grendel’s cheek is at the airport

Some things I thought about on the tiny poetry tour which I failed to update on (see readings):

Kristen Stone is adorable. It’s too bad that staring at people can make them feel creeped out. Nobody likes to be reduced to an object. The desiring gaze is terrible because suddenly… suddenly you are accountable for your body.

But her thoughts are also adorable. I respect the adorable. It’s adorable to watch KS and J together, and watch them touch and smile at each other.

K uses the word abject so much it becomes another object. The closeness of object to abject is also very pleasurable. Friction between words and meaning and the question of meaning, the answer being another question, because separating levels of sense? Data begets more data. We didn’t wash our hair for days—I gave in to shampoo after I got flakes in my scalp but KS remained ever greasy. Sad feelings are not bad feelings. Kate Z, Kristen and I agree.  KS has a tattoo of asymptotes on her arm, and asymptotes are one of my favorite analogies. Feelings, poetry, meaning, asymptotes. BAM. SAT vocab.

It’s true, how strange it is that people worry about being happy. It’s a Disney thing. I only like the broken parts of Disney, the broken parts of happiness, because the broken stuff is the part where it becomes possible to love other things.

Sianne Ngai said that brokenness contributes to cuteness because it makes them helpless. Beauty is often helpless of itself. I read Hunger Games in Gainesville and felt weird about the helplessness of Katniss’s uncontrollable beauty. The kind that cannot be achieved, because posturing by default makes it impossible.  Broken people scabbing together always make me cry. “Thank you for your children” boohoo boohooooo! But it’s true. The threshold of cuteness vs. abjectivity/abjectness is ambiguous.

Other things, it was nice to meet/see everyadorableone else I met while running around the south! Hi Ariel (yay!) and Rose and Kale and Brooks and Jesse and Nic and Genet and Maggie and Ben and Kim Vodka (har) and my libra twins and KS’s fam and Toad and Bruce (kittens!) etc etc etc, thank you for your children and the puppies.

[this was written many hours ago in the airport.]

 

I just finished reading Ghosts by C Aira and I need to read it again because it’s thick and I’ve only been able to drink thin soups because my brain has a cold and it has had a cold since last semester. I will be writing a few sentences about it w/ people over at Montevidayo. My left foot is numb and I have to write 25 pages of a screenplay today that has been deemed too much mumbo jumbo, and has scary amounts of fluids in it but doesn’t have a “thing” so as to say it is malformed. I saw the worst movie I’ve ever seen yesterday and it was Analyze That because I have to do a presentation on it this week (I did not choose the movie, just like I did not choose to be born) and so. That is why I am here, writing about my crusty navel. If you are in a bad mood for too long, it is no longer effective or worth it to relish the evil.

I wrote this for the 7th of April and in response to my friend Paul’s poem in which he becomes a toad.

TOAD AND PRINCESS

i am also vaguely wishing
all the time vaguely wishes

like the cigarette butt stars of omaha.

the people i love most

are the ones i resent

and what more to resent in this world

than the things that make you want to live,

question mark.

for many weeks now or maybe months i have not been able to think

or care, ideas are getting more more dull like stars

in the city.

all the hypnotists are there

to give you real ambition and zest

they put that stuff through a cheese grater

and then you are tarred and the zest is thrown

at your face

but your genitals are burnt

that’s where the soul is

like mine it’s gross

and star juice comes out of the burnt hole.

i never want to do anything.

my siblings in the rhizomatic factory

work to sustain me.

i wish i were strong

enough to jump off a building

and become  a star

blowing kisses from all the mouths my whole body

fluttering empty toothless

star star star star star.

*

I also read something about a brother and it make me cry for many reasons, one being that I can’t remember my childhood very well, or I am afraid to. I feel very dark. Lately people ask me “Mary why are you so quiet?” and I usually say something like I am tired or sick, but maybe I’m not. When I was a child, I never spoke, except to my brother, maybe, and I also beat him up. I remember that better than the times we were loving, because guilt is more intense than nostalgia. Yesterday I ate a frozen version of durian which is the only thing I miss from Singapore and thought about how something is better when unattained. I wanted the “real” durian not the frozen kind. Seems like so many things attained in this life is frozen and not “real” including aesthetics, which is not to say that is bad. Thinking that rationality/humanity is special and unique is bad. Kindness is not bad. My hero is Justine of Melancholia and I am avoiding advancing myself career wise by making drawings:

In Ghosts, stars die and turn into humans and not the other way around.

