poem on a British prostitute, “Shivering Mountain”—with Sabah Jasim reading the translations he’d made of them as well. She also read a poem she’d written at the Festival, in memory of the Babylonian poet Ja’fr Hadjwal, who died on the train carrying him to the very Festival.

After the first venue, the bus took the poets to the riverside statue of Shaker Bader or Al-Aysaayab, an impressive towering monument to one of the founders—with two women, Nazika Mala’ka and Lameea Abbas Omara, working independently and simultaneously—of the Free Verse Movement in Iraq, which began in the 1940s.

From that statue and across the Arab River, one could see Iran.

The other guest poets included two from Italy—-Anna Lombardo and Alberto Masala; Eric Sarner from France, though he lives at present in Uruguay; Kamal Akhlaki from Morocco; Sejer Andersen and Kristen Bjornkjiflr from Denmark; Bayan al-Safadi from Syria; Maurilio de Miguel and Angel Petisme of Spain; and Osman Ceviksoy, Necdet Karasevda, Imdat Avsar, Ayten Mutlu and Ali Akbas from Turkey.

Apparently the poems I’d read had appeared on National television the first morning and I was asked to read at the Translation School of the University of Basra on the second day. I’d thought the request was part of the Festival but apparently heads had to get together—security-wise— because the university was not on the Festival venue. But I was cleared to read to a large group of about 150 in a hall at the University. At that event I read a whole ensemble of poems including “New York, N.Y” and “Mother” but it was “The Quntzeros Arcane” which I’d written about the war in Iraq that gave me one of the greatest pleasures of my life, reading it to those incredibly receptive students of the English language . It was my own personal highlight of the Festival, but the collective sense of harmony in poetry at the Festival is what has made Al-Marbid such a new inter-national wonder.

Afterward I was told by Khadin Al-Ali, the professor of that large class, that I had been the first poet from another country to read at the Translation School in seven years!

At the evening session at Autba-Bin Ghazwan Hall on the second day of the Festival we all were treated to stirring Mendelsohn and Tchaikowski by the National Symphony Orchestra, brilliantly conducted by Kareem Wasfi, prior to the poetry readings that continued filling the air with Iraq’s finest verbal sounds and its desire to became part of an international community. At this session and others, I had a chance to meet young Iraqi poets and comrades, largely through Sabah’s being on hand to bridge the language difficulties.

On March 25, readings continued at Al-Shuhada (Martyrs’) Hall in the morning, and at the evening and final session once more in the Petroleum Cultural Center Hall the newspaper of the Iraqi Communist Party (which won 4 seats in the recent elections), called The People’s Road, was on hand, and I was humbled to see a large photo of me next to a general article (or so Sabah told me) about the Festival.

Afterward the Council-General of Basra invited all the guest poets to a dinner in the garden of the Gold Tulip Hotel. The celebration spilled over into March 26, which, as it happened to be Agneta Falk’s birthday, was celebrated after breakfast in the Hotel dining-room, with songs being sung in Italian, Danish, Turkish, Spanish, French, Moroccan Arabic, American, and Aggie sang a Swedish lullaby. It was a truly international finish to a Festival that spread its wings outward, beginning to make its claim of belonging to the international struggle against the evils of globalization. Long Live the Poets of Al-Marbid in All the Years Ahead!

–Jack Hirschman

San Francisco, March 30, 2010

ALBERT HERTER

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BLUNDERING AROUND, PONDERING ALOUD

On Becoming A Lacanian Analyst

by Albert Herter

“What is realized in my history is…the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.” –Jacques Lacan

I am still in the beginning.  The beginning is very genteel, friendly, civilized.  A theoretical discussion, nothing on the line really.  Nothing I couldn’t step back from.  I have put concepts on the table which are worthless.  The first time I saw my analyst I was walking behind her into a lecture hall, and she suddenly turned around and said hello, smiling.  I said hello and smiled and she turned around and we continued walking in.  A pleasurable and surprising first encounter. The next contact I had with her was three years later when I emailed her about entering analysis.  In her email back she mistook me for a mutual friend of ours I had mentioned as way of introduction.  I don’t think I responded to that email.  Before our first session I was struck by a long wait that imposed some feelings of anxiety.  Later I would learn to love this long wait.  We talked about her situation for a while, some troubles, and then she said “That’s my story. What’s yours?”  The first words that came out were “I’m an artist.” A few sessions later she mentioned that in many countries people don’t say “I am an artist.” That it’s an adjective.  I think we continued to speak about art and various shows and one in particular at the New Museum.  I said I thought conceptual art had a tendency to be too cute.  I asked her if this particular show was old.  She said it’s older than JESUS.  I bare some resemblance to Jesus (I’m tall and had long brown hair at the time, maybe even a bit of beard) and so I thought this was some sort of message. I thought about it for a while. Later I found out that was the actual name of the art show we had been speaking about.  Many misrecognitions.  I remember her opening her legs a bit which I also thought was some sort of maneuver.  It sounds a bit adversarial.  I thought of it later as being called to an appointment, not knowing why, and knowing that one had made the appointment oneself.  I referenced Lacan’s statement on beginning from a point of not understanding.  And then the session was over, a friendly introduction.  We had faced each other.

