Testing...testing...1...2...3

So I'm spending part of this summer proctoring placement exams at summer orientation.

Now, I've spent a fair amount of time in lecture halls; I know them pretty well. I also know my way around a test, having taken one or two over the years.

But man is it a little trippy to be on the other side, watching 300 soon-to-be freshmen scribbling away, clawing at their heads like they might be able to somehow drag the answers out, the sweat beads rolling off while they chew on their pencils and their nails and then they put their grubby freshmen paws all over everything and spread their saliva everywhere.

It's actually kind of intensely gross.

The nerves ratchet up towards the end...they glance up to see the remaining time at more frequent and frantic intervals, and sometimes you see one just sitting there staring off into space, maybe wanting to cry, maybe contemplating the previous first real night at college and ruing the amount of alcohol consumption that has made their liver weep a little bit. Or at least, that was what my roommate at orientation seemed to experience after she stumbled in at 4am and then somehow managed to roll her ass out of bed again at 8 to take her math placement test. I wonder what happened to that girl...

Or maybe they are just wondering what the hell they are doing up that early. In any case, the glaze in the eyes is just a little bit hilarious.

See, I feel like now that I've passed the halfway mark of college, there's enough distance between myself and this new gaggle of younglings that I can more openly ridicule them. It's a good feeling. Except that the omnipresent what-to-do-with-the-rest-of-my-life question seems a lot closer on this side than it did the first two years. And the fact that most days I still feel like a freshman myself. But they don't really need to know that as I laugh at their standardized testing woes.

I personally like the non-testing side a little better. Less pressure. Less oral fixation. It's kind of fun, because you can simultaneously empathize with their suffering and be grateful that you are not in their position. And I gotta hand it to professors who deal with the lecture halls. It would be insanely intimidating to stand in front of 500 people and yak on about your subject. Even if you know it incredibly well, there just seems to be 500 times the potential for screwing up. And that's scary.

That's the trade-off, I guess, for moving on in life.

Fear for fear.

Standardized testing has pretty much become the norm in modern American education. It's efficient, it's uniform, and hey, who doesn't just love filling in an endless sea of scantron bubbles with that trusty #2 pencil?

Even little kids get thrown out into the scantron circle sea and are made to swim for themselves. I remember taking those ridiculous tests all the way back to elementary school. The only part I liked was the essay, and only because once I got to write about a purple elephant that ran away from the circus. But anyway, you can call it what you want...aptitude measurements, "success" predictors, readiness assessments, blah blah blah, but it all really just comes down to being a highly systematic way of categorizing and evaluating people.

And though the scores produced might be hailed as an effective device for determining "readiness" (readiness for what, by the way? There's no amount of "readiness" for life, that's for sure), there is no accounting for any kind of creativity or individual thought.

Hell, the "What We Do" of the ETS says it pretty clearly:

All of our products and services — including individual test questions, assessments, instructional materials and publications — are evaluated during development to ensure that they

• are not offensive or controversial
• do not reinforce stereotypical views of any group
• are free of racial, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic and other forms of bias
• are free of content believed to be inappropriate or derogatory toward any group

Well, I know that I can sure sleep more soundly now, knowing that all the testing I've done over the years has been nice and PC and just perfectly (yet, unbiasedly) tailored to people who have some kind of weird knack for multiple choice tests.

I'm not encouraging racism or sexism or classism or any other "ism" out there, but I do encourage deviation from "proper" thinking, and I just mean in more general terms that according to those standards, there could never possibly be an actually good literary passage on any of those tests because, hell, good literature is almost always controversial, and if it's really great, then it's usually offensive, too, to some group of people or another. Normally, if you don't like it, you're more than welcome to challenge it. But see, these tests don't want to be challenged, they just want to establish a top percentile that knows exactly how to answer their questions in a way that pleases their sensibilities. And if you care about the number you recieve, then you might as well just check any of your own thoughts at the door and start thinking like an unbiased, appropriate test-writer would!

That has to be the only explanation for how the hell Billy Collins showed up on my AP English test senior year. Because that guy is just about as unoffensive as a poet could possibly be.

