Why I Like To Write ~ with Eileen Myles
~ Fall 2006 ~ 2 - 7pm ~ 11.14.06 ~
Since I've been teaching in a university setting since 2002 and this fall I've been on “sabbatical” I've resisted writing this description since I love Fritz and the Salon but didn't really want to teach. But I did want to be part of this Schoolhouse plan.
So I've procrastinated making up this school session since I've been busy since June when I finally stopped teaching. I've been reading, riding on the poetry bus, tending to my semi-dying dog, writing little articles etc. I've basically been enjoying reading and writing. I've written poems, re-wrote my novel, started something new I'm unwilling to discuss, and as of November 1st I started blogging weekly at http://openfordesign.msn.com. It's been great so I'm really not going to start teaching now. I'd like to continue to retreat and I'd like you to join me. I invite people who are somewhat or even wish they were engaged with writing poems, stories, blogs, libretti and plays, reviews, manifesti, and tomes, whatever, to bring to this retreat the obvious - paper and pens, pencils and pencil sharpeners, what you like to write with and we'll go through some of the types of writing, poems, tomes etc. and what's good about them. This will be a session totally structured around the soft part of writing (production) while alluding to what we couldn't possibly do here (editing) which I think is really the powerful and sexy part and actually even more fun and we'll talk about approaches to it. To do this session we need atmosphere. Mine and yours. I'd like you to bring evocative stuff, stuffed bunnies and like totemic statues, illustrations and posters, glowing balls, scraps of cloth, things that kind of allegorically open up the larger spaces of contemplation or areas of concern in your life. A picture of mom, perhaps. Clay, how about your camera.
Bring some snacks and tea and shit. I suppose Fritz has some of this, too. In the later part of the day I'd like to play writing therapist. You can tell me in front of the group what the things you need to write are and then even what your problems are around them. I think my intention is something cooler than touchy feely. I'm kind of a poet-coach. I enjoy problems solving and I'm good at it. I actually love groups and think it would be great to strategize about how you can be doing exactly what you want to do. It's all possible. I mean in the container 'writing.' Cause I don't think writing is hard at all. Life, to me, is the problem.
And from 2 to 7 PM on Thurs. Nov. 14th we're just not gong to worry about that.
Eileen Myles, November 3, 2006
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If you don’t know who Eileen Myles is, go to www.eileenmyles.com or www.eileenmyles.net, and find out. These sites are comprehensive; they include her presidential campaign of ’92 and many poems, and interviews and also a commencement speech that she read at Hampshire College in ’98 called “Universal Cycle.”
Here is what she had to say about her time at Sundown Schoolhouse, posted on x.openfordesign.msn.com on November 22, 2006. (Note: It was posted alongside a photo of a freeway.)
What’s Left?
I got this picture in the mail the other day. It’s a still from a video I sat watching under the dome of Fritz Haeg’s Sundown Schoolhouse in LA. People show up one day a week (Tuesday) to do a range of activities that includes yoga, daily manifestoing, eating student-prepared vegetarian meals and participating in the range of classes provided all fall by a diverse group of visitors -- today being me. I offer ‘writing,’ yet to be frank, I am really not wanting to teach. So instead I was attempting to offer an explication of ‘writing design’. Not how to write, but the craft of it without the production because that is the down side of teaching. You want them to do their work but you don’t want to read it. So instead I tried to create the space of it happening. To manifest the writers studio. To that end everyone brought–– as well as paper and pen–– some stuff: an outsize pair of wooden dice, perfume, an ancient stuffed bunny (mine) and someone (Pablo) brought this DVD of a road trip. My actual intention was to do more than create the ambience of the writing space. Ultimately I was thinking: the world. One works in a small space to secure something larger. The knickknacks on your desk become the dashboard of your car. Intertwining the front of the road, the sides and your daily teeming thoughts, all that craft, yields a kind of living shrine. And that’s what I mean by writing. The construction might sound a little stilted. But I saw this freeway move.
~
We were to write letters, to someone, to anyone. Or we were to respond to the ambience of the objects people brought to the dome. Here is what we wrote.
(Sarah’s response)
I feel like I’m a kid stuck in the back seat of this car. The perfume Tracy brought in, well I loved it for the first few minutes, then watching the car video and smelling the perfume made me car sick because it feels like I can’t escape this smell and god it got hot in the car. Because the sun just happens to be on the side of the car that I’m on. There’s a feeling of having no control of my situation. Looking at the painted lane lines and breathing with my mouth is the most I can do.
I once used a bad smell to cover up an even worse smell. We were staying in Croatia, in a guesthouse run by a woman we were to call “Mama”. The room we were shown had the most sinister, hideous smell in it. We all detected it upon entering. Rather than complain, and really we didn’t have any other choice, we tried to cover up the smell. We did this by 1st waving soapy hands in the air, propeller style. Then, farting, because at least it was a smell we knew and understood. And finally, by smoking cigarettes and blowing the smoke into the sheets up until the last moment when it was time to sleep.
(Qusai’s response)
Living in Los Angeles, developing such a fascination might be considered an imperative: how else can on one occupy the mind and prevent it from overheating like an old engine going south on the 5 on a smoggy Friday afternoon? When the traffic, even in the fast lane, comes to a standstill I secretly imagine I have a monster truck, and with a flick of a switch my special suspension bounces on and I simply roll over the endless queue of cars blocking my way, taking special pleasure in casually grinding to bits the flashing lights of police cars.
At night I sometimes drive very fast, playing richly textured and slow, almost motionless music- Morton Feldman’s Pattern for a Chromatic Field or maybe Debussy’s Reverie or KLF’s Chillout- and blur my eyes, somehow safe inside these serpentine Siamese twins, glowing tail-light red in front of me, headlight yellow on my left, colors appropriately reversed in the rear-view mirror.
Sacrilegious when broken, there’s something in the grey periodicity of it all- the changing rhythmic tempos of the dashed lane markers, moving so fast right by you but slower away in the distance, the focus in my eyes in spite of this hurtling movement- that helps me turn my mind off, gives me the feeling I’m going somewhere and that it’s alright to enjoy the view and the music and my loud singing that nobody outside this glass and metal mobile tomb can hear, because there isn’t really anything else I can do.
Sometimes the road makes me feel incredibly alone, especially when driving into the suburbs on an early winter’s evening, just another anonymous person in another anonymous car. Road-kill punctuates the melancholy, already flattened into the asphalt. I reflect on the assumptions that allow me be here: the trust that my 17 year old Honda is sufficiently well engineered to withstand the 100-years-prior-unfathomable feat of traveling at 75 miles per hour, brakes working and steering wheel responsive enough to weave through equally fast moving traffic; the faith that my fellow drivers will follow the rules, not break all of a sudden or decide, on a whim, to slam into me.