The next session continued in the same vein, art, aspects of Lacanian analysis and it’s present developments.  I began to feel frustrated that we weren’t talking about what I had come here to talk about.  Towards the end I said I would like to speak about my “personal problems”.  Josefina asked if I would like to start now or next time.  I said we could start now.  I said “I tear the skin around my fingernails. My cuticles.  I tear them till they bleed.  I lie in bed and read my book and play with my penis or tear my cuticles.”  She stopped the session there and said I had named it and said it well, that often it could be hard for men.

I enjoyed my own bewilderment when friends asked me about my analysis. I recounted things I’d said and my analyst’s responses, letting the words hang without any anchoring points.  My most intimate formulas delivered to a stranger.  I felt like analysis accentuated the absurdity of all other intersubjective contact.

I missed one session, out of absent mindedness.

I recounted a dream of driving a Porsche into a giant pile of laundry.  She said it reminded her of my sculptures and cut the session.

She asked me what the mandate was and I said “Economic and to sleep with lots of women.” She said “But it’s a mandate so you know you don’t have to do it.”

Everything was infused with meaning. It’s a realm I invested with power and knowledge.

“You’ll find some way to tell me.”

She said something about a “Narcissistic world where there is no desire.”

“I don’t know what words mean. I need to understand my words before I say them.”

“You postpone yourself.”

Sometimes I noticed her perfume.

“Look at you” she said.

I said “I say ‘You know, I don’t know.”

She said “You say that?”

I said “That’s something I say.”

You can see I simply dictate words I heard while in analysis.  I haven’t yet threaded them into any larger fabric.

At one point I said “This isn’t exactly a doctor’s office.”  Defending myself against any power she might have over me.

At first I moved her chair closer to the couch before she arrived, it couldn’t really be close enough, preferably in my ear.  I couldn’t hear her words properly. Now I hear her well enough, though there are still some mumbles and slurs I don’t have the courage to ask her to repeat.  I just smile and nod.

She said “There’s something regal about you.” I smiled, embarrassed.  She shook her head, “Not in a stupid way.” There’s nothing more stupid than an angel’s smile.

Once I lay on the couch, mind racing for some talking points, coming up empty. I began to panic.  She entered- began in our usual way- “How are you?”- “Good”- “So?”- “So.”

I said “I don’t know…I feel…I don’t know…I feel…”

“Wow,” she said “and twice!”

That was the first time I had sat in my uncertainty, without hypotheses.

I entered analysis with the ulterior motive of combining Lacanian theory with the physics of Roger Penrose, specifically two books he had written on the impossibility of artificial intelligence due to the non-algorithmic, non-deterministic nature of consciousness.  He postulated a theory of consciousness based on some subtle quantum mechanical procedure, which would necessarily take advantage of some physics yet to be unveiled.  Penrose does not take the neuron as the atom of consciousness, discretely either firing or not, but rather the empty space within microtubules. This stance seemed to have an affinity to that of psychoanalysis.  Cognitive scientists, brain science, and string theorists to one side. Penrose and Lacanians to the other.  But as Josefina said quoting her analyst “Psychoanalysis is not Kabbalah.”  Nor is it physics.  Though there may be phystricks or

Kablahblah.

I named a symptom, right off the bat.  Josefina said Miller says “One can’t read Lacan and tear at one’s fingers.”

I wasn’t sure why I was there.  I was worried I wasn’t crazy enough.

She said “You make me the analyst.”

I am only a few months into my first analysis, and so there is no clarity of hindsight.  But like, from a speeding train, I can try to name some discernable landmarks.  What I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

We only had two sessions face-en-face before she said I was “beginning to go.” I was ready for the couch.  She laughed upon entering the next time because I was already lying down. I took to the couch.

She said for Lacan, Don Juan was great.  That night I went to a club and across the street was a neon sign in red and white pulsating “Don Juan”.  I went home and took Byron’s Don Juan off the shelf.  This really made her laugh.

Every week I would come in with a new diagnosis or thesis.  “My father is my father and my mother.  My mother didn’t want me.  Why do women read mystery novels? I tear my cuticles and play with my penis while I read. My father plays with his penis when he speaks to me and plays with his nipples when he speaks to my girlfriend.  I want a woman like my father.  I play with my penis so I know it’s there.”

I made an art video in which tearing my cuticles till my fingers are bloody and a baby infinitely reflected in two mirrors figure prominently.  At one point I wondered aloud whether I was the viewer looking at the fingers and babies or if I was the finger and babies exposing myself to the viewer.  That was a cut.

