I’ve been keeping a list of all the books I read this year. I know it’s kind of narcissistic and self-indulgent, but I’ve liked having a record of it and I’m going to do it again for 2010. The list seems kind of puny when I look at it (and I even included the ones I didn’t finish but read more than half of), but I think I did a decent job of reading things I’d been meaning to read for a long time (Lunch Poems, Moby Dick, Lolita, Robert Creeley, Mina Loy) and also a bunch of these came out of nowhere but were totally amazing. Log from the Sea of Cortez, The Last 4 Things, Scary, No Scary and The Elementary Particles are definitely way, way up there on best books I’ve read ever and strongly recommend to everyone ever. What was your favorite book you read this year?

The Gift by Lewis Hyde

Tarpaulin Sky Winter ‘09

Chicago Review Winter ‘09

Caketrain Winter ‘09

Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner & Steven Levitt

Poetry State Forest by Bernadette Mayer

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

My Vocabulary Did This to Me by Jack Spicer

The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner

The Fall by Albert Camus

The Prince (unfinished) by Niccolo Machiavelli

Selections by Paul Celan

Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut

Poker by Tomaz Salamun

Necessary Stranger by Graham Foust

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Words by Robert Creeley

This in Which by George Oppen

A Jello Horse by Matthew Simmons

For Love by Robert Creeley

Isa a Truck Named Isadore by Amanda Nadelberg

One Man’s Meat by E.B. White

Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck

Demian by Herman Hesse

Tuned Droves by Eric Baus

Labyrinth of Solitude (unfinished) by Octavio Paz

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis

Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg

The Last 4 Things by Kate Greenstreet

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellenbecq

Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara

Lost Lunar Baedecker by Mina Loy

East of Eden (½) by John Steinbeck

In the confusion that follows, the LRAD is going off, tear gas is being thrown and people are pouring into side streets. We call in to the comms station (from which our Twitter updates are happening) to let them know that 30 or 40 riot police just headed down a street following a group of protesters (hope I don’t get arrested for saying that). At this distance people are milling apart from the action – eventually we head back to the house nearby where half of the People’s Caravan is staying. We take a much-needed rest and receive word 1) that the comms station has been raided but continues to be functional (interesting side note, after the fact) and 2) the march is reconvening at Friendship park for a second round. With another friend we head in that general direction, not quite sure of our purpose.

After some fruitless wandering we jump up and beginning running towards shouts chanting “LET HIM GO! LET HIM GO!”  We find ourselves outside of a vandalized Boston Market, many windows broken. Not shattered – clear holes put into them. Riot cops form lines blocking off one strategic way (if I remember correctly it was the way to Friendship Park) and we have just missed cops trying to snatch a bicyclist who wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of the street fast enough. A clearly shaken, half-crying female bicyclist is being interviewed on camera by local news. A young male – I’m not sure if he was the bicyclist in question or an ACLU legal observer, we got there too late – walks across the street to the line of cops and asks a specific cop for her badge number and the cops start screaming at him to get back and making threatening motions.

“Ma’am, I believe you are legally obligated to identify yourself to me,” he shouts from the sidewalk. No response but the hackles are visibly raised. We continue our wanderings. Cops are in the streets in school buses and Budget trucks, k9 units and armored trucks and their slow exodus begins around us eventually. Twitter lets us know that the reconvergence has been disbanded. We decide to venture towards the medic camp – a good hike from where we are. Rachel and I want to talk to people about women’s safety and sexual assault at mass mobilizations and based on the information from the workshop the night before, sounds very well organized.

 Urban navigating is really interesting. We are glued to Rachel’s laminated map – my atrocious sense of direction has flashbacks of horror to orienteering in elementary school. Out of desperation I pee next to a highway behind the concrete steps to an overpass. Apparently when gearing up for a mass mobilization like this, one of the first steps the cops take to up the ante is to make the fine for public urination completely ridiculous – $500 or something.