LOOK AT ME I”M ON A BUS

I am indeed, dique, on my way to Chicago now. My feet are damp and sweaty, and I have slept while sitting upright with open mouth and microbes festering in my mouth.

Among the things I will do: think about tinglyness and thinglyness.

Goth Club Reading: 10 PM / NEO @ 2350 N. CLARK, CHICAGO / NEW WAVE + 80′S DANCE PARTY UNTIL 4 AM Thursday

THE LEGION (with Black Ocean) 1354 W. Wabansia Chicago, IL 60642 Friday (9PM)

 

RED ROVER: 7-11:30pm
TABLE X/Y CACOPHONY:

Writers from 32 small presses
read simultaneously in one space!
Full details at https://www.facebook.com/events/221605691264245/

and attending lots of other readings by awesome people! If I don’t get lost.

Books I will be reading / giving away / selling:

butcher’s tree w/ Black Ocean: new excerpt here: http://www.everyday-genius.com/2012/03/feng-sun-chen.html

• I will sitting at the BO booth on Saturday for an author signing I think

blud (um, where are my copies? spork press, I’m coming after you) http://sporkpress.com/sporkblog/?p=2805

I forgot my Ugly Fishies so I guess I won’t be reading from that :( But it’s available as a free download now! Just click on the picture of the larynx on the right sidebar.

pockmarks of the internet

Blogs are like popped zits that reform. Since facebook became a direct drip applied to our veins, the face of the internet has more pockmarks and fewer fresh zits. That’s ok. It can be attractive. Like Skrillex’s face. Skrillex reminds me of an ex. He was the first one that was kind of good to me.

Squeezing out pus from my face in front of a mirror is calming. I used to do this more frequently, when I was younger and had much more anxiety. Now I do it every few days. More often, I casually pick at it before showering.

Getting the sebum out. Does this analogy work with the way blogs are also “platforms” for marketing? Facebook is the ultimate landscape of a billion huge whiteheads, flowing in sync… I guess it doesn’t work. Sebum says little about hypertext and digital synapses. On another note, I’m also annoyed and tired of how so many arguments about ANYTHING is gets integrated into the fiction/reality of the market. Everything I do can be called marketing, sure. Nothing escapes capitalist exchange, not even love, sure. It touches everything. Maybe. But I don’t think it is productive to wallow this way and certainly doesn’t help us understand desire any better and most of all it does nothing to undermine it.

Anyway. So did I already post a link to claudius app? http://theclaudiusapp.com/ There it is. The splash is really cool, really dynamic popping the stuff ia all over the screen.

Yet the internet is so… un-oily.

I recently ordered a book about Chinese mythology. I am waiting to read more deeply about Nuwa, the creation goddess, and how the world was created through snake-gods this way:

I’m still thinking about the N Djurberg video of the masked/masking snakes, which were creation gods by pageantry and not by heterosexual reproduction. I very briefly wrote about it here http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2542

The snakes come out of holes and wear masks over their wounds, inflicted by an orgy of biting and wounding. The masks then serve as their faces/eyes.

Becoming reptile:

At least half of what I experience in this world is virtual. I’m half light soup.

Looking forward to AWP!

Secretions

I haven’t posted anything in months. No reason. But I thought I’d put something up today to show that I’m not dead. I’ve managed to squeeze myself into a screenwriting class 2 weeks late, and have been working on “Loglines” for the first assignment. Not surprisingly, my loglines seem to be the kind that will never get sold. But how awesome would it be if I could turn these into actual movies?

LOGLINES

1. MARS VIOLET

Two painters and ex-lovers trapped in a studio for several days during a blizzard begin hallucinating together, to potentially violent, passionate ends.

2. MINOS

Introverted schoolgirl who can see into the underworld befriends a jaded but brilliant teenager in trouble with drug lords and gets dragged into the fray.