She asked me to name the part of me that had made that video and I said “Albert the pervert.”

One would have to finish an analysis to know how long the beginning lasted.  I’m not sure the beginning has begun.

In the midst of an analysis, one doesn’t see the forest for the trees.  I have one side of a formula and hope she can provide the other.

I am beginning to remember dreams, and to linger in bed, gathering evidence.

Of her I know very little.  I want to sustain the illusion.

Once I tried to slip her a note, a list of all my sins and character flaws.

I was willing to say anything, confess to any crime in order to be successfully finished.

In the beginning, I am desperate for activity, concrete signs of improvement, or at least change.  A lever, to move a weight.

I prepared the sessions, formulating.

I try to dig deep into my sentences and find the hottest stone I can and throw it up into the air.

Lying on the couch, head cocked to the side, staring out the window, grimacing, arms crossed over my head, then across my chest, never in my pockets, fingers laced across my belly, squirming.

I was completely caught up in the images and words.

I thought most people had elaborate personas they constructed for the outside world, to get the job done and as a sexual lure.

–Albert Herter

Book Review of Curtis Smith’s BAD MONKEY

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Spending/Reading Politically: Curtis Smith’s Bad Monkey

by Raul Clement


Historically speaking, I don’t read much work from small presses and journals.  I am well aware of the arguments against this: 1) as an aspiring professional, I should support the industry that I hope will support me; 2) there’s a lot of good stuff out there that doesn’t get picked up by major New York presses; 3) politically, not supporting small presses is like shopping at Wal-Mart over your local grocery.  Yet I tend to stick to Barnes & Noble.  Indy for me is McSweeney’s or Tin House.

Recently, I won a drawing from Press 53. The prize was a book of my choice from their catalog. Because of my ignorance about small presses, I pretty much had to pick at random.  I chose Bad Monkey, a book of short fiction by Curtis Smith, for two reasons, both superficial: 1) the title struck me as amusing; and 2) I liked the cover.

It turns out you can judge a book by its cover—if that cover is a monochrome photo of a shirtless man crouched, monkey-like, on a back alley stairwell.  The photo promised a collection that was quirky and dark—and those adjectives apply.  There are stories about abduction, Russian mobsters, Ukrainian rapists, and demolition derbies. This is not the plotless, slice-of-life fiction so popular in journals, large and small, these days.

Even better news is that these stories avoid the pitfall of other work of their kind: stylization. Curtis Smith knows that high drama, in order to be believable and compelling, must be grounded in careful prose and attention to detail.  He writes about the most over-the-top subject matter with a subdued lyricism that reminds me of writers of a more traditional bent, like John Updike.

Here is a passage from the first story in the collection, “The Girl in the Halo.” It is told in the second person, the “you” being a teenage misfit in a high school of rich kids. One of these kids, a girl named Sally for whom “you” harbored secret feelings, has gone missing—presumably not willingly. In this scene, Smith observes the effect of her absence on the chemistry lab she and “you” took together:

“…how many bleary mornings had you spied on her, her purple pen scribbling notes and Mr. Fink droning on as he held one of his molecules, a slapped-together collection of spheres and connecting sticks that reminded you of a child’s toy.”

I’m not going to pretend that there’s anything groundbreaking here. But it’s solid, unflashy writing. It starts with “bleary,” which evokes the drag that high school was for most, while being a word we can read right past. But what really gets me here—what really takes a sledgehammer to my cynical reader’s heart—is the purple pen, encapsulating as it does an entire world of vanished innocence and half-realized femininity.  And the molecular model is great, too: who doesn’t remember these, and yet who remembered that he remembered them?

This is what good fiction’s all about: the oft-referenced “shock of recognition.”  By generating that shock, Smith earns the right to tell a story in the second-person (and present tense at that, though the above quote doesn’t demonstrate it).  He earns the right to sensationalist subject matter.  I am not going to give away the ending, but suffice to say, it’s a killer—pun certainly intended.

There are flaws in this collection. At times, the writing can wander into the excessively literary. At these moments, it reminded me of the worst stuff from small journals and presses—writing that adopts the tone of “good” writing, while having none of the feeling or insight. Here’s an offender from the same story, concerning the rumors that have circulated around school regarding Sally’s disappearance:

“Daryl Stone claims he spotted Blake’s red car on the other side of the Duke street railroad crossing, and between the hoppers’ cars flickering, thundering parade, he saw a blonde in the passenger seat…but when the caboose passed, the car was gone, the gate’s zebra-striped arm raised over a deserted macadam patch.”

I seriously doubt Daryl Stone described the scene this way. Now one can argue that this is the way “you” re-imagine(s) it. But there are similar instances throughout the collection, where Smith loses track of his characters in an ecstasy of linguistic posturing. Here’s one from “Without Words”:

“Ambrose, a cost analyst by trade and thus skilled in calculations and extrapolations, could have predicted these things, but when her loaded-down car pulled from the curb, what he couldn’t have predicted was the greater absences that would find him, his life’s unappreciated scaffolding of love and trust and faith sent crashing to the ground.”

