522. Collection at the Intersections of Science and Poetry (and Song)

First off, to say this is a touchy subject for me... because all my poetry and lyrics are deeply embedded in thoughts and themes of science. The question is, how have science and poetry become so distinct, so divided? As I was scrounging around through the internet, I learned that a lot of early scientists and explorers expressed their knowledge through art and poetry. Haeckel is an obvious case, Darwin wrote a prose adventure novel on the origins of the species... and I encountered someone who wrote poetry about developmental biology. Scientific expression through artful means was rather common.

But then somehow through time, science and art started to split to a point in which scientists and artists in the same room would look at each other like they just sited a pack of aliens across the room. Milton Love and I even discussed this theme... somehow through time, the structure of scientific expression transformed from artful and emotionally driven to logical, robotic, emotionally-absent, highly precise, verbiage that no one intuitively enjoys reading, including scientists themselves (me being one). I told Milton that writing a scientific paper became meaningless as I discovered that it was like filling out a form and that only 10 people in the world was going to read it. But then again, as I discovered the difficulties of publishing POETRY and SHORT STORIES, I started to realize that ... well, at least I get my scientific paper published, and THANKFULLY ten people read it. I announced to Hector in the car a couple weeks back, "It is officially easier to publish a scientific article than a poem," and then my heart sunk as I scratched my head, "And a lot of the published poems SUCK, the poets already established a big name, and they say nothing in particular... geee, this is really sad." And THEN, I realized the SOLUTION to this double-edged sword (as I spoke with Barry Spacks) was TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT BEING REJECTED BY DOING SOMETHING MEANINGFUL AND BEING ACCEPTED DOING SOMETHING THAT HAS LOST MEANING OR VALUE. And that, would be meaningful! *Sigh*

Captions from Above Slideshow: Collection at the Intersection of Science and Poetry (and Song). Well?! I've written over 500 blogs, I can say it's extremely surprising that I'm covering such a topic "so late in the game." I've bene having a long-term discussion with Barry Spacks on the intersection of scientific knowledge and creative storytelling for the last two years now... and have learned sooo much... but at this point, I am paying particular attention to the inter-relationships between science and (specifically) poetry, as brought to the forefront through NCEAS'-Santa Barbara Poet Laureate gathering last June of 2009 (where Barry presented a poem, I was so excited to review it before its presentation!). In addition, as an undergraduate, I happened to run into a few oddball poems in the middle of my science textbooks and handouts... so I just started to save a few snipits of other people's work, and I sincerely hope the collection grows!

The Poetry of Science. June 5, 2009. 8pm. Fe Bland Forum at SBCC. Sponsored by The National Center fo Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Santa Barbara City College Creative Writing Program. Santa Barbara Laureate. My professor Barry Spacks (or poetry pal?) presented a poem and the only metaphor I remember out of the whole event (a year later) is how scientists behave like swarms of bees. Some snipits of Barry's poem: “Mostly she likes to count, to fill spreadsheets, to sample populations, invent software,” he read, garnering laughs from the audience, including Ryan, who stood on stage with him. “Oh, scientists so like to count! And foremost to get it right! While we slovenly poets need wild elixir for our work..." Noozhawk wrote an article on the event HERE. :

PDF of the Poetry of Science can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/poetryprogramfullfinal5inorder.pdf.

"This is How Shxt Happens" Poem that I yanked off of Dr. Raul Suarez' office door to make a photocopy. We both tried to find the source of this poem but it was futile (one of Dr. Suarez' predecessors). Most likely it was an imitation of a well-known poem of "This is How Shxt Happens" in the corporate world. Fall of 2008. (probably will include in an essay in Ecology of Scale / Environmental Metaphors). Written on the Blog 105 .

"When a Fellow Needs a Friend" icthyological (fishy) poem by the esteemed Dr. Milton Love. Found in the book "Probably More Than You [Ever] Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast." This poem captures the miniscule parasitic male clamping onto the gigantous female of anglerfish. Whacky and very sexually exploritative! Uploaded Fall of 2007. Blog found at http://www.biologicallyincorrect.org/2007/09/two-and-half-poems-by-dr-milton-love.html (Two and a Half Poems by Milton Love).

"Reproductio Ad Absurdum" icthyological (fishy) poem by the esteemed Dr. Milton Love. Found in the book "Probably More Than You [Ever] Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast." This poem explores the bold and edgy notion of sex changes in fishes (wrasses, basses specifically). Uploaded Fall of 2007. Blog found at http://www.biologicallyincorrect.org/2007/09/two-and-half-poems-by-dr-milton-love.html (Two and a Half Poems by Milton Love).

Page 1. "Sweet Parasite Lovin'" Spoken Word by Martin Moretti, as found in my Parasitology Laboratory/Handbook from Dr. Armand Kuris' epic UCSB course... back in 2003.... Sigh... I still wish I were still an innocent undergrad... (missing poem Ode to an Alga)

"Digital" Lyrics by Mia Doi Todd. Last quarter I had the golden opportunity to watch her and Michel Gondry perform at Spaceland in Silverlake, California, though unfortunately she did not sing this song, which is potentially my favorite of hers. Though the lyrics metaphorically detail some form of intense male-female relationship, the metaphors evoke scale in a scientific fashion.

The one very weak spot in the entire tune is use of the term "plastic bag lubricated safety tube." All lyrics were surreal and metaphorical, and then this moment of precise, literal, and TACKY language destroyed the essence of the song--the worst part is that Mia ACCENTUATES these words when SINGING! I cringe every time I pass through this part.... Maybe that is why this song is not super famous, which it deserves to be. I think a more benign, and metaphorical term like "love glove" would be more appropriate... and the strange thing is that she had NO RHYMES to constrain her word choice... and still decided to use such gnarly words!

Refer to BLOG 454, an analysis of "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop.

"Science and Poetry" is like this whole can of worms I just opened... A can of worms so large I feel it's even worth exploring for an entire quarter, like in a College of Creative Studies Course (e.g. Bruce Tiffney and Hank Pitcher go out to Sedgwick Ranch and both offer commentary on landscapes when designing artwork depicting landscapes).

Here are some websites and names that may serve as starting points:

http://www.firstscience.com/home/poems-and-quotes/poems.html
Classic poets address science in their works.

http://www.helpstoknow.com/html/ps/
An attempt toward a first e-zine devoted to the intersection of science and poetry. Seems pretty dead right now, but it's certainly the right idea!

Of course, there are endless resources on Ecocriticism, "Nature Poetry" (like in Orion)... etc...

And then... just in the last hour I encoutered more than enough media classified in the "LAME" category... or "SUPER LAME" and "SUPER TACKY" category. For example, I encountered this Youtube video entitled "The Symphony of Science," and it was essentially old footage of science figureheads (Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Shermer, to name a few...) with altered voices to make it seem like they were singing to some techno music track. Ummm... I'm sorry, if people were inspired by this piece (as state on Youtube comments), I could say this was more disturbing than inspirational. There was no sense of artfulness in the visual aspects, though quite a bit of technical music skills were portrayed (plus a lot of patience to dig through old video footage)! I'm trained as a scientist and I could barely watch any of these music videos. In all truth, I am appalled that there is recycling of old footage "old science icons" rather than generating new icons, characters, adventures...

Another tacky hit I got was a video called Science Cheerleader and it ended up being a bunch of ditzy blond (some were blond) high school girls waving pom poms and narrating "fun facts" about physics and chemistry and advocating that science was cool. Ummm... this honestly to me... was a bit degrading... to both parties... the cheerleaders no longer looked cool and the scientists were being associated with ditzy cheerleaders supposedly saying intelligent things (without demonstrating much comprehension of their knowledge).

