Although the boxing gym looks nothing like this, there's still a bit more fighting involved than I prefer.

On Monday, I went with three other EWU MFAers to a boxing gym. I know this sounds like the start of a joke – four writers walk into a boxing ring and – but it’s not. My friends joined the gym at the start of the quarter and have been working out there three times a week. At a party last weekend, they were singing the praises of the experience and I, a few drinks deep, said something along the lines of “Take me with you! I wanna punch some bitches!” So on Monday, they took me with them.

I got an introductory lesson on how to stand, how to protect my face, and how to throw a punch. This was pretty rad. I’m sure to anyone watching, I looked like a giant Gumby doll wearing boxing gloves – floppy, too-long limbs folded at awkward angles. But just being in a real boxing ring with my fists up made me feel kind of tough and cool. Plus, my tiny, feisty girl instructor shouted “get your shit together” every time I lost my balance, which is a surprisingly effective instruction. I wish some one would come by my desk once an hour and say it to me while I write. Anyway, it was a great workout. Afterward, the gym’s owner pulled me aside and asked me how I liked it and if I wanted to join the gym. I told him I did like it, but I would have to think about it.

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No one likes to be misunderstood.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

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We made it through November and December unscathed by the snow. But now we’ve reached January and the snow came with a vengeance last week. Since I’m from the Midwest, snow does not scare me. In fact, I enjoy it. It’s pretty and it makes the cold that much more bearable. The snow reminds you that it’s winter, and it’s not just cold out of spite. Now, I’m not saying that I love snow, I’m not a winter sportswoman or anything like that, but it’s okay. Anyway, my point is that in the Midwest, we prepare for the snow. It’s not a matter of if it snows but when. Spokane has not had this realization yet. Snowplowing in Spokane is something saved for the apocalypse. It’s a friggin’ mess out there.

So in honor of the winter colors outside, the melting slush and muck, here are some songs about winter. Read more »

Did you know that coffee is actually a fruit and not a bean? What a wonderful world.

I was raised Mormon, so there was never any coffee around my house growing up. I always enjoyed the smell whenever we ran across it in Einstein’s Bagels or at the airport, but the drink according to our faith was strictly prohibited, as were alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. While I have abandoned my Mormon faith, I still observe most of the dietary restrictions—a nod to my culture, I guess—all except for coffee, which I now drink every morning.

It was a chain of events that led to my first cup: For reasons that I will never understand, upon entering college the first class I signed up for was Macroeconomics 256 at 8 a.m., a class that would earn me the lowest grade of my scholastic career (C+). This was due, in no small part, to the timing of the class in conjunction with my habit of spending the small hours of the morning playing Chutes and Ladders at various 24-hour diners. My first cup of coffee was actually a cappuccino that I picked up a drive-thru place, Café Expresso (stet), on my way to that class. On Fridays, I would reward myself with a café mocha.

When I drank my first cup of regular joe, however, it was a year later when I was taking Intro to Creative Writing. At night, I would walk down to the 7-11 and buy a cup for a buck-seventeen, and I’d sneak it down to my basement room where I would sit at my desk and write little stories and poems or exercises for the weekly class. At the time, I loved the process of sitting down and pounding out a story. I would sit there for four or five hours—the coffee, long since cold—till the draft was done. Read more »

The Digital City, darkened.

Wikipedia has gone dark today. So has Reddit. So have news sites like Raw Story. They’re all protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and its counterpart the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), both pieces of legislation currently under consideration by Congress. SOPA/PIPA would impose harsh new restrictions on web content and online sourcing, effectively forcing websites — including this one — to become copyright police. Intellectual property enforcers. Private-enterprise agents of censorship. SOPA/PIPA would impose vicious penalties on those who so much as link an article or quote from a news story without paying, thereby making ventures such as the ill-storied copyright troll RightHaven a very lucrative pursuit, indeed. You can read a detailed summary of the bills and their implications here.

I recently read a friend from my undergrad years, posting on Facebook. He referred to the idea of a “post-scarcity economic paradigm,” in response to SOPA/PIPA. Post-scarcity economic paradigm. It’s a turn of phrase I’m sure my friends with Economics degrees would find laughable, but regardless, we live in the Age of Information, the Age of Anonymous, the Age of Cyberdissent. If you Bark, if you Twitter, if you Google or Wiki or YouTube anything in this day and age, you’re dealing in information — a commodity which has no scarcity, which has no real allocation or redistribution model. It is viral, in the truest sense of the word, spreading from host to host invisibly. More to the point, like every good virus, the content changes as it moves. Everything now is a cover, or a parody, or a mashup, or a backlink, or a remix of some other piece of content.

And congratulations, by the way: if you’re seeing this page, you’ve just become a vector. Read more »

I got this image from somebody else's Facebook page. Is that Internet piracy?