They might as well rephrase their entire mission statement to read: ETS: making boring our standard (and so should you)!

Because who doesn't love being evaluated on how well they can conform to the AP-style essay, right? (Never, ever forget to state a complementary tone!) Our heads were crammed full of this crap over the years, and only so that we might have a chance at getting the testing formula right and obtaining good enough scores to somehow eke ourselves into college. And just when you enter a university and think you're finally home free, you realize that if you plan on giving up your soul to a grad school or a law school or a med school or a whole host of other professions, you'll have to do it all again in just a few short years.

No reprieve no reprieve no reprieve!

Not to mention that test prep is probably something like a multimillion-dollar industry. Because hey, if you can make an absurd amount of money exploiting the desperation of students in the midst of all their life crises, why not, right?

But you know what? Have some faith, disheartened bubblers! Even if those tests haven't been kind to you over the years, somehow, someway, you might still be able to make it in the world. Hell, I've always really kind of sucked at standardized testing and somehow, I'm doing okay. I haven't completely failed at life. Though there's still plenty of time for that, I guess.

Anyway, if you are currently on hiatus from testing, take a moment and be grateful for that fact. And, if you are among the unlucky throngs that are currently engaged, or preparing to engage, in battle with that dreaded scantron sheet, you have my immense sympathies.

And do also know that I am silently and gleefully mocking you.

Optimism and Yeats' testicles

for Mrs. H, may you forever rue the day that you filled out my report card

You know, praise be for spell check.

I still, after 19 years, can't spell "calendar" without first getting that blaring little red squiggly that underlines my misstep and practically screams: You call yourself a writer?! But no, not so much. More just one who occasionally writes stuff. And who apparently can't spell 'occasionally,' either. I just can't seem to get a handle on when those letters geminate and when they don't.

Maybe my 4th grade teacher was on to something. She gave me a D in spelling, on my report card. Way to strike down the self-esteem of a 9-year-old, eh?

But! Lucky for me, technology has allowed me to recover from that massive blow to my fragile 4th grade ego and bounce back from what might have turned into a lifetime of self-loathing due to my acute inability to spell things correctly.

I've been thinking about it quite a bit, mostly because I have nothing better to do these days, and I have come to realize that I probably come off here sometimes as a terribly-misanthropic pessimist. But, in all honesty, that's really only a part-time gig. I actually do like people. Sometimes. Anyway, I thought, since this world does contain things that do occasionally encourage intermittent optimism, like spell checkers, I'd consider at least a few things that are not wholly pessimism-inducing. I'm viewing it as it an important step on my way to self-betterment.

So, I came up with: Coffee, baby giraffes walking on their spindly little legs, baby animals in general (anything but the human variety), my recently-acquired love of cryptoquotes, Costco free samples, Matt Damon, Celebrity Rehab 3 later this year, the Bad Religion song that just came on Pandora, and the Star Wars marathon that is on tv this weekend.

It's a small list, but we're starting slow. Can't get too happy all at once, right?

Also, I should probably add proving my 4th grade teacher wrong to the list, too, because she made us run laps outside every single morning before class, even when there was three feet of snow and ice, and quite honestly, I'm still really bitter about that, and the D in Spelling, so you know, gotta make sure to really stick it to her.

I'm trying to tell myself that I really dig this positive thinking stuff. Like, hey, maybe tomorrow will be full of puppies and rainbows and the world will smell like just-baked muffins or something and we'll smile all day long and maybe we can have an awesomely-choreographed humongous dance number in the town square, just like they do in Disney movies!

The problem is, Yeats then pops into my head:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Not to be Debbie Downer or anything. It's just that once Yeats is inside you he isn't easily shaken out.

How dirty sounding.

He probably would've liked that.

You know that Yeats feared impotence so much that he underwent a surgery in which he implanted monkey testicles into his own scrotum in the hopes of making himself more virile?

