RONALD PALMER

RONALD PALMER lives in the Richmond District of San Francisco with his partner Kevin Rolston. His first poetry collection is titled Logicalogics (Soft Skull, 2005) . He graduated from NYU's program in creative writing (MA, 1993) and also from Binghamton University (Ph.D., 1996). A chapter from his porn thriller, Prick Queasy, is forthcoming from Summer BF Press.

The Reluctant PharmaWhore


          Ronald Palmer's first real job, besides mowing lawns and chopping wood for his neighbors, was working summers as a mental health worker in the mid 1980s at the now defunct Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Connecticut. At the age of eighteen, he worked along side night nurses in a locked ward with adult patients suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disease. (Also subbing occasionally on a separate ward for “shell-shocked” Vietnam Veterans who had gone “berserk”; in hindsight, this was only about a decade after the veterans had returned from the war.  Back when a decade felt like an eternity.)

          His first career plan was to pursue a Ph.D./M.D. in psychiatry, so it's mildly ironic that now, 25 years since his first job as a Mental Health Worker, he is a drug representative for a global pharmaceutical company calling on psychiatrists as customers.

Between 1988 and 2000 he worked as:

·      a dish washer in a pizza place in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

·      a counselor in a group home for abused foster children in San Francisco

·      a model/extra in national commercials such as Diet Coke and the defunct MCI

·      a room service waiter at The Mayfair, a fancy upper east side hotel in NYC

·      an advertising traffic coordinator for a Japanese Advertising Corporation called DENTSU on 42nd street in midtown Manhattan

·      an assistant executive at J. Walter Thompson, an advertising company

·      a tutor and instructor at Manhattan Community College for the COPE program for parents in the NYC welfare system

·      a teacher of creative writing at NYU, Binghamton University and Framingham State College during which he moonlighted at Barnes and Noble Bookstore on weekends to supplement a 33K contract salary for a 4X4 teaching load.

·      An international professor of writing and reading seminars for students seeking an M.A. degree in teaching, a position that flew him around the globe from North Africa to Poland, from Bolivia to Costa Rica, Panama to Morocco all during the year in which he enjoyed (what amounted to a writer in residence) a fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in The Netherlands.

2000-2010:            

A decade's journey from a post-doctoral stint in the Netherlands to a senior sales specialist position in the world of Big Pharma:

          In the summer of 2000, Ronald Palmer landed at his parents' house in Connecticut, broke and depressed, without any savings and without any job prospects. He took to reading in his bed while overhearing his parents’ blaring television set. To his absolute delight, a few months after repatriation, he got a job as a corporate writer (Free Water! A cubicle of one’s own!) at a corporate moving company that handles employees transferring to positions overseas. The job offered him health insurance, a salary and a gym membership, all of which afforded him the opportunity to move out into his own apartment (with a college friend in Harlem) and ultimately propel himself into a decade long career as a salesperson.

          He became The Avis Guy and sold corporate contracts of Avis-Rent-A-Car all over the Bay Area Peninsula to emerging companies like Google, Netsuite and SanDisk. Eventually he became the #1 salesperson in the country for Avis. (People in stupors pretend to know what they're doing.) Recruited by Pfizer, he sold Viagra for three years in San Francisco before the 2009 layoffs and luckily landed at their arch nemesis, Eli Lilly, to sell Cialis to the same doctors/customers in San Francisco.

Proprietary and Incendiary : {THIS IS NOT ABOUT MY OTHER}

Ronald Palmer’s place of birth: at the top of the stairs of a two-story house near the railroad tracks on Richmond Hill Road in New Canaan, Connecticut on Thanksgiving Day on November 27^th, 1966. There was no hospital in the town at the time.

A Play in Two Parts.

{hear simultaneous thudding sounds of Compliance and Ethics

bouncing like rubber balls, one pink, one blue, from the ground of sticky cement.}

Part 1/

CORPOSELF: I am the user. The user presents with co-morbid symptoms typical of the postlust era {Internet vs. intellect} with tidbits of the customer casino.  I am in a state of postlust, porn pills, Viagra and Cialis, fill my trunk. All the doctors want free samples, some of which they actually share with their ‘patients’.

A creeping out of the target HCP (Health Care Professional) with an irksome, presumed intimacy that would creep out any priest, conflated with a false sense of ownership. A creeping in… of thought infecting a library of antibodies, my antibodies. My office is an interchanging waiting room that revolves around San Francisco, California. In the morning I’m in the Castro, in the afternoon, Chinatown, at dinnertime, I’m at a big pharma function in the Financial District. I eat so much I make myself sick with cream and kobe beef and oysters and butter cookies and chocolate and wine and espresso. I shit myself on the car ride home; explosive diarrhea when I make it to my toilet.

PoetSelf: will you falsely identify the gene in question {or positive as it might be to be identified}

PoetSelf: will you pluck out the writer gene, the queer writer gene, the wannabe queer writer gene like a bullet from my chest? How to negotiate being a pharmawhore with the fact that all I want to be is a writer. Even if I’m a bad writer. Even if I’m a “Bad-with-Children” type of queer who’s Blood’s-no-Good for the RED CROSS. This is where my post-queer (only out Pfizer rep on the West Coast) isn’t as clean as it should be.

There’s a queer corporate tension that eclipses my motives to survive, a ghost of my queer always following me, daring me not to return to my 72-year-old parents house. Begging me to hold on to the farce of a six figure position until the entire industry tilts over the patent cliff, capitalizing on a feeling of nausea, of vomiting, of diarrhea, of the tiny orange spiders crawling out of my nose in dreams, digging under my eyelids. The ghost of my queer finally gets me to admit that I hadn’t been properly prepared to be a tenure track professor. Of finally finding that I hadn’t been prepared to feel, anything, especially a failure with only one book a decade after the infamous MFA.

CORPOSELF: YES s/he is the doctor/customer/viewer and s/he is stunned into supposition— (as a best practice)

because I am listening so intently, s/he feels loved—

victim entranced in the subordination of power, s/he literally cannot move.

That’s my premise, jovial comportment with a hint of sparing-daring.

This leveraging of one’s emotional intelligence can often lead to my starting point; my aborted thesis. I’m interrogating xer/her/his buying signs while weaving a dramatic closing question to create a ‘positive tension’ with my premise.

{before I even believe it myself, I’m quantifying the rate of relapse}

Which amps the situation into a need for an emotional exchange even if it’s a promise to change a belief, a behavior, instead of adjunction with a dopamine agent maybe my handshake will turn into a lifetime prescription

especially when s/he is still chewing while treated to a belly full of expensive beef.

Let’s stop stomping around and dance, said the pornaddict, choking on his middle-aged guilt.

PoetSelf: Work has always been torture for me. I have sought out work that I love which is daydreaming in a car looking at the waves at Ocean Beach. Which is masturbating to emergent forms of marine pay per view porn, which is walking around unshaven in a hipster baseball cap with surf company logo in a stupor of my own making.

Full disclosure: a dialectic of madness, a postmortem spiritjump: I am your imposter bear. Tripped up by the hipster mystique, I embrace my own oxymoron. The contradictions begin with dharma of big pharma:  two of the biggest in the industry: Pfizer and Lilly: wish I wouldn’t have to be so shy, I could fry for this.

As my poetself and corpoself strangle each other for time and energy, my poetself asks my corpoself: is publishing my own ‘work’ pointless?

I had Motherwell nightmares about enormous black lemons rolling my off a chopped-off earthquake highway for a very long time. Sometimes the dream revisits me and I turn the black lemons (the size of cement trucks) into pink lemons that burst into a thousand pink bunnies and they tackle me giggling, taking turns nursing on my nipples.

That is the question. Moot or Mute? Egolibido R Us.

Postlust, in my baggage of sadness I jerk off amid the unraveling of this new century. I’ve heard the words Al Ki Da more than love ya hon. Especially from my TV.

[Or a radio of anti-matter prancing and posturing as microsonnets: sonnetweets.]

CORPOSELF: I suppose I want to admit that WORK IS A FARCE THAT KEEPS GIVING. WORK IS MY S:LFIMPOS:D DUTY TO ASSUME THE POSITION OF SELFTERROR>>>>>>>>>I am the opposite of bravery.

PoetSelf: What if our galaxy rejects our history?

And I’ll sip a lime green iced tea and write a movie in two pages and observe a hummingbird dipping into the rhododendrons below my window.

CORPOSELF: A digital rectal exam is really the only way to investigate the prostate, maybe even predict early onset BPH. If I conflate the worlds I feel less schizophrenic. My twin is concerned about her anti-psychotic. Her hands are starting to shake during her hospital presentations.

So I do a WEBMD search and find the long-term effects can worsen attention and produce cognitive dwelling (I mean dulling) but when I go off them I can stop crying at work,

She says.

And I’m silent on my cell phone sitting in the front seat of my company car, a 2011 burgundy Ford Fusion, facing Ocean Beach. I watch four crows chase away a stand of seagulls thinking my life is this black hole of sadness or something dramatic like that yet comparatively, people especially Americans say this: “well comparatively we’re better off as Americans.” But are we? I’m totally stumped over that one. As I write this OccupyWallStreet protests take over the globe. I just found out on Twitter that protesters in Oakland had to be rushed to the hospital with broken hands after being arrested. I feel guilty all the time. I’m afraid almost all the time.