I trust you can see why this is bad—or maybe not bad, but merely competent. A little bullshitty. Additionally, there are several examples of flash fiction here, which in trying to pack too much punch in too small a space, fail to achieve resonance. Maybe some people will like them; I preferred the more expansive work, where Smith’s lyrical aggregation has time to take hold.

But these flaws are, by and large, overlookable. Stories like “Think on Thy Sins”—in which a series of questionable moral decisions lead to one of the most bad-ass, and emotionally damaging eruptions of violence in recent short fiction—more than justify the $12 cover price which I cleverly avoided, but which you will have to pay. An earlier collection, The Species Crown, is next up on my list. I will shell out hard cash for it, and unlike when I shop at Barnes & Noble, I will know my money is going to the preservation of something real.

This could be the beginning of beautiful friendship.


Raul Clement is a musician and writer living in Greensboro, NC. His work appears in such journals and anthologies as Coe Review, Mayday Magazine, and Main Street Rag, among others. He is currently at work, with co-author Okla Elliott, on Joshua City — a Brechtian, po/mo, sci-fi novel replete with lepers, revolutionaries, and Siamese triplets who can see the future. An excerpt from Joshua City appeared in Surreal South 2009.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SOLOMON IBN GABIROL

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I’M PRINCE TO THE POEM

by Solomon Ibn Gabirol


I’m prince to the poem my slave,
I’m harp to the court musicians,
my song is a turban for viziers’ heads,
a crown for kings in their kingdoms:

and here I’ve lived just sixteen years,
and my heart is like eighty within them.

© Translation: 2001, Princeton University Press.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol (approx. 1021 – approx. 1058), one of the greatest liturgical poets of the Middle Ages, was a Hebrew poet whose entire life was spent in Spain. He was born in Málaga in Andalusia in the third decade of the 11th century and died approximately thirty years later in Valencia. (Annotated biography of Solomon Ibn Gabirol courtesy of Israel – Poetry International Web.)

Editor’s Note: As I move toward graduate school I am contemplating what specific areas of poetry interest me and what I might want to spend the duration of my PhD program working on. As an Israeli-American poet whose parents were founding members of Shalom Acshav, a prominent peace movement in Israel in the 1970’s and 1980’s, I feel drawn toward middle eastern poetry, and particularly poetry that contemplates Israeli-Palestinian peace struggles. Poets have been political activists and anti-war protesters for nearly as long as poetry has existed as an art form. Poets throughout history have played an important role in peace struggles, as well they should given their ability to manipulate language and be heard. As I embark on this journey into this particular subset of poetry you will see more posts that explore middle eastern poets, and particularly those who contemplate politics and peace.

Want to read more by and about Solomon Ibn Gabirol?
Article by Yehuda Ratzaby
Jewish Encyclopedia
SOLOMON IBN GABIROL: AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET
Poetry Chaikhana

ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

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Flickr photograph by Pacdog.

A MAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE

by Andreas Economakis

All alone on Saturday evening and no one called and you really want company and there’s just no one there and you sit on the couch all alone and time passes by like a wet knot sliding down your throat, a sick feeling in your stomach, a palpable emptiness in your chest and you want so bad to fill it, to fill it with love, with anything and you end up filling it up with booze and television and you pick up the receiver but no one’s there and you can cut through the silence in the air with a knife. Maybe you are the victim of a bad idea, of a love gone south, off the map and you’re almost sure that you’re suffering from some kind of brain damage brought on by your mom boozing when you were a fetus, because damn it, the other kids aren’t like me, they’re out there, laughing and singing and kissing and fucking and talking to one another like there’s no problem, like they get along just fine, and maybe they do, they sure as hell act like it.

Midnight and you’re still on the couch, tonight it’s a soft coffin couch, all pretty in fabric and patterns and so very hard to leave behind but you hate it, you loathe it and you long for day to come and you’re afraid of the night ahead with its nightmares and your bed, alone in your cold bed, a bed that hurts your chin when you lie on your stomach, a bed that only you have slept in recently, that hasn’t had that sweet smell of a woman in a while but hopefully will soon, a bed to share with someone, and maybe if you fill your bed that emptiness in your chest will go away, you hope so but you’re just not sure it will because it’s so damn empty in there it would take a hundred women to fill the void.

