what I missed at the Open Embodiment conference--well, I missed a million things, but sleep remains my biggest arts practice

Heather Barrett's experiment at FLUXX on being a slime mould. Here is her TEDTalk.

"When it meets itself, it knows it is already there and turns back, to grow in other directions."

I always wanted a pet slime mold in a dish, when I was a kid. How could I not? I grew up with GhostBusters. and in proximity to so many hot retention ponds. Heather passed me the lime green flyer and asked if I planned to stay, but alas, it was late at night, I was jetlagged and my colleagues who shared my hotel were nuclei, pushing our cell membrane back across the desert, toward the Marriott. I did not want to travel alone. Who stayed to become slime at FLUXX? Did someone "make photos", as Petra would say? A mass cell selfie?  Join the international slime mould collective!


Anthony Wagner--the gorgeous Austrian who came to sit with me on my double bed/the body poetik's random intimacies installation at the Solar Culture gallery. I heard Austria and wanted to exclaim, My middle name is Vienna! But my brain gave a blip for all the energetic charge and  I could not really recall if Austria was the home of that city. Anthony said he followed me back to my bed to inquire about sexological bodywork, what it was, did he need it. But really, later, when he and I got to the public spooning portion of the installation, he told me he followed me because I was a non-normative girl wearing a quite attractive neon coral negligee.  So, I felt in that moment, that my experiment in obviousness made the right point (I had worried the wearing of lingerie did not suit performance art...gesturing too heavily, and thus falsely, toward intimacy). Anthony was wearing a mermaid tank top and he studies monsters in trans culture. Of course, we talked about the monstrous in disability culture and my one blind pearlescent eye, which stands out to people, these days, far more than any of my other "aberrant' physical traits". I love Anthony.


The other trans person who is a scholar of clowning and sat with me on my bed...why do we fear clowns, why do we fear sex? They are both so absurd and over the top, but really, the art is in the subtle. And that is where we get back to the deep play and the gift. But yes, I missed out on getting his name...It was an excellent conversation.


Oh also, Natalie Brewster Nguyen doing her acro-performance art in the gallery next to mine. I mean, for the record I was not asleep when I missed this, but otherwise entranced, as was the case above. Here is one of the pictures I borrowed from her Facebook.

I missed about a million things, including a visit to Casa Libre, but I presented 3 times and had to store up energy to see a bodpoe client on the last evening...it is important for me to see clients in other states so I can better know body/landscape relationship. He drank iced tea and told me about his work with propane tanks, until kidney and lung issues put him in an early art retirement. Soon, he will be making farm animal murals out of multi-colored corn kernel. We listened to Neil Young for an extended period of time. We attended to the very act of comfort and my Fox and his ferrets.

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.

Me at SFMOMA tonight doing jellyfish, institutionalization, bureaucracy and bio filtration, pee

Amber DiPietra on IwamotoScott Architecture's Jellyfish House


Thursday August 4 2011
Meet in the Haas Atrium before moving into the galleries.
6:30pm. Readings, 20 minutes. Part of Pop-Up Poets. Free with museum admission. 


--- Much to MOMA's terror, and my own, my reading has turned into a performance. 
Please don't lean on the vitrine!

Beauty Is A Verb, also--

this thrilling cover for the anthology! i almost can't believe it and want to catch up with the editors to ask them for  the story behind this image/idea. because this is so in line with my Accion Mutante plan to go totally aquatic one day.

january

watched Exit Through the Gift Shop and now I want to morph energies that go into being a disability advocate /poet into being a street artist. radical hyper-visible incognito. web cams and spray cans on my scooter. (in other news, a car swerved on to langton street while I was going to jury duty—God? Kafka? at work…—and hit the back of my scooter as I crossed at the intersection. I flew off. and had a lot of time to think. rapidly reframing it as an aerial dance and doing the magical thinking math. that this meant this one bad thing would save me from a dozen others for future months. maybe.)

visited laguna honda state hospital for the first time, as part of my new job as transition facilitator. it is no magic mountain, but it is refurbished. no more 10 beds to a room and people abandoned in beds in the halls. but it is still a place one wishes to transition from. my client has been there for 10 year since he fell off a building. he writes poetry that is transmitted to him from PBS and sunlight. he has never heard of jack spicer. I am trying to convince him that he could turn into a hot quad rugby guy.

