New Web Page

I have my own web page now! I will no longer be posting here. All posts will now be at

www.leilaniclark.com

check it out!

Wanderlust

Been thinking lately about the idea of wanderlust. Is it a malady or a boon? The ultimate literary example of wanderlust is Ishmael, the narrator and protagonist of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Ishmael, who must take himself to see whenever he finds himself "grim of mouth" for fear of knocking the hats off people's heads as he walks down the street.

I can sympathize.

I've moved more times then I can count and find myself wanting to move again.
Feeling the constraints of small town, dreaming of the city, San Francisco, Oakland and all of the adventures I dream await me.

Yet, how many times can one move in a lifetime? Look at the trouble that Ishmael's constant wanderings brought him. He watched all his shipmates die and almost died at the hands of the great white whale. But how boring might his life have been if he stayed on shore?

Frank Bidart

Been reading a collection of poems by Frank Bidart titled Stardust. As I read last night, my eyes fighting sleep, I realized that I rarely read poems because I am lazy. And poems are like puzzles, and you need to concentrate to do puzzles. Here are a few lines from one in the collection I particularly enjoyed deciphering called Advice to the Players:

"But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal."

I like this because it serves as a reminder that we don't have to create epic works of genius to be an acceptable human being. It sometimes can be enough to just breathe into the day, to make art from the moment, to walk in beauty on a dirty sidewalk.

Not really a poem, more like a collection of repetitions, a collection of thoughts about what it is to be a "maker."

Direct Action Against Iraq War on March 19th

March 19 Actions

DIRECT ACTIONS ON THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRAQ WAR: DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO

7:30 am Multiple actions at multiple locations.
Market and Sansome
War machine tours of shame leaving from Market and Sansome throughout the day.

March & Rally to End the War Now!
5 pm
Gather at Civic Center
Polk and Grove Sts., SF
Initiated by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition - San Francisco - (read their call to action)

Rosa Luxemburg

Revolutionary

Born March 5 1871
Died January 15 1919

"The modern proletarian class does not carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation."[4]

Leslie and the LY's

Big girls rule! Leslie's playing at the Rickshaw Stop in SF on March 8th. I'm a steal that gold lame jumpsuit if it kills me.

New College of California

The New College of California, where I am currently working on finishing my MFA, has just lost it's accreditation. A sign of the times and the perfect death to the "Age of Aquarius." I will post a link to the article I wrote about New College's history of bad behavior for the North Bay Bohemian as soon as it comes out.

Freeconomics

I stumbled across this article today by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired: Free: Why $0.00 is the Future of Business
and while I'm still digesting it, here are my inital thoughts.

Now, in all honesty, I'd rather not think about money, advertising, web business and all those things that involve what I perceive to be slimy handed people doing back-alley exchanges that almost always seem to involve the exploitation of people in countries far away. On the other hand, I love the idea of things being free. Free! It makes my heart happy just thinking about things being given away with no money exchanged and no animals hurt in the process. Anderson basically argues that the times they are a changing in terms of the way we look at scarcity and markets.

The things that power the web-storage, processing power and bandwidth-are getting cheaper by the day, according to Anderson, making it feasible for companies like Google and Yahoo to give things away (web space, blogs, etc) for free while still making a profit in other arenas. It's all very clever and insidious, and I think the whole free thing could be used to great effect by us non-Capitalists trying to keep our heads above water in a deeply Capitalist world. (Is it possible to be a non-Capitalist in a capitalist world?)

Thought of the Day

"It doesn't matter how many freedoms you claim-even the freedom to change jobs you hate, even the greedom to vote among corporate-owned representatives-if you can't breathe the air and can't drink the water (except the water they sell you).