Our journey takes us miles along a highway until we reach the medic camp in the darkening twilight. A feeling of relief and safeness pervades even as we walk up the driveway, past folks chatting outside, towards the big building (a church?). There is a small tarp tent erected off to the side where some one is rinsing pepper spray or tear gas off. “Can you throw me a shirt, man?” comes from inside.

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The above was written before I proverbially fell off the face of the earth in terms of this blog. But how do I come back to it? I’ve been avoiding making eye contact, thinking about it has become slightly painful and I really want to write about other things. Writing about Pittsburgh is hard. It takes a lot of effort and is emotionally exhausting. It began as catharsis (admittedly one of my nemeses) and I felt cathart-ed before I finished writing. So how to return to my blog?

I feel some need for summary, albeit wildly half-assed. So the medic tent was ill. We heard that it was raided and shut down that night shortly after we left. The Friday march was kind of a sham. It felt like the powers that be so graciously allowing us crazies our 15 minutes to rant and rave and march in the streets before letting the door hit on the way out. A couple highlights: Iraq Veterans Against the War. They do amazing work. You should check them out. They did a speak-out and we stood there crying in the street in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh. Look: They did that with mud! And riot cops surrounded us completely on 3 sides. For the permitted march. Here is a somewhat decent picture of the crowd from when Rachel and I climbed a billboard on the side of the street:  

We got downtown, there was shitty music and a lot of standing around and we had to pee so we went to eat lunch a block away. 45 minutes later we return only to find the banners our friends had wielded abandoned on the sidewalk and hundreds of riot cops lining the streets, on horses, moving the fuck in on somebody. A call to our friends tells us they are in the crowd and can’t get out. Some one on the street tells us the protest was dispersed (cop information, in hindsight) and we find out later, miles away, that they successfully marched over the bridge…and then dispersed themselves. We feel robbed of our ending–an awful rush of anticlimax. Basically everything can be summed up pretty well, and hilariously, by The Daily Show (see the guy in blue with the hankerchief over his face?? He was part of our group and I was literally 3 feet away from him. OMG BRUSH WITH FAME).

I left Pittsburgh feeling like everything had changed for me. I am angrier than before but know less what to do. I decided not to apply for my MFA for next year. In the meantime…

I wake to 12 new text messages. Before leaving Portland I’d signed up to get Twitter updates sent to my phone about major happenings in the G20 resistance (despite my serious trepidation about any involvement with the whole Twitter THING). I learned that this was how much of the post-election protests in Iran were coordinated. Honestly, it’s genius. There was a general announcement group you could follow, but also ones concerning arrests, cop movements, medical help, food and many others. While we slept, cops staked out the convergence center.

Over breakfast Rachel’s phone mysteriously becomes useless – we suspect the cops are responsible somehow. The whole time there is pervaded with a dubious paranoia, and because we are scared of the police we are best able to deal with them as bogeymen – for example if it rains on us the rain must have been planted by the cops like a booby trap, and then we can laugh about it.

We take the bus down to where the “unpermitted” march is going to take place. Rachel and I have agreed that our common goal is to avoid arrest, but we want to see the marchers off and get a feel for what’s going on. My phone is already blowing up with updates about the path the march is taking, street by street. Once we meet up with it we walk along the edges, staying on the sidewalks, but gradually our reticence begins to dissipate. Everyone is peaceful. People are singing and chanting, but there is a firm sense of defiance and preparedness, like everyone is holding their breath. We join the currents of people intermingling in the street, surprised at how many people we recognize.

The cops seem to appear suddenly but I surmise they’d probably been there all along. We are by no means near any sort of front of the crowd, but there doesn’t seem to have been any provocation from protesters. An authoritarian voice projected over speakers informs us that we are part of an illegal gathering and must disperse immediately or be physically removed by means of arrest or other measures, including tear gas. The crowd doesn’t disperse, per se, but begins to move with a note of panic, like heated molecules. A cop car with its lights and siren on comes barging from behind (the pigs always with the penetration) very close to us, scattering people in the street. The voice over the loudspeaker intones repeatedly. The helicopter which has been overhead all day is suddenly close enough to be loud. This is the closest to war I have ever felt.