So, the reason is that WHY I am in environmental media, is because the old "science and society stories" are OLD and the ICONS are the same old icons... and novelty is needed.... I'm also environmental media because I want to make Tackiness and Lame go EXTINCT.

520. "Colors Before the Sunrise" A Song? A Poem? A Piece of Vispo? (Plus A Discussion on Vic's Commitment to Cartoons)

"Colors Before the Sunrise" Poem / Song / Vispo in Poetry Format. The PDF of this poem can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/colorsbeforesunriseSONGPOEM.pdf.


Image displays a typical state of pre-sunrise (dusk, so they call it?!) at the Bahia de Los Angeles, Mexico. Image taken toward the end of March of 2010.

A quick effort toward VISPO for the song-poem "Colors Before the Sunrise."

The end of March seems far off (it's now the end of April). I was in a state of a massive, tangled knot from winter quarter of 2010. I was intellectual roadkill that needed a giant restoration project. But Jules swept me away to his and Duke's place to the Bahia de Los Angeles for a good 8-9 days. It was a much needed calibration. Just crossing the border from the United States into Mexico, venturing into brand new territory for myself (south of San Quintin) opened up my eyes, loosened me up, and brought me into a state of establishing new inner-outer perspectives. The people of Mexico barely had any resources and they made the most of what they had. I noticed that people were more attached to each other simply because they truly needed each other's help... whereas in the United States... it seems like visceral attachment to others has been largely replaced by technology, and so there is not much need to communicate and collaborate with others. We commune with machines instead. For about a week or so I was thankful for some clean water and a flushing toilet. I was surrounded by a land of unfinished and abandoned projects... which kind of felt like my mind... externalized.... Quite soon I started realizing that things in the United States are a bit too easy for our own good and once we get in our habits, it's sooo easy for our minds to take for granted what we have and not realize that we have what we need....

So Jules gave me the best possible present... that even my parents haven't given me for so long.... He swept me away into a foreign land full of empty, serene landscapes and depravity/scarcity of human resources.... His presence allowed my inner self to unravel and untangle a little bit... and re-prioritize.... I largely focused on taking photographs in RAW format (man, I'm officially professional now... well... almost...) and downloading music and photography software... which took me a couple of days (even internet was a scarce resource!). I became a sensual, visual creature, visually absorbing the landscape, ignoring the Spanish (I actually enjoy being in a foreign country where I don't know what the hxll anyone is saying, so I view humans as chattering monkeys and end up only visually processing the landscapes). So I took lots of photographs and soaked up the landscape as much as possible--which was a strange ecosystem indeed. Bahia de Los Angeles is a desert right by an inland Sea of Cortez (hence in my poem "desert's ocean"), which totally threw me off because you don't get these kinds of ecosystems in California (or combinatory ecosystems--desert and ocean right next to each other?!!).

Also when I was down in Bahia de Los Angeles, I figured out how to use my new SANSA mp3 player, and retroactively, I'm quite happy I purchased it. The new versions of the IPOD shuffles are appallingly bad (way too small, no control of audio on the device, forcing you to wear ear buds which hurt my ears in an ergonomic sense). I went on fantastic jogs along the beach and through the salt marsh, even one jog from the LA Bay dumpster site all the way down the hill back to Duke and Jule's house. The final jogs I took were toward the south end of LA Bay toward Larry and Lois' house. There was a lot less traffic (quite a bumpy dirt road!) and the last structures I passed were open-ended houses where squid fishermen were staying... and even a micro squid processing plant. And it was these jogs where the poem/song started formulating. The idea of "Colors Before the Sunrise" came to me in my half-sleep I think on the 4th day of the trip. I told Jules and he liked the title. Then during my last two jogs along the bumpy dirt road, out by the cordone cactus and the spindly cirios and other interesting vegetation structures I was listening to a song entitled "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop (to be honest, I was attracted to the initial melody but I had no affinity with the vocals) . And through this happy backdrop melody (with a few minor chords), I began to formulate my song/poem. It took two jogs along the same road to get the main bulk of the poem worked out (plus a few ideas in my car drive home, back to Riverside and Santa Barbara to start spring quarter). On the last day at the Bahia de Los Angeles, I woke up extremely early in order to have the opportunity to take photographs of the sunrise (which I was procrastinating to do) and last minute images of Duke's neighbor's yard (Carolina's?), which is where the above photograph came from....

I suppose I had been sitting on this song/poem for a while because of my personal epiphanies on how to channel my energy in this society. After my initial experiences in approaching "literary journals" with my poetry and short stories, I had become increasingly frustrated. I talked to Barry Spacks about facing my "string of rejections" with poetry and short stories, and not only that, how literary journals are now failing to respond to the input of work. What a complete waste of my time, waste of my life to endlessly send off pieces of writing to literary journals, only to receive thousands of rejections, and more "no responses." Barry Spacks commented that "things are starting to slip"--that the sacredity of human transactions is vanishing as we interact as if we are in a plasma state as a pinball machine only found at the center of the sun. The Rejected Life is the only life that most writers know nowadays. Barry told me that if he were stranded in the desert for seven days without any food or water... he would crawl to the nearest computer and his death words would be to write a very polite rejection letter to all the people in the world he never had the time to respond to (given that he were an editor of a literary journal), wishing them well, hoping that one day their poetry and short stories would finally find a home. This was so visually striking to me, I hope one day to make a short film featuring Barry and the Rejected Writer Life. Good advice for all his students... in the form of a flick!

After that conversation, which was about a couple weeks ago... how Barry said this society was "slipping" whether it was about even providing a nice or even RUDE rejection letter... it was that moment where I just completely gave up on the idea of submitting my poetry to places (except every once in a while to particular people and specific circumstances). My poetry is published here on this blog. What more could I possibly want? Literary journals are not my venue, not my audience. What is the chance that any literary journal editor would understand the fusion of science, art, creative writing, and human-environmental change? 0.000001%. Sorry, it's a nearly stone-solid truth. Most "creative writers" don't have much comprehension of science, let alone incorporate science into their writing or processing of everyday life. So, whatever. What a waste to deal with people who don't even know how to diagnose your validity and contribution to society.

The other problem is that anyone can be a poet or a writer. Little ten-year old kids can write poems and short stories, let alone little old ladies on their 20th year of retirement who have nothing else to do but sit on their porch and write the 5 billionth poem on the metaphorical representation of sunsets in their lives. Writing is analog. Linear.... But combining writing and art requires one to think spatially-temporally... non-linearly... in essence... right brain left handed. And just through this thought, I am eliminating 90% of the population of storytellers, which consist of linear-thinking, left-brained people who express themselves in writing. And then to combine words with images to tell a story with a consistent set of characters, settings, and plots?! I think I am eliminating 50% of the remaining right brained people. And then for this story to make a contribution to society and the environment? Basically, there is close to no one left. I have no competitition. My Biologically Incorrect Cartoons are so unique that they stick out like an eyesore. And if I want to write a poem... it's gotta be in cartoon format. I can dump most of the rest of my artwork into cartoons. I have my own niche and close to no one having the ability to compete. I just have to keep chugging along and cranking out as many cartoons as possible, while simultaneously building a compilation of emails of people who I know will appreciate the cartoons and can provide editorial advice in the process of making my first few hundred cartoons (before expanding to a subscribed email list service).