So maybe extreme poetic genius doesn't necessarily equate to what might be considered healthy body-image, but, Yeats' testicles aside, let it be known that I did attempt the Sunny Life Outlook, however briefly and if only out of summer boredom and sleeplessness, and I've really gotta go with Yeats on this one (the thing about surely some revelation is at hand, not so much about the testicle thing, as that doesn't really apply so well in my case), that revelation being that sunshine and smilies are all good and grand but not nearly as much fun and meaty as discontent with the entire world. But fear not, I'm sure things will be back to normal soon enough.

At least I gave it a shot, right?

Read this book

The best kind of literature--the only kind of literature that is worth it, really--is the kind that makes you intensely uncomfortable. Like when you recall some memory from the dregs of your brain and something in your gut constricts because of the rawness...it's that same feeling with the best, truest kind of writing. It is what's immensely troubling that teaches the most, that strikes something internally and remains there.

I've been in a sort of state, post-reading of a book that flooded me with something kind of indescribable. Ever since finishing it, I feel like it has taken root inside of me and all its barked limbs are gripping my insides and twining everywhere and its planting disturbed all the equilibrium of the soil and damn it this book really, really got to me.

J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is a book that should seriously be made required reading for the world.

It is staggering.

I won't get too into the details; go read it for yourself if you care. But I will say that it deals with war and hatred and death and anger and torture and the absolute pointlessness of it all but it doesn't preach and it approaches it all with amazing, articulate, perfect language and this is what literature is. It's a reminder that while it might be tempting to pick up some kind of awful, predictably mass-produced McNovel (which, hey, I don't totally condemn...everyone needs some occasional fluff in their life), there still exists real words and real language and real ideas. Real. The kind of thinking that comes out of a great mind and preserves the mammoth energy of words and is a very sharp, very pointed reminder that literature has this incredible power to wend its way into the heart and actually mean something. Because it can. I don't care how much time is spent existing in this sort of hazy, unreal, 21st century world where everything and everyone sometimes seem to be surviving in this funky sort of paradoxical state where people and their souls have become so hard and sad and calloused but at the same time so, so fragile, like if you poke it it might crack and then cascade in shatters only seconds later. And maybe books don't mean that much in that weird penumbra that infects so much of what we know these days, but when my brain encounters a novel like this there is just this massive eruption in my soul of the charged electricity of ideas and everywhere there are words that can actually effect and when I read a book like this one where there is elegance in every phrase and ideas that are actually humble and real and true and not pumped full of idiotic modern steroids and popular thought, I actually feel hopeful (despite the bleak nature of the story), that maybe some things really are worth it and by god, maybe language is one of those things.

What, after all, do we live for if there is nothing we encounter that makes our insides quake and our minds rattle and disturbs us to the point that we act and do something and actually progress with ideas and work and living?

To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable.

Coetzee writes that. Yes, he writes that, and maybe that is true, but I can't bring myself to think that as a reality, because even if that is the despairing narrator's sentiment, I do not feel it is the author's. Quite the opposite, actually...that maybe learning really can occur--that it is not the impossibility that moronic contemporary thought might lead us to believe.

At another point in the novel:

Ridiculous, I thought: a greybeard sitting in the dark waiting for spirits from the byways of history to speak to him before he goes home to his military stew and his comfortable bed. The space about us here is merely space, no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital. Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same.

everywhere the same
everywhere, man and men
we do not know
the human condition
I hardly know
my condition
I observe
your condition
there is no knowing it
you breathe
I breathe
the air is not
recreated for each
of our souls--
we share it,
we share the life
everywhere the same:
the life
the air
some kind of temper

Hey, I did warn that the book is on the bleaker side of things. Which is maybe why the title recalls a certain Waiting for Godot? As one of my literature professors likes to remind us, "Beckett always said that if his play had been about waiting for god, he would have named it that."

So, anyway, I don't really know what the hell the human condition is. But I do think--no, know--that literature in some kind of culmination probably does. All the words at once might finally come to mean something...to approach some kind of truth.

I feel like I am saying the same thing over and over. Is redundancy a component of the human condition? If it is then maybe I do get it, after all.

Anyway, all this talk of humanity and stuff reminds me of another part in the book, where the narrator shouts wildly after witnessing the public degradation of some of the so-called "barbarians:"

"Look took at these men!"..."Men!"