IN A WORLD WHERE WE’VE BEEN TAUGHT THAT WORK MUST BE A S:LFIMPMPOS:D TERROR OF OUR OWN PERPETUAL MAKING: I memorize the product information on competitive products.  I have the Epocrates APP. I must increase my scientific knowledge so that the customer trusts me more. I must bring passion for the molecule alive with me voice in a strained elevation. I need to create action by injecting positive tension into the interaction. I tried stimulants to up the ante but they only made me more skittish and scanty when I’d shoot it would hit the opposite wall of my little green S:LFIMPMPOS:D dungeon.

The guilt I ate served to puncture the punctum. I punted this prankster who sprouted his jetsam. I love the picture of me when I was seven posing on the fireplace with my sisters like a little hustler in training or a vamp vamping around without feeling. Wrapped in a black and brown, leopard print robe, I mean: who was I kidding?

PoetSelf vs. CORPOSELF: Is the new form of sonnetweet driving you crazy with inspiration? A: yes.

Is the micro-truncated sonnetweets system of pulsing Jedi {inculcation if hiccuuping joy, a letterplay in two chapters: contra’s diction of malice vs. joyless?}

Or more precisely:

{unpacking the proxy, an incendiary whiteness. A stewing witness

to the masses, I attempt to transcend queerness –‘out at work’ I’ve learned from experiential knowledge simply opens an invitation to objectify and fetishize my erotic practice, yet possibly also opens an even exchange if initiated with levity

with questions like: so are you the top or bottom, JP Marriott, INDIANAPOLIS October, 2011 and to be honest I’m a pervert anyway an inverted invitation to open the opportunity to ask my female cohorts: Do you enjoy anal? Do you and your husband have rip roaring jack-hammering anal sex? {Gulp red wine, everyone guffawing} I mean do you use a riding crop on your husband?)

And I use this unparalleled, corporate farce of compliance into an implicit condemnation, which I think is a grander way of deepening the offense, (more appropriately cruder) a croquet unpacking the witness over the pre-sliced, orange-glazed chicken breasts that nobody has to pay for, or rather everyone must pay for, because it’s a corporate expense.}

Expense accounts reign in the land of pain medicine and anti-depressants, but one eats the guilt, bingeing on billionaires to boot, truth is the blockbuster molecule goes off patent this month, investors fear they can’t play fake

I happen to do false exceptionally well. I fake it so it feels like dwelling in the moment of this add/mission: is a whore to achieve a likefulness? [ballooning contagion, not hiv but more like alogia or aphasia]

a kind of tender kinesthesia that I’ve developed on the company’s dime:

to win me, your listener, is to become my voice plus three.

MARGARET RHEE

MARGARET RHEE has worked as a clerk at a clothing store, journalist, the West Coast Web Editor for Back Stage Magazine, organizer, teacher, go-go dancer, research assistant, babysitter, and for the past five years: project manager of a PAR project out of the SF jails, for the past three: doctoral candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California.

For poemas, she co-edited the chapbook anthology, 'Here is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Asian American Poets' (Achiote Press) and is the managing editor of 'Mixed Blood,' a literary journal on innovative poetics and race, edited by C.S. Giscombe. Her chapbook Yellow/노란/
노랑/Yellow was published by Tinfish Press in 2011.

A Short Note:

The academic industrial complex and the prison industrial complex, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write in “The University and the Undercommons:” “The slogan on the Left, then, universities, not jails, marks a choice that may not be possible. In other words, perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university contains incarceration as the product of its negligence.” How does the academic industrial complex perpetuate silence—from undocumented students, those from the working class, silence of the ‘undercommons.’ The prison industrial complex  keep people in, the university keeps people out. The university is not innocent.

Thus, when included, you are expected to maintain a joyful narrative of entry to higher education. The university silences where you come from, there is no space for contradiction, we are happy students, happy teachers, happy well acclimated workers. The university grows fat upon silence(s). Yet, the consciousness that Gloria Anzaldúa writes so much about, (and in this discussion of labor) reflexivity of class/backgrounds, from all positions of the university machine remains crucial. Thus, this paradoxical bind for subversive academics is necessary, to even begin to fathom reimagining the university.

Transformation of the university

requires

the language and tactics

of poetry.

A Poem About Work

Here my world is created     through books

How to unpack them

Make disappear      my girlhood horrors

Not so different from    my mother’s    and my own

I try to sprint away     into   worlds of

Paper and ink

I try to understand   but its all so confusing to me

Because it makes itself over    and over again

And because the more I know   the lonelier I become

The second time I went on a plane    the first time by myself

Was for poetry   Landing in Virginia

I knew all at once    My world was so very small     I desperately wanted to remake it

Maybe like God with his hands       Creating Adam and Eve

With dirt, sun, and creatures all around

A graduate student once told me, I wasn’t cultured or interested

Because I didn’t know who the Ayatollah was

It’s not that I don’t want to know, it’s just that I haven’t traveled much

I regret telling him   Because I don’t think he really could understand

That there is a lot I don’t know

My father at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard

On a ship that would never move

A ship that broke his back

He showed me his hands

And taught me what it meant to be blue collar

He pulled at his workman shirt, and in broken English

Told me I must grow up to be white collar

To never work with my hands.  To not have my back break

To sail on ships that move fast across the ocean

And into lands far away

My mom’s hands are thick & calloused too, gruff from holding

Wigs and dollar bills in a store she works at in Watts

She’s worked at a dry cleaners and Lucky’s Supermarket

She says a job is just a job  and sometimes, she

Doesn’t recognize her hands anymore.

She says, you shouldn’t study so hard

Because her friend in Korea was at the top of her class

Then she married bad and now she cleans houses.

My hands are calloused from holding pens

My back aches from slightly hunching over daily

Taping on mechanical keys

I realize all together how much I am

Grateful for my books and how much I hate myself

My dreams are so thick that I can’t hold them

In my palms. And I can’t swallow them either.

But in them, my father is sailing and my mother is not working, and

they are very happy.  It’s quite simple.

Except the map leading to the end of a dream

Is not only impossible but sometimes unimagined.

You must marry well, my mother says, then

You won’t be like me. You won’t have to work at all.
------

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney "The University and the Undercommons: SEVEN THESES"
Social Text Summer 2004 22(2 79): 101-115

http://www.scribd.com/doc/51113513/17/Stefano-Harney-and-Fred-moten

LAURA WOLTAG

LAURA WOLTAG has worked as an organic vegetable farmer, garden educator, lentic ecologist, writer at a mountaineering magazine, product representative for annie's cheddar bunnies, product representative for amy's goddess dressing (which really burns your eyes if you happen to stare at it for more than an hour. sayin'.), waitress (x4), barista, tutor, custodian, and horse stall cleaner. She currently works for a non-profit and is starting a native plant/ edible gardening/landscaping business with a friend. She aspires to be an herbalist, someday. She very much loved Brenda Iijima's Labor Day response & is thinking this is going to be her Brenda Iijima Labor Day Response Year. Her attached image is also informed by the work of the psychic anarchist sanskritists, with whom she also works -- you know who you are.

OCTOBER at the POETIC LABOR PROJECT

Greetings, friends!

For the month of October, we are posting some of the fabulous work presented at this year's Labor Day event in Oakland. At that event, organizer David Brazil set the scene with how much had happened between the first Labor Day event and the second: how much gathering, thinking, and political work.

So, let's say it again: a great deal has changed, in a very short time. With Occupy Wall Street, San Francisco, Oakland, Atlanta, San Diego, Philadelphia, and on and on as backdrop, we feel that we're holding hands with you in public space. And we see these writings as part of that energy - present and most welcome. Please read on for our October edition, featuring Lindsey Boldt, Jackqueline Frost, Bill Luoma, Melissa Mack, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Michael Nicoloff, Jill Richards, Wendy Trevino, Brian Whitener, Ida Yoshinaga, and Stephanie Young.

To download a pdf of this edition, please click here.

Thank you for your interest and solidarity - see you in November!

BRIAN ANG

Brian Ang's Labor Day talk "Poetry and Militancy" was published by Lana Turner, and can be read here.

LINDSEY BOLDT

Lindsey Boldt lives in Oakland and commutes to San Francisco and Sausalito to work as a teaching artist with elementary and middle school aged people and as an editor with The Post-Apollo Press. She is also co-editor/publisher of Summer BF Press with Steve Orth and contributes her labor to Writers Bloc and Occupy Oakland. Chapbooks include "Oh My, Hell Yes", "Overboard Rampage" and "Titties for Lindsey" (forthcoming). Her first book, Overboard, is forthcoming from Publication Studio Press.


-Introduce self
-Tell the people what I do for work: teaching artist
-Difficult to decide what to focus on today so I decided to talk about a place in my life where the topics of day converge most dramatically: poetry, activism and work, which for me is in my work as a teaching artist.
-Read a poem from Ulloa-Po! and from Marin Juvenile Hall Anthology


So, those poems sort of blew me away and still blow me away whenever I read them. I want to say first that when it comes to “teaching” poetry, there isn’t much teaching going on. You don’t have to teach kids to write poetry really, because you don’t have to teach kids how to be imaginative, or inquisitive or observant--all qualities that poets tend to possess and for the really brilliant ones, how they express they’re unique kind of genius. One of the things I’ve learned from being a teaching artist is that poetry is not a specialized realm of esoteric knowledge harbored, cherished and protected by a small group of believers.