Plus, through all the pressures of my Ph.D. committee meeting in February of last quarter... combined with an overstimulating environmental history course with Dr. Peter Alagona, Terra and Buz became fully resurrected into my mind... except this time, it was a near-completely visual format (rather than a long manuscript). I came to grips with the notion that the Question Reality manuscript was not a failure. My Question Reality manuscript will never die. It is the fundamental baseline for all else to grow with my cartoons. I will give interested folks a piece of my mind in mentally digestible cartoons (a little bit every day), that will create a continuum of experience form the QR manuscript to my acquired knowledge as of today....

The other thing I noticed in the publishing world is that to approach a publisher (for writing), you need a literary agent. But to approach a publisher of independent or alternative cartoons? You directly submit to the editor and publisher. It goes to show there aren't that many in the pool of storytelling through cartoons. Bless my right brain... take good care of it, and give it a work out every day! Nevertheless, writing is always a part of the creative process, I will still have to write to even evolve my cartoons and films! It's just that in order to make my WRITING financially viable, I am going to have to prove to people that I am unique and that I'm going to have to EARN MY RIGHT TO WRITE through multi-media arts (cartoons, music, film) before I return to the pursuit of writing... safely... with a little bit of financial compensation....

And after a week of panicking before my Ph.D. committee meeting, I established my own SI Units for cartooning. Fine Point Black Sharpie. White Computer Paper. Portable Scanning Machine. Photoshopping the Fine Details. Black and White and One Shade of Gray and Occasionally a Gaussian Blur Effect with Lighter Lines to establish a Hierarchy of Lines. My cartoons are evolving to higher quality... and slightly different proportions... just like how Calvin and Hobbes evolved. Barry has been very supportive and I send him lots of my cartoons "fresh off the press." We agreed that once a narrative has become apparent to the reader with my cartoons... and/or once I reach about 200 cartoons, we will choose 12 of the best cartoons and approach the Santa Barbara Independent to start a weekly run... which would be so exciting (Barry knows two editors and I know two editors, one editor overlaps)! Barry recommended I check out the "independent" magazine scene, with"Village Voice" being the top (in New York?). He said that incorporating the themes of science into cartoons in a very satirical, but mentally digestible way... is unique and a very valuable pursuit, especially in these times, eh?!! Ya... Science should be culture. But American "culture" is so divorced from science. We have become a user-friendly-push-button-gossip-about-your-neighbor's-clothes type of society... and it's rare for conversations to go much deeper than the shallow schmoozing... even at a university donating charity event loaded with nerdy professors (which I witnessed LAST weekend).

So, here I am, bitterly Blog-publishing this poem that expresses my "inner soul" at a given point in space and time, which separate from standards of society--is a beautiful thing to pursue, self-expression--except that society has destroyed the enjoyment of self-expression through the persistent psychological devastation of Rejection Letters (or No Response, better yet), only to redirect my thoughts toward the abandonment of efforts toward being rejected 5 million times in attempt to publish poetry and short stories through the traditional BS avant garde avenues (though Barry said it would be a grand idea for me to start a science-art multi-media literary journal, scientific research exploration through multi-media arts--so the door is not completely closed!). And then I am again redirected toward the positive route of cartooning about science, politics, and human-environmental change through my charming little innocent kids, Terra and Buz.

I didn't expect all this information to come out on this blog, but stream-of-conscious venting is all for the better for my own clarity of thought. I am going to have to now condition myself... mentally divorce the PROCESS OF WRITING POETRY AND SHORT STORIES from the PROCESS OF PUBLISHING. I have to convince myself that none of my ideas are in final form (or an audience magnet) unless they take shape of a cartoon (or a cartoon-driven poem-short-story), a piece of music or performance slam poetry, or a film. It's amazing to think that my mind can construct any story format--ranging from scientific articles to poetry to short stories to photographs to cartoons to paintings to pieces of music to film to websites to whatever the next new medium is--but I'm starting to feel the pressures of establishing a unique niche in society--the need to be perceived by society as a "needed storyteller" that needs about $20,000 a year in order to have health insurance and a roof over my head to continue storytelling. Certain doors are "closing" (but not completely) right now but other doors are opening full-wide open. Creative survival is a matter of desperation. As one of my recent cartoons discussed my need to avoid the MacDonald's hamburger flipping treadmill that close to everyone else is pursuing, whether in a science lab or at MacDonald's.

I have more to write about with my positive experiences in the Bahia de Los Angeles... plus LOTS of PHOTOGRAPHS! This poem was just an introduction.

470. Roadtrip Nation Briefing with the Barry Spacks Creative Writing / Teaching Interview, Santa Barbara, California

Before all the hubbub of Extras and Central Casting, Shannon and I had a spectacular evening interviewing my poetry professor/writing pal thee-one-and-only Barry Spacks! He's been already embedded in my brain... and my blog... and so I call it, attempting to acquire the "Barry Spacks" consciousness, which includes unboundedness, succinct artfulness, and telling stories for the sake of storytelling without butchering the story (and poem) for the message. Aka preachy used-carsalesmanesqueness for the environment. Thoughts lingered the day after as I unwillingly stormed into Los Angeles to sign up for Central Casting (it's not that I didn't want to do it; I just felt overwhelmed... didn't want to do it that particular time and day...).

Shannon and I ventured into Barry's and Kimberly's cozy little Victorian home off Bath Street in downtown Santa Barbara... and I was finally able to see his office den, which is riddled with very cool art I had NEVER seen before--Barry had not placed on his website (there's one I particularly liked, playing on the notion of an inner universe and an outer universe, boundaries of order and chaos). I remember seeing the livingroom scene. I remember Barry being interviewed about the craft of teaching poetry to the local Cable Channel and I was like--we need a NEW setting. The sun was setting quite fine and there was little light left when Barry and Shannon settled in the kitchen, on a bench, with really cool figurines and cacti and buddha-like wood carvings in the background. Maybe a little cluttery, but interesting all the same. It represents Barry.

I have about 1 hour of interview footage and some B-roll. Perhaps I need to get some footage of the house--external B-roll, perhaps a later time. I remember showing up early, sitting in the car, contentedly delving into "Dead Cities" by Mike Davis, two key chapters on impact tectonics and "a natural history of dead cities." It's fine writing, but I would have to do a lot of "fact checking" in order to verify the validity of the prose.

But anyhow, Shannon was a superb interviewer as usual, and Barry had some very crucial points to make that are guarantees to be included in our Roadtrip Nation film.

(1). Major quote of the day. The most important thing I need, besides breathing, is to have the right to be creative, every single day. And Barry is fortunate he is able to squeeze creativity time, every single day.

(2). Major drivers of storytelling: message driven, or story-telling driven. Learn how to tell stories for the sake of telling stories. Messages can be there, but don't bombard with messages like meteor impacts with a sacrifice of the art! Major issue with environmental-related storytelling. (Need to balance message with storytelling). (Sierra Club storytelling junk mail used car salesman letter I received).

(3). Barry's a skeptic as to whether people can easily be scientists and artists, all in the same head. And, me, I, Victoria, am some form of guinea pig to see if I can get away with BOTH. Barry said that the writing style of science is so strict, so exacting, so precise, so lanuage-tecky, so robotic, that he is not sure that if scientists can easily start learning how to write poems, which require a mentality and looseness about the field. Barry actually recommends scientists to PAINT rather than do CREATIVE WRITING in order to get into an "artistic mode." Though, a scientist going into creative writing does have some BENEFIT. They have a greater repertoire, inventory of metaphors that are not necessarily common or accessible to the public. So, scientists in their tecky, specialized worlds have an opportunity to bring new material to the creative writing process. Most creative writers only tap into "the great history of American/World writing," they don't outsource in terms of their experiences and subject matters.