Rachel and I decide we need to get out of there pretty directly. Weaving our way across the street we find other members of the People’s Caravan spectating. We’re too far away to see what the cops are doing but it feels like shit’s about to go down. We head back a few blocks and stumble upon a black bloc rolling a dumpster down the street, pulling debris into the street. Making some distance, we watch that whole effort fall apart. Some of the bloc appears to want to march in the opposite direction and many seem opposed to creating a blockade at that particular intersection. “These are all unresolved disagreements from the spokescouncil last night,” says the person standing next to me, who I recognize from the workshops at the convergence center.

I want to preface this account by saying it’s just that, an account: that time I went to Pittsburgh and protested the G20. This writing is my way of thinking through my experience and hoping to come to a better understanding of what happened there, and its implications for my life in the bigger scheme of things. I want to publish these in day-by-day accounts to keep them manageable for me to write them, so my brain doesn’t explode. Also a general disclaimer is needed based on the sheer amount of information I was inundated with in Pittsburgh, and misinformation which trickled down from every direction – there’s probably a lot I’ve gotten wrong. Rachel has been kind enough to help my memory.

One of the things I wish to recognize up front is my own privilege. I am extremely lucky to have a job that pays me well enough to have the ability to fly (rather than hitch hike, as many from far away did). Not only am I lucky; my place and privilege in society is the result of the many social and cultural forces which have shaped me and my experience, and I only hope to use that privilege in a way that helps more than it harms, if nothing else.

Day 1

I land in Pittsburgh the night before the first protest is set to happen. I’m met by Rachel, my protest buddy, who has been organizing with the People’s Caravan (also here) for a few weeks, whom I adopt as my affinity group for the protests. In the car ride to where we’re staying she earnestly begins talking about what she’s learned on the trip to Pittsburgh: how to avoid arrest and various methods the police have used on mass mobilizations in the past (“less lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, sponge grenades, tasers; and tactics like “wedging,” “snatch squads” and “kettling”). Even two whole days before any delegates of the G20 are meant to land in the city it is immediately apparent that the police presence is ubiquitous. From an overlook view of the whole city we see they already have one of the main bridges to downtown blocked off. I quickly realize exactly how serious the situation is. Of course I had expectations before I left but with a deep gut-rush it becomes tangible, visceral.

The next day after getting coffee (with some debate – participating in a movement which opposes capitalism as-is, can we justify getting our coffee at Starbucks? We end up laughing at ourselves about it but feel guilty despite having few options) we head up to the tent city sponsored by Bail Out the People where most of the People’s Caravan crew stayed the night. A meeting of everyone staying there commences. There are many different kinds of groups and people – young old black white homeless etc. The meeting begins, again, with protocol as to the cops, even though the tent city is on a church’s private property and thus don’t need a permit, they are clearly looking for an excuse to raid and shut down everything they can. By the next day the Climate Camp has been disbanded – tents and belongings confiscated & any bystanders arrested – so this is a legitimate concern. As Rachel says, “I think the differences between those camps are a really awesome illustration of the shittiness of needing a permit at all, and how the system works to 1. benefit people with property, and 2.  criminalizes people for less than criminal actions.” At the end of the meeting a Sharpie goes around so everyone can write the number of the ACLU on themselves. If arrested the cops will probably take everything in your pockets, so skin is the best canvas for the one number you’ll get to call.

The People’s Caravan’s mission for the day is to find more ideal housing than the tent city – about twenty more people are expected to be rolling into Pitt and there won’t be room. We split up into a few cars to tackle neighborhoods to go around knocking on doors of churches. The police have done an amazing smear campaign in the months leading up to the summit - our group is told time and time again that the police will come, that we’re dangerous folks of ill-repute, and so on. The cops have also been raiding the homes which housed activists in the weeks before. Eventually the Quakers agree to take half of us in and friends of group members take the second half.