Denise Leto and I got together to talk about Italian deli dykes, pushing the jump cut. and other stuff. actually, spasmodically laughing about her World Series antics while we tried to rein ourselves in and edit down the collaborative poem we have been knitting together over the course of 8 months. this is for Patrick Durgin’s post-ableist book. She also filled me in on what happened at the mla re: disability and poetics panels. (in seeking out tidbits online, I ran across an article—totally unrelated to the mla—about the “discursive abyss” between trauma studies and disability studies. the guy who wrote it claims disability studies people are rigid about not acknowledging trauma. and that the trauma people are overly mystical. I agree on both counts.) I both did and did not want to go to the mla. I have no desire to ever write something academic again, as I was telling Brandy, my ex- anthro-Ph.D- candidate friend turned community radio organizer. she concurred. but it is cool that the Beauty is a Verb anthology that I will be in is being presented at  the "Breaking Boundaries" conference at Sarah Lawrence College on March 4-6th. many thanks to sheila black, jennifer bartlettt and michael northern for putting that book together.

oh, and Denise has discovered a way to work with her dystonic voice and will be performing it, as multimedia, at this event

http://www.headlands.org/event_detail.asp?key=20&eventkey=928. sadly, I cannot go. I will be on the fruit streets drinking forties for my 10 year college reunion. but you should go.

this Saturday will be the last in the second series of Write To Connect. www.writetoconnect.blogspot.com. I am so grateful for the response I have had and what has been possible to explore. the participants carry me. went to the new, shiny ed roberts campus near ashby bart on Sunday, the first ever ed roberts day. hopefully, soon, I will be offering WTC from that venue. an enormous, wide ramp, spiraling into the upper levels of a sunny atrium. a light-suffused example of universal design (and the ashby bart elevator will open directly on to the campus—no need to even cross Adeline!)

and, speaking of access, I went to Brandon Brown’s new reading series last week with Michelle. It is only a few blocks away from my work at ILRCSF. mission at 7^th, right near the SSA office. certainly it’s being there—I think Brandon is calling the series The Commons?—transforms my dreary oppressed experience of the SSA and the federal bldg, where I have spent some time. AND, it is a reading series WITHOUT STAIRS!  (I pull the granny call caps out for this one.) just rolled up on the scootz. I very much appreciate this.

there are other, accessible, new reading series on the horizon. mine. with michelle puckett. in a garage and driveway near macarthur bart during the summer months. with barbecues and kids and dogs and Christmas lights. pertaining to working class aesthetics and other stuff. as per the Labor Day series (which I am excited to see renewed as blog and to be writing a blog post for some time soon…)

also, excited about the Words and Deeds series curated by margit and friends. http://artworkouts.wordpress.com/ language in the physical world, in the body. the perfect thing to replenish my poe-matic store for what I can offer in future Write To connect classes. Words and Deeds starts Feb 21. check it out.

finally, after talking to steffi tonight, I concluded that I may never write another single, “simple” poem again because the materials scatter. become dense, hunch up, waiting to be the leaping musculature of some other prose thing that sleeps and waits. or the thing the poem could be disperses, floats, wants to happen in the air, with people, in a class, dancing. so, I may as well let some of the poiesis run-off filter through here, real time stream style.