(4). A beautiful metaphor. Most writers/individuals in America are focusing on ME ME ME. Self growth and self development until the self becomes the center of the universe and there is no other universe out there. But what Barry emphasizes in class and in writing in general is to take this big ball of an "ego" and scrunch it and smoosh it down to a little blue gem, and then smash it with your foot, and watch the dust blow away in the wind. (But why is the gem blue?) If you are a true writer, the sense of self completely vaporizes and you become the system to which you are writing. FORGET THAT THE SELF EXISTS AND YOU BECOME THE SYSTEM AND THE STORY ITSELF. That's a trip. I can do it easily. When I was high school I was practicing this all the time. I had no sense of self. I was everything around me, but not my self. Then because everything around me had pulverized me into an anorexic stick, I had to invent this concept of self at age 17 just to survive and realize that I cannot be at the whims of my surroundings all the time. But then again, my sense of self has developed to be very relativistic, more so what is my place in this universe and society? The relative self in light of the evolution of the universe and life on earth. I feel very small... now by default. No new epiphanies here. But I suppose, intrinsic to my own personalities, and given a non-disturbing background, I can very easily forget that I exist and become the things that I am writing about. As I told many people, when I am writing a story, I am experiencing it. I am seeing it. I'm going through the emotions. I am experiencing it. This philosophy is associated with Buddhism, I think. Barry's affiliated with Tibetan Buddhism? I think, as well as works a little with Zen Buddhism and Koan-stuff.

(5). I learned that potentially a very easy way to get out of service in the military is to state that you wanna be a "poet" when you grow up. It worked for Barry back in the day!

(6). Barry and I are both prolific ramblers, so I guess it's very good that Shannon was there, and she was interviewing, because if it were Barry and me... well, it's dangerous... black hole phenomenon of human conversations.... Black holes are cool though!

(7). Having participated in theater, Barry considers himself a "performer" when he's teaching. People don't even realize that teaching is a performance practice and study.

I lost an orange clamp.

And another final key point that Barry made is that ... he recited a poem to us. It was about a mountain, and how sometimes we are given knowledge--as if we were being spoonfed--and sometimes don't we wish we simply didn't know? The poem reminded me of the brutality of those car GPS units like "Constance" in Mark the photographer's car. That machine made the process of driving and exploring a totally mindless, mechanical experience, and there is no sense of spontaneous adventure otherwise. Sometimes you wish there were no grid there. No grid left. No grid at all! You could re-invent the universe all to your self! Who wants all knowledge at the finger tips? Invent your own worldly map!

After the interview, I talked with Barry one-on-one about our novella-sharing. It was very-much-needed advice! This is potentially our next subject of discussion! And then I went to find Shannon and wished Ben happy birthday at Sharkeys downtown Santa Barbara. The bar was empty for once. And then I had Freebirds and went to bed. Zzzzz....

452. Photographic Collection: Celebration of Papu Ray's Memorial and the Minnich Family, 2009, 2008, 2003 (Literature Discussion Leaked In)

Photographic Collection from Ray's Memorial (Riverside and Mount Baldy, California, July 12, 2009, as well as Ray's 96th Birthday in Corona July 2008 and a happy summer back in 2003.

The Blurb that I Wrote in Picasaweb:
Ever since my grandfather Ray's passing, I felt like a strong current in my mind and life had stopped flowing, a string of attachment to this world had been cut. But it's funny; though Ray has metamorphosed into new life and planetary cycles, the past flows of this mental river of Ray never seemed erased--perhaps now even more vibrant than ever. [Paradoxically chopped up, severaged, and reconverging into a new order] I returned to Riverside shielded by video cameras, digital cameras, voice recorders... knowing that this familiar home is somewhat foreign, now that one major character in my life has been removed... or altered into another state. Through loss, or perhaps, strange transformations (for me), I feel I have gained new, stronger currents... more closeness to my family than I had ever detected in myself before. Anyhow, the least I can do is construct a collage of the memorial and highlighted past adventures, which reflects a heightened consciousness and appreciation of family, as well as acknowledgment of inevitable change.

I emailed several of my family members--I don't have everyone's email, but whatever emails I could scrounge for--and I sent a long email to my aunt Jeri Lyn in Sebastopol. She vamped up her website http://www.dillindesign.com, and I can't wait to tell Barry Spacks about her work!!! Jeri Lyn had this funny line concerning her life-long moodswings as well as her attempts to differentiate "nothingness" and "pointlessness." That's SOOO funny. SOOO Beckettsonian, and something I SOOO get. My Ph.D. question is "What's the point?" in the first place.

I'm glad I performed this task of photo compilations. I feel I have delved deeper into the psyche of my grandfather Ray, preparing me for writing an upcoming story, "The Mountain's Last Flower," concerning the story of a scientist with a troubled history with personal walls and universal walls of perception and action. And due to these internal walls and borders and failure to address them and break them down, he defied his own childlike commonsense and his adult antirationality took his own life. The main character is not a mirror of Papu Ray, but certain elements mimick his circumstances, especially in terms of retroactivity of perception of the condition of his son John--the retroactive diagnosis of Asburgers.

Well, shxtso! I'm ruining the story! I better write it SOONER than LATER! Okay, I'll shut up now. I invented the story on the fly in a car drive, and through my conversations with Barry Spacks, I discovered I was crafting a character that summed my fundamental troubled relationship with science and scientists, as well as my attempts to understand the inner world of Ray. It was all very subconscious creativity... now taken into full blown consciousness. I am actually kind of shocked at myself.

Barry Spacks mentioned two things to me and the class. He noted in one of my poems in which "my writing became smarter than my own self," which I agree. And we also talked about the IMPORTANCE OF READING versus THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE. I argued that if I spent most of my life reading litrary classics, then reading would become my experience, and then there is no possibility of injecting novel input to the field of literature. And if I lived a life strictly of experience (without being well-read), then I can be majorly detached from the gestalt of human history (except for the stories told by people in real life). My combination of life is (1) experience, mostly with mountain and ocean boys and chics (2) reading scientific literature, being taught scientific ideas (3) barfing everything out in literature-art mode (4) retroactively being informed that I sound like Samuel Beckett. I told Barry that we have to unplug ourselves from the Matrix to bring new ideas into the matrix. If we read strictly classic literature, the field would be self contained, and the likelihood of anything new coming out of younger generations is close to minimal--especially if experience constitutes of being locked up in a classroom for 20 years (so I raise my hand, claiming to be victim of that). And then I argued, another horrible part about modern experience is that most of it is INDIRECT, as opposed to DIRECT. If you ask someone, "how did you spend your day?" they discuss the news they watched and this movie star did that, and that pro athlete took this type of dope, but did not talk about their own personal lives or experiences, like I talked with my neighbor about the tides and had an adventure up in the mountain and worked all day trying to make a gadget to improve fuel efficiency for my car. I could not write a glorious piece on tennis (for another person baseball), because I feel insulted that this society has come to glorify the most absurd sport of swinging at a ball to hit over the net with a stick of high surface area. Professional tennis players get paid more than teachers, etcetera. Society has made absurdity a CONVENTION. Granted sports is all about exercise of primal aspects of our brain, like socially acceptable forms of competition beside bloody warfare, but to make it the centrality of entertainment?! Come flipping on! I would rather go in my backyard with my friends and figure out, and invent a new sport. That would be more self amusing. And to think the psychological damage tennis was for the entire family, and so many familes who's mommies and daddies who want their little kids to become the next Venus Williams or Roger Federer. Like flipping whatever. Okay, okay. I'll shut up. The point is, I would be mortified to write a more rudimentary memoir of my life simply because the first 19 years of it, I was trapped, drowning in a largely consumerist mentality, largely consumerist society, physically and mentally. By the time I entered CCS, I started carving out a universe of my own. I was 19 years old, and that's when I felt like I was born, when my "self" and my "surroundings" was born to its truer state of consciousness. Right now I'm in a fiction phase in which I construct alternative fictional realities based on oversimplification of components of the current universe I live in, and through this fictional universe--I seek to discover new and greater truths about the world we currently live in. Tadah!