It definitely reminds me of another favorite scene of mine, from 1984, when O'Brien turns the naked, starved, demoralized Winston around to face a mirror and he says to him: "Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity."

And this also hauls up from my mind the scene of Pontius Pilate as he presents a flogged and fettered Jesus to the crowds before his crucifixion: "Ecce homo!" Or, behold the man! (the scene has of course been depicted in art at least once a century ever since. My favorite rendering, I think is Caravaggio's [c. 1605], probably because if you consider Pilate up close the eyes are pained and full of conflict. Or maybe I just see what I want to see but, hey, that's art [and they also really are].)

They're all kind of seemingly disparate moments (from biblical to science-fictional to an unnamed magistrate in an unnamed land), but they all, I think, call into question the same ideas of humanity and what makes a man a man and how damn futile it can sometimes be to fight when there is nothing to be won.

Torture arises in the book, as a realization of something bigger and more terrible and also as a question of what damage the body might undergo before the soul, too, gives way:

Thereafter she was no longer fully human, sister to all of us. Certain sympathies died, certain movements of the heart became no longer possible to her. I too, if I live long enough in this cell with its ghosts...will be touched with the contagion and turned into a creature that believes in nothing.

What is rather amazing, about the torture in the book, though, is not that it occurs or that it is terrible, but that there is something so much more profound than just the bodily injury. It is something about the strength of the internal, the spirit. Maybe strength isn't the right word, more...protected? Encased within the body is something that can be totally unreachable, totally unknown and immutable:

Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of another!

It appears, at points, that the narrator is willing to cede himself to his captors and yet, there is just that most minute particle inside that remains untouched by whatever physical pain is being inflicted upon his body. Maybe that is also why I like the Caravaggio painting so much, because there is a certain internal serenity, or rather, security, in the rendering of Jesus, despite his being in a state of post-flogging and total demoralization. It does not necessarily have anything to do with god or religion or faith, but rather that there is an internal core--the soul--that will persist despite whatever torture the shell that protects it might encounter.

I often think: as a university student, I exist in a totally insular world. Academia is safe. It is comfortable. But it is certainly not a very accurate representation of the everyday experience of the general population that exists outside classroom walls. Intellectual stimulation or research or sitting through Chalk Lady's hellish classes are not a necessity to survival, or at least not as far as the perpetuation of life goes, despite what I would like to believe about its essential place in my existence.

So, being constantly immersed in this world, I really don't understand anything about war or torture as they exist in the far-away reaches of this world. But I do know something about fighting, and I do know something about conflict and I definitely do know something about existing in a tempest and maybe it is not on the same scale as torture or nuclear warfare, but we all fight our battles and sometimes we have an oar to help row ourselves out and sometimes we don't but always, always we have to find some way to weather the squall and that is some kind of veritable war. Oh, yes it is.

We fight and fight and fight and still there is this constant, ridiculous world that teems with prejudice and hate and sickness and call me idealistic and naive but holy crap we all suffer the same damn way so what the hell are we doing? What the hell are we doing but destroying ourselves with our painful clinging to the ideals we form for ourselves?

How do you eradicate contempt, especially contempt when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than difference in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid?

Despair sucks equally no matter what the hell you look like. People love the same way and they are born the same way, bloody and alien-looking and covered in placenta, and I'll be damned if we don't all die the same way, too, breathing one last time the same air that cycles through all our bodies and will still compose the atmosphere long after all of us and all of our idiotic injustices have been long fought and killed.

Anyway, that was more of a tangent that I had really intended. Just read the book. It isn't very long and you might find it actually means something. It really did to me, anyway.

He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops. In the clear silence of the morning I find an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness. With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.