You’ll have to excuse me, I’m a bit out of touch here. I spent the three-day weekend visiting friends in San Francisco  and only went online once (just to check my e-mail) while I was out of town. This was nice. But then, when I got back yesterday, I discovered that in my absence, THE INTERNET HAD EXPLODED.

This happens from time to time.

About once a month, my most “political” of Facebook friends and Twitter followees (what the hell do you call the people you follow on Twitter?) get all agitated about some event/law/idea/video/weather forecast that, if not stopped/remedied/responded to immediately, will lead to all of us living in a fascist police state. They post petitions to sign, link to inflammatory articles, and compose urgent 140 character manifestos. I’ve heard this behavior – getting all riled up online, but then not actually doing anything more – called “slacktivism”* and I think that’s pretty much spot-on. Fervor for the slacktivist cause of the month usually evaporates in a day or two** without the issue having been resolved, or the country turning into a fascist police state. Oh, the complexities of modern democracy, blah blah blah.

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“Once someone passes away they’re open to interpretation.”

So says Daphne Williams Fox, the grand-daughter of William Carlos Williams, as she responds to the new Herbert Leibowitz book on her famed ancestor.   Leibowitz suggests that the Rutherford physician had an unconsummated affair with a Dadaist artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — and with names like these their mere introduction to one another probably sucked all the oxygen from the room.   And can you imagine what might have passed for flirtatious chatter between the two poets, The Mind’s Games?

If a man can say of his life or
any moment of his life, There is
nothing more to be desired!  his state
becomes like that told in the famous
double sonnet — but without the
sonnet’s restrictions.  Let him go look…

Looking, of course, is always an option, and Williams undoubtedly engaged in the activity a lot.  His optic nerve never grew tired.   A coastline?   “Today small waves are rippling…”   Tomatoes?  “Green/ in one basket and, in/ the other shining reds.”   Violets?   “Once in a while/ we’d find a patch… big blue/ ones in/ the cemetery woods…”   An old brownstone church?   “Among a group/ of modern office buildings…”   Look!  Look!  Look!   And finally–Look!

But what happens when someone looks back?   When the writer as observer or as imaginator becomes the one who is seen and known and, as Daphne admits, “open to interpretation”?   My sense is that creative writing, as a discipline, has no clear-cut answer.   Nor does the practice of crafting a simple declarative sentence that is true come with an operators‘ manual.   No safe place exists for us — not even the library, not even the local delicatessen.   Those people behind the reference desk are always watching.  Those slicing lunchmeat have built-in baloney-detectors.   And so, the conundrum that fascinates Leibowitz in telling the tale of William Carlos Williams is also the issue that Leibowitz himself may encounter some day.  (He can only hope!)
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Moose loves public space

Every morning, Moose and I walk along Pacific Avenue in Browne’s Addition, Spokane. At the western end of the street, where Pacific becomes Coeur D’Alene, is a small, fenced-in yard where Moose chases sticks and does his business. There I meet other owners, but never learn their names—like Keeper’s mom, or Sam’s dad. We are, for the most part, apartment dwellers, so our dogs don’t have access to their own yards. And, with the surplus of squirrels in Browne’s, a place where I know he can’t take off (unlike Coeur D’Alene park) is a wonderful asset to the community.

The yard, rumor has it, used to be attached to the house next door. When the owner died, he unofficially left it to the community—unofficially so that it wouldn’t be controlled by the city. Instead, he asked his friend and neighbor who still lives two houses down, to take care of it—watering, mowing the grass, raking the leaves—so people had some green space to take their dogs, or whatever. Read more »

her, maybe

I have a strained relationship with writing exercises. The whole idea—the open-ended prompt, the furious silence in the room while the pens scratch the paper, the cramps between the knuckles, and most of all the sharing that follows—thinking about this feels, to me, like thinking about a girl who I might’ve had a crush on in high school. In retrospect, the whole business seems like evidence of my poor taste. Writing exercises are that person who you desperately hoped wouldn’t friend you. But then they did.

Now that I am teaching undergrad creative writing classes, I find myself in a strange spot. I have zero interest in writing exercises, but I know that my students love them. And I also know that they’re probably good for my students at this stage in their writing lives. They were, with some qualifications (fodder for another post), good for me when I was in their shoes. Incidentally, I also know that many writers far more accomplished than I also love writing exercises, so far from judging the practice, I find that I need to reassess my dislike.

I also need some good writing exercises. That’s where you come in. Read more »

Last year, this adorable little stop-motion video made its way around the interwebs. And we were all very pleased.

This time, same idea, but with an entire bookstore worth of books. It actually saddens me that the video is only two minutes long because I could definitely watch this for hours.