415. Ten Poems that Question Reality (Within Biologically Incorrect / Stokastika Summary Documents)

Ten Short Poems That Question Reality. Page 1.

Ten Short Poems That Question Reality. Page 2.

Ten Short Poems That Question Reality. Page 3.

To view the whole document, please view the PDF below: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/tenpoemsthatquestionreality.pdf.

I compiled this collection of poetry during winter quarter of 2009, while I was simultaneously taking my first official poetry class with Dr. Barry Spacks and preparing to go to the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Meeting (this year in Chicago). I constructed this document as a "sample-capture" representative summary statement of who I am and what my blog is all about, but it ended up that I needed to turn in a three-page sampler to Barry's course toward the end of the quarter... and since I did not have any time to work on other poems, I ended up turning in this summary to the class.

Everyone took turns to read other students' poems throughout the class for about three class sessions. It was a lot of fun, though sometimes the readings were tedious to listen to because they were previously workshopped poems, and they had not altered much. Not many students read my poems in the beginning of the session, and then towards the end they started to read my work... as last resort. *Sigh.* Perhaps not necessarily that my poems are "bad" but they are more so "concept" poems--poems with big ideas exploring the interface of "science and art"--that they have not wrapped their heads around (as students are young and are still dealing with their first or second bgfriend relationship crisis and perhaps their decision-making abilities may not span much farther than which class to take next quarter... one from column A and two from column B... these may be students in general... not necessarily these writers in Barry's course). There were three students in the class who were more existentialist-surrealist-philosophically-oriented (and surprisingly all three of them were guys) and they finally tackled my poems. They did a superb job! On the last day, Barry Spacks announced to the class, "We have to catch up with Victoria's poetry!" followed by an an extraordinary reading of "Purpose or a Process;" his re-enactment of my melodramatic mind was doubly haunting than how I perceive my own mental ecosystem, and there was a chilling seriousness to the reading, as if Barry understood what I have gone through. I left feeling disturbed by someone else's reading of my poem. It made me feel emotionally restless and psychologically dissatisfied--I wanted more, but in my own time. The poetry reading felt like a psychological thriller: you have to be in the mood to enjoy it, or be absorbed in it. But if you push all the buttons with the right combinations, like The Matrix movie, then you can easily be in the mood to soak in dense material.

Barry's reading of my Purpose or a Process poem was one of the extraordinary, un-expected highlights of Winter Quarter of 2009. Such a tiny thing--one minute of appreciation of my work by a great poet--can add up to mean everything. It's funny how reality works--the level of warpedness in value and meaning in stretches of time.

I also find it funny how in my poetry I decided to be melodramatic and soap opera-ish about big-picture ideas, not my nails, my split ends in my hair, my neighbor's tattoo, nor my boyfriend's fetish with the girl across the street. I'm over it... or maybe I just never got into it.

404. A First Lecture in Ecological Anthropology, A First and Final Day of School

So... I am starting my first day of the quarter on the "wrong" foot. I found out last moment that Barry Spacks is teaching a "finish your creative writing project" course, and more likely than not I cannot register for units, and I may have to be a "crasher ghost" within the course. I can observe and listen, but not necessarily participate. I am excited about the group. This batch of students looks like the most sincere bunch I have encountered yet in a CCS course. There is one guy in the class who is writing a book about surviving Hurricane Katrina. That is astounding. Glad he's doing it. We have some very lengthy undertakings in the course. We are also watching a film called "Adaptation" with Charlie Kaufman... all about writer's block, starring Nicolas Cage. Errr... Nicolas Cappola, more revealingly and accurately. And? It's a riot act. Charlie Kaufman collaborates with Michel Gondry. And that... was that. Those are my dream peeps. People I am dying to work for. Now... everyone around me is getting on the same page in terms of mentality and vision.

And then after class, I am ansty because I didn't get my full jog. I am sleep-deprived and hyper all at the same time. Just got out of a 11-minute massage. Before I was thinking of TN and CE. Now that JLs around I thought getting this stupid technology-mediated, machine massage was so unfulfilling... nevertheless slowing me down, emptying my mind, and relaxing me. Stupid mammal needing a hug, dxmmit, that's all that I was doing.

I started a poem last night:

I wished my bed were in the shower
I wished I dreamed, bathed under water....
Yet the sheets of cold and arid
Took a drift to heights of desert.

And so I slept
like a half-buried mummy--
in unrest,
folded in unrest.

Everyone is apparently too pregnant in the head to have time to read my writing, eh? So it goes. Barry said in class that we are lucky to engage in the process of creativity, but most times we are too quick to be self judgmental and worry about what other people think, eh?! Ya!!! Just write for yourself, for the sake of writing....

I just came from Dr. Teddy Macker's axe-handle poetry course, which was packed with 20 students, myself included. But nevertheless, a very LIVELY bunch. I introduced myself as Victoria, from the dregs of Los Angeles (Riverside), but half-Greek (did not mention). Currently, I read Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe (by accident on the internet, top 500 poems), and been appreciating the sophisticated lyrics of Jack Johnson. Basically, the metaphor of an axe coupled axe handle is used in which we can create new poetry through reading other people's poetry. Once you are given a model, you can create your own model from the fragments of other people's models. The question is, where is the line drawn between plagiarism/stealing versus inpiration/buildingblocks, or taking a piece of other people's work and implementing it in a new creation? That is a good question. For me, most often, there is an issue of independent origin of common thought. I invent something in my head and then I found out someone else already wrote about it. And I'm like, oh. I still feel master of the idea because I cultivated these thoughts in my own terms, though I feel slightly to greatly less original and worthy of much of anything. We read some poems and then we went to the Campus Lagoon to write some poems--mostly in the domain of simple language, intense detail, and trying to have an "ending punch line."

Right now I feel mentally beat up and just want to be left alone. Since I felt drained, I created a "draining" poem.

Bleached

In this bleached light
I do great shame
for not trying
to playing this game
to delve down deep
down spiraled knots
from flickered feathers (when a noisy truck passed by)
of fickle thoughts.

Burn a charred shrub,
Sway a tattered web,
and there exists no means
for novelty in growth.

Basically, I am sooooo beat up. The quarter system is making me depressed. I need to break away. All words are cheap if I am bombarded once again. I need to be brave and let go of all of this, except for visiting Barry Spacks on Mondays and Wednesdays. I am going to go insane. This university mental institute I am in is going to make me go insane.

Barry asked us to vow to writing 15 minutes a day. Well, here I am, writing down all the things that Charlie Kaufman mumbles in his head and never writes down on paper. I write down the dregs. Always will. Because sometimes dregs make stories.