Aristotle and the ancients and shopping at the agora and awkwarness

This post is probably going to be one massive betrayal of The Nerd Pact (in which those of us so afflicted with generally socially-unacceptable-in-mainstream-American-culture interests like debating which form of lightsaber combat is most superior [I am very much inclined to say Form III, because, hey, that was Obi-Wan's form and we all know he was the greatest Jedi ever--bar Yoda, of course--totally destroying Anakin's whiny dark-side-ass and just being generally amazing] all agree to attempt to somehow assimilate into society without completely alienating all those who belong to the truly uncool masses and don't spend their days daydreaming about attending Harry Potter conventions), but it's not like anyone who reads this blog isn't already aware of my astounding degree of geekiness anyway, so I guess it's all good.

That was a really terrible sentence. I'm such a hypocrite. I was all on Virginia Woolf's ass not that long ago for being a semi-colon whore and here I am using parentheses without much of a second thought and making long run-on sentences that no English teacher of my past from first grade until now would possibly approve of. But man it's just oh so tempting...

Anyway, grammar aside, you're allowed into this elite bunch of people if you've ever been talking to someone and noticed how it just seems to really put them off a little when there is an awkward lull in conversation and the only thing your brain can heave up to fill it is a bad Star Wars joke.

Like:

-What do you call a bunch of dark lords piled on top of a lightsaber?
-->A Sith-Kabob!

or

-What's the difference between an AT-AT and a stormtrooper?
-->One's an Imperial Walker and the other's a walking Imperial!

I'm just saying that more often than not it usually causes the already-painful awkwardness to balloon and become astoundingly more uncomfortable, where you might have never even thought it possible.

But since I am actually kind of fascinated by the whole phenomenon of awkwardness, I'm going to perpetuate it a little bit more.

I was doing a crossword puzzle earlier and one of the clues was "mall for Plato," and it sent me into a very bizarre kind of daydream that went something like this:

Plato (to Aristotle): My chiton has been feeling tighter and tighter these days.

Aristotle: Too much wine and cheese, eh? Don't exactly have the metabolism of a young Spartan chicken anymore?

Plato (glaring): You would think that you would treat your old teacher with more respect.

Aristotle: Oh, I do respect you, I just think it's far past time for a trip to the Agora. You're looking a little outdated these days, like you were dressed by a Turk.

Plato: Ungrateful wretch.

Aristotle: Just sayin'.

Plato: Well, ok, bright one. If the gods have spoken so directly to you about this season's essential fashion statements, please do enlighten me.

Aristotle: I hear that purple trim is all the rage. It would really bring out the color in your eyes and the subtle pink in your cheeks.

Plato: You know, I would never have dared to abuse Socrates like this.

Aristotle: Also, if you ever want to snag yourself a lady, you ought to trim your beard. It looks like a sheep died on your chin. You can't just always rely on your brains, you know.

- - -

So...I clearly have way too much time on my hands.

I just very much enjoy the idea of the ancients sitting around talking about completely inane things and finding themselves squirming inside their chests at exceedingly awkward and inescapable human moments. Because we all sort of act like they were these very stoic, brilliant people who maintained constant ideals of politics and art and philosophy, but in reality, they were probably just as horrifyingly bad at social interaction as people today are.

I like to think that Aristotle and Plato would have completely understood The Nerd Pact. They would've been like, I got yo back, homeboy. Straight up. And then they would do whatever the ancient Greek equivalent of The Fist Bump was.

Think about it: I bet Plato totally had those moments where he was like shit, did I really just say that aloud? But, see, lucky for Plato, his genius and crap exceeded any sort of ridiculous things he might have said without thinking first, and his name remains unsullied. But if we were able to dig deep into all the sordid affairs, I'm sure that all those great minds would probably look a little bit pathetic (ultimately sympathetic?).

Like, Aristotle is thought of to have all this finesse and whatnot, but I bet that at some point during his life, he wished that he had some kind of dictionary for interpreting relationshipy things. I bet that there were times when he was talking to a potential Mrs. Aristotle or something and he made a complete ass of himself and there was no indication of any sort of brilliance. I think it's something that probably has been a human standard across the ages...idiotic conversation with potential mates, that is (or just other people in general).

Maybe there was some kind of ancient equivalent of Loveline that they could contact for all the answers. Instead of Dr. Drew there could be Dr. Oracle or something. Dr. Delphinator. I don't know. My gut feeling is that thousands of years ago people were still just as pathetic as we are now and that is not something that is likely to change...ever.