3. MASTER APHRODITE

A modern per-version of the venomous love triangle of Aphrodite, Eros, and Psyche  leading to the suicide of two children, set in a summer camp.

4. MEAT FAIRY

A lonely fast-food worker grows pathologically attached to the food products he makes, believing them to be sentient; meanwhile, a meat packer dies in a meat packing factory.

In other news, I have an interview at Radioactive Moat (Ugly Fish is now a free download!), and my book, Butcher’s Tree, is now available for preorder. It ships right after AWP. Speaking of which, I will be doing a book signing on Saturday at the Black Ocean zone. I will, however, be reading at 2 readings, Thursday and Friday nights. Thursday night will be a strange affair inside bathroom stalls with Lara Glenum, Lucas de Lima, Johannes Gorranson, Kate Durbin, and other strange people at a location TBD (because I don’t know where, and I’m hoping it’s off site so I can actually do it) and Friday (I think!) will be a Black Ocean reading with my awesome Black Oceanographers. Details to come.  Why is this year’s AWP sold out? Has there suddenly been a population explosion of avid poets and writers? Tough times call for feeble literary types?

I’ve also been reading this http://www.scribd.com/doc/42995065/PONGE-Nature-Things book by a french poet, Ponge, who loves snails and talking about pebbles. The one line that sticks out to me regards the secretion of humans, and this secretion is not like/unlike the creation of shells by mollusks, but rather than calcium, we secrete language.

Finally, I never thought I would like a show like Downton Abbey. But I am getting old, and historical dramapics are becoming more and more interesting to my wrinkling mind.

Also, looking forward to the birth of my book. Look at this amazing cover design! Thanks to Janaka Stucky and Josh Wallis and all the hot people at Black Ocean for this:

Cover Image

beans and space, swine-wed

Beans are a recurring motif in my writing and picture making these days. Also, the new cat farts like no cat I have ever been farted at by.

Lines of repetition make my life venetian blind and I’ve been bumping into things a lot. I finally read (sort of) or re-read Pound’s Canto I and found the word “swine-wed” (misread from wine-red?)very marriageable. The parts I like are the kennel things all over the piles of language:

lynx-purr (I just mistyped that as lynx-puff)

eye-glitter

pad-foot

green-ruddy

etc.

and somewhere in my reading came across “human bean” but can’t retrieve it… apparently it is also a coffee house…

While loathingly working on my project in animating the infamous late Gu Cheng, came across a quote on Jackie Wang’s website through which the drumbeat of his name tumbled and in my experience her ballerinas dance with machine guns has really been a place of strong energy transfer and then of course,

To write my poems,” Khanan Zhuai remembered, “I listened to everything.” He continued: “I would go into the rainforest and sit for hours to listen to the trees and the birds that live on different branches of the trees. I used the sounds of different birds to convey human emotions. For instance, the cry of the cuckoo, gu? gu! gu? gu!, is heartbreaking, and I use it to stand for human suffering.
— Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders

—

I found this poor dead bird on the way to campus and it was clean and soft and yellow, but it wasn’t decomposing because it was on cement, so I took it home. I plan to bury it. Right now the bird spirit is in the fridge inside a tea box.

—

Gu came to me again in a dream. When my friends ignore me, I slap dreams in their faces.
Little do you know that only in dream are you not in exile.
It is where I have loved you and the cry of the cuckoo
I could say that the cancer that falls off the bird is a journey towards perfection
that now the bird is perfect
but I don’t tell the truth nor does the truth tell me.

—

It is 11 degrees out. Celcius. I think. I’m not going anywhere. Also, David Lynch twated:

I truly believe there is a field of peace within & that it can be enlivened & brought to the surface to be enjoyed by all.

Dear Twitter Friends pls check this out: Have We Overlooked the Most Effective Way to Prevent Terrorism & War? huff.to/qZtFYZ

—

What is this UNIFIED FIELD of sacred bulls pooping?