I’d like to let you all in on a line of questioning that I often preoccupies me. I don’t think it’s necessarily a very productive line of questioning, but it happens. It begins with me considering the state of things: When we are in the midst of an incomprehensibly high stakes global crisis, when our rights are being pulled out from under us by increasingly obvious slight of hand, when I’m never sure if I’ll have work, when some of my students parents are either already unemployed or live in fear of becoming so, when some of my students live in a near constant state of chaos threatened by violence, neglect, indifference, and the very real prospect of and expectation that they will end up in prison.

Why teach poetry? If I really want to help youth today why not teach civics or radical political history or farming or environmental science instead? How can I justify my presence in their classroom? How can I communicate the importance of poetry? What do I, a privileged girl from Washington State, have to teach or inspire in my students? Would they be better served by someone from their own neighborhood? Someone who came from a similar background? Would my students respond better to and gain more from a different kind of artist, say, a different artist? Does my style of writing, my aesthetic communicate or perpetuate a culture of oppression? What do my students really need to know to survive? What tools can I give them?

And then I try to relax, try to remind myself that poetry saved me, that it has been essential to my survival in no small way, so there must be something to it. Then, I try to tease apart a mess of emotionally laden memories, patterns of judgment and guilt, etc. and figure out what it is about poetry that is special, that is important, useful, essential, that lets me give it and myself a break. I come back to the qualities I mentioned before: imagination, inquisitiveness observation and also reflection. These are important skills.
skills. They won’t show up on any standardized test, but without them nothing can change.

Certain things have been made concrete for me through teaching that were only ever abstract. The fact that I know the work of very few poets of color well enough to confidently bring into a class and even fewer poets of color personally, has been made very clear, and the more I try to do something about it, the more I realize how much work I really have to do.

So, as the school year ramps up, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I can do this year in my personal life and in my poetry and journalism classes. I spent a lot of the summer reading, learning, and talking about current and historical radical politics, community organizing and radical pedagogy. I feel afraid about a lot of things. I feel unsure. But I also feel excited about experiments i.e.:

-Bringing the Black Panther Party 10 pt Program to a middle school classroom and asking students to write their own version.
-Performing/having a day at the beach on a BART platform
-Bringing a section of narrative from Karen Tei Yamashita’s I-Hotel to an elementary school creative writing workshop and hoping the students there will find something in it to relate to.
-Performing the qualities of imagination, inquisitiveness, observation and reflection in my role as poet, teacher and within a role that feels new even though it was my first, the day I was born in the United States, that of a citizen.

BILL LUOMA

Bill Luoma works as a developer in the mobile software industry. He is the author of Some Math and Works and Days.


Days& Works


My Lap

Touch

Romplr

Virtual 

Paranormal State

MELISSA MACK

Melissa Mack does research on publicly-funded social service programs. Singly or collaboratively, she has written many many reports that she often imagines housed in the bowels of the federal departments for which they were written, in unmarked crates a la the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. To make money, she has also hung out ("provided training to") women on welfare, had a paper route, hung out ("supervised") developmentally disabled sex offenders, sold vegetables, hung out ("counseled") with court-involved pregnant and parenting teenagers, and weeded.


September 4, 2011

Dear Poets and Laborers,

I’m away because of a work trip to Washington D.C. to feed the machine of government. I do contract research on publicly funded employment programs for a U.S. Department which shall remain nameless, speaking of the occasion of this Labor Day, yet so far from satisfyingly.

I grew up inside a military industrial evangelical complex the only way I figured out how to deal with was to follow the rules—politeness, selflessness, financial responsibility—and cultivate an inner life I didn’t tell anyone about. But the inner life is as penetrated by The Complex as the outer one (as St. Paul, Giorgio Agamben, and many others have noted), and all unawares I kept mine contained, clean, heterosexual, and imaginative only in so far as it related to attending closely to weather and to practicing a secretly catholic devotionality that kept my heart soft. My paintings looked like Lionel Richie songs, and my animism applied only to the woods behind my various suburban houses. Why am I telling this story?

“And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no ‘breaking forth vision.’” I Samuel 13:1

Well, obviously, that’s not true anymore.

Anne Carson says, “Mere space has power.” We’re here, aren’t we? And there are such a proliferation of heres these days. (e.g. huge swaths of the Arab world, the streets of Oakland, that darling occupation in Vienna where they made the youtube dance joint video about hand signals that facilitate collective conversation).

In The Time That Remains, Giorgio Agamben’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Agamben talks about division. The division he’s interested in is Paul’s division of Jew/non-Jew. But I want to think about the division between poets and laborers—which recalls the penetration of “the complex” into the human interior because the reason we are gathered today is that we are all both poets and laborers. But there is an external division too. We’re here and a lot of other people aren’t. They’re rusticating or computing or fighting wars. It isn’t “us and them” that concerns me. Just, my sense of alarm is growing that huge portions of my vital energy are poured into a job that is not my Real Work. I want to be here with you all the time—in all the iterations of that “here” and “you” that exist—doing that Real Work. Which of course is a false division, since having to go to my office most days of the week for most of the day is a reality I can’t ignore. But Agamben. He identifies in Paul an idea of a messianic (for our purposes, read that as revolutionary) division of the law’s division of people (for Paul, into Jew and non-Jew, for me/us, into poet and laborer). I don’t have time to explain it in detail, but such a division renders a remnant. (Agamben calls it a dialectic with three elements rather than two: Jew, non-Jew, and non non-Jew.)

The division of division renders a remnant that prevents the law’s divisions from “being exhaustive.” Which to me means our identities as Poet and Laborer aren’t exclusive. Though we are exhausted.

Agamben also talks about Paul’s idea of the messianic (revolutionary) calling that is “the revocation of every vocation [read: worldly condition], released from itself to allow for its use.” Which I take to mean, I’m still a social scientist. If I now have two vocations, poet and laborer, well, let them both be revoked and rendered inoperative except insofar as they can be used to joyfully rock the casbah. Let them render us a remnant, “hittin’ our rackets like tennis players,” as MIA says. We do our jobs, we work to undo the world in which we have to have the jobs we have. Also most of us make poems.

Here are some remnant, revocational activities I especially like these days: Sex. Potluck. Reading and thematic and political and writing and radical ladies groups. Moots like this one. The making of music. The making of poems. The doing of actions. The saying of spells, the reading of signs, the close attention to the formation of sound in the mouth, into words, into cries of ecstasy or rage or grief. The insertion of the body into spaces ostensibly public until you realize the cops in riot gear have it surrounded and are closing in. Radical generosity meaning the pooling of resources, the sharing of housing, the making of texts and books, the bringing of one’s inadequacy, the willingness to participate in struggle wherever we find it, the making of friends.

I’d really rather walk across lawns in the dark, watch the light change, make love, meet all strangers in mutual gazing, or not, and have that be safe, have that be productive activity. I don’t think it’s too late for that, exactly. But just like how I have to bill my time in tenth of an hour increments, I have to tithe my time to struggle too. To self- and community-educating. To acting out in the presence of my employer and fellow employees. To clothing myself in remnants from the clothing swap. (Thank you, whichever lady—Lauren, was it you?—offered that cute royal purple puffed sleeve sweater with the lavender seed-pearls sewn on the front and marks of mending here and there. I wore it to address The Department.)

SEAN LABRADOR Y MANZANO

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Ever critique the empire in these positions: push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, self-destructs, 59-Chevies?

After my first year of college, I was restless, impatient. I knew I wanted to document “the military,” “the cold war,” “The Spanish-American War,” “The Philippines-American War,” “WW2,” “Vietnam,” “Beirut,” and “Afghanistan.” But I didn’t know in what form or shape. I took on my stepfather’s challenge, to know REAL work. I enlisted.

This path is rooted in the military base library, my day care. My parents gone for hours, returned at closing. Having exhausted children’s lit, I explored military history, anticipated the course of future wars. (So when 9/11 happened, I was not surprised.)

I wanted to be a journalist, always wanted to write for the Stars and Stripes—but I tested too high and qualified for bubblehead—Nuclear Submarine Sonar Technician. But I didn’t see myself listening for anomalies hundreds of feet submerged. I went to bootcamp unfortunately in winter north of Chicago. I wanted to embody the physical and mental indoctrination experienced by so many of my fathers, uncles, and cousins, alas the snow.

Imagine, marine bootcamp in Full Metal Jacket for an approximation of my experience.

Before, I appreciated my family’s military service voyeuristically. War films. No one talked. My stepfather, a Vietnam Vet, and I sat quietly through bootlegged VHS tapes. I was 10 watching Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. My stepfather warned, how I will understand these movies and their context when I was older. Gallipoli had a profound influence. Accepting the futility of the infantry charge against a trench. In many dreams I ran towards bayonets and machine gun nests. Waking up wondering if I could do the same in real life. Jump on a grenade to save the many. My childhood films were “Romantic.” Then Saving Private Ryan set the standard for gruesome.

Having critiqued my experience enough, I endured the Navy 8 months, leaving on a “failure to adapt.” The military psychiatrist loosely translated: I should be in college, and was eager to speed my return to the civilian world.

9/11 happened in my last year at CAL. My first conversations at the Free Speech Movement Café afterwards were about re-enlisting, but this time in the Army. I’d call the recruiter every other month. But I feared the previous “Failure to Adapt” in the navy would be an obstacle. In 2002, I went to SFSU for the MFA. I was the only student in my workshops writing insistently about the War. Then the invasion of Iraq led me to finish the MFA at Mills College.