I read the above poem to class, and since no one heard it due to the noisy truck passing by when I was reading, Dr. Macker was kind enough to make note that it rhymed. *Sigh.* The one poem I will remember from the bunch of 20 is that of an Asian student by the name of Richard who was walking to the Campus Lagoon and completely diverged in his train of thought, and it ended up that he wrote a poem about he and his friend texting each other in concern of their stolen skateboards, and that the students were all wanting a nature poem, as if they were on this planet the last 15 seconds of their life, and he ended up reminiscing about his skateboard. Richard even had cus words in his poem. I felt that this poem encompasses the truth about our lives as students on this campus. We were bullshxt fooling ourselves trying to write some fxcking nature poem, and me? Well, I paralleled my emotions with the generic fractal shapes around me, predictable of me. The issue is, I can write the accurate humor of what Richard wrote, and I have done so in the past, but the issue is that I would have never considered this writing as a poem. It was just a journal entry/story. It's a matter of taste. At least the poem I wrote encapsulated my sense of being drained.

So the real kicker of the day is a summary of my life story. I attended the first-ever official "anthropology lecture," held by some stuffy TA with a heavy French accent. Dr. Aswani was not there, so maybe I have to attend one more time this Wednesday. This epic lecture basically summarized WHY I wrote Question Reality: An Investigation of Self-Humans-Environment, because right now, all these different fields and disciplines of the university are merging in perspectives (most notably social and natural sciences), but no one is streamlining any of the logic or knowledge. Everyone remains with their pet pea hypotheses in their respective cult disciplines--it's all the same even though it seems different, but no one is ready to acknowledge that, as indicated by this lecture. Essentially the university needs to streamline itself because redundant classes exist among ecology and evolution, earth science, geography, environmental studies, anthropology, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It's tragic. I'm sure even the undergrads are detecting a sense of redundancy.

The French chic TA recited 18 different perspectives with anthropology and ecology, and it is simply INSANE CONVERGENCE with NO CONSOLIDATION. Consider the entire university a software engineering program that is willing to synthesize but not consolidate efficiently. I didn't know a few of the "academic cliques" that were mentioned, and there were other "buz words" I know of that the temp teacher didn't mention. She also misused the words "habitat," "niche," and "adaptation." She defined adaptation so badly that I am sure my evolution professor would have yelled at her if he were in the room, and if he were in his teens, he would have shot her with a beebee gun. The adaptation definition was totally teleological. There evolves a trait--"adaptation"--or purpose, is assigned retroactively, it is chance that there is a function to the context of anything. Sheesh!

Disciplines that study the interactions between humans and their environments:
Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (NSF)
Coupled Human-Environmental Systems (CHESS, this is MINE, the synthesis of petty redundancy)
sociobiology (evolutionary psychology) (EO Wilson?)
panarchy / ecological economics (Holling)
evolutionary social constructionism
socioecology
social ecology
physical / biological / cultural geography
ecological anthropology
environmental institutions
human dimensions of environmental change (my advisor Oran's research)
common pool resources (indigenous knowledge and environmental decision-making, scale issue)
environmental determinism (environmental conditionality)
environmental possibility (The Serenity Prayer Poem, engineers' research degree of freedom-constraint, he's at Duke, what's his name?)
cultural ecology
cultural evolutionism
environmental sociology (Dr. Freudenberg)
ethnoecology (conceptualizing the environment, definitions, classifications)
cultural materialism (production of materials, development, social relationships)
"ethnic processes"
systems ecology (funk daddy complex math models)
evolutionary ecology (the Botanist from EEMB?, Susan Mazer?)
political ecology (e.g. tracing the food on your dinner table plate)
historical ecology (land use history, coupled long term human-environmental change)
spiritual ecology (interface of religion and ecology, institutions-fads, codes of ethics, assumptions) radical ecology (environmental disaster and human disaster)
deep ecology / green ecology (stuff covered in Flmstudies 183 films of the human and natural environment, Naess, tenants of deep ecology, not in complete agreement)
ecofeminism (the role of women in human-environmental change)
ecopsychology (ecology and human psychology)
environmental anthropology
post-modernist ecology (I think I am one of this, the notion of objectivity is moot, humans are a part of the system, GONZO SCIENCE, construction of objective reality is moot, it's all relative, in non-traditional publishing means)
metaphor and scale (that's me!)

[INSERT MORE DISCIPLINES HERE]

So, as I said before, I look at this list and I feel three things: (1) I am thankful I wrote Question Reality because now I have a straight head and understand all the assumptions and what fits where regardless of the absurd compartmentalization of disciplines, (2) I feel sorry for the undergrad students who have to memorize this bullshxt rather than use their intuition to synthesize the assumptions behind all the jargon, and (3) this lecture saved a LOT of legwork for me in terms of knowing the "search terms" of the literature, so THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! I should show Oran this list and see how he responds, and this should be a part of a film script on the natural history of the university. Academics married their minds to the literature, not to reality of experience or intuition. In short, this is the most pathetic, humorous lecture I have ever heard. The summation of academic absurdity. This lecture is basically solid script material for a movie on graduate students and where they fit in the university and the world in general. It's all about how you approach the human/environment problem... just like Hollywood, as I said before. So, this is probably one reason why I'm going insane.

Other than that, this UCSB campus is still a ghost town, though it's the first day of spring quarter, 2009. Everyone is having one more day in Cancun or chillin' with their parents, or more likely their hometown friends. Everyone is "over it," including myself. Spring quarter sucks, unless you know you are graduating in June.

This morning Barry went through a series of "writing wisdoms" in the process of creativity. Here are a few that I remember, but I'm sure I'll add more later.

**Writing requires sadistic isolation in space and time. Virginia Wolf, a room of her own. You are around people, you are collecting data, when you are writing your Ph.D. you now have to process and organize all this information into a very condensed stories.

**Mark Twain said that "adjectives and adverbs" were evil. And I say, NO. You know what? No flipping way. I think that's what makes my EOT story different from the dry drone of most writing. I see the world in hypersaturation (when I'm not drained), and I think that adjectives and adverbs add precision and emotional dimensions to the activities.

**Jealousy breeds creativity. An ape, chest-beating stand-up show. I admit to that. That's the only ape-beating thing I can actually do! (from Teddy Macker)

**Tom Clancy. "The difference between fiction and reality. Fiction has to make sense." Consistency of emotions, logic, space, and time.

**V.S. Naipaul. "I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next." Barry Spacks adds, "My poems are smarter than I am." The genius of fleeting creativity--1% inspriation and 99% perspiration.

**Gloria Steinem. "Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." Barry adds, "Writing requires full consciousness, full attention."

**"Being famous is a luck thing. But the one opportunity in life I would always crave to have is to be creative." (Barry Spacks quote)

399. "CHESS: Poetry of Human-Environmental Change," Vic's First Book of Poetry Currently in Peer-Review

A tangible product of winter quarter, finally manifested! "CHESS: Poetry of Human-Environmental Change." After being filtered by the mind of Barry Spacks, I feel confident enough to present to the world a suite of poems which essentially serves as an "outline" to a longer piece I must inevitably write.
Above is a widget that serves as a "Mini Storefront" to my Lulu identity on http://lulu.com/questionreality. Below is a little "buy it now" doohickie from Lulu. I guess the essence of this entire blog and this form of self-publishing is the do-it-yourself mentality. You don't need to be endorsed by a mass-production corporation such as Penguin in order to create and distribute great writing... not to say that my writing is great at all... a bit of an overstatement, I should say.