I believe that we are all a part of the unified field of insanity, made flesh, the uniform field of fog-o-war and fog-o-war and poetry. I enjoyed this comment to the article… it’s probably my favorite part actually:

englishman545

47 Fans

10:47 AM on 9/13/2011

Thanks or the article, but it requires Americans to think beyond their own selves, if it could be accomplished it would be a Miracle in itself.

—

“your self-review is up at WWAATD today:

http://wewhoareabouttodie.com/2011/09/13/feng-chen-on-feng-chen/“

—

hahaHA:

“Pigasus”

I love it!

And friends far away, I miss you all and unite with you in the unified field.

on the dashboard of my vehicle to conquer anxiety

TRAFFIC TO HERE:

Top Searches

zdzislaw beksinski, city bird, pig primal cuts, joyelle mcsweeney nectropastoral hiromi, post traumatic

ON MY EASEL THAT IS A CHAIR:

I title my painting: The Ritual that Fertilizes

INSIDE MY GOOSE PIMPLES:

Internal Nebula
(crystalline)
Rocks growing slowmo
(crystalline)
I conquer claustrophobia
(crystalline)
And demand the light

It’s the sparkle you become
Conquer anxiety
Sparkle you become
Conquer anxiety

Summer Valentine

a painting I made (or am making, though I don’t think I want to continue with this one):

ACK came in the mail today:

The quality is surprisingly decent.

I also read (on Silliman’s blog) that 200 million americans want to publish a book. People complain that there is a lack of seriousness in self-publishing.

Perhaps that is true. But I am very serious about my unseriousness.

Been reading a lot of Doris (see above picture), which I purchased on a whim from Mayday Books. Makes me sad I missed out on the zine movement. I also got a Ken Dahl book (for Pony). He says that zines are now left for the amusement of sheltered bourgie somethings. Like me.

Watch out.

I have been thinking about phobias, exposure therapy, and art. I have trypophobia (of clusters of holes, and flesh bumps, or clusters in general. it’s hard to describe). Yayoi Kusawa has visions of polka dots taking over the world, overwhelming her, obliterating her. Sometimes I worry about the power of “art”, which comes from the ideology around it, and its ability to dilute, distort, and glorify terrible things. It can be very amoral. Beauty is. So I painted a cluster of flesh wounds in my painting for myself, so I am reminded that what I make is something terrible. I am curious about whether or not, if I keep doing it, it will lose its terrifying quality.  I also wrote little prose things concerning this:

i looked in the mirror and discovered my taste buds. i thought that they looked abnormally large, though i have not seen another’s person’s taste buds for comparison. the more i scrutinized, the more they seemed like little flesh sacks stuck to my pink lingual muscle. clusters of pale flesh pustules like milky grains of rice sprouting all over the surface of it. i stuck my tongue in and out between my teeth. the long white buds were like insect eggs on a leaf. any moment now they could give birth. in the dream, i regarded these little egg sacks with utter neutrality. upon awakening, the image awoke with me. fear and disgust awoke with me. everything awoke and the things filled my world once again with meaning, and the pustules on my tongue begged to taste meaning in everything, in themselves. they tasted themselves and their white, worm existences. in one of Plath’s poems, one of the first consciousnesses that remembered me, a black gap discloses itself. / on the opposite lip / a small white soul is waving, a small white maggot. my limbs, also, have left me. / who has dismembered us? / the dark is melting. we touch like cripples. (Plath, Event)

on playing Sims in Ocean City and being a reverent humus (dedicated to Falafel)

I think today was the end of my life as a zombie. Sims gets boring after the certain point, when you have reached the one goal that was supposed to make everything awesome. I was trying to get the Goth’s to move in with me. I managed to get the woman and the child, and became substantially richer. But then I didn’t want to do anything with the money. This could serve as an analog for real life, except that if I had as many dollars as simoleans, I would still definitely not be set enough to not struggle interestingly through this dream. However, I do know that if I landed in big money, I would not know what to do with the money, except go to school indefinitely or until I feel like “giving back”. Maybe I would try to do something good with it, or maybe I would be selfish and buy a mountain cabin and raise goats by hiring a goat herder and learn how to make goat cheese.