You open another beer and it slides down smoother than the last one and another soft layer is tacked to your brain, making it stray a bit and dull the fact that you’re all alone here on this couch, in this apartment, in this city, on this Saturday night. You wish you had the gift of gab, you wish you were an actor and could just talk for the sake of talking and smile like you care and listen when nothing’s being said and pretend that you interested when you don’t give a shit.  Maybe then you’d be happy, with lots of friends, the phone always ringing, the girls always laughing, people always listening and inviting you to more of the same and god forbid a moment’s silence should arise because you just might have to look at your real self in the mirror then and you’re not sure you’ll like what you see.  No, you’re not sure because you’ve been running away from that mirror a long time now, running away from that image, cloaking it in fancy ribbons and clothes and haircuts and eyeliner and cars, dressing up your image so that you can’t see yourself anymore and you actually believe this new mirror image is you.  Your new best friend and he looks cool.

You close your eyes…

You get up and walk outside, the cold air biting your face, the dog from next door barking, the fucker wakes you up every morning at 6 and the asshole neighbor is too damn selfish or stupid to do anything about it and you dream non-stop of putting a bullet in the dog’s brain, no the owner’s brain.  Maybe that’s the problem with this world, you think, that no one gives a shit and when they do they do nothing about it, like you, letting things escalate to a burning point, a point when all rationality dies and the only answer lies in killing and hurting and stealing and all the other deadly sins that are just weird, fucked-up offshoots of the survival instinct, a survival instinct gone haywire, isolated from society, alone, disconnected, like you feel this Saturday night.

A young woman drives by and you look at each other.  She’s breathtaking, a soft focus woman with hair like silk and skin so soft it makes the knot in your chest grow bigger and drip with envy and hatred for yourself because you won’t ever meet her, it’s just not in your cards.  At the corner she puts on her brakes and waits and for just one moment you hope, you imagine, you dream that she is waiting for you, that you’ll walk up and the door will swing open and she’ll ask you in and the light will play in her eyes, revealing the fact that she likes you very much, that she has been waiting her whole life to meet you.  You’ll take off together and… that’s when the story goes dead because the car turns the corner and disappears into the night, taking with it all your love and future and desire and hope.

You sigh and walk on.

You find yourself on the local bus to Hollywood, nowhere in particular, just a Cassavetian somewhere where lots of people are milling around because you need to be near people tonight.  The man across the aisle from you has a vacant stare revealing nothing inside, an android in motion, a pod returning to a refueling station.  You notice the reflection of your own face in the bus’ darkened windows, the eyes pitched into darkness, your skin a deathly neon yellow, a whitish yellow, a dead yellow.  Your image is looking at you and it scares you, it sucks the life out of you, it reminds you of a horror movie you once saw where people just didn’t have emotions.  You shutter and your image in the window looks away.  The lights of the city slowly jostle by, accompanied by the soft hum of the bus’ engines, the occasional dinging of the warning bell signaling the next stop.  You get up and wait.  In slow motion you see three fat, juicy tomatoes explode on the front windshield of the bus. Son of a bitch, little fuckers, the bus driver says and accelerates again, switching his wipers on, spreading the red tomato sauce around, obscenely, streaking the windows, garishly.  Son of a bitch, he breathes again and you remember when as a kid you used to egg buses with your brothers, but from rooftops, you weren’t brazen enough to do it from the street.

You get off the bus.

Beer, please. Yes, that’s fine, and you walk away from the bar a moment later, your hand wrapped around a cold bottle, the dew drops forming a puddle on your right index finger.  There’s something very phallic about a beer bottle in your hand, all hard and wet, especially when you’re looking at beautiful women.  You pick a low impact yet central point just left of the bar and lean against the wall, affecting your most coy, unaffected look, your hand automatically going up to check your hair, your receding hair. The hum of the bar is deafening, a myriad of people jostle by, all kinds of folks, beautiful, strong, gorgeous, butt-ugly, plain, yuppies, hippies, grungers, Hollywood-types, businesswomen, bums, cute girls in skin-tight dresses that ooze sex, guys so full of themselves you catch them fucking with their hair, their hands constantly checking their hair, ablaze in cockiness and those fuckers will probably all get laid tonight because they’re in a bar and they’re not alone, alone like you, even if they have no one with them.

Next to the blonde surfer dude at the bar–you hate blonde surfer dudes, they must be the dumbest species on earth–you spot a brunette sitting alone with a blue drink in front of her, wisps of smoke curling around her head, her body cocked in such a way on the stool that you know she’s desperately trying to avoid the blonde surfer dude.  But he’s persistent and actually taps her on the shoulder, him waiting with a stupid smile and she turning annoyed but they actually start to talk and her body tilts towards his and, fuck (!), she just smiled and looked your way and caught your eye, her gaze lingering just long enough to send a cold trickle of sweat down your spine.  A moment later she looks again and her gaze lasts longer this time, its message clear.  You’re sick to your stomach now because this is where it always falls apart–you never get your nerve up to do anything, you just sit there like a fish blowing bubbles and hope like a bloody fool that the girl will walk up to you and say she spotted you and that you’re cute and Hey do you want to take a walk (?) and before you know it you’re holding her hand and in a dark spot on the street you turn and kiss and she’s an amazing kisser, your tongues in perfect unison, her scent so incredible and she presses into you and her hair is so soft and her nape is so warm and your hand wraps itself around her waist and she hugs you like she means it and you know she will be the mother of your children and you will love her until the day you die and probably longer.  But this doesn’t happen and eventually she leaves with the blonde surfer dude, a guy who has the IQ of a pea and the personality of blanched rock.

