out-of-body conference

A conference is something I live through on Bhanu's blog mostly. http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.com/2012/04/non-photography.html

But then I actually go to one. Drive up to Santa Cruz with Neesie.

Us in the car, like living inside the writing of Waveform without the fear of Will it get written? I pass out, briefly, cheek pressed against seat belt nylon, in the curving bearing forward golden light, up the mountain. Wake after 10 minutes (feels like ten hours) to Neesie singing Beth Orton's "Broken Shopping Trolley". It sounds dysphonic, perfect.

Neesie, gesturing toward her stolen tape deck, catching me up on Moon Doggie's travails in the last few months, Italian American classism and body shops.

We discuss deadline, obligation, what one should do with their time, nagging sadness, addiction.

"Who you are in your very nature collides -- I mean, interacts with external circumstances to make a perfect storm of Lucy Ricardo-ness. Kinesthetic emo meets cataclysmic--& then you didn't finish"

This dashboard driftwood anticipates the Super Moon; is a conduit that has no agendas.

Parking in the mountain campus, almost impossible, esp. with limited mobility. On car trips, I go into happy blankness, but essentially become useless. A scrubbing bubble with no teeth, floating along, pushing translucent colors up from the road. Neesie asks a student directions to a parking lot--the Northern Extremity or some such thing. "He is so beautiful. I did not hear nay of those directions. I don't see a parking structure up here around the bend. Can we just go back, go back and ask him to get in the car with us?" We really, almost do.

We arrive for dinner, we come from an isalnd, Sicily, we are late. And feeling insular/socially unsure (for various reasons). Which is ironic since we are to do a workshop on Embodied Poetics the next day. "People go into all these details about the amazing work they are doing, and then they ask about my work and I leave my body." (Later, when I talk about the faltering of will to keep up a certain identity, a wanting nothing--no new projects or work--but a gliding interior opening into everyday tasks with the bodies one could best nurture--basically, not working or creating, but just sitting, with others-- Neese explains it as choosing "an economy of longevity rather than choosing to call it laziness or chronic low level aspirations.")

 We openly covet Jen Hofer's outfit. Like a Stawberry Shortcake girl, bad ass, on a moto, in Milan.

A deer calms us. Poulpe, I saw a deer!

Petra, with coffee in the Sta Cruz freezing dwtn wind, is warmed enough to laugh. I am working on it, silently losing pastry in my sarape. P, has done all the work to get us to Emergent Communities in Experimental Poetics UCSC Conference. We are grateful. if not a bit bewildered. I want to talk more with Tisa Bryant about the auto-immune system.

 The Wings of Desire sculpture clangs in the cold wind.

 Anna Moschovakis' hair shines, coppery, in the cold light. Her poem reminds me that "I' is only me, a fiction as it is. So why make yet another artificial divide? A schizophrenic, homeless man from  behind the fence, chimes into her poem. She turns her head fully, to meet his. We listen. My client? No, but I want to go out on the sidewalk and talk with him later. A misguided impulse toward what I can contain and will thus feel held by.

 The sun at lunch-time readings. Some kind of eucalyptian cicada, drones on. Neesie needs her fan.

Tisa Bryant and Brent Armendinger doing a generative exercise/mini somatic collaboration.

Soon after, Petra leads them all in a sound cloud..And then, a run through of Weft. A pink and indigo and cocoa cluster that is Brent/Tisa/Juliette Lee. They brush each other's forearms lightly and grin. Performance art scrubbing bubbles.

Then, home.