Sometimes I think about how “lucky” I am to have been shielded from extended menial labor. Well, other than my string of secretarial and library jobs. Is being a TA menial labor? It does feel very much so, at times. But I doubt that it would make me “appreciate” anything more. Would I like this vacation more? I don’t feel like I am liking it more. Would I be rendered speechless at the sight of the endless sea? What is Wonder? I do appreciate humility. The word that brings one closer to the lowly and the earthen, that makes us into a small humus secreted by the globe’s moist and pungent genitals, overwhelmed by the mass of our own bacterial overpopulation and the grand rashes of natural extravagance. I think this is my place. Perhaps this is why I feel comfortable being a poet, one of the most invisible and repugnant races. I am most honest as one smear of the world’s smegma, prey and beholden to even the smallest, microbe encrusted piece of sand in the toenail of the breathing corpse of Greater Being.

One of the dangers of being a reverent humus is the withdrawal of one’s humanity. I feel like a terrible citizen. Or does this have something to do with reflexive impotence? What does it mean to be a selfish selfless (as in attempted ego-denying) person? I hope I never go on extended vacation again.

I cannot write Poetry, a poem

I once dissected a fetal pig. It smelled like atheism and art.

My brother is lonely in Baltimore studying to be a doctor like William Carlos Williams. Perhaps he will write intestinal stories and poems in the snaking hours spent away from the body.

His hands are not as steady as mine but his heart is sharper. I was born to be a surgeon. I know this because I am afraid of the intricate and the organic.

It seems appropriate that I am not doing what I am meant to do, which is something I cannot explain.

I am afraid of the intricate and organic because I am drawn to its slime and its dark throb and the prospect of touching the quivering new mouths of severed arteries is like prayer.

When I pray it is an orifice of horror and pain, the edges of pure love.

Which is only known through what I eat. The sick saltiness of fried bacon, the shiny quality of a fulfilled pair of lips. When I love someone I think about eating them and my nails grow dirty and long.

Perhaps this is not love, but it is what I know. Everything else is too political and I am not a competent citizen.

The pig organ is very similar to the human organ.

Ben had a shiny face and a big mouth. From what I hear he became somewhat of a pig in regards to the ladies. But I see sweetness in the people I meet and he was a sweet. It is hard to think of the bracelets of vomit that ringed him at the precipice of frenzy, the anorexia and aporia that teased him with little thongs of death.

Sometimes he was filled with joy. He was poor and worked a million jobs so he could school. He was poor and white and skinny and self death was a warm sea.

My love is alive and pale and skinny and I can see his clavicles ringing like winter bells and perhaps I want to put my teeth there and suck the bones. His favorite nonfiction book is by Iris Chang, the rape of Nanking.

Sometimes I don’t want to write poems but I am not good at anything else.

Poems are stupid like pigs and make me cruel and fat.

Someone once accused me of being culturally white and it is true. I am so white that I can’t see my own dandruff.

When I saw The Elephant Man and when he said my life is full because I know I am loved or something I wept and wept and wept and wept and wept because of dramatic irony and because I know his brothers.

Only cry alone, what I do. I am obsessed with my weakness and do not want to share. I hate Barney and I hate to hurt.

I plod through the world thinking oh no oh no oh no oh no
because I see things like burning ladies
and people with no faces and I cannot do anything and there is a certain agricultural manufacturing of sorrow that happens within me.
I am also aware of more nuanced conditions of existence
and of strength, which is strange and mythical to me.
I am of the feeble fever
the boar luxury
the surveyor of suffering’s safari
including my own, the tiny spit pearl of universal want.

There is an irony that runs through my whiteness.

I no longer aspire to be great. oh no oh no oh no oh

Throngs of pain sheep dazzle my mind at night.

My body is feeble and fatty. I cannot build a house. I watch through the pinhole in the door the big bad. The big bad speaks to me and I watch.

I know of a great uplift like the flight of flesh and I have seen the flying pig. Maybe this ugliness will flap its paper wings.

It is a modern world full of modern pigs, dark, blubbery pink pigs capable of ecstasy.

I want to be like Mother Teresa and carry my emptiness
deep inside like a pearl.

I want to fold my brothers into my decay.