From "On Freedom" by Derrick Jensen

Sandwiches

A few sandwiches available at the bookstore cafe near my house

The Charles Bukowski
Hot ham, cheddar, lettuce, tomatos, mayo on rye

(old man sweat, old rotted wine, cigarette butts, warm beer driplets, hooker bum)

Isabel Allende
Vegetarian burger, jalapenos, jack cheese, avocado, lettuce, tomatos, onion, mayo on a whole wheat bun with tortilla chips

(they had to add the tortilla chips. Just because she's Mexican, except she's not, she's Chilean, and I guess vegetarian and healthy according to this sandwich)

Oriana Fallaci
Provolone, pesto, lettuce, tomatos, sprouts on a focaccia roll

(I have to admit, I had to Google this one. Now, I've learned that Oriana Fallaci was a famous journalist who interviewed everyone from the Dalai Lama to Henry Kissinger. As you may have guessed from her sandwich, she was Italian.)

That's her to the right. A good-looking lady, eh?


Leilani Clark
Fried spam, mustard, white bread

(so sick it's delicious)

Bikini Kill Saved Me

In 1993, I was in my late teens and thoroughly obsessed with music. After graduating from high school, I fell in love with “grunge” and male-fronted bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone, Green River, and any artist listed on the Singles soundtrack. But it was a Bikini Kill show in the backyard of a suburban Santa Rosa track home that ultimately altered my relationship to both playing and listening to music as a woman. Through Bikini Kill I discovered Heavens to Betsy (fronted by Corin Tucker who went on to form Sleater-Kinney with Carrie Brownstein of Excuse 17), Team Dresch, Bratmobile, The Third Sex, The Need, Helium, Slant 6 and countless other woman-fronted bands that eventually inspired me to start a fierce band of my own.

Bikini Kill, started in the early nineties in Olympia,Washington, were considered by many to be the forerunners of a movement towards highly-politicized raw feminist punk; they called themselves “riot grrrls.” In the blistering opening anthem “Double Dare Ya,”that kicks off the band's self-titled E.P. lead singer Kathleen Hanna declares over a cacophony of guitar feedback, “We're Bikini Kill! And we want revolution girl style now!” It rings out like an war cry, an invitation to fight a mighty battle. It was a song that spawned a million riot grrrls.

As I did my lonely trudge around the campus of Santa Rosa Junior College, where I was finishing up my second year of community college, I'd see these punk rock goddesses, these “riot grrrls” walking among us mortals with their colored hair and black hoodies emblazoned with the feminist fist of power. They sat on the lawn and smoked cigarettes, taking a break from lives of brazen revolutionary abandon, or so I imagined. I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to live my life outside of the gender norms imposed by society, punk rock style. By spring of 1993 about two months before I moved back to San Diego, I became tentative friends with a girl whose name if I remember correctly was Melissa. She was in with the scene and told me about the Bikini Kill show coming up that weekend. I decided to go, although I was deathly afraid of attending events by myself; it seemed like something I didn't want to miss.

That weekend, I found the innocuous blue stucco house with a white fence where the show was to take place. Melissa sat on a stool outside the gate collecting five dollars from attendees. At the time, that was the going rate for a show with three good bands in someone's backyard. I gave her my money and made awkward small talk for a minute, then entered the backyard. About thirty kids sat on the lawn, on the porch, around the periphery of the yard, waiting for the bands to start. I didn't know anyone. I stood in the corner of the yard and people-watched, praying the bands would begin soon, so I would be alleviated of the pain of not knowing a soul.

It was late in the afternoon and the sun shone weakly as Raooul, an abrasive yet endearing all-girl band from the East Bay, began their set. Two fearless teen singers screeched and pawed their way through rambling out-of-tune songs wracked with sarcasm, boasting and a devil-may-care attitude. I fell right in with their fearless rantings, their ability to scream against the terrible awkwardness and confusion of being a young female in American society. The crowd danced with raucous pleasure as Raooul barreled through a short set of songs, none longer then two minutes.

