Content Resolution: Learning

I think I need an angle for this blog, like some combination of the above topics that play into and off my experience. Metawriting isn't cutting it anymore.

Content Crisis

Okay, so I want to blog more. I really do,. However, I'm not sure WHAT to blog about. I am fascinated by these things:

poetry,
politics,
trans and queer issues,
music,
creative nonfiction,
journalism,
the media,
science,
the natural world,
food,
family,
economics,
education,
atheism,
spirituality.

That's a lot to fit into a single blog. But they're all related (somehow, I am sure), so I think that's still almost okay.

I want to blog about these things. I also want to stop wasting my time posting about them on Facebook, since I only get a handful of likes (and one of them is me!) and rarely comments whenever I post anything that has to do with this stuff. So maybe I can have better conversations on this thing.

I'm also going to start a second blog for innocuous little creative things. Stay tuned.

Blogging.

Z

New Stuff Coming up the Pipe

Heyo,

It's been almost half a year since I posted anything here. Not dead, not silent. Many things have happened. I'll spare you the mundane details, but in a quick list:

stopped writing poetry,
was accepted into the MFA program at Oregon State University for creative nonfiction,
graduated grad school round 1 and nabbed my MA in English,
discovered Fleetwood Mac
hostessed a party dressed congruently with my identified gender,
got a letter from my therapist recommending me for hormone replacement therapy (!)
moved to Oregon,
changed labels from transsexual to transgender to bigender to trans to transfeminine (blog post coming about this soon),
got a job in the Writing Center,
started writing poetry again.

Between hormones letter and moved to Oregon, my Dad died. I'm not in shock anymore. I'm not angry anymore. I'm not in denial anymore either. I'm in the place where you remember the person for who they were, warts and all, good times and bad, and learn a lot about them by talking to relatives. I'm at the point where his death inspires me to do and not do things. The point where you let go of a lot of garbage you didn't know you were carrying around until you knew you could throw it out. The place where you both weep as the ashes disappear in the wind, and search for a good place to keep the cardboard box that holds them: in the closet? In the basement? Maybe bury them at some yet to be found scenic locale?

That place. I start school again in a month. I know I can't hurry this up. I'm sure he'll make it into my thesis more than I'd like. I hope I can treat him fairly when the time comes.

That's a lot of life happening up there. Probably pretty boring to read in list form, honestly. But too much to cover in a blog post. These things are supposed to be entertaining on some level, yes? Balance the self-obsession with some quirky stylistic or formal play? Zap the mundane with the extraordinary or collide the extravagant with the dull? Explode? Implode? Just plode? I've ploded enough for a while.

The major point I'd like to convey right now is this:

I owe Rebecca a breakdown/explanation/investigation into my understanding of my gender identity from like a year ago. I'll be posting about that soon. 

Working name: Zia. I want to expand it. More syllables, before or after.

~Z

Facebook vs Blog vs Applications vs 1965 Miles Davis

If you want a soundtrack, here's some moody jazz. I think it sounds like what's been happening between my ears since February 22nd, when the conference turned to shit, then the magazine arrived damaged, then the big conference disappointed, then the rejections came rolling in. Result of MFA/PhD application season: three MFA waitlists. There are both better and worse results than this. Somehow this result refuses to elate.

Not much to celebrate these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn2JdkTv78

How to Write What You Came Here to Write: An Attempt at Writing AT the Definition of "Writing At"

In order to write something close to what you really want to write, you must push. You must write something that sounds like something you would write. Then You must write more--you must get bored with the way you write, and try something else. Abandon complete sentences. Delay the settling of syntax. Delay the completion of the thought. Allow the gaze to focus, then dilate and take in unexpected things, and allow those unexpected things in, onto the word-receptacle. Allow yourself to abandon your original purpose. Let the newness arrive in its bloody mess.

30 in 30 Challenge: Approach

Once a season, local poets in Flagstaff, AZ, challenge each other to write 30 poems in 30 days. In the spirit of starting the new year off in a new way by making new stuff, yep, I'm in. Time for this. 

The 30 in 30 Mindset is not necessarily to write 30 perfectly beautiful poems in a row. The goal is to get back into the habit of writing often in order to free up the pen some--write even when you don't think you have anything to say, force yourself through rough spots where you would usually stop writing, try new things that pressureless you would avoid.

With 30 poems looming ahead, the pressure to be awesome kind of disappears, and I tend to write my best stuff with just that amount of pressure: write something, and let it be awful if it wants to be. The value is in the practice, the scrimmage, the skirmishing of forces--not necessarily the product. 