9.1.11

resume a

live/work

balance

give me a sheltered workspace

and call it

enough can i

distend quotes from

a post-

feminist

stay-at-home

& just want trauma

where its permitted to tunnel

in, be

mysterious and explode

instead

regular

leaky gut

measure the week from Wednesdays

collects on the filtering gill

pressure to determine

if the well is dead or

beings that

are

a thin membrane between

water and sun,

envy them their knees

tiny black froglets

in chlroine

he put the wrong part

in me so it will never bend

thought Shriners are ossuary Masons

but it was fixed

plexi-glass trophy case

in sports medicine showroom

on account of the acids

can’t build its shell

black mucus clots and hind springs

sharp-snouted day

frog knows its neck

to pulse only so long

and a spooky emptiness in the sample nets

http://afteriwasdead.blogspot.com/2011/01/osc-part-one-hope.html

Mrs. Maybe 3, Arnieville, being Ba-roke

Mrs. Maybe #3 party, poetry reading, tamale-fruit pie-red bean bonanza. Thanks Lauren, Jared and Catherine! Got over the feeling that I read poems which unfortunately strain to be stories and lean too heavily on articles, the the and a's, a kind of perfunctory agony, eyelids sticking to eyeballs and such. There were, after all, vuvuzelas and avatars and I had Bubo, Athena's blinkity owl, in attendance.

afterward, Ashby flea market

in which i paid a thin square slice for some tangly gridded colored space to get light to suffuse through. Michelle Puckett, this is my visual answer to the New Ba-roke Poetics. golden lyrics and such. remember when i said it was Bunnicula that made me want to be a writer? well, it was also Charles Wallace's brothers and sister, dancing, backlit, greeny gold, with his mitochondria.

and then Arnieville (i.e. Depression era Hooverville)

a certain kind of sudden embarrassment, that i call myself a disability service provider and advocate and that i work at a large service agency in SF, but had not gotten over to this traffic island to show my support. the tent city protest has been there for several weeks and will hopefully continue to be there as the budget for in-home care for CA disabled and seniors is facing cuts by %50. why do you see more disabled poeple out and about in CA? because the state in-home care system helps them to live independently in their homes, instead of institutions. please drop by and show your support for that crucial way of life.

Food Not Bombs folks were bringing the Arnieville protesters dinner when we arrived, so they were sort of busy rustling up containers for the change-over of tureens. We gave them some tamales K. made. Met Jean Stewart and Robin Earth from Center for Independent Living Berkeley, said I would make it back soon.

This Saturday, Country Joe McDonald is performing, while the giant paper maiche bloody hatchet Schwarzenegger wobbles along in the median wind. I hope the people who whiz by this strip off of Russell and Adeline get it--it is a small campsite yes, but it is different than other types of sleep-out protests. The sparseness (in terms of tents/protesters) does not mean that the issue is less than vital. These campers are folks who use ventilators, voice machines, electric wheelchairs, etc which is just to say that this type of sleep-out presence as social action/protest is packed with, well-- a lot of presence.

You can find them on Facebook by searching Arnieville. if you cannot make it out of your home or residence, this is a great way to connect and contribute.

come find a new way to fall

This is the YBGF blurb, though now I think we are near 50 dancers, in flocks and pods.

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival & Meet Dancers

Sat. June 26, Shows at 1, 1:50 & 2:40 pm, FREE

Yerba Buena Gardens, SF, CA

Enjoy a new outdoor AXIS piece choreographed by AXIS Associate Director/Dancer Sonsheree Giles including 35 dancers. The performances will be followed by a Meet & Greet with performers/staff/board at Jillians at 3:30pm (no host bar, opportunity to meet and socialize with the company).

more info: www.ybgf.org

Prosthetic arm listens to it s owner

http://www.itsnormal.org/2010/05/prosthetic-arm-that-listens-to-its.html

I want that stupid.

My zombie poem to re-vivify love or domestic partnership came out on the Real Poetik blog today. (Thanks Claire and Lily!--and--check out Claire's reading with Graham Foust at St. Mary;'s May, 2010!)