By the time Raooul finished, the sun was setting and twilight had made the crowd into shadows. Bikini Kill began to set up and I heard the band members talking about how they wouldn't be able to see the instruments in the dark.
“Why don't we pull the cars forward and shine the lights on the band,” suggested a guy with a blue mohawk and a Rancid patch.

Soon, a flood of car headlights illuminated the area where the band would play. Kathleen Hanna, who went on to form feminist electro-pop group Le Tigre, drummer Tobi Vail, guitarist Billy Karren and bassist Kathi Wilcox tuned up quickly, and then blasted into a set of songs that began my re-envisioning what it was to be a woman in modern American society. I was in the midst of a group of traveling feminist warriors, who had been sent to transform me into a warrior myself, singing lyrics that hit me my heart's core. These lyrics castigated rape, body image issues, gender stereotypes alongside full-blown, unfettered rants against patriarchal oppression.

I drank it in—the shining car lights, the dancing crowd, the Santa Rosa night sky. Hanna called out, “Revolution Girl Style!” and we screamed back “Now!” Young punks, male and female, desperately wanting a new way of existing beyond what we had known before. We wanted it so bad. It was like a shot of truth to break up the muddled confusion of teenagedom, the desires to be everything in a world that might offer nothing, the map I needed to create my own way.

Mushroom

I don't tell him how ugly I felt that day as I walked down Valencia Street towards the book store. It wasn't important. What was important was that I had the notion to pick up a a book about living abroad in China. See, this week, I want to research and plan exactly how we will start a new life in Hong Kong. It will work, I tell him. He's scared because he's never done anything like this, and who will take care of the dog while we are gone? My mother, and don't worry, I'll take care of the important things, I tell him.

But then, I remember the garden.

Last spring, I began planning my paradise community garden. I take notes in my mind whenever I pass the abandoned plot of land near our apartment complex. I ache to till and sow until paradise arises as beans, lettuce, peppers and squash. The owner of the land has okayed the project and all I need to do is dig into the dirt and plant some seeds.

But today, I discovered Virginia Woolf. I've listed her books in chronological order by publication date but I thought I would start with Orlando, or To the Lighthouse, or A Room of One's Own, because I own these, and I have never read them. I don't know which to study first, so I study all in fits. And then I lie down and read a book by a different author, one who writes in the present tense, who reminds me more of myself then Virginia Woolf ever will. To this new and different writer I want to say, I understand or, I emphathize, even though my own life experience was never so bad as I remember.

I exaggerate to survive.

Amidst the travel planning, the internet searches, the making of large chicken sandwiches, the feeding of the dog, and the walking through tall green grass damp with morning rain, I forget to tell him how ugly I felt walking along Valencia after sitting next to the pretty girl who writes experimental fiction and remembering that ugly girls are cursed to mediocrity and that mediocrity equals death.

I do tell him about the mushrooms that I saw on my morning walk through the park. He is alarmed and asks me if I ate one. I tell him about Babar, the elephant, who moved to Paris and developed a taste for fine men's clothes, and how the King of Babar's village ate a poison mushroom and in the picture book picture turned shrively and green, then died.

I don't tell him about the mushrooms that I saw in the field where the dog chased the ball. Mushroom villages. Tiny roofs like acorn caps over short beige stems. A mushroom with fine black and white pen lines, turned up at each corner like dainty tea cups. A mushroom like an ice cream cone, layered in black, white and pinkish-beige. A flat-roofed mushroom with unobtrusive construction like the white modernist couch in the shop window by the bookstore on Valencia Street. They, the wall, in between, made of tweezed roots and mushroom tea. Succulents glowed in the window like paradise.