You storm out of the bar, sick to your stomach, thankful for the blast of fresh Hollywood air on this cold winter night.  You’re exhaling steam under the bar’s neon sign and you spot the blonde surfer dude jump into the brunette’s Celica, son of a bitch.  You look to the left and you see a woman in rags approaching, pushing a shopping car filled with bottles, empty jingling jangling bottles and she’s got the most amazing smile plastered all over her face like she’s the happiest woman in the world and maybe she is, you just can’t tell anymore.  She smiles at you as she goes by and you look away because you are the opposite of her and her happiness depresses you though she’s the one sleeping on the street tonight and you’re the one sleeping in your house tonight, alone.  You’re both alone but the big difference is she has come to terms with it and you haven’t and for a second, just a second, a smile lights across your face and you see yourself in rags, pushing a shopping cart down the boulevard, not a care in the world.

Excuse me, do you have a light (?), you hear behind you and you turn and two big brown eyes are looking at you, framed in a beautiful face, the face of a girl you noticed in the bar briefly, before you were sucked into the surfer dude vortex. I… I don’t… I don’t smoke you stammer and wish you did, fuck, you wish you were the Marlboro Man right now.  Oh, she says and blushes and you blush and she turns to walk away and you want to say something so you stutter something stupid like, I can find you a light if you want and she turns and blushes again and your eyes lock and she steps toward you, her body opening up and she says That’s so sweet, what’s your name (?) and you squeeze it out and you ask What’s yours (?) and she replies Amy.  Hi Amy, and you look around for a second, hoping somebody is smoking nearby so you can be a knight in shining armor, but there’s no one and you look back and say, You want to walk to that 7-11 and get some matches (?) and she says Okay.  You jam your hands in your pocket and affect the Bob Dylan look from Highway 61 Revisited and she walks next to you, comfortable, not a care in the world and out of the corner of your eye you notice her noticing you noticing her.  You both smile and she tucks her arm into your arm just as you dodge a car and then she pulls it away to not give the wrong impression and your heart takes a wild beat, you’re such a fucking hopeless romantic.

Once outside you’re at a loss for words but not thoughts and you manage to sputter a suggestion of grabbing a bite at a dinner or someplace, maybe the House of Pies (?), and you notice a change in Amy, a slight but perceptible chill.  I should probably be getting on home, she says and, gentleman that you are, you nod and say okay and your bodies separate, tearing those little strings in your heart to pieces but the game isn’t over so, as you pause by her car, you add Do you want to catch a film or something in the next few days (?) and she hesitates and you’re sure she’s going to say No and she backs away some more and you wonder if you are indeed cursed and she says Okay…  Unbelieving, she gives you her phone number, whose last 4 digits are identical to your number from freshman year in college and you wonder if it is fate and before you know it you’re shaking hands and she’s saying Thanks and you’re saying My pleasure and you see her tail lights disappear around the corner and you’re happy, a damn stretch happier than you’ve been in a million years and you pump your fist into the air and feel untouchable and you scream Yeah under your breath.  Yeah.  You decide to walk back into the bar and celebrate, yeah, fuck the blonde surfer dude and that loser chick.

Back inside the crowd has thinned to those that are planning on closing the place down and you order another beer from the bar and the cute bartender smiles at you and you know you’re on fire, it’s written all over you. You suck half the beer down and scan the room, noticing a few couples and some other guys just like you, only the tide has changed and you’re the winner now, the one who’s scored and so you’re cocky and as you look around you see that other girls are checking you out and you act indifferent, you are indifferent, in a dream world with Amy, walking down a dusty road somewhere in Baja, in search of a small French restaurant with 4 tables run by a sympathetic Belgian couple who moved to Mexico and as you round the bend you notice the most amazing small beach with palm trees and you both run and as you reach the sand you both strip and dive into the water and under the cool waves you grab her and she’s goose bumped and your skin touches at the exact moment your lips meet, the salt slightly burning the side of your mouth and you don’t have a clue where you are for a second when the lights flash on and a man at the bar yells Last Call!