In a word: experimentation. In a phrase: invite the new, no matter how it arrives. In an exclamation: Hooray! A poem has been made! This in itself has value--the appearance of one poem usually signals the presence of others.

If this last year can function as any kind of lesson, the piece of advice Matt Larrimore offered me in July holds true: sometimes you gotta write through the yuck before the gold starts to appear.

Side note: I love writing prompts like these, wherein I am commanded to write, but not what about, and the quality does not matter. I suppose its more an exercise than a process then. And I could use the exercise. I haven't written a new poem since November.

Hopefully, this 30 in 30 will provide a double-writing-whammy. I'll get to write more poems, and I'll also be providing myself with writer-stuff to blog about. Process, instances, brief discussions with the muse, things I love in other poems, the experiments failed, the experiments succeeded, the way there and the there too. 

So I'll be updating more soon. 

-Hope (not bad)

Revision

I think we can revise ourselves. I think we do this every day we interact with anynone, or make a different decision than usual. In the spirit of new year, new thoughts, new ways, etc, I'd like to briefly revise yesterday's unfocused post about rumors, to revise myself a bit.

Goodbye Pork Pie Year / Meta-Discussion about Genitalia

2012, I don't want to say you were completely awful.

Here is Charles Mingus and his band playing the title-song. Background music for this post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sfe_8RAaJ0

Names

So I'm experimenting with names now.

Some I've found that I enjoy:

MFA / PhD Applications...DONE! Also, Three Lists

*giant exhale, not a sigh*

Woke up super early to mail packets before the holiday cut off for overnight shipping, glad I asked about it on Saturday. Mailed rec letter sent to me for me to send to program. Called around to places to make sure they had everything assembled. Checked up on rec letter submissions, everything is as expected. Called clearinghouse about transcripts. Checked bank account to see if the GRE folks (ETS) had taken out their money yet, samesies for transcript folk. Crossed off last items on last lists.

Everything made it in on time! The statements of purposes; the transcripts unofficial, the transcripts official; the single goals statement; the rec letters; the GRE scores; the poetry work samples; the nonfiction work samples; the combined-but-not-interspersed poetry-and-nonfiction work samples; the writing samples critical, expository, and analytical; the teaching assistant applications; the teaching philosophies; the teaching statements; the statements of interest; the CVs; the cover sheets and cover letters; the pdfs; the pdfs that couldn't be filled out electronically and thus were printed, filled out by hand, scanned, and emailed; the documents uploaded, the documents mailed; the documents literally cut and pasted on top of one another  and scanned (thanks Ben!);  the online graduate college applications; the paper department applications; the payments!

Speaking of the payments...

A list for those who may want to do this sometime: Total Expenses

December 18th Update

So I haven't blogged since the semester kicked into gear. What a time, what a time.

Here is an experiment in how to summarize four months' worth of life-altering events in a single post. First thing: you condense time. Second: elements must recur for a secret narrative to tremble below the surface. Third: be honest and choose your details wisely.

Against "Faith"

I have been trying to put my thoughts about the irredeemably bad nature of religious thought into words for so long, and I just saw a post on Facebook that beat me to it. These first three paragraphs mirror my thoughts exactly. Post starts "In another thread, we are discussing atheism and anti-theism..." on December 18th (today).

http://www.facebook.com/TABCP
Yes I am atheist. Yes I am anti theist also. I will not censor my beliefs to comfort those who feel threatened by my ideas.

Though I only have personal experience with how Catholicism can ravage lives, the same idea holds true for all faiths: they deny reality in order to preserve beliefs. I feel fine making that generalization about all religions. And that is the problem: a distance from reality is sought, and it never makes things better. That distance allows religion, via faith, to interfere with the mind's sense-making apparatus, so that people will act in the best interest of the religion instead of in the best interests of themselves and other people. It took me years to intellectually become an atheist, and I still find myself trying to rid myself of the destructive emotional effects that exposure to religion at a young age enacted upon my mind (guilt issues, self-esteem issues, paranoia, fear of self-assertion, etc.).

What I love about this post so much is that it pinpoints faith as the primary problem, and religion as simply symptomatic of the faith pathogen.