I wrote this poem in real time and also, in thinking about Bhanu's "prebiotic" "dead book" especially re; the flatlines in relationships. If they were just a strict cardio measure, the body between the two bodies, made of the routines of the two bodies, would cease to exist.

Instead maybe "It’s the place where something stirs." It, the relationship, remains undead and zombies are truly lovable in a plain way that is hard to explain. Bhanu says, "when I show my work to friends, they suggest: “more details.” Or: “It’s a bit flat.” I am learning to retrain the automata of lyric events in my work, and this interview helps. It helps me with the part of species/sentence transformation that depends upon imperceptible events held in an early field. Writing books that deflect reading, that don’t attract it as a sexual relation (between the reader and the writer) is, perhaps, disgusting, boring and stupid. I want that stupid." [This from an interview Drew Krewer at http://marspoetica.net/2010/02/20/imaginative-interview-bhanu-kapil/.]

hawking alien ethics

Stephen Hawkings says there are def. aliens and that they will def. want to kill us.

does it make me a silly naive nonprofit type idealist--to think that the aliens would NOT be mean? is that why I am surprised by Hawking's assertions? because of course the aliens would be mean--that is the realists' conclusion....

note that i am not doubting the existence of said aliens, but whether they would be nice or mean.

is it clear that i am very tired? this is not a joke, folks.

but considering that both Hawkings and i are a kind of political minority that is akin to earth-aliens, it seems in his best interest, to assert/bank on other odds--that aliens will be useful, friendly and all about not obliterating difference.

or is this really about survival? Hawkings theory...when you feel yourself to be the kind of political minority (disabled person, illegal alien, what have you) subject to predation and ignorance (which is a form of becoming prey....)

There is part of me that thinks I am SO tired that I have been fooled and this article is on some kind of site like the Onion, because I am zombie-processing what's on my screen right now....

Accion of the day.....

Tax dollar vote:

A: Terminator to surveil the retinas and map the fingerprints of seniors and people with disabilites--$5 million dollar military-style cmaeras will insure that absolutley no governemnt money is being wasted on fraud while quadreplecig business professionals receive their morning asisstance from toilet to shower and old ladies get help in heating a cup of tea for lunch. (http://www.sacbee.com/2010/03/20/2620537/high-tech-fix-wont-stop-ihss-fraud.html)

B: Talking infared computer pens reveal the layers of info embedded in periodic tables and soon--train station maps--for the visually impaired scientist or traveler. Or any student, really, who can more readily grasp the boxy reality of how carbon is a tree is hydrogen is a montain when it is revealed in strata of audo-tactile graphics.

You choose.

Maybe there can be a C.

C. Vidal Sassoon, once a member of the 43 Group, a Jewish veterans' militia organisation that broke up Fascist meetings, said, on a recent Studio 360 broadcast, "I don't get blown away by the movie stars because I've seen them all with their hair down...But, a great architect...I'll go out of my way..." he muses on about Bauhaus and such, the lightness of a building that one feels they can lift off the street, and then he says "People say to me, 'What do you design for?'To make people look pretty?' No, I design for their bone structure. If I can design something that makes someone feel and look different because of their individual bone structure, then I've been successful."

I think a lot about integrated medicine or alternative healing centers for people with disabilities--but then hearing old Sassoon, I was suddenly inside steel and light and a clean new bob (thanks Mom), I was dreaming about hairdressers styling for osteoporosis, Paget's and Marfan's disease. How to create a facade (as hair is) for an aberrant structure, one that is really complement to that architecture? (Suddenly recalling when I was 12 in New Orleans and had to be in the Juvenille Rheumatoid Arthritis tween girl fashion show and I threw a fit about the shapelessness of the easy to put-on Velcro dresses. My mom was appalled at my behavior; now I can couch snobbery in a poetics at least...not that I am uber couture--I do pride myself on wearing the same old jeans to work every day, because they fit nice.)