What was I supposed to do for gainful employment? My resume has travelled the world. From the Bay Area to as far as the American University in Kurdistan.

How was I to pay off student loans, or child support? Where was my Bailout?

When I was 10, I collected Soldier of Fortune magazine. In one issue from the 80s, a picture of a mujahedeen child soldier cradles an Ak-47. He was stoic. My family has a history of children in War. My mother was a refugee in her own country. Other pictures--children maimed from Soviet mines. I wanted to be there. Why couldn’t I be a child soldier? At the rifle range, I was sharp within 100 yards..

So these images from my youth, and the desperation of unemployment, finally pushed me in to the Army recruiters office in Alameda. I was resigned to learn a “strategic language” (like Farsi, Urdu, Arabic) or to disable IEDs. I psyched myself to kill. For 8 months I waited for my re-entry file to be processed. For 8 months, I wrote for McSweeney’s about the anticipation becoming a Poet on the Ground. I did pushups and sit-ups. I imagined killing people, how easy it would be in the right frame of mind. Applying transference. If the Dept. of Education wanted its money back, then the Dept. of Defense must put a weapon in my hand. The eerie and most exhilarating part of reenlistment, I was expecting to sign my name to a $250,000 life insurance policy, and naming my son as beneficiary.

Then karma intervened.

Now, I am beginning my 2nd year teaching English, Poetry, World History, American History, Government, Economics. (And echoing Jackie Frost, last year I taught my high school students “The Libidinal Economy in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.” Likewise “Marxist Buddhism in The Matrix Trilogy.” And I teach Gardening. At a Buddhist School.

I am trying to understand the meaning of this karmic intervention. What I must do in return for such Providence. So this book/this conversation, Conversations at the Wartime Café: a Decade of War 2001-2011 was produced. So I host a monthly MFA Mixer in the City. So I get people to write on subjects as Suicide to Stockholm Syndrome. So I teach my students how history is a record of violence. How Compassion is an end to history.

JILL RICHARDS

I teach comp, mostly to freshmen. The next class that I keep planning, that keeps getting put off, is entitled, “Women, Modernity, and Revolution.” The title is pretty self-explanatory. But today I want to talk about one section of the course and the way it speaks to problems in contemporary protest movements. The section considers representations of social revolution as narrated by a young girl. My texts are the graphic novel, Persepolis, the film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and the young adult novel, The Hunger Games. I want to talk about these texts today (somewhat distantly) because they all present, in various ways, a very specific fantasy. All of these works use a young girl as a narrator because she offers a seemingly neutral, purely spectatorial viewpoint. Children are not expected to be political actors, so here is a subject that does not have to take a side. For the child, merely observing seems to be a natural, even a neutral position. These texts suggest that only bad or dead parents would not work to maintain this stance of neutrality and inaction until age 18.

However, in both these texts and in real life, the nimbus of “adulthood” surrounding either side of age 18 is a little confusing. Protective, panicked, outraged, or exasperated responses to militant political action often use the figure of the child—who cannot know her own mind, or foresee the consequences of her action—as their primary rhetorical stage. This often has nothing to do with the specificities of age 18. Some of you may remember an email that a prominent Berkeley professor wrote last year, complaining that the undergraduates involved in the occupation movement were always coming to her asking for help, always expecting her to defend them against the university. Or you may remember the complaints after the freeway protests, that anarchists were leading unwitting children unto the freeway (three juveniles were arrested, but not taken to jail; their parents were called). Finally, some of you may remember one strain of negative reactions to the Oscar Grant riots: the concern for the safety of Oakland’s children (not just in the riots, but also presumably sleeping in their downtown Oakland beds).

And I’m sure you are all aware of the student protests in Chile right now. You may or may not be aware that the student protest movement in Chile has a longer history. I lived there in 2006, and want to speak about my experience then to provide some ground for a more detailed discussion. Five years ago, students in the public and private school systems went on strike across Chile. Students occupied their schools. The largest, most prestigious universities got the most press, but smaller high schools and private schools were also occupied. According to La Tercera, more than 500 schools were on strike. More than 350 schools were taken over by the students. This led to a general strike that included high school teachers, truckers, and other worker unions. During this time, I was mostly in Santiago. The second-largest city in Chile, Valparaíso offered more of a dance party occupation, or Santa Cruz-esque, atmosphere.

On the days of the general strike in Santiago students had barricaded the area near the University of Chile’s main campus by pulling dumpsters and trashcans into the middle of the street and then setting them on fire. This worked for some time to protect the crowds and the looters from tear gas and water canons. I want to note that adult, middle class Chileans—the Chileans that I was living with and working with at the time—were scandalized, just shocked! that Chilean police would use tear gas and water canons on “mere children.” But this reaction only confirms the thing that I want to emphasize here –that the masked people setting the trash cans on fire, and breaking the windows downtown, and looting the stores, were the very young students, the junior high and high school students, not just 18 plus adults attending university. The students that I spent the most time talking to that day were thirteen and fourteen. In many parts of the crowd, very few people had reached their full, adult height. I’ve never seen a black bloc before that was composed of so many short people.

The protests in Chile now—what is now being called “Chilean Winter”—have a wider target, and are no doubt composed of some different students, though the photographs and news reports suggest that the population is still very young. However, in each case, both the actions of the students—and the police response to these actions—produced a kind of panic that is, I think, perhaps more easy to critique when it occurs in other political terrains. The language of this panic made me think of No Future, a book by Lee Edelman. The book is about a strain of homophobia that gets excused by the familiar refrain—“we must save and protect the children,” from the gays, in Edelman’s account. The book argues that this sentiment leaves us perpetually deferring political action, and political change, as one generation of children after another grows up. But this language of panic arises around the coupling of “the children” and militant political action as well, though it is less talked about, and though today’s youth may have more experience as political actors than many of their older, critical peers.

It is hard to talk about ageism and not sound like a jerk, I think. You end up creating these categories that don’t fit people, their beliefs, or their experiences. Nevertheless, I think it needs to be talked about, especially if, like me, one works with eighteen year olds every day, especially at a moment when a good chunk of the student protest movement in America consists of teenagers, not all technically, legally “adult.” I want to be able to talk about working with these political actors, not shepherding them or showing them the light. Chile then or now is certainly not the only instance, but it serves as a rebuttal of sorts, from the younger students and political actors in our midst. I think we can safely assert that they don’t need us, or anyone else, to save them.

WENDY TREVINO

Wendy Trevino has worked as a Summer Recreation Leader with at-risk and special needs youth; a LSAT Instructor and Site Director for The Princeton Review; a House- and Pet-sitter in Iowa City; a Teaching Assistant and Creative Writing Instructor at UC Davis; a Guest Services Attendant and Development Intern at the California Academy of Sciences; and a Writing Consultant for SFJAZZ. She currently works as a Grant Writer at the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco.


The “We” of a Position

I started writing this at 6 this morning, after 5 hours of sleep, after a night of doing nothing, after a couple of hours talking on the phone with Lauren Levin, after a day of seeing a very disorganized friend off to Kuwait, where he will teach for two years in order to have a free place to live and pay off a fraction of his grad student loans.

I started to make a list of things that have happened, beginning with “global financial crisis” & ending with me standing here in Oakland, reading something about labor, writing, and fighting. Without even trying to include everything, I ran out of steam by the time I got to the third instance of “looking for work” and the first word of students occupying UC buildings.

I started to respond to a piece that Stephanie Young so generously sent me, a piece that included a piece of something I’d said about working with people that are hard to work with, people you might not like all that much or at all, people you might not know. How it is still possible, how it is already how most people work every day in jobs they wish they didn’t need. How it reminds me of my family, a very large group of people that includes people who just appeared in a field to work one day. How it isn’t a family in the traditional sense. How it includes a kid named Taco, an orphan who would ask for tacos from other field hands, a kid the barrio my mother grew up in took in. How it includes a woman my mother met working in the fields and her son and another woman who took care of me as a child. How it includes the neighbors my mother lived with when she ran away from home at thirteen as much as a [woman] my mother recently met on a flight to New York. How the support these people have given each other is financial as well as emotional. How in continuing to support each other XXXX.

I started to think about my father picking cotton as a kid and the hierarchy of the fields. How poor whites and Mexican-Americans got first pick. How undocumented workers went in second, and African-Americans picked last. How my father said getting first-pick made him feel special until one very hot day, in Lubbock, during a break, his family went looking for water. How none of the white people in town would give them water. How on their way back to the fields, a truck of African-American farm hands offered them some. How they didn’t even have to ask. How my father says we’re all living like that—not even knowing who our friends are. How my father passes for white until he speaks. How a farmer and his wife, in College Station, told my grandmother they would adopt my father and raise him as white when he was four years old. How the men who hired my father at XXXX in the seventies laughed and said they were meeting the requirements of affirmative action with a man who “talks like a Mexican but looks white.” How, when my father tells this story, he doesn’t even seem mad.

I started to worry that what I was writing was dealing too much with identity without dealing with it. I remembered why I hesitate to talk about these things. Because what I am trying to say is that we should really think about who our friends are. What I am trying to describe is what is described in Tiqqun’s Call as “the ‘we’ of a position.” A “we” that includes people we do and don’t like. A “we” that includes people we haven’t met yet and people we will never meet. A “we” that sees the hierarchy of the fields and calls bullshit without being dismissive of its bullshit effects. A “we” that is aware of other fields.