I hope I'm not preaching exclusively to the choir here. I have had many conversations recently about the evils of religion, and always backed down when people say "Oh, well, it works for some people," and I can't deny that some people think religion does them good (besides not wishing to engage in the absurdity of refuting the hypothetically beneficial experiences of hypothetical people). But keeping faith-as-distancer-from-reality in mind, it becomes apparent that even if the short-term emotional gains of feeling secure and feeling comforted and feeling moral that arise from faith are what "work for some people," even if faith creates a belief in a better reality than the present one, in the long term the effect of faith (and religious practice as its proxy) is a slowly increasing loss of the ability to engage with reality in a rational manner.

If faith is needed for the world to be good, or for a person to feel their existence is validated, then for the believer there exists a much larger perceptual problem: why is the world or the self in need of validation in the first place? Why must people wait for death in order for good things to start happening? Faith asks people to become non-actors and wait for someone / something else to change things.

Religion (faith's proxy) plays on insecurities and gaps in understanding. Becoming comfortable with the imperfect nature of reality allows for both more reasonable expectations of behavior in people and a higher frequency of experiencing wonder. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean there is no way we can. Just because there is wickedness in the world does not mean the whole of existence is flawed and in need of redemption.

Faith short-cuts the critical thinking apparatus, and places false answers designed to satisfy people emotionally erroneously in the places we seek intellectual answers. I think this is why faith is so hard to abandon. It is more emotional than intellectual. And emotional suffering is a brutal thing indeed. If you think of it this way, faith functions much like paranoia, creating a feedback loop of fear and alleviation of that fear (fear of not being good, of not acting good, fear of the unknown in death, fear of loss of faith, fear of loss of the validation religion and faith provide, etc), like a mental illness. The mind becomes a prisoner of faith. The inspiring part is that the mind is also the warden of said prison. You can unlock the door anytime you want.

To my religious friends, please, if you value your mind and its sovereignty, religion can only hurt you. Get out as soon as you can. I can guarantee you will find the better world you seek.

Not sure why I felt inspired to write this now, but I did, and so there's that. Maybe it's because of all the stupid Christmas garbage I'm surrounded with this time of year. Anyway, that's my reaction to this neato post.

-J

BTW, I am experimenting with female names in my personal emails, so I figured where better than this place? New names to come. Fell free to leave comments on them!

-Ylia

Republicans Finally Out of the Closet: GOP Opposes Critical Thinking

Neruda will have to wait. I just saw this infuriating piece of nonsense today.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/news/2012-06-27/gop-opposes-critical-thinking/

Here's Richard Whitaker of the Austin Chronicle quoting from the Texas GOP's official platform.

Pablo Neruda

I believe my next post will be about Pablo Neruda, and how he makes poetry seem both easy and impossible.

Until then, here is a rather pleasant translation of one of his early poems, by Stephen Mitchell. Found in the anthology, Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. I think I would let that fourth stanza do whatever it wanted with me, and then invite the fifth and the sixth over for dinner. Would?

"Walking Around

It so happens that I'm tired of being human.
It so happens that I enter tailor shops and movie theaters
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
sailing on a lake of origin and ashes.

Psychic Telephone Service

My friend Rosemary just suggested I start a psychic telephone service.

Sleep, Kenneth Koch

I'm sick today.

Whipping Girl

Reading a trans manifesto / collection of critical essays on feminism / gender mindfuck in a desperately needed way. Called Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. It's blowing my mind. Dissecting sexism and privilege into 3 major camps. Promoting a bimodal distribution pattern for the relationship between gender expression and biological sex. Identifying and undermining both cultural and personal patterns of cissexual privilege and transphobia. If any of this stuff interests you, reader, by all means, this book is a gem.

Hurm. Stakes, Dean Young, and Unblocking.

Hokay. So, I don't want this space to turn into a gripe-fest. Practically, based on my last two posts, it has. Ultimately, though, the idea is less about whining and more about writing. Let's talk a little about block, stakes, and why I have always been secretly attracted to Dean Young.

Life as of 8-2, Like a Geode

So I haven't done anything writerly for a while. No poems, no essays, no stories. I may be blocked, but block implies I've been trying to write. Sometimes you need a break, even from things you enjoy. Makes me remember why I enjoy them when I come back. Assuming I do come back.

Life as of 6-30-2012

Some people say "Write what you know" is the mantra of all successful writers. Other like to say things about how you won't be producing interesting writing unless you are living an interesting life, getting new experiences all the time. Others say, Fuck it, just write.

I've been living a very interesting life as of late, but it has been keeping me from producing writing at all. I don't think I am the sort of person who writes about what is happening to them. Usually.