Celebration (The Band not the Song)

I've been listening to Celebration's The Modern Tribe on non-stop rotation for the past few days. Lead by singer Katrina Ford, who recently did a guest vocals on TV on the Radio's latest Return to Cookie Mountain, Celebration combines elements of Sioxie-style goth, a Fela Kuti influenced horn section, and intense, tribal percussion elements, into one grand amalgam. Here, we find songs that could be sung from the tops of mountaintops, a tribute to the world before us--a basketful of crime, war, tempered with the stalwart beauty of nature and the possibilities of human kindness.
I've been following Ford and her organ-stomping bandmate Sean Antanaitis since their early days doing blasting noise punk as the Jaks and in a later incarnation called Love Life, where they paid tribute to the undead ghost of Nick Cave. The Modern Tribe documents a band that has reached a pinnacle. It taps into something primal, the idea of the spirit unbound, and the closeness of humanity with all it's trappings and vestments, to the animal world, and the world of trees lifting towards the sky, our nature as creatures of a wild, unpredictable earth. The German philosopher Hegel wrote of something called the Zeitgeist, which he defined as "the spirit of the age." Celebration ride at the forefront of the Zeitgeist, calling for a new way of being, learning and loving as the system breaks, and societal ruptures knock us further towards the abyss. And they say, Jump.

"If you hear a howl near/It's time to feel, not to fear/If you see Running Bear/Go ahead shake his hand for me."

From "Tame the Savage"

The Voting Conundrum

I don't believe in the system and yet I plan on voting. I feel like I was brainwashed at some point (probably elementary school about the same time that we had to make miniature representations of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria) into thinking that my vote actually counts for something. This is an idea that has proven to be a blatant myth after the last two elections, which were unofficially stolen by our Alfred E. Neuman dictator "leader." Yet, here come the primaries and I find myself weighing who to vote for, without faith in any of them. Somewhere inside my brain, there must be a subconscious desire to feel that I still have some agency in this country, I want to believe the democracy myth, and voting acts as that one frayed root that keeps me connected to the tree. Who am I going to vote for? Does it matter? Not really.

R was Beyond Him

"Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water--endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then--what is R?

"A shutter like a leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying--he was a failure--that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R----"

From "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is like a late but precious discovery. I covet her ability to name things from the subconscious, to name the dark into the light, to capture those moments of life, of thought, of despair and of joy, that I have yet been unable to elucidate. She is doing it for me.

...Manifesto #1

Can you live in a world without creativity? Art, music, words, etc? No. Why? Because within these forms, you are allowed to transcend the drudgerous reality of being human. Through a combination of words, letters, images, notes, harmonies, movement, flashing, toe-tapping, you are able to become as fluid as nature, or ghosts, or heaven, or hell, those things that move in realms outside of your own breathing, shitting, working, bill-paying self.

Double-Consciousness

"Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart life and longing, but shut out from the world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempts, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows."

From "Our Spiritual Strivings"
by W.E.B. Dubois

What's Hardcore?

Democracy Now played "What's Hardcore?" this past Tuesday, after a segment on Somalia. Amy Goodman said the artist's name so fast that she left me wondering who wrote this fucking rad song. Later, while listening to a forum about the San Francisco 8, host Mos Def referred to a rapper named K'Naan. After a bit of google searching, I put two and two together and was stoked to discover that Somali Rapper K'Naan was my mystery artist. He has an album out called "The Dustyfoot Philosopher" which I am going to purchase as soon as I can get myself over the Last Record Store on Mendocino Avenue.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Truly a book for the 21st century. Junot Diaz writes history, diasphora, post-colonial life in America, science fiction nerds, love and violence like the world is on fire (which it is) I recently read a quote about how the sign of genius is being able to hold two completely opposing idea in one's head without going mad and that is what Diaz is able to do in this story of Oscar Wao, the world's biggest Dominican nerd who just wants to be a writer and be in love. He writes of love, sex and all those glorious things that make up life on earth, while incorporating layers of history, politics and seriously ripe dirty language. Yeah!