So, next time you're at the mall, just think to yourself, years and years and years ago, Plato was at the Agora doing the same thing. And hey, maybe take some kind of comfort in that. Or just be disturbed by it. Or just buy a fresh-baked pretzel and don't even think about it at all.

Just do whatever the hell it is that gets you through the day and this bizarre and awkward thing of human life.

More

Words seem to be occurring with a greater ease, these days.

I will enjoy it, before it flees.

- - -

study of the ear, v

"Loneliness is a breeding ground for sickness."
-Irvin Yalom

god there is sickness
everywhere
like in the atomic nucleus
of the nuclear family,
just waiting, waiting for
the detonation

and in every threadlike line
of solitude there's that same
sickness, in every
threadlike line
lining what used to
be unlonely and unlined

it is such a long wait,
wading here until our
skin wilts,
trying to uproot
from the salty waters
some medicine--
some cure

waiting like
anticipating the oncoming
wave in the sea

see, I've heard that
enormous noise before--
it was something much
more real than solitude
or sickness

living seemed so sharp,
hearing that crash.


study of the ear, vi

the doctor told you
that your ears were full
of scabs and liquid,
that a scrupulous cleaning
would return to you
comprehension

you became disoriented
post-scouring,
your sleep and sadness
avalanched,
the edgy permafrost sliced
any gladness and
the slushier waters
began to seep
everywhere

mopping up
the saturated mess
will take so much time

so much time


study of the ear, vii

let us rewrite the definition of 'home'
have it say:

--noun /hoʊm/
1. a location in which
there is faultless clarity
in every uttered sound

where the acoustic
resonance is flawless
where all the auditory things
are perceived and realized
sweetly, and with strength

where language
gives sense to everything

where it has encountered
no damage


study of the ear, viii

so many words about ears
and mouths and the body

so many words
written to convince that
I understand such things

but I understand nothing of the body
nothing of chronic disease
nothing but the pumping of
laboratory-birthed medicines
to perpetuate a life

can you feel the sterility of it
inside you? can you feel
it when it enters just beneath
your skin—the humanly-forged
things that try to restrain
you from the loss of your eyes
and your limbs and your heart
and your viscera and your ability
to feel anything or
to love anything or
to know anything but the
relentless betrayal
of the body?

you breathe because of
this invasion of replication—
the clones of
truly-animal concerns,
of the clinical operations of
these prescribed, vialed things

you persist because your
body howled once and the response
was prepackaged
and ready for injection

you heard the shrillness
of that weeping
you felt it in your cramping heart,
you had spent so long
immersed in the brutality
of sleeplessness

so why, when your body
turned against you
was there an answer in
modern medicine
yet there is no answer
for when you face
the living masses,
try to urge forth words,
and nothing pours
but speechlessness?

it pours
they release their umbrellas
they are dry and unhearing
and you are drowning
in everything
but a cure

Happy happy Bloomsday!

I think that James Joyce, being the disturbed and disturbing man that he was, would like nothing more than to commemorate this happy day by talking about how the world is in a slow and horrible decline. Or maybe not-so-slow, depending on your view of things.

My favorite radio station, KWOD, has recently been replaced by a crappy syndicated 90s station. Stryker has departed from Loveline. This past year, The California Aggie made the decision to cease printing of the Friday paper, and subsequently left me crossword-puzzle-less one school day a week. There is also this whole analog converter thing, which quite frankly just reeks of massive shady government conspiracy, if you ask me. Oh, the government has a whim! You must get cable or a black box! Let us see how easily we can control all the mindless American drones and make them bend to us in order to obtain their entertainment!