Below is a profile that I placed on Lulu to summarize the book. It's just a sketch. I am assuming that this will be the "first version" of CHESS. The second version will (1) be peer-reviewed... errr... legitimatized by several individuals who already received stamps of approval on their forehead, and (2) also include a few more poems... perhaps... that I wasn't able to include in this round because I am buried in my own mismanaged file systems and pressed for time.

“Stokastika!” Victoria Minnich, a Ph.D. student in environmental science and management/ environmental media at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a chronic seeker of order from chaos. A bold and daring exploration of scale and metaphor through the unconstrained means of poetry, Victoria asks timely questions, and in the process, surges an influx of grand themes of environmental philosophy and artful scientific dialect into the realm of literature and the humanities. CHESS is a debut collection of poetry.

It is difficult to write my own abstract, because I have to be in a mode of "self-glorification... within relative moderation." I don't want to toot my own horn, but the marketing system requires me to do so.

"CHESS: Poetry of Human-Environmental Change" Hugging / Formatting / Sandwiching a Manuscript to Make a Book. Writing and hugging a manuscript requires a lot of patience and precision, which required a "time out from life," or experiencing the world. I actually hid for a few days in Buellton, California (Pea Soup Heaven!) in order to work on the detailed nuance of editing the poems and formatting the book... which includes a book cover (front, back, spine), title page cover, copyright page, devotions, table of contents, introduction, parceling up poetry into chapters (I have seven chapters, I think!), and some form of conclusion page, adding page numbers, formatting with pdf (that was a battle!), and a few other residual items on the list I don't have on the top of my head...

Above is a collection of images involved in the formation of the logo / symbolic illustration for CHESS, entitled "Oak Tree Mind / Emerging Transcendence." Still not sure which title should be used, but I write down both to capture the attention of the search engines. I showed the illustration to my friend, Shannon, and she really liked it.... It can potentially be used within the literary magazine!

Below is a list of links of major documents available for FREE to paruse through:

CHESS Sample that Lulu requires for authors to make as a "preview" for the book: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/1CHESSsample2smaller.pdf

CHESS Interior Title Page: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/2CHESStitlepage1.pdf

CHESS Copyright Page (without a Library of Congress Number, and Presently without an ISBN Number, will need more feedback before I will invest $100 on a barcode): http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/3CHESScopyrightpage1.pdf

CHESS Table of Contents: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/4CHESStableofcontents.pdf

CHESS Final Page in the Back: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/5CHESSfinalpage1.pdf

"CHESS: Poetry of Human-Environmental Change" the COMPLETE BOOK: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/6CHESSebook2smaller.pdf

CHESS Storefront from Lulu: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/7CHESSpoetrystorefront1smaller.pdf

Question Reality / Stokastika Storefront with CHESS on the Top, from Lulu: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/8QuestionRealityLuluStorefront1small.pdf

This is not an all-inclusive blog. What I would like to summarize in a future blog is (1) What is CHESS all about? Where do all the ideas come from? What is the context? (2) Where am I heading next in the world of poetry? and (3) Some fundamental Life Principles that I learned from Barry Spacks' course... and any other miscellaneous ideas....

397. A Slice of Time in Barry Spack's Poetry Course (Poems Included)

Easy

It's easy to learn
How to do anything
Once you have something
Urgent to say.

Today I confessed to Barry Spacks my tainted past with "the real world" of writing. We discussed the dichotomies between the "sheltered university" and the "real world," in which the university, people become so oblivious and immune to the outer world, and in the outer world, survival requires some level of skills, and mostly connections, and a lot of luck of being at the right place and the right time. But it is always an interaction between chance opportunity meeting a prepared mind. They are both very different games to play, and being sheltered in the university certainly doesn't help. As Al Gore is in the 10th step of the 12-step Recovery Politician Mode, I myself am on the 9th or 10th step of the 12-step Recovery Writer Mode, after being exposed to the brutality of anonymity and apathy of the real world.

Barry mentioned that there is a Tibetan/Buddhist saying about two arrows. The first arrow hit/whacked my chest and then it fell to the ground at my feet. He then asked me what would happen to the second arrow. Me? Guess that? What? I first asked him how come the arrow did not penetrate my chest in the first place. He then stated that the saying wouldn't work if that happened. And I said, oh. Then I asked, can I do something to the arrow that fell off the ground. Why sure! he remarked. I scratched my chin, paused, then resumed to say that I would pick up the arrow and transform an object of pain to an object of solutions to the pain--an arrow that transforms negative into positive. Barry was impressed by the answer because the saying actually entails the notion on how humans tend to dwell in their negativity--the usual ending to the story is that people tend to pick up the arrow and stab themselves in the heart. I was shocked and mentioned that this was my mentality in high school--carrying the baggage of self destruction. But pain is important to go through because they make great stories once it is the right time for me to reflect upon these painful times.

At the end of our parting from a "typical," very engaging office hours chat, I gave Barry my final workshop poem which entailed a teaser:

The Barry Spacks Theory of Poetry

Astonish me,
But spare me.
There are no rules.
Anything is possible.

He mentioned that it was very nicely summarized--something that he tries to do in 4000 words is crystallized in four lines. I wanted to show Barry that I appreciate this advice, and that I was listening this entire quarter, though I had my periods of quietness (depending on what was going on in my life). I shook his hand, and I was off. I know this won't be the end of anything, though it was my last official class of the quarter. I know with Barry, this is just the beginning.

I thought this would be an opportunity, since it was the last day of class, to document a typical--or atypical day in class. On our Monday meeting, Barry asked us individually what we could do to improve the class, and he applied two or three suggestions instantly into this last Wednesday class. Like ten minutes of writing in the beginning of class, and an unexpected guest speaker! Unfortunately, I tend to crawl into class 5 minutes late, simply because I feel like I am behind in my mind, and then I show up late to almost everything I do. By the time I entered class, everyone received a poetry exercise handout. We all then went through a two-minute meditation of complete silence to empty our heads, and then started our exercise, which follows like this:

Jim Simmerman's poem-writing provocation "Twenty Little Poetry Projects"
8 Little Poetry Projects
1. Begin a poem with something specific but utterly preposterous (outrageous)?
2. Now, change direction: digress from the last thing you said.
3. Use a simile or metaphor.
4. Contradict something said earlier in the poem.
5. Go on a bit of "talk" you've actually heard (faking that you've actually heard it is allowed).
6. Make the speaker or persona or main character in the poem do something he/she/it would be extremely unlikely to do in "real life."
7. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
8. Close the poem with a vivid image that "echoes" an image from earlier in the poem (or simply repeats an earlier image).

I am very proud to say that within 7 minutes I was able to concoct a poem I would have never dreamt to have written if it weren't for this class. I have brinked the realm of unrealistic absurdity, and I am proud of it. I am always excited to discover and exercise new habits, and then work hard to break them, and find something new. So, here goes the poem:

Unlikely Parasites

A baby grew out of my sixth finger
and a nematode crawled under my toenail.
They were all parasites.
Lucky me, they were outside
my form.

Another baby grew from the split ends of my hair
and the nematode jumped to the other toenail.
It's quite unequitable, unfair,
for one to be supplied by cold blood
and the other by dead cells,
and even shields of organic armor!

They were all parasites,
but instead of plucking
and cutting them off,
I let them stay and grow on me
just for one full-moon day
just for one sun-dipped night
just to see how it was like
to hold life.

Even though they were parasites,
And just for this short bit of time,
They got inside.
They all got inside.

To be honest, I would have NEVER ever written a poem such as this if it weren't for this class. It's absurd, silly, and I could say that Ryan Hechinger, parasite guru, inspired me, because he decided to nurse a botfly in his skin. You only encounter these characters in the realm of biology and geology.