Crossing the Arid “I”: A Study of Annie Ernaux's Feminist Autobiography Shame

In her essay, “The Universal Subject, Female Embodiment, and the Consolidation of Autobiography,” Sidonie Smith uses the Isak Dinesen short story “The Blank Page” to illustrate the notion that female autobiography can interrupt the expectations of traditional normative masculinity in (western) autobiographical practice. The setting of the Dinesen story is a Spanish convent. Stained with the shed blood of lost virginity, framed wedding night sheets from aristocratic marriages, line the corridors of the convent. Row after row of the sheets tells the same story until one framed sheet appears that is missing blood-it is blank and white. Smith explains the scene thus, “one autobiographical sheet breaks the narrative pattern in its silence in its refusal to be framed the same way.” (3) The sheet, in its silence, interrupts the narrative of female embodiment by not telling the expected story of the wedding night.
Annie Ernaux's Shame, an autobiographical exploration of her childhood and the effect of one traumatic event on her perception of self, interrupts the assumptions of (western) autobiographical practice in the same way as the blank, white sheet interrupts the narrative of female embodiment on the convent walls. Ernaux resists the assumption of an individual self unshaped by environment as well as the elevation of the disembodied 'I' in favor of an “ethnological study of the self” (33) that acknowledges female embodiment as well as the role of societal influence on the formation of self-identity.
The tyranny of the arid “I” is a phrase coined by Sidonie Smith who-inspired by a passage from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own- describes the way the encompassing assumptions of the “I” in (western )autobiographical practice leaves no room for those who do not fit the normative masculinity of that “I.” The tyranny is in the assumption of what and who the “I” is that leaves no room for anyone outside of the normative masculine individuality. The arid “I” is derived from the concept of the disembodied “I,” a notion that began in the Renaissance when the concepts of the individual and of a universal human subject grew in stature. The dominance of the idea of the self-defining individual expanded with the 18th and 19th centuries, until a standing universal subject became a common assumption of intellectual and philosophical discourse
The assumption of a disembodied “I” rests on the belief that the self is an independent entity that develops from an ahistorical or transcendent site of knowledge. It is a self that is rational and unswayed by the influences of race, culture or class status.
Ernaux challenges the idea of the “disembodied I” as well as the dream of “unimbedded selfhood,” in the very structure of her autobiography Shame. In fact, much of the autobiography centers on the way Ernaux was shaped by her environment, class status, material desires and familial/social issues. and how this shaping led to the way she dealt with the traumatic instance when her father tried to kill her mother. She describes Shame as an “ethnological study of the myself.”(33) Ernaux states that she is not going to write a traditional narrative in which certain aspects of reality are assumed to be true.
Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead
of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and
transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining
them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out
an ethnological study of myself. (33)
The author completes a study of the self by documenting and listing the rules and behavior expectations by which she lived in a small Normandy town. The lists are detailed and distanced, written in a vaguely scientific tone. She explicates painfully tiny details concerning how a twelve year old girl in 1952 was expected to behave at home, in public, in the workplace and at school. She describes the songs that formed her yearnings and the clothing that stoked her material desires. Ernaux looks to these daily informers as the definition of self, saying “At the age of twelve I was living by the rules and codes of this world; it never occurred to me that there might be others.” (51) It is clear that Ernaux resists the idea of the disembodied “I” because sees her twelve-year old self as completely formed by her gender, societal and class status.
To convey what my life was like in those days, the only reliable method I have
is to explore the laws, rites, beliefs and references that defined the circles in
which I was caught up-school, family, small-town life-and which governed my
existence. (32)
Ernaux resists, contradicts and outright rejects the idea of a free and autonomous soul, able to exist above and outside of the demands of society. Rather, she takes it down to the minutest levels of society to explain her reactions to the traumatic events that occurred and from which she was not able to recover. From the rules of the church (No holding the handrail, no chapel during recess) to the successive stages of existence (Do one's military service, get married and have kids), Ernaux leaves little ground uncovered.