Maladaption!

in which lots of money goes into research to indicate that people with Rheumatoid Arthritis are "maladaptive" "catastrophizers"

http://rawarrior.com/does-rheumatoid-arthritis-pain-really-hurt-that-much/

“The findings suggest that RA patients display a fairly general hyperalgesia to mechanical and thermal stimuli across several body sites.” Hyperalgesia is an abnormally high sensitivity to pain. In other words, it’s a low pain threshold. These doctors claim that “maladaptive physiological responses to stress” play a part in the hyperalgesia of RA."

Seems like they could have used this money to modify moon boots for people who experience joint damage any time they engage in any basic weight-bearing activity. (James, I know NASA sent you those rocks, will they send me footwear?) But maybe its cheaper to prove that everyone is just a wimp?

In other news, the sky is falling and I have a hang nail.

Parallel parallel Lingis chart

Dear Alphonso Lingis,

I wanted to say--bring out that amputee again! The one with the knife tricks in Rio, who made the tourists feel as if they could go home to clean suburbs and have a little empathy for "disfigured"and "crippled' peoples. Oh, but you see, I put too hard a read on that, do not let myself stay soft, with awe. Get tripped up in reacting, quietly, to what I heard--a narration that took all its import from the the use of the disabled spectacle....

In trying to locate the gratitude in that language...I decide you were aiming to create a vessel for awe. Which is why I did not speak up. Because, I felt a bit silenced--I looked a little too much like the vessels you used for your ideas, to feel that I could speak. It would be kind of weird to out myself as the awe.

But, certainly, I know what you mean by the awe. Though it is taboo for me to admit it in disability community circles--I feel it when I am with someone more "disabled" than I. Because I stand so much closer to their place on a spectrum and still, have to stretch my somatics to imagine....and then, the joy, that we all persist and create (even when we don't) and do clever tricks with blades.

Tricks...there was a kind of circusy vibe to your talk, I think....

Which is OK. Defetishize the freaks, break the container of the individual "sufferer"! Let there be larger, more intimate containers for other mixings....So, my offering, at least in gesture: bring out the Brazilian armless man again! Invite him to do a collaborative improv on some island you have yet to visit (Can we get him there on a Fulbright? --check out www.miusa.org..Can he get a gig with AXIS dance--especially the insects/prosthetics dance?) And then, let's talk bodies and phenomenology!

* * *

Some notes to myself after the Alphonso Lingis talk at the Poetics of Healing Symposium (3/3/10):

It is a mysterious process, this reading and responding with written individualized feedback to [med] students’ reflective narratives as we accompany them on their journey of personal and professional identity development. Rita Charon captured the awe: "What a remarkable obligation toward another human being is enclosed in the act of reading or listening" (1, p.53) This became my mantra as I diligently typed at my computer, striving to craft meaningful, quality feedback to the students’ narratives that had sailed across cyberspace to land on my screen. I tried hard to establish a "comfort zone", a trusting "mentor" relationship where an embryo doc could safely share vulnerabilities and uncertainties, personal angst and yes, triumphs, dramatic moments and perhaps even more meaningfully, everyday moments of caring that should be recognized by a self-aware, mindful practitioner (student and teacher alike). And, I learned, it wasn't a bad idea to keep "oven mitts" (2) nearby for the "hot" stuff, the personal and/or professional content that can be challenging for both writer and reader, albeit less frequently encountered. Life is not sanitized, homogenized, or neatly packaged. Neither are narratives.

[ ]

Rita Charon appreciated the value of considering the nuance and texture of patients' experiences of illness as well as what students themselves were undergoing in providing patient care, even though "you cannot write that in the hospital chart, we will not let you". (1, p.156) "And yet", she instructed clerkship students (and later, residents as well), "it has to be written somewhere. You write it in the parallel chart" (1, p.156) In similar fashion, I suggest, the teacher's experience of the student's narrative, of the student's "narrative writing in the service of the care of a particular patient" (1, p.157) can be considered a "parallel 'parallel chart'". In essence, my narrative writing evoked by the student's text is in "the service of the care of a particular student", regardless of whether all of it or none of it appears in my formal written feedback. “The Parallel Parallel Chart”, Commentary by Hedy S. Wald, Ph.D., Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI. Literature, Arts and Medicine blog.