We reconvene at the convergence space set up by ResistG20 and, I believe, partnered with other anarchist groups. I sit in on a legal training workshop and learn still more about what to expect from the police. Basically, anything you would think that applies to dealings with cops under normal circumstances (that cooperating will get you better treatment, for example) is no longer true in mass mobilizations. You get thrown into a pen with a mass of other people and held until they charge you or just let you go after the action is over, regardless of who you are and what you were doing. Whether to give them your real information or not depends upon what your goals are in jail – whether you’re looking to post bail and get out ASAP or to practice jail solidarity and organize prisoners to work together (the specific ends to the latter are less clear to me). One thing which was particularly interesting to me – being “de-arrested,” which emphasizes the importance of having an affinity group. If a person is snatched basically the whole group turns on the police, chanting “let them go!” and physically trying to suck them back into the crowd.  I imagine it’s a pretty powerful experience.

After the legal workshop there is a Health and Safety for Activists workshop, run by two street medics. Some of it is common sense, but it is good to be reminded of the potential ramifications of fecal impaction on your ability to protest. There’s a lot of good information on combating tear gas (a bandana soaked in water and lime juice), staying hydrated, and the medical support and resources that have been set up for this particular mobilization.

After the workshop Seeds of Peace Collective provides us with delicious free food and we disperse so that the spokescouncil can take place and the details of the (unpermitted) march tomorrow can be hammered out. What happened next is hard to explain. Rachel and I went back to the boys’ house (two friends of mine plus their two roommates) where a heated argument ensues over the course of consuming a large jug of cheap wine. We weren’t trying to win any converts, and yet our inherent positioning (going out of our way to take a stand on something). From my perspective, three of these participants perceived us as threatening their comfortable position and worldview, their desire to maintain a status quo of poverty and pursuit pleasure through music. It was a hard conversation to have – I think Rachel and I came to the conclusion that these boys were not so different from us as they thought, but they continually put up barriers around themselves that said “I do what I do and you do what you do,” as if it was audacious of us to publicly express our opinions, or that we were somehow imposing ourselves on them by planning to do so. I think, for me, that it served as a reminder of a very common and popular mindset: willful apathy, willful ignorance; a determination to only be concerned with one’s self and immediate world. Ultimately I think this mindset is a self-insulating, protective position to take up – I suspect because generally the conclusion we’ve collectively come to is that we’re pretty well fucked on the whole.

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve seen maybe 3 movies in my life, and now one of them is District 9, in which insect-like aliens – in the place of historically oppressed peoples – are evicted from their ghetto of scrap metal shacks by “security contractors” (uncannily akin to Blackwater, or Xe, or whatever they’re not calling themselves these days). A slew of parallel social forces and images surface and interplay here besides the fraught issue of security contractors: underground arms dealers, apartheid, corporate corruption, warlordism, witch doctors, medical experimentation, cat food addictions, Fallujah, concentration camps…and so on. You would think that with all these potent, loaded images (and this is what I like about scifi in general) there would be some kind of larger commentary being made. But not really. While these parallels are easy to draw, the story doesn’t gain any traction or real relevance throughout. It was easy to walk out of the theater and say “Wow, the world is so fucked up,” but it didn’t take you anywhere from that; there was no arrival or “aha!” moment. The forces which drive the story draw directly from real life but the meat of the story itself is outside of allegory, so any attempt at satire was lost. The aliens gather a fluid that powers a ship that will enable them to escape from Earth – the hope of the characters is complete separation, a hope which is only for those in the film.

While the ending is intended to leave us hanging and wondering, it just seemed like a cop-out. I don’t care if the aliens come back or not.

Taryn has a totally sweet poem in elimae!

Also, as of this morning I’m really obsessed with TYPO.

Talking to poets makes me get all shy and shit. Not actually shit. But you know.

“History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality–if only for an instant–by means of creation.”

- Octavio Paz, from The Labyrinth of Solitude

Just returned home (Portland? Still weird) from a week in Maine blissfully absent of most human contact. I feel better about everything, or, at the very least, like I have a better perspective on what I need to be doing with myself from here on out. I think staying in one place for an extended period of time can give you an unhealthy tunnel vision and I’m glad to say I feel that’s dissipated.