These don't seem like big things (except for government brainwashing, that is, but maybe I've just read too much science-fiction or something. Nothing like a little dystopian milieu to liven up your day, right? Joyce probably would've enjoyed it), but there are also all those things that we already have dug and allowed to settle into our daily lives, like that whole little issue of war and people everywhere dying for absolutely nothing but stupid pointless shit and so much anger everywhere all the time and people voting yes on prop 8 last year and minds in despair and those same minds not being able to get out of it and the world telling them that, well hey, some kind of pharmacology must be the answer to every problem that no one wants to take the time to actually work out properly and then there's also language poetry and that The National Enquirer is yet again putting "Worst Celebrity Beach Bods" on its cover which it only does when there is no really juicy celebrity gossip and my god if Brangelina hasn't adopted yet another child from yet another underdeveloped country this week then things must really be going to hell.

Maybe eventually we'll all just become artless, mindless, soulless shells of the government and soon they'll carry out the ultimate goal and just completely and totally suck all vestiges of individuality from inside us and won't that just be absolutely grand?

Anyway, sorry Joyce, to steal your thunder with the suckiness of the world. Back to you. May you be forever posthumously awesome.



Also, I do realize that the whole converter box thing probably does have some kind of sensical explanation but I am way too lazy to go research it. I much prefer to blame The Man. It's what Joyce would've done.

A Study of the Ear

I notice a lot of artists doing the whole series thing...like, "Study of ___" and it's a series drapes or eggs or femurs or whatever thing they happen to be obsessed with at the time. So, anyway, I'm thinking about the ear.

There's something very critical about the ear, you see.

Hell, van Gogh hacked his earlobe off in a moment of complete desperation, no? (Or was it really some kind of seizure? A seizure of despair, maybe?)

So, I want, in the great tradition of artists and ears and despair and series of studies of things, to do something of my own sort. I'm calling it "A Study of the Ear." Some of the parts aren't working for me yet. There are gaps. Like how you even begin to approach the seeming inextricably of hearing and language. And it could go on and on and on like the works of so many poets who can't figure out where the idea ends (not that an idea can ever end, but it can at least rest). I don't want it to go on infinitely. I just need to work with more, probably.

Also, that ear is just a close-up from van Gogh's "Self-Portrait." Art is unfortunately beyond my MLA-trained citation abilities. In any case, I take no credit for painting it, haha.

So, anyway. I really shouldn't ever preface poetry. Especially because I find it so annoying when other people do it and yet here I am. Yeah.

Let's try a better sort of intro: Have some words.


study of the ear, i

spider where it doesn't belong
speech always
where it doesn't belong
what is any of this but muddle,
cogs grinding like they'll
make something--
like something real
will be produced

what is any of this but whirring
what is this haze but
talk talk talking frenetically
scribbling out this shit
like someone
might hear it
like they might know it

spider, go back--
people on this inside don't hear
they're almost deaf, you see

yes, here there is a listening,
nodding and automatic response
but no, not hearing


study of the ear, ii

you can't hear over this din
this worst of noises:
the silence of having
become unfamiliar--
unfamilial

it is
when all goes only in--all the drink and dirt--
where nothing is outed; where nothing is spilt
when no one unties their lips
where there are no mouths
when articulation has no universe
where all this rusts


study of the ear, iii

so many times has
the deafness spurned
the throbbing internality
the finding of answers in books
the scrawling of this
desperate language
as a way to understand
how things work--
to somehow know the process
of existence

it is a process--
plans have been drawn,
explanations; they've tried
to map out its angles
giving latitude to mindspaces and
quantifying the longitude
of the human crave

finding the sum
of those numeral assignments
has become
the obsession

like you, really, obsessed with the turning
and revolving of your mania and
your nadir--when you kiss the grime,
the dirty layers of the underside
you know so completely

oh, you know misery thoroughly
but you perceive no sound
that same way--
no sound but your wailing

my language is wailing--
where is the disconnect?

nothing auditory comprehended
nothing written comprehended

distance is all that's in your ears


study of the ear, iv

is this language repulsive?
in this time post-
vehemence of emulsion
the words seem awfully mutated,
confused, or maybe just so
violent that the ache
has produced only particles
and dirt

one day every sense
might know
the sad muddle

because every moment now
touches the damage,
seeing but not understanding
the splay of my letters,
tasting the repercussions
of your swallowing
and knowing only too well
the smell of your next
depression when
you will fall into the loam,
hearing only your vacuum