Petra Kuppers on her boredom with disability disclosure and how she favors a transforming of personal illness/injury narratives into an immediate sensory group artwork.

The vessel as matter: deterritorialising and reterritorialising, familiar and strange, shaping into form, and shaped out of formlessness, fired in the light and baked in the earth’s darkness, hardened only to crumble and crack again with the ages, returning to dust. These disclosures are in time and space—they are not narratives that create an archive or a body of knowledge. They breathe, and vibrate, and press against skin. What can be contained, what leaks, what finds its way through the membrane? [“your darkness also/rich and beyond fear”: Community Performance, Somatic Poetics and the Vessels of Self and Other.]

My question.

When does an architecture of devastation—the changed body after illness or through persisting low grade illness that has been assimilated as process—become another kind of architecture? When does such an architecture, a ruin/a body become something that far exceeds its history, a (de)structure exploding with futurity?

Orbitouch and Datahand

I have been on the search for new ways to type. It would change my life--the exacting, limting equation between time I spend typing, creative works and work-works I accomplish, and the toll it takes on my body.

K. showed me these two options. I already use an onscreen keyboard with a touch screen, but I am very slow at it, so it makes it difficult to sue when I I want to get something done fast or am ina hurry to meet deadlines at work.

Orbitouch seems a bit cumbersome, but perhaps more intuitive than an on screen keyboard witha touch screen, because it does not require vision (at least i think it doesn't...would have to ask some friends to test it...

Datahand is more old school, circa 1995. However, it may be easier to adjust to than the Orbitouch. It requires less shoulder motion, but does require that you have all ten fingers. Curiously, it costs a lot--more than an OSK and touch screen, which seems weird. K. says it is simply because supply and demand is low--marketing never overcame the leanring curve and reached the right consumers.

When will the exoskeleton get DME status?

From: kyle

Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 1:57 AM
To: 'amber dipietra'
Subject: exo
Importance: High

berr,

exoskeleton.

allows the wearer to carry extremely heavy loads, as it redirects the weight towards the ground.

it also allows the wearer to run faster (the video said 7mph for long durations, and 10mph in bursts).

am i the only one who sees implications for physically disabled people?

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-ru4uxdatnya/mfc_hulc_terminator_becomes_a_reality/

Ohmn nom nom

Zombie folk rock meets Office Space. Jonathan Coulton's zombies stagger around a mall, but I prefer to think of it as an airport.



This has inspired a part II to the emo poem I wrote when K and I first met. Now, five years into the relationship, it's all about the undead. Here's part of it:


After 1

Remove contact
cataract night glasses

K’s mouth
is just a black
hole in his face

dream I ate his brain
and our fight
diffused by morning

4686868 bytes transmitted in
58 seconds our brain,
the cat puts a parasite in

so we love him more, suffer
the rug with litter and
his gastric juices

Shadow, the oldest cat K brought
to our cohabitance and a corpse
already under the floorboard

heart heart
burrow in
become zero

Monsters and Models and Mutant DNA or Aliens, Ordinary Girls and Auxiliary Bodies

This comment is from an article on how disability figures in the new film Avatar--in which a paraplegic lead character is able to merge his mind with a proxy body thanks to recombinant DNA.

J. Scott Richards, director of research at the Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Center at the University of Alabama, said Sully's character flaws in "Avatar" also made the film appealing.

"The other thing that people in wheelchairs might appreciate is having a key character who is not a super achiever," said Richards, who counsels patients after spinal cord injuries.