We started reading some residual poetry from the "samplers," given out. And I was thankful one student read my poem, Matrix of Metaphors, and everyone agreed, including Ingred Wendt, a very accomplished poet and surprise guest speaker for the day, that the poem was very dense, and she would have to read the poem a few times to get it. First of all, if you were a philosopher of science, or a film-maker, you would get it right away, because the philosopher of science would know about Aristotle and his explanation of metaphors--making comparisons of systems--whether they were figurative or valuable as scientific theory--or Truth. I beat Aristotle by two days. I wrote the poem independent of knowing what Aristotle thought, and two days later I found out through my reading that he made the same distinction I had. Talk about independent origin of thought!

Ingred is a very interesting character. She flew all the way from Eugene, Oregon, and will do a poetry reading at 4pm at the College of Creative Studies Little Theater. Ingred most noticeably admits that she has ADHD, which is an advantage for a poet, and then Barry asked whether you could buy some ADHD from the store, and which one? Ha! I only have ADHD post sugar-consumption. She has a very strong bond with a renowned poet by the name of William Stafford. A couple of noteable books include Sturgeonfish and In Her Own Image. Some interesting commentary and quotes below:
(1) I did not know the more that I drank the world of poetry, the thirstier I would get (positive feedback).
(2). At first when she strated writing, it was like running dry, you sit down to write and have nothing to say, which is sad. Over time, you have too much to say and not enough time to write.
(3). "I don't know who you are, you don't know who I am" a poem by William Stafford, lots of darkness in the world, more philosophical poem.
(4). "It sounds like I have done a lot of stuff, but you know what? I've lived a really long time!"
(5). The longer you live, the more opportunities you get. You gotta take advantage of them. That's your job."

So? Okay. The last thing before I talk about... the class being ajourned, Barry and I put our heads together and had a vivid talk about how to organize a chapbook. He discussed continuity, variety, with the first and last poems being very strong. He also mentioned a sequence of poems as a series of conversations. If it's a longer piece, it will be a series of sections. Things I have already considered are mixing short with long poems, rhyming poems with non-rhyming poems, varying the theme or angle for diversity purposes, as well as considering an order or progression of logic.

After the poetry class, I mozied on to the Graduate Student Association and snagged a cup of orange juice. I ran into Julian and we both buzzed about the upcoming Human Behavior and Evolution Conference up at Cal State Fullerton. He might be able to help me spin my AAAS poster into something workable within the framework of the conference. Maybe I should just attend. We'll see.

It's nice to document a snapshot of time from the Winter Quarter of 2009. If I did this every day, I am sure I would go nuts. Barry Spacks is most certainly one of the most profound and approachable professors I have met and interacted with on the humanities side. I feel a lot more level-headed now that I can filter the world partly through his eyes and mind. As he said, one day, Victoria, all the jitters will go away. Close to nothing will surprise you anymore. I want to keep being surprised, I just don't want to be so overwhelmed. On that note, and on superb dreamlike note, I will be volunteering for the Origins Conference (I had a strange dream last night about the conference, that I was at Arizona State University and they had this cubic-like zeplin ball that was remote controlled by graduate students and it was flying all over campus because there's nothing else to do out there in the desert. Don't ask me why I had this dream, but I know this is a repeat dream, and it was SO vivid) under the advisor ship of Jessica Lee and Lawrence Krauss. It will be a life-changing experience! I am so excited I want to call my dad, but he's in Arizona right now... frustratingly. *Sigh*

Thanks, Barry. One more time.

389. A Clever Poem on Psychologists, Shared with Dr. Barry Spacks

Earlier this morning I was quite sleep deprived. It is a dangerous condition because I am socially desensitized and when I encounter someone I know I tend to ramble forever. As if I had undergone a drunken stupor.

I am sorry Barry Spacks had to be the victim. I even warned him, and he scoffed, "Don't worry! I don't mind rambling at all!" Man, my housemates' Kyle and Karl got me down pat. They know when to politely avoid me and shut me down and tell me to go sleep. I feel so bad--we went overtime in office hours. Hopefully I didn't seem like too much of an out of control, non-self-contained idiot. *Sigh*

What came out of it though is that I recited the beginning of a poem and Dr. Spacks just liked it the way how it was, so I'll just ditto the first lines here and call it a poem.

When you enter the room happy
And leave the room depressed,
That's when you end your relationship
With your psychologist!

386. Pandora Knows My Musical Tastes Better Than I Do... / "Mad World" by Gary Jules

An Appreciation for Some Music Lyrics--Mad World
Dr. Spacks and I had a conversation about the relationships between poetry and song-writing. Song-writing and vocal performance can very easily drown out and compromise the lyrics. Which means, more times than not, the lyrics do not stand as a very strong, naked (music-absent) poem, simply because implicit meanings are added through the layers of music performance. I think "Mad World" by Gary Jules might be able to stand uniquely as a poem, independent of the ghostly beautiful music performance. We also discussed the notions of "cycles" and "flipping hamburgers." The Flipping Hamburger University is just doing it in test-tubes, and it's kind of sad you need some big shot credential to do that. I emphasized though, that life is full of cycles, it's just a matter of some cycles hardly changing, slowly evolving, and other cycles are open to innovation--small baby steps and huge leaps of innovation. I think in poetry there can be several baby steps made. But Dr. Spacks also made this wonderful analogy that "a poem is a living organism. You are to foster it, build it, let it evolve. You never know where the poem will take you." I followed it up with "No wonder why I write most of my poetry in the car--because that is the only time I have free space and time to let something just spontaneously evolve!" Chryss Yost (prominent poet in Santa Barbara) emphasized that "poetry is a craft. You are building a system," which made me think why poems don't start at the bottom of the pages, since you are building something bottom-up. Hmmm. Good idea!

"Mad World" by Gary Jules

All around me are familiar faces

Worn out places, worn out faces

Bright and early for their daily races

Going nowhere, going nowhere

Their tears are filling up their glasses

No expression, no expression

Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow

No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad

The dreams in which I'm dying

Are the best I've ever had

I find it hard to tell you

I find it hard to take

When people run in circles

It's a very, very mad world mad world

Children waiting for the day they feel good

Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday

And I feel the way that every child should

Sit and listen, sit and listen

Went to school and I was very nervous

No one knew me, no one knew me

Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson

Look right through me, look right through me

And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad

The dreams in which I'm dying

Are the best I've ever had

I find it hard to tell you

I find it hard to take

When people run in circles

It's a very, very mad world ... mad world

Enlarging your world

Mad world

After listening to Pandora for about two or three days, only subscribed to two streams--one being Daftpunk and the other being Gorillaz (though I should add Bjork and Regina Spektor and Nick Drake, for sure)--I have come to realize that my tastes in music are very idea-based music with VERY pure melodies. Nick Drake-esque. And if it becomes layered, then it becomes tribal, classical symphonic Rite of Spring Bjorkesque. For example, here are some songs that have given me pricked ears and teary eyes: the song above "Mad World" by Gary Jules, "We're Going to be Friends" by White Stripes, "Fall Line" by Jack Johnson, "In the Waiting Line" By Zero 7, "I'm Happy / Feeling Glad / Got Sunshine in a Bag" by Gorillaz, "Crazy" by Gnarles Barkeley. I am becoming even more musically predictable to myself!

My housemate Kyle converted me... got me addicted to Pandora.... It's scary to think that Pandora perhaps knows my musical tastes better than I know my own!