Got a satifsying amount of reading done – we had a lot of rain which prevented too much adventuring. I decided poetry and I needed to “take a break” and see other people for a week. I don’t know if that happens with other poets, but before I left I started to feel like a sponge completely saturated and dripping everything all over the floor whenever I would read, and everything sounded the same and felt the same. In Maine I read (the hilariously titled) One Man’s Meat by E.B. White – a series of his essays written 1938-1942 when he moved from NYC to a saltwater farm in Maine. He ranges all over the place in topics; novice farming concerns, rural life, writing, movies, and politics – all against the backdrop of WW2 conflict in Europe and America’s eventual involvement. He writes unpretentiously with the perfect blend of curmudgeon and optimist to be thoroughly enjoyable. Refreshing, for me, like the outdoor showering and outhouse pooping I did that week.

What really struck me was the total faith in democracy and freedom for every individual that’s pervasive throughout all of White’s writing, and made me realize by the contrast exactly how cynical about those things I’ve become. Smoking cigars and watching the constellations with my dad the one night he surmised that soon we’ll need to start colonizing other planets in order to sustain and propagate the species. He was somewhat appalled when I countered that the species probably wasn’t worth sustaining or propagating at this point. I think it made us both deeply sad, for me especially after reading White.

I also got a raging mega-boner for John Steinbeck, of all people. I’ve liked most of his work more or less, excluding The Grapes of Wrath, but when I picked up The Log from the Sea of Cortez I was hooked. Steinbeck ships out with his friend, Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist (“Doc” in the thinly-veiled nonfiction novel Cannery Row) to collect any and all manner of marine life specimens in the Bay of California. It is one of those wonderful multi-hybrids; part ship’s log, part memoir, part philosophical treatise. In the section “About Ed Ricketts,” Steinbeck explains:

We had a game which we playfully called speculative metaphysics. It was a sport consisting of lopping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and busy. We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality.

That quote was found in the introductory “About Ed Ricketts” section in the book I originally started reading in Maine. It was old, thick and smelled the way all excellent old books should smell.  I borrowed it from the library in the church on the island and was sure to return it before leaving in fear more of the wrath of gossip-mongering New England old heads than Jesus, picking up a new one at Powell’s upon my return. The new one is a Penguin Classics brand, and is altogether entirely too floppy (flaccid) and the spine thin and unbroken. Honestly it just isn’t as satisfying to read. And that’s why I will never own a Kindle, folks, because books are a total experience.

In other news – finally joined the Independent Publishing Resource Center and signed up for the Intro to Letterpress class. Needless to say, …!!!

Taryn came to visit – she writes amazing poems and got to go to Powell’s and somehow didn’t kill us when we rode 15 miles one night. She is made us vegetarian chicken broccoli peach casserole and is generally a good influence. Here’s a picture of Taryn in our backyard:

Yeah, it’s pretty overgrown. It killed a lawn mower once.

I don’t know how I feel about flarf but I’m writing a flarf poem about one of my co-workers, based on her facebook. She dresses like a clown and plays a lot of Vampire and Mob Wars on the fb and stalking her gives me something to do at work. The grammar will be atrocious. It is intended to be a Marxist critique of something. Any advice is welcome.

Just finished Isa the Truck Named Isadore by Amanda Nadelberg, which was lovely if too cute(sy) sometimes, and am now working on I’m the Man Who Loves You by Amy King, which, so far, is amazing. Still reading For Love. And Marjorie Perloff. My brain sometimes feels like exploding and instead spending the whole day on textsfromlastnight.com. I recently joined goodreads.com which discourages me from writing reviews because I can just give a book the amount of stars relative to my general good-feeling towards it and then jerk my dick over how many I’ve accumulated and judged via numbers of stars. I’ve been working on a review of This in Which by George Oppen and the Objectivists, but this post is really just a post for the sake of writing a post and is therefore somewhat  worthless. Every blog needs some filler, though, right