I started to worry that I would cry reading this in front of a room full of people I respect and am just getting to know. Mostly because I read what I’d written to Dereck, my partner, and he said some of you might cry. I started to consider having Dereck read this and worried about the effect a white man, an adjunct professor from a working class family might have on the text. A white man whose grandfather grew up on a Choctaw reservation, moved to Arkansas and bought land because it had once been illegal for Native Americans to cross the Oklahoma border into certain parts of Arkansas. I wondered which option I would worry about, then do anyway.

I wanted to talk about how I started slowly to see this “we.” How I had been looking for work, then working six days a week and all that time reading. Reading Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, thinking about envy, asking, “To what extent do homosocial group formations rely on antagonism?” Reading Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History, thinking about the British slave ship Zong. Reading the first chapter of Marx’s Capital for the nth time, listening to David Harvey’s podcasts. Reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, engaging in an argument about Social Networking Sites, weak intimacy and collective action in because poetry is not enough, a “secret” group on facebook consisting of me, Brian Ang, Tiffany Denman, Joseph Atkins, Jeanine Webb, May Ought, Erin Steinke and Dereck Clemons. In a cubicle, an unpaid intern, arguing on facebook, with people I do and people I do not often see, arguing “I’m not sure the weak intimacy that characterizes even strictly fb relationships is so different than that of the intimacy characterizing most work relationships or relationships between peers, and while it is true that relationships are implicit in collectivizing and while propinquity remains a determining factor in whether one participates in a particular collective action, I think it’s a mistake to think people have to be on intimate terms with each other prior to collectivizing / in order to collectivize.”

BRIAN WHITENER

Brian Whitener has worked as a sports photographer, dishwasher, music reviewer, adjunct, and in a prison. His most recent projects include False Intimacy (Trafficker Press), De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México), and Genocide in the Neighborhood (ChainLinks). He edits Displaced Press.


We live in a world of experience, of worlding, no longer (just) a world of representation. What I mean by this is that “experience” (in quotes) or work on the realm of the possible (which shapes the actual), on “being” (in quotes) itself or worlding, has overtaken prior cultural formations predicated primarily on representation and “breaks” with (prior) representational schemes. One banal example (of many) could be the last Bjork album which is distributed across multiple platforms, more an environment (an operation on the virtual) to be lived, moved through than an “album,” (of photos, of “representations,” of discrete pieces of aural structures) as if Satie’s music had become not just like the furniture, but had wanted to become the walls, light, and time as well.

If the classical figure of early twentieth century capitalism was the street-walker, who directly sells their body as a commodity, one figure of labor today is the camgirl, who sells an experience, access to a psyche, likes/dislikes, personal information, who creates and sells (not just) a body, but a worlding (not yet a “world”). If the classical figure of early twentieth century capitalism (ironic emphasis on the repetition) was the worker, who sells their labor power, one figure of “labor” today is the redundant surplus briefly integrated into the circuit of production only to be then discarded, shunted beyond the edge of the human on the other side of an ontological gap, into another world, desaparecido, which is another worlding, equally dark.

If the classical figure of early twentieth century war was shell shock, which outed as fatigue and disconnection, the figure of war today is post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that is located somewhere between the mind and body, between matter and spirit, that draws a new line between the material and immaterial; that is, one that acts neither on the body (discipline) nor the mind (ideology) but on a (new) total complex. In the medical literature, no one can figure out how to treat these new forms of trauma as they sometimes out as physical, sometimes as mental (can we conclude then that it is neither? But rather a new line, a new “body,” a new demarcation between the virtual and actual?). Look at all the traumas around you: natural disasters, crimes, wars. Where do they come from? Is it crazy to think we live in a world that is being disciplined by new forms of catastrophic experience, by trauma. Meaning that both the category of what counts as a trauma has been amplified and that more potent vectors of application have been created, making us exposed at every turn to sensations that used to be reserved for the most far off battlefields (as the “shocks” of WWI were coterminous with the rollercoaster, the animated cartoon, cinema). Note that the term catastrophe only takes on its current meaning (mathematically) in the 1950s and then (more generally) with the onset of financialization: catastrophic risk (a black swan, a risk that cannot be foreseen, the catastrophic event realized on the vector of trauma). We live in an all or nothing world, a world of no return.

Turning to “our” world, a literary world: Have you noticed that no one is celebrating the 100th anniversaries of literary modernism? Is that because there’s nothing to celebrate, because we find ourselves in the same tragic position of individual souls facing a systemic crisis? Or because we live in an “intensified” world following a different vector, one of worlding, trauma, and moves to new forms of innervation, and not representation, shock, and the bodily apparatus of cinema? Is what has been called chaos cinema, post-continuity cinema (the end of classical Hollywood editing in blockbusters like Transformers) a symptom of the end of one bodily apparatus of cinema and the slow invention of another that prepares a new mind/body unit (a new line between the material and immaterial) for trauma, for the loss of the prior referent?

Literature’s strongest links remain with representational and anti-representational schemes (two sides of a single coin) and the bodily sensorium attached to the apparatus of the book. The question is not how to leave behind “representation” but rather how to connect literature’s devices, knowledges, and affective relationships to an edge that would match the new problematic of experience, of worlding, of trauma, of this new line between the concrete and abstract.

We don’t have much time today, so allow us to speak in images, as if written on walls: Through the waters of history cuts the prow of a ship known as financialization, on one side is inscribed “war,” on the other “communization.” To not out as war, literature must find ways to connect with the latter.

IDA YOSHINAGA

Ida Yoshinaga has worked some crazy-ass jobs in tourism, fashion, television, law, education, journalism, feminism, and finance. But mostly, she's a recovering academic, the first in her immediate family to attend college, and three decades later, still inexplicably addicted to the university. She writes on colonialism and language in US-occupied Hawai'i, fantastic fiction and genre theory, and transmedial narratology in comics and film."


Labor Day Hawai`i 2011


Furlough Fridays, Furlough Fridays
Saved money for the people of Hawai`i:
Once a month, publicly funded, "lazy"
State workers were forced to take unpaid leave.
They said taxpayers heaved great sighs of relief—
Freed from the pricey burdens of community—
Schooling, social work, traffic safety,
Affordable housing, food and environmental
Regulation, and other jobs so easy
No doubt private firms could do 'em
(They said), practically for free.

Furlough Fridays—grand management experiment
By our ex Governor, a gift to Republicans
In states across the union. But her test was
Anti-union—which collectively organized
Government office clerks, schoolteachers,
And other public employees—in garbage,
Transportation, public health—could clearly
See. And fought. But my union, of college
Faculty, more white and male than brown
And yellow, in which we Asians and Hawaiians
Comprise a struggling minority, this
Collectivity of the brightest minds at the
State's flagship research university,
Got their comparatively sweet pay raises
Bargained with her, got divided & conquered
From their public union siblings—
Stayed silent when our janitors &
Secretaries & other campus colleagues were
Furloughed straight out of affordable lives.

Furlough Fridays: our mid-2000s gift from Hawai'i
To Wisconsin, Minnesota, other states with histories
Of strong labor struggles, teaching Republican leaders
That if you prime a group of elitist, self centered,
Racist public workers, you can keep cutting their
Budgets, make them beg for scraps, and not only
Will they say yes please may I have another, but
They are only to happy to repeat
Long colonial histories of racial dispossession,
Gender oppression, and I-got-mine greed.

Furlough Fridays!

STEPHANIE YOUNG

Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. She is a full-time administrator of graduate programs and part-time teacher of poetry at Mills College. Previously she could be found executive assisting, sales analyzing, shelving mass market paperbacks, cleaning houses, and selling cookies. Her most recent book, with Juliana Spahr, is A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism.


Something about Sheila de Bretteville crying about money in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary film Women Art Revolution.

Something about Sheila de Bretteville crying about the feminist art movement’s focus on women’s exclusion from systems of power, rather than identification with others who also lacked power, also lacked money.

Something about the moment when several of us started crying about student loan debt at the Department retreat.

Something about how I started crying in therapy about everything I seem as yet unable to give up, and couldn’t stop.

Something about willingly giving up the individual body’s privilege: as white, of a moderate income which both allows and requires that I travel most days with moderate docility the paths laid out by ATM machines, highways, places of business and institutions. Something about willingly placing that individual body in the way of arrest or even direct injury by the state, as an experiment in identification with bodies marked otherwise, bodies vulnerable to regular interruption, harassment, arrest, detainment, imprisonment and murder by the state.

Something about heroic regard for this particular experiment in identification.

Something about militancy in the U.S. right now as an art project, acts of imagination in the wake of state repression, in the wake of COINTELPRO, something about imagining a future of being on the street together, if not yet on the street together as in Chile, if still outnumbered by riot cops and cameras.

Something about the swagger of one art project’s dismissal of other art projects.

Something about splitting off material from emotional care.