And you open your eyes and find yourself glued to your couch, your neck in a crick, the TV tuned to a horrific Tom Cruise film.  Is that fluttering sound coming from your stomach?  No, it’s coming from the daydream you just had.  You click the TV off and slowly pad your way to bed.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece was inspired by Dylan’s Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie and Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence.  It is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Inactivism and the Movies

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

INACTIVISM AND THE MOVIES

by Billee Sharp

I’m under-whelmed by the amount of worthy and righteous local events I’ve missed in the last month.  There was the anti-war demo downtown on March 20, marking seven years of war in Iraq, a Marin-side Palestinian benefit in memory of Rachel Corrie to raise $ for the Gaza Mental Health Organization and even Arundati Roy talking about tribal resistance in India to benefit the International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights  in Indian-administered Kashmir. I was absent from all these events and my excuses range from having to attend the immensely important first game of the U-13 Spring soccer season, to a bout of chronic hypertension and that old chestnut – lack of funds.  As a permanent resident of the U.S., formerly and more exotically known as a ‘resident alien,’ I am actually verboten to participate in anything political, and of course I don’t get a vote locally or nationally. Basically though, not having enough surplus monthly wealth has been key: sliding scale admissions that start at twenty bucks and go upward haven’t been in the budget this month, AP exam fees, SAT tutorials, gym membership, music lessons and soccer fees – the basic stuff that supplements public education here in California, sucked up those few hundred bucks that were left after paying the rent and the bills. I  know that I should have made more lentil-based suppers to make a contribution to the Gazans. I should also have considered being more humble by going and offering the five bucks I had in hand (another theoretical six being dutifully paid for bridge-crossing). We did succeed in going to the Education Cuts demo though,  my middle-schooler, as you see, with a home-made banner reading ‘SCHOOLS NOT BOMBS YO!’ We rendezvoused with brother and his crew from SOTA and the Balboa High contingent and  all spent some happy moments chanting outside City Hall.

During this period of law-abiding political inactivism I do seem to have managed to have seen quite a lot of movies. While this is not necessarily a noble pursuit I feel sufficiently inspired to write about them. I don’t always get to watch a lot of movies, but I do have a weird attachment to having them in the house. I’ve been known to hang on to Netflix movies for many months, paying ridiculous sums to have obscure classics like Aguirre: The Wrath of God here, ready for viewing.

I feel that a household like ours has been a golden vein of revenue for the DVD delivery businesses, not being organized enough to actually watch and return discs makes the average cost of having a movie delivered to the house probs around twenty bucks. Then we still have to go to the video store because we only have Aguirre, and Waterworld which boys have long since  maxxed out on. The third delivered movie  has invariably  dematerialized sometimes leaving its insignificant little paper envelope behind, sometimes not. Our home collection of movie discs has diminished since the advent of  T.V. on the computer (so much for the years we spent feeling lofty while depriving the boys of brainwashing Cable) now they are sucking up episodes of Lost and The Office for free online.

Most of our DVDs are, predictably, the ones Blockbuster made us buy after we missed the return dates, if anybody wants that Miss Pettigrew flick, its languishes here, still unwatched, also Babel and something called Scotland P.A.

The DVD rental business has to be in significant decline: digital download technology, already utilized by i-tunes and Netflix must logically precede more empty vid stores in suburban malls, as even the movie–idiotic like us figure out that we are wasting money, gas and time getting our movies the old way.

So viewing  has been wider-ranging for me this month as I’ve attempted to view what I’d paid handsomely for. I’ve been rendered amused, inspired, heartbroken and informed as I  watched comfortably from my own sofa. As the Oscars swizzled in the headlines I caught up with some that were nominated but more that weren’t.

Favorites:  Bright Star (2009)– thanks Jane Campion for exquistite visions of Hampstead & early nineteenth century fashion, 10 out of 10 from me , nada from the boys “Mom, the music was fucking awful” they snorted, utterly unmoved by the tragic Keats.

Moon (2009), we all loved, brilliant story, ace clone by Sam Rockwell and pretty faultless everything:  direction,soundtrack & cinematography. I’m almost tempted not to return this to Blockie so it can sit in its rightfully place in our collection, next to BladeRunner.

The Hurt Locker (2009), not as gratuitous as I’d feared and functioning pretty well as an anti-war statement, I particularly liked how the good guys-bad guys dictum was absent at character level.

The Hangover (2009) culled by the offspring for hilarious dialogue  fully low-brow and guiltily enjoyed by me, cue husband head-shaking about banality, vulgarity etc.

Where the Wild things Are (2009), cool computer animation, but even my big kids were freaked with the dark interpretation of the beasties, I definitely wouldn’t show it to any smalls.

In The Loop (2009), British-made Office-like hilarious look at minions and cabinet ministers interacting with American counterparts in the build-up moments to the Iraqi war, it’s really funny, I say a must-see, and super impressive for a production budget of less than a million.

If a movie is likely to be disturbing I try and watch it during the day, its true what the Ayurvedic tradition says about not overstimulating the mind before bedtime with books or visuals: it does lead to troubled dreams. That’s why I held on to Sin Nombre (2009) for so long, I’d watched the first twenty minutes in bed and made an executive decision to continue during daylight hours. If I was going to recommend just one movie from recent viewing, it would be this one, directed by Oakland-born Carey Fukunaga, it tells a commonplace story of Central American migrants coming north and the everyday tragedy of young men caught up with gangs. There is an indisputable reality that glints in every frame, hugely talented understated performances from the main actors and the non- professional extras add pathos in the unmistakably genuine slump of their shoulders.