The act of crossing and doublecrossing the line of the “I” occurs when Ernaux challenges the assumption of a self with a hard core at the center, a core that is able to access some pure idea of truth. She does this by questioning what she has learned from the experience of writing about her own life. Instead of winding down her autobiographical study with a pat explanation of what she learned from her experiences, Ernaux instead questions her own thought processes and even her own capabililty of learning anything from the examination.
After evoking the images I have of that summer, I feel inclined to write “then I discovered
that” or “then I realized that,” words implying a clear perception of the events one
has lived through. But in my case there is no understanding, only this feeling of shame
that has fossilized the images and stripped them of meaning.” (104)
By refusing to make meaning from the experience, Ernaux resists the assumption that the goal of autobiography is to travel to that true center of self where the stable referent lies. In doing so, she creates a space for the idea that there is no stable referent. The self is constructed of so many different influence that it is impossible to strip an experience down to a core meaning. It is the images, material possessions and random experiences of life that defines one, not a solid core from whence identity arises like a tall building out of the fog. The author does not see the act of writing down the journey of the self as a way to find a solid answer about her identity. In fact, Ernaux would not describe the act of autobiography as a journey at all. She would more likely describe it as a series of images that add up to only one emotion: Shame.
Smith argues that the assumption of a Universal subject, of unimbedded selfhood “obscures through a gray and shapeless mist everything colorful that lies within it's vision,” (4) meaning that the assumption of a Universal subject is only defined by those things that lie outside of the accepted definition of self. In order to have a concept of self, there must be something that is identified as not the self. In this case, traditional normative masculinity is what has been defined as the stable referent since the Renaissance, meaning that certain groups such as women, people of color and homosexuals are identified as the other, and in turn marginalized and forced to live in the shadow of the looming black line of the Universal I. Smith argues, “Founded on exclusionary practices, this democratic self positions on its border all that is termed the “colorful,” that is, that which becomes identified culturally as other, exotic, unruly, irrational, uncivilized, regional, or paradoxically unnatural.” (9) In other words, in order to be a disembodied “I,”there must be something that is considered embodied. Something identified as unruly and irrational.
The act of crossing and double-crossing the “I” continues as Ernaux creates a space in her autobiography for those who are deemed “colorful” in the definition of the democratic self. She identifies herself and her family as those who live on the margins, who are not considered part of upstanding French society. One scene in particular illustrates this point. The twelve-year old Ernaux and her father are in a restaurant during a bus trip to Lourdes. The author watches as a wealthy father and daughter eat at a table near them. She cannot help but compare herself and her father to the others. It is during this comparison that Ernaux realizes her “otherness” as a working-class person.
The restaurant scene in Tours is by far the most vivid. When I was writing a book
about my father's life and roots, it would haunt me relentlessly, proof that
there existed two separate worlds and that we would always belong to the
one down below. (105)
The text acts as a reversal of accepted historical autobiographical practice in that Ernaux represents the other traditionally excluded from the narrative. Ernaux is clear that she is the other. She is the colorful force that must interrupt the accepted narrative to make space for her own version of the story. Her story is representative of the “colorful,” the other, and documents the story of those who are forced to live in the shadow of the “tyranny of the arid I.” Through her fragmented tale, Ernaux brings the colorful out of the shadows and into the light of historical narrative.
In challenging the assumptions of (western) autobiographical practice, Annie Ernaux creates a space of resistance wherein the accepted narrative is questioned, and in its place a space for those who have traditionally been “embodied” or assigned the definition of “colorful.” Like the blank white sheet on the wall of the convent, Ernaux resists the tale told before. By implicity resisting the idea of a disembodied “I,”Ernaux defeats the tyranny as described by Sidonie Smith and Virginia Woolf, creating a space of illumination within shadow, and a way to tell a story of self that is authentic while still being fragmented and non-conclusive. Ironically, though Ernaux doesn't feel that she is able to discover a core identity, her interruption of accepted narratives manages to seem to be even more authentic and truthful than those written from the location of a stable, Universal self.