Something about something Wendy Trevino said at the Durruti Free Skool meetup a few weeks ago, something about being able to work with and care for people who one dislikes, or feels irritated by, or ambivalence towards. I remembered this as being able to work with and care for people who one hates. Probably because I have been obsessed with that Tiqqun book The Terrible Community: “…a post-authoritarian power apparatus. It apparently does not have a bureaucracy nor some constraining form. But to produce so much verticality within the informal, it must resort to archaic configurations, roles handed down that still survive in crowded caves of the collective unconscious. Thus the family is not the organizational model but its direct antecedent in the production of informal constraint and the indissoluble living bond of hatred and love.” The euro family euro critique.

Something about the family Wendy talked about, the family that extends, on a plain, without so much verticality. Working with and caring for others who one dislikes, or feels irritated by, or ambivalence towards. I need to say that the family Wendy talked about is a specific example located near or on or beyond the U.S. Mexico border.

Something about Etel Adnan’s To Be In A time of War.

To be the panic of constant information.

To be hurt, distrustful, competitive, envious, angry.

To be singing in the car, my heart’s a stereo, it beats for you, so listen close

To be THEN YOU ARE STILL THE ENEMY. To be unsure of everything, unable to ask for or take it back with force. Are the wetlands everything? To wish the wetlands back as difficult as anything else, necessarily my own death and yours.

To somewhat falsely oppose decomposition and insurrection.

To be post-camp messianism on the one hand, labeling everything else reform or collaboration with existing structures on the other, just, dangling there. Unsure of everything.

To be intimidated by the debt collector. To seek assistance from a non-profit.

To be ashamed of one’s self.

To be full of desire and fear.

To be making art projects. To be making art projects together.

“Every miscarriage is a work accident.”

To be Claire Fontaine, to be dismissive of Claire Fontaine, to find Claire Fontaine somehow useful. To pivot and grind. To frottage with Claire Fontaine.

“The return of the repressed threatens all my projects of work, research, politics. Does it threaten them or is it the truly political thing in myself, to which I should give relief and room? (…) The silence failed this part of myself that desired to make politics, but it affirmed something new. There has been a change, I have started to speak out, but during these days I have felt that the affirmative part of myself was occupying all the space again. I convinced myself of the fact that the mute woman is the most fertile objection to our politics. The non-political digs tunnels that we mustn’t fill with earth.”

SEPTEMBER AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

We are excited to share a new round of responses. Our September edition features Kristen Gallagher, Dan Thomas-Glass, Ariel Goldberg, and Monica Peck. To download a pdf of all three, please click here.

Thank you for your interest and solidarity - see you in October!

ARIEL GOLDBERG

Ariel Goldberg has worked as a babysitter, a door to door salesman, artist assistant, hebrew school principal's assistant, the country's best yogurt server, photo transporter, and teacher. Recent publications include the chapbooks Picture Cameras from NoNo Press and The Photographer without a Camera from Trafficker Press. More work is online at www.arielgoldberg.com

Quasi-symmetrical Limbs Attached to a Whole Body

I

The jobs I supposedly want are the ones where art and work are not in a dynamic war over time and energy but operate as quasi-symmetrical limbs attached to a whole body. Like in Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty, she keeps referencing her class called The Art of Cruelty. Perhaps this looks better than it is, but it seems like a gift. In order to wrap her head around what to say about artists and writers she’d mention in her book, they became part of a syllabus.

In a fit of inspiration and life transition, I’ve decided to invent a class called Writing as Photography that will frame my artistic obsession. It could be for photographers, or writers, or people not identifying as anything. This class can be formatted to a quarter or semester schedule. It could even be just a daylong workshop. It’s flexible. I should mention here that I don’t have a book length work published. And I'm pretty young. Maybe Maggie Nelson would tell me all about how teaching her class that shared the title of her book was hard work and she never wants to do it again. How teaching an invented class still wouldn’t get me a contract longer than a semester or health insurance. But I figure I should just go for this.

I’d like you to read a draft of my syllabus. Pretend like you want to hire me when you read it. Keep in mind that I’ll go anywhere to teach. I have six years of classroom experience. I can diffuse bad attitudes, as well as explain grammar, which may not seem relevant but is. I feel passionate about how seating arrangements create situations where people feel they are challenging hierarchies inherent to institutional environments. Here it is:

The objective of Writing as Photography is to consider how and when language can replace cameras. The premise of this class is a response to how photographs are haltingly ubiquitous, as well as agents of change in our consciousness. The relationship between language and photography will be explored not as symbiotic but as in conflict. The invisibility of watching without a camera will be employed.

The assignments for this class will explore various poetic forms for language to replace photography. These forms include:

The Letter

The Caption

The Press Conference

The Annotated Inventory of Photographic Detritus

The class time will be both seminar style and critique. Just as photos of our contemporary landscape often include people taking pictures, we will consider how people photograph to perform an action, as opposed to produce a printed picture. We will examine types of photographs that appear in our lives daily, and types of photographers. You can choose to write in any supposed genre or hybrid form. The final assignment will be a portfolio of writings from the weekly assignments, or a directed project.

Discussions will be centered on these themes:

Impulse, consumer markets, and dematerialization

The myth of the photographer as hero and the contested ethics of Photojournalism

How to look at art photography when everyone is a photographer

Reckoning with Photos that Depict Loss

Readings will include selections from:

Towards a Philosophy of Photography and Into the Universe of Technical Images by the philosopher Vilém Flusser

The Journalist & The Murderer, by Janet Malcolm

The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, by Emmanuel Guibert

The film Born into Brothels, directed by Zana Briski

The Civil Contract of Photography, by Ariella Azoulay

Slide lectures will focus on Gustav Metzger, Ehren Tool, Oreet Ashery, and the text fields on photo sharing websites.

The class will also take trips to heavily photographed places to watch photographers and photographs.

II

When I try to make a narrative out of it, my job history reflects a string of disillusioned attempts at how I can make money doing something that will help me be a better artist. Standing up in front of people and practicing something, or attempting an explanation, became attractive because it felt like performance art. I formed this conceit when I was determined to be an autodidact performance artist, shortly after a very expensive BFA in the obsolete skills of analogue photography and English literature. At this time, I also decided to decline an offer to become a New York City Teaching Fellow, a full time job as a public high school teacher that came with a free masters in education. I decided I wanted to really be an artist.

Just trying to put art first by filling my schedule with unstable part-time jobs was only possible because of my fancy education and the ability to live on a low-income. I didn’t have any debt. My whole family saved so I could go to a “good” college. I was incredibly lucky to get this undergraduate degree without any loans, and my family did it as if there was pride in buying this thing. Does how my family paid for it matter? My grandfather’s savings from a frugal life as a garment worker and war reparations from the German government paid for most of it. Then it was my dad working as an accountant, my mom as a social worker, and my brother dying when I was a kid. Even though he died at eight, I still feel like I got double what I deserve.

KRISTEN GALLAGHER

Kristen Gallagher is an Associate Professor of English who specializes in Creative Writing at City University of New York LaGuardia Community College. She received a Ph.D. from the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program in 2005. Her first chapbook, Operator, used documents, materials, and information from her job as a call center operator. She was co-editor for a five years, with Tim Shaner, of WIG: A Journal of Poetry and Work. She is currently co-editor, with Chris Alexander, of Truck Books (truckbooks.org) and her book We Are Here came out in 2011. She lives in Queens.


My Emails for This Week

Number of words written for professor job this week: 2408
Number of words written related to Poetry outside of school: 278
Number of Exclamation Points: 38