Richards said Hollywood portrays extremes when it shows characters with disabilities: "A physically achieving athlete in a wheelchair, or the opposite end of that -- someone who is miserable and has a horrible life.

"I'd much rather see the middle of the road. Where people are just people but they happen to be in a wheelchair," he said.

The oddest thing is--alongside this view point, just to the left of the actual paragraph containing the comment by Richards, is a glossy headshot of Muha as Miss Wheelchair USA.

Muha does say of the Avatar paraplegic character, "He would rather stay on this island with smoke monsters than go back to Earth in a wheelchair," said [Satina] Muha. "Me? I would pick to stay here with my friends and family."

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/wheelchair-users-applaud-avatars-parapalegic-character/story?id=9505175

Dancing with Disability/Pushing Limits KPFA

Listem

Radio Collage With Adrienne Lauby, Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, Lakshmi Fjord and Amber DiPietra(music from Mindy Dillard). Many thanks to P and N for dancing with me, and thanks to Adrienne for getting me back in the recording studio!

Humanimal lives!

Now available from Kelsey Street Press

Humanimal, A Project for Future Children

Bhanu Kapil

Order with free shipping http://www.kelseyst.com/publications/humanimal.htm

In this new prose document, Bhanu Kapil follows a film crew to the Bengal jungle to re-encounter the true account of two girls found living with wolves in 1921. Taking as its source text the diary of the missionary who strove to rehabilitate these orphans—through language instruction and forcible correction of supinated limbs—Humanimal functions as a healing mutation for three bodies and a companion poiesis for future physiologies. Through wolfgirls Kamala and Amala, there is a grafting: what scars down into the feral opens out also into the fierce, into a remembrance of Kapil’s father who survived a brutal childhood in rural India to become the headmaster of Beaconsfield Primary School in Southall, Middlesex. The humanimal text becomes one in which personal and postcolonial histories cross a wilderness to form supported metabiology. “Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed.”

Bhanu Kapil has written three full-length prose/poetry works: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), and Humanimal, a Project for Future Children (Kelsey Street Press, 2009). Born in the UK to Indian parents, Bhanu lives in Colorado , where she teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She also maintains a blog, devoted to quotidian and hybrid behaviors of all kinds.www.jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.com

What are the limits of cruelty in what passes for love or civilization? The implications of even asking these and other questions are fully explored in this startling and informative text. Bhanu Kapil’s artful combination of documentary, poetic and narrative genres into an anatomy of human wildness is absorbing. This book is compassionate and savage; a physical act, filled with risks and satisfactions. “Each feral moment is valuable.”

-Laura Moriarty

In the famous story of the “Bengali wolf girls”—Kamala and Amala, found running wild in 1921 and “recuperated” to Indian society—poet and novelist Bhanu Kapil has found her ideal subject. To recreate a vanished era of colonial rigidity, Kapil travelled to Midnapure with a camera crew, and revisited the sites of the girls’ capture and torturous domestication. Can one reach back through time? Can one move forward after such horror? If you stick a girl in a dress, can you eradicate her animal?

-Dodie Bellamy

News from KSP, Links for the arrival of Humanimal

Humanimal, A Project for Future Children

From Kelsey Street Press

Mid-June 2009

In anticipation of Bhanu’s newest “prose document”, I wanted to take a moment to invite KSP readers to check out a couple things on our web site.

Go to our podcast page to hear Bhanu reading a special, altered version of Humanimal. www.kelseyst.com/listen/2009/05/28/humanimal-bhanu-kapil/

On our blog, find a link to Laynie Brown’s recent article for the Poetry Foundation on voice in Bhanu’s work. www.kelseyst.com/news/2009/05/28/into-the-wild/

Stay tuned to order Humanimal (with free shipping)!

Kelsey Street Press has been publishing innovative work by women writers and artists since 1974. To explore our catalog or sign up for this mailing list, visit www.kelseyst.com