“I didn’t have to tell them [the extras] anything- they know how to sit on a train” said Fukunaga in an interview in the Socialist Review.

I’m haunted by Sin Nombre, and rightly so, beautiful and brutal, it has spurred my inactivism into at least a renewed effort to habla espanol , ‘501 Spanish Verbs’ is back on my bedside table.

–Billee Sharp

Undocumented and Unafraid

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

My Name is Mohammad and I am Undocumented

“Get in line,” they like to say, without realizing that many of us were at some point in this infamous line. My family immigrated to the United States from Iran when I was three years old. At the time my dad was accepted to a university on a student visa to get his doctoral degree. After three years, he completed his studies and applied for something called Optional Practical Training, essentially allowing him to extend his stay for twelve months. During that time, he would be able to continue to work and study in the same field he received his PhD in.

While still under the OPT program, he secured sponsorship from a job and applied for a change of status from OPT to an H1b visa. Rather than do this themselves, my parents thought it would be better to put something this serious into the hands of an attorney. However, due to not knowing exactly where to go, they contacted the university and were referred to the international student center where there were immigration attorneys on hand. The school’s immigration attorney handled all of the paperwork, my parents paid the required fee, and they were told everything was set to go, or so they thought. Now mind you, up until this point, we all still had legal status; we were still “in line”.

Eventually a letter came from INS stating that the application was rejected because the fee enclosed was not the right amount. Apparently, INS had raised its fee the previous year, and it was now $20 more than we were instructed by the attorney to provide. Doing what any normal person would do, my parents immediately hired an attorney who was independent of the university. The new attorney, however, turned out to be no better than the free one provided by the school. Rather than file an appeal with INS and provide a check for the correct amount, the attorney chose to bicker back and forth with the school attorney as to why they were even advising students on such matters. The attorney failed to inform my parents that they had only 60 days to appeal the decision; the attorney failed to take any measures to protect our status or to inform us of what could be done to protect our status. And so we lost legal status.

If the immigration system doesn’t work for someone who tries to do everything the right way, then how does it treat those who were never even given the option of doing things the right way?

I now find myself in a constant state of limbo. I am currently enrolled in the social work program at school; I have always volunteered within the local community and have been offered several jobs I have had to unfortunately decline.

I can’t see myself living anywhere else other than America. All of my childhood memories are from America, and it is the only home I have known. Apart from that, I also happen to be gay, and if one is at all up to date on their current events, then I am sure you know how unfriendly a place Iran is for anyone who happens to be LGBTQ. Iran is one of the countries that not only punishes people for being gay but also kills them. Mahmoud Asgari, 16 and Ayaz Marhoni, 18 are two teenagers who were recently killed for no reason other than being gay.

“To execute people simply because they are gay or have had gay sex just isn’t acceptable in the 21st century,” he exclaimed. Their comments follow the public hangings of Mahmoud Asgari, 16, and Ayaz Marhoni, 18, on 19 July in Mashad, provincial capital of Iran’s northeastern Khorasan province, on charges of homosexuality.

In addition to the outright intolerance towards homosexuality, it is the view of the Iranian clerics that the cure to homosexuality is a sex-change operation.

“Approval of gender changes doesn’t mean approval of homosexuality. We’re against homosexuality,” says Mohammed Mahdi Kariminia, a cleric in the holy city of Qom and one of Iran’s foremost proponents of using hormones and surgery to change sex. “But we have said that if homosexuals want to change their gender, this way is open to them.”

Going back to Iran is not even an option for me, and honestly, the only difference I see between myself and the next American is $20, two strong cases of legal malpractice and a piece of paper.

~Mohammad, DREAMer from Michigan

We were so inspired by the DREAMers’ courage in coming out last week that we will continue to feature their stories through the end of March.  Please show your support by signing the petition to pass the DREAM Act.  Thank you.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DORIANNE LAUX

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

DUST

by Dorianne Laux


Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor–
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes–
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

Dorianne Laux began writing poetry in earnest when she moved to Berkeley, California. Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. With a number of books to her credit, Laux is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.

Editor’s Note: Dorianne Laux has been featured on As It Ought To Be before, but a good poet should be celebrated, and often. Some poems simply ring true to you in both their language and their message. I find this phenomenon occurring with acute regularity when I read through a book of Dorianne Laux’s poetry. I couldn’t get twenty pages into What We Carry without being strongly torn between two poems to feature on today’s series. The poem that competed with “Dust” is “Aphasia.” Read it here.

Want to read more by and about Dorianne Laux?
Poets.org
Web Del Sol
How a Poem Happens