That's a very helpful message. Thanks! KG OH! So is it in E-242, as the poster says, or in the Little Theatre? If it's in E-242, then I don't think we have quite as much worry about audience! Tho we should still get the word out asap if we want quality participation. Hi All, I agree with Chris that we should use Rosemarie's Room and have an intimate chat over free snacks. I think asking students to go out to the Diner will end with us losing them. We have to make sure Rosemarie's Room is available. Just FYI, it always says it's reserved every Weds 9-5 for administrative use, but the truth is that it's almost never actually needed. Lenore is the person who gives the go-ahead on use of that room Wednesdays, so it may be useful to email her soon if we decide to go with the Rosemarie's Room idea. Also, I think we should send a "Save the Date" email to the English Department ASAP, then re-send a slightly more targeted version of that email to the current creative writing instructors. People need time to plan. I'd hate to resort to that thing people so often do--which is at the last minute beg people to bring their classes--then you get a bunch of random students who don't quite know what they are seeing and any number of them chat and text and move around through the whole thing. KG Hey, I am giving a paper on OCT 27. Should I apply now or after? Does it matter? Did I already miss the fall deadline? Thank you so much for handling all the massive amounts of committee emailing and minutes typing and everything. Aside from making my life easier (!), I think it's great that you are visibly taking the lead on these things. It's important to have your name associated with highly valued things. Now we need to find you some kind of college-wide stud-level contribution so you can get promoted asap! As a matter of fact, I wonder if you and Carrie shouldn't think about pursuing an articulation for our CW track with somewhere...Queens? Brooklyn? Let me know what you think! That is considered VERY valuable college work. Hi Lizzie, I have two pretty good not-so-good first drafts of applications/personal statements. Here they are!! zoiks, we have an administrator's meeting that day. i'll see what i can do. Hi Phyllis, Gail, Sue, and Sandra, Each of you spoke about something substantive at yesterday's meeting and as the minutes-taker I'd like to know if I represented your words in a way that feels right to you. If you have anything to add, or even want to correct my grammar or ponder my word choices, please share. These things happen fast, so I may have missed something. I'd really appreciate anything you have to add. Attached. Have a great weekend, KG It looks like this Sunday walk is not going to happen for us because of this panel I am slated to moderate. I really really wanna go on these walks, so keep me in the loop. It just looks like this panel may be more complicated than I realized, and I'm a bit nervous about carousing renaissance style, getting high on turkey legs and all that, and then being ready to moderate well. I am TOTALLY BUMMED about missing you guys tho!!!!! It sucks. Now it's me who has a scheduling problem. A conference I'm presenting at has scheduled my panel on Friday 10/28 at 9 am. The only flight from NYC to where I'm going leaves on 10/27 just around the time of our seminar. Could we try rescheduling a meeting for 10/20 or 11/10? Sorry!! Are you sure? that would be great! We should probably alert the group? Hi Marisa, After meeting with Paul this morning, Arianna Martinez and & I are charged with doing a large scale assessment of the Urban Studies program and would like to meet with you at your earliest convenience to figure out exactly what we need to do. We're anxious to get the ball rolling. Please send us some times that are good for you for next week, if possible. Thanks, and looking forward to working with you-- KG How about Wednesday 10/5 at 4 pm? Thanks Marisa! I am almost there! I basically scrapped my first idea, then wrote an entire second thing, then scrapped that. I am now doing a statistical analysis (wink wink) of my time. I do think I can have it to you by Thursday night. Would that work for you? School is actually canceled Weds and Thurs, so this time there really should not be interference! Dear Ann, We've attached our revision to the curriculum for the Creative Writing Track of the Writing and Literature Major. Here are the changes we made: 1. Eliminated Liberal Arts Cluster requirement to accommodate the new additional Natural Sciences credit 2. Moved HUA167 Introduction to African Art from a required to an optional Humanities course 3. Eliminated ENG/HUC238 Screenwriting from Humanities to minimize ENG999 English Blanket Credits transfers 4. Eliminated ENG235, ENN240, ENG268, ENG/HUC272, and ENG280 to minimize ENG298 Special Topics conflicts (since only one class may transfer as ENG298, and additional classes in this category revert to ENG999 English Blanket Credits) 5. Eliminated ENG205 to minimize ENG399 Special Topics conflicts (since only one class may transfer as ENG399, and additional classes in this category revert to ENG999 English Blanket Credits) 6. Restructured English electives to require Creative Writing Track students to take a genre course (ENG260, ENG265, or ENG270) Please let us know if we've made any missteps! And thanks again for your help in this process. Cheers, Chris and Kristen Hi Ann. We were just reviewing the original articulation agreement, and it seems like York left out a group of courses in the Social Sciences category. Here's the Social Sciences category as it appears in the articulation agreement:

> Social Science: 9 credits
> SSY101 General Psychology                             3
> Select one of the following courses:
> SSH101 Themes in American History to 1865             3
> SSH102 Themes in American History Since 1865          3
> SSH103 Western Civ from Ancient to Renaissance        3
> SSH104 Western Civ from Renaissance to Modern         3
> SSH105 World History from Ancient Times to 1500       3
> SSH106 World History from 1500 to Present             3
> SSH110 East Asia Civilization and Societies           3
And here's the group that was left out:
> Select one of the following courses:
> SSA101 Cultural Anthropology                  3
> SSE104 Introduction to Macroeconomics                 3
> SSP101 U.S. Power and Politics                        3
> SSP250 Political Ideas and Ideologies                         3
> SSS100 Introduction to Sociology                      3
Would it be okay for us to go ahead with the agreement as is and make the students choose two courses from the list of SSH courses to fulfill the requirement, or do we need to correct the error so that the SSA/SSE/SSP/SSS courses appear in our curriculum and then run it back by York? We are concerned that they will not be able to get this done in time for the next Curriculum Committee meeting. Cheers, Chris and Kristen Hi Everyone, Just a reminder, our next meeting will be 10/13. We also need to reschedule one of our dates from 10/27 to 10/20. It's my fault. I double booked against a conference presentation. I seriously apologize for the scheduling drama! So our meeting dates for Fall are: 10/13, 10/20, 11/3, 11/17, 12/1. Let us know if you have a problem with this new date.Kristen You are sitting on the cusp of C plus / B minus. I expect you to revise. You have some good ideas, but the writing really needs work. It feels like a first draft. Remember to engage the recursive process--get on to your main point right away, stay on it, keep circling back to it, and keep going over your writing looking for fullness of detail, adequate transitions from idea to idea, and detailed follow-up commentary and explanation after quotes. You have one week to revise. DUE Monday, 7 days from tomorrow, on your blog. Good Luck! Just the one I handed out at the very end and forbid you to read. Off the top of my head, the 7th is a Weds, right? That shld be good. And I'm happy to meet the doula any time. I have no current plans for January. Not teaching, no conferences, no readings. So I shld be ready to go! Yay! Kevin and Eric! On Nov. 1 in the after noon I will be presenting on Creative Writing at LaGuardia: our new major that begins in spring, the club, and our upcoming events. I think Laura may have already asked you to show up on behalf of the club, but we've also been invited to have a couple of you read your work. Are you up for it? KG Let me figure out how long we have and then you pick whatever you want to fill the time. Thanks Irwin! This is actually very helpful. That's totally ok with me. But since it isn't due til Tuesday, you can have more time if you like... It's not sad, it just wasn't indicated anywhere in what you sent me, so I didn't know. Just FYI, nothing was due today. Last class (this past Tuesday) the thing due was a piece of your choice: either the page or the bed or the bedroom. Last week I asked people to turn in a writing they did just wandering around LaGuardia. Next Tuesday (next class meeting) the thing due is either the apartment or the apartment building or the street--choose one. It's a good basic start, but you have to work on getting concrete description. Here are my ideas for how to improve this: 1. Don't use passive voice. When you say "green grass is seen" there is no actor in this sentence. Who sees? And since it turns out that it isn't grass after all, but weeds, this whole part of your piece should slow down and lay out exactly what you perceive and in what order. What exactly happens that you thought it was grass but then somehow realize it is not grass? For example it might go something like: "When I look out the window, I see a field of green grass surrounded by sidewalk. There is one tree in the middle. This open green space seems a welcome place to write, so I head out of my house, around the corner to check it out. But when I arrive there I realize there is no grass at all, just weeds, dirt and cigarette butts. I am so disappointed. I look around for somewhere else to go and realize there is nowhere to go except the McDonald's on the corner, or back home." Give us the blow-by-blow account of exactly what gives way to this scene unfolding in your experience. 2. Stick to the facts. This is a concrete description of a space. What exactly does the gate look like. Color? Shape? size? what is it surrounding or leading to? Gates do not sing. And how can anyone possibly know what strangers feel? You can only know what you feel. So never assume what anyone is feeling, but show, when you actually have the evidence to do so, behaviors, movements, expressions, etc., that will lead to your reader perceiving the feeling you perceive as you look at this scene. Your job here is to re-create a scene in words, so that a reader will perceive and feel what you perceived and felt when you experienced that scene in the first place. 3. Where are the stone pillars exactly? What makes you say they seem designed for sitting? Can you show me what they look like? do people sit on them? Show me what you see that leads you to this conclusion. Show us the evidence. 4. I think the line "The front porch __two chairs vacant of bodies yet still manage to seem in conversation as they point to each other" is the best one in this piece. It paints a clear picture, and you don't make assumptions or generalizations. I really like how your phrased it, and it gives a really great feeling to read it. I like these empty chairs facing each other! Strong work! 5. An example of an assumption that doesn't fully reach our goal of description would be  "the creatures that seem to not care for the railing." In stead of telling me they don't care, show me what they are doing that leads you to this conclusion. What kind of creatures are they? Alley cats? What are they doing? Through an exact description of their behavior, their movements, their expressions, etc., you can create a feeling of their not-caring...or is it really not-caring that they exhibit?? as you look more closely and find the words to convey exactly what is happening, you may find yourself shifting in your understanding of what is happening. Sometimes as we look more closely, we find they all our first assumptions were wrong, and only then are we beginning to truly SEE. 6. The last few lines are getting closer to real description, but I'm sure you can add more detail and fill this whole piece out more. Remember what I said in class: the length requirement for all these pieces is NOT a word count or number of pages, but to be EXHAUSTIVE. We require an exhaustive, detailed account. No stone shall be left unturned/undescribed. Write til your hand hurts, observe til your brain and eyes are so exhausted that you pass out. 7. Overall, I really feel like it would help to know where you are. Just tell us. I'm not geting a clear picture. Is it an apartment building? Something about all these pillars and creatures makes it seem like an old manor or an old library or a haunted house. Good luck! 10/9 shld work for me. Check this out: Scientists at UC Berkeley have figured out how to make videos of images from the brain, so that a video can be made of whatever you have dreamt based on tracing the activity in the visual cortex. What a exciting future we have! http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity I'm sure they'd go viral. As you've probably discerned by now, we can't make it to Beacon with you. But we really really wish we could have!! We've never met Cheryl and would love to meet her and also learn more about her work. But we're swamped with craploads of our own non-art work. And it's turned out to be such a nice day, too. I really wish we could be out there with you guys instead of grading papers. I hate grading papers more than just abt anything. I think I'm going to hire some young poet to start doing my grading for me. Maybe Kareem needs a job? Argh. Wish we were there... KG John! Hi! I told you on the phone this summer I'd come to a training but I seem to have not written it down! Ah summer... Can you remind me what day/date I signed up for? And maybe also what the other day was that was an option, just in case I've since screwed up and cross-scheduled the day and time I originally signed up for? Sorry for the blankout. KG Hi, No, *I'm* sorry for not keeping better track of my situation! But of course reminders are always helpful. I'm really sorry I missed it. Last year I had off in spring for research release, but this year I am hoping to do way more union stuff. I will be at the rally Monday, so hopefully I'll see you there! KG Hey I recall you said you blurbed him? do you have a copy of his book? maybe even a digital one in your email you cld fwd me? i'd like to try to prepare a little for next weekend! kg

MONICA PECK

Monica Peck lives in San Francisco and works in San Jose.


on the clock

things i want to write about for the poetic labor blog

gender discrimination in the workplace, esp. re non-normative gender being told that i can “get away with wearing anything” the non-productive vs. the productive vs. anti-productive, esp. re being an artist art i’ve made at work, i.e. clip art comics, poems, ppt. “movies” horrible art i’ve been paid to make on the job: a musical mash-up of the wizard of oz & the loma prieta earthquake, poems about facial expressions for preschoolers, a poem for an ex-boss that she published under her daughters name in an ad post-it note fetishes using a grant to be anti-productive and a drag on the economy, i.e. not make commodity art, but converse in a leisurely way or wander or day dream or “research” or cruise how i wrote my first poem at my first job on the clock at st. anne’s church about chewing gum the various ways bosses have kept track of my time & “their” money: spread sheets, charts, clip boards, time sheets, sign-in logs being scammed when looking for work: the western union scam for a tutoring gig, the ice cream truck scam, the postal worker classified ad scam bleeding on the job: performing “worker” while having brutal menstrual cramps eating on the job, esp. the logistics of various workplaces: teachers’ lounge politics, cubicle lunches, and the politics of “shared” food in corporate zones unions spontaneous work signage, i.e. passive-aggressive notes, esp. in bathrooms being asked to “compose” bathroom signage re: flushing it all down work drag making magic totems to protect from mean co-workers and abusive bosses, esp out of the office supplies at hand: thumb tack & dry eraser shaman dolls morale boosters and fake morale boosters, i.e. corporate office art & kitsch vs. a view of a beautiful tree inappropriate/illegal job interview questions that sought/implied/assumed socio-economic class, race, gender, ethnicity, marital status, health, or other personal background info or are otherwise memorable for how uncomfortable they made me feel:

why do you like children what is your favorite book how would you react if someone said, “fuck you” are you a vegetarian how would you handle a difficult parent did you have trouble finding parking how did you get here do you feel comfortable driving a truck how often do you eat yoghurt is anyone in your family a lawyer do you have any children can you lift forty pounds do you mind getting your fingerprints checked do you mind getting a TB test what brought you to san francisco how are you with money what interests you about mobile technology have you ever worked with dry ice can you cut an onion do you have an allergy to bleach when can you start do you have your own computer do you have access to the internet do you know how to type have you ever done a mailing can you answer the phone how did you hear about this job what do you like to write about are you and [current employee] friends would you be willing to do a partial trade are you a “real” teacher do you have a cell phone can you help me get a good grade can you fit thirteen boxes in your car can you write quizzes do you have cash register experience are you familiar with microsoft office how are you with the public have you read mencken’s “the joy of monotony” can you pull it out with the root can you make a decent chowder



queer resume: an interesting oversimplification

this is a list of all jobs (in reverse chronological order) and approximate wages per hour taking into account actual hours worked for salaried position and including tips for service jobs, followed by my age, whether or not i was “out” on the job, and my gender presentation.

job title, wages, age, “out-ness” and “gender” presentation

adjunct lecturer: 25, 35, out, queer
lab experiment subject: 25, 35, out, queer
babysitter: 15, 35, out, queer
focus group participant: 75, 35, out, queer
private tutor: 25, 34-35, out, queer
mock juror: 30, 35, out, queer
teacher: 25, 34-35, out, queer
house sitter: 2, 34, out, queer
graduate teaching assistant: 15, 33-34, out, femme
administrator: 35, 32-34, out to some co-workers, femme
writer: 35, 30-32, out, queer
vegetable delivery driver: 15, 30, out, queer
teacher: 35, 28-30, out to some colleagues, queer
assistant teacher: 17, 26-28, out, queer
bookstore clerk: 13, 26-28, out, queer
associate editor: 25, 25, closeted, queer
editorial assistant: 12, 24, out to one co-worker, queer
electronic cartographer: 10, 24, closeted, queer
sprout farm laborer: 10, 23, out, queer
artist model: 20, 23, out, queer
cook: 10, 23, out, butch
coat check person: 25, 23, out, butch
book clerk: 8, 23, out, butch
ice cream vendor: 10, 23, closeted, butch
cartoon editor/ad sales: 1, 22, out, butch
baker: 8, 22, out, butch
dishwasher: 8, 22, out, butch
cashier 8, 20-23 out, butch
cooler freezer stocker: 7, 20-23, out, butch
farm laborer: 5, 19-21, closeted, butch
archive assistant: 5, 18-19, closeted, femme
teacher: 20, 18, closeted, femme
book editor: 10, 17-18, out, queer
lab assistant: 10,16-18 out, queer
actor: 30, 13-16, out, femme
busker: 4, 15-18, out, butch
receptionist: 4, 14, closeted, femme
drill press operator: 5, 12-13, closeted, butch
babysitter: 2, 8-12, closeted, femme
weeder: 1, 7, closeted, butch

DAN THOMAS-GLASS

Dan Thomas-Glass lives in Albany & works in Palo Alto. He is a teacher, communications director, & department chair at a progressive all-girls middle school. He & his wife Kate, along with their almost-three-year-old Sonia, just welcomed baby Alma into the world. He is the author of 880, Seaming, & Total Noise: Language Poetry, Hip Hop, & Urban Collapse. In spare fragments of time he edits With + Stand & The 30 Word Review. You can find recent poetic labor at http://danthomasglass.blogspot.com


[Drive] [to] [Work]

Freeways are our cathedrals. I sit in awe, marvel at the scope, feel the impossible majesty of capitalism’s moving so many bodies through space. I sit in my car, in awe. We bought a new car, one moved through space in a line to assemble, a history of capitalism’s moving so many bodies in the movement down that line to assemble our new car that I sit in, in awe. Our new car is assembled to consume “natural” gas, so I sit in awe in a special lane on the freeway for HOVs PZEVs & ZEVs so I can get home faster. I am in the front row of the cathedral, we bought this proximity, I atone for the 90-mile roundtrip daily sin by buying this indulgence. I sit in awe, in proximity to capital’s glow, thinking of the dead bodies poured into the Great Wall, what bodies under this pitch & gravel. What majesty.

Where I live there are many poets. Where I work there are many venture capitalists. I traverse this distance in awe, daily, so as not to forget this distance. Or this proximity. In awe. Awe comes from an Old Norse word that also meant terror or dread. We retain these meanings in awful. I am in terror & dread. The Old Norse speakers traversed the North Sea in terror & dread to rape & pillage & then live among the Angles & Saxons & Jutes, & because of that traversing Old English lost its gendered nouns & various other trappings & so a car is not a boy car like other European languages because those Vikings spoke the Old Norse/Old English version of Spanglish which in its simplification did not include a gender for a noun like car. So in my genderless car I traverse this distance in awe but my driving is not genderless.

Did you know it is very expensive to live in the Bay Area? It is very expensive. We are waiting for our second daughter to be born & because we have decided it is important to us for one of us to stay home with our young daughters I drive to work. I am a school administrator as well as teacher now so that we can afford to live here at all. We decided my wife would stay home with our young daughters which was an easy decision because it resonated in the echo chamber of our world, in a compound modifier like stay-at-home which was gendered female. This was an easy decision to make because of this resonance. My wife works (when she is not a stay-at-home worker) in non-profit management & development & I am a secondary school teacher/administrator, so our “earning power” is very proximate. The decision for me to drive to work in awe was one we both felt very comfortable about & our feeling comfortable with it was not genderless in the way that my driving is not genderless.

In these gendered decisions in this language on these freeways I sit in awe & marvel & my poems are about these things: movement & family & the yawning proximity of this awe to all of us. What majesty.

*** WORKING *** WRITING *** FIGHTING *** : SEPTEMBER 4 in OAKLAND

The Poetic Labor Project Presents :

*** WORKING *** WRITING *** FIGHTING ***
A Gathering on Labor, Art & Politics
this Sunday, September 4, 1pm to 6pm
at the Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA

This labor day weekend, please join us for a convocation on the intersecting themes of writing, work and activism.

Confirmed participants include : Brian Ang, Jasper Bernes, Lindsey Boldt, Chris Chen, Chris Daniels, Jack Frost, Owen Hill, Tim Kreiner, Melissa Mack, Sean Manzano, Michael Nicoloff, Steve Orth, Margaret Rhee, Jill Richards, Wendy Trevino, Dana Ward, Brian Whitener, and Laura Woltag.

We'll meet for presentations at 1pm, have several panels interspersed with breaks, take a break for dinner, and then those who wish can reconvene for a facilitated collective conversation on the day's themes.

This event is free and open to the public. Please distribute this announcement as widely as you see fit.

Any questions ? Write to David Brazil at dzbrazil@yahoo.com.

Hope to see you Sunday !

Love & solidarity