Forgive me for my smuttiness.
[LAUGHTER]
"Autobiography."
So when I was in Granada, a strange city
in the South of Spain, obsessed with its Arab history.
I was obsessed and frightened by the haunting of this city that
murdered its poet.
And he was killed by the city itself.
He was-- the mobs literally stormed into his place
and carried him off.
And very recently, the other folks
who were in that mass grave, where
Lorca was said to have been dumped,
they have been petitioning the Spanish government
for years and years and years to exhume
that grave so they can identify their loved ones
and rebury them.
And always the Lorca heirs, were sort of not wanting his remains
to be disturbed.
But if you remember a couple of years ago,
he did order the exhumation.
They did DNA testing and Lorca is not in that grave.
So he's-- nobody knows what happened to him now.
We only knew what happened to him because one of those guys
explained, we went at this time, we took him,
we took him to this hill.
We shot him.
We buried him down there.
And that's not a true story so we don't know.
So I was there in this hotel staying at the corner
of Calla San Anton.
And San Anton, St Anthony, of course,
is the saint of lost things, and I at that moment,
was a lost thing in Granada, as happens to me sometimes.
And then at the other two was Calla Duende.
"At the corner of San Anton and Duende,
I hardly know the edge of the sidewalk, a bare consonant
of the city's harsh sentence.
How can I say my actual name, when all I can manage
is counting change for coffee I do not buy?
Every night the clouds that argue in the sky for the right
to be the one who will part to reveal
the new moon, blank but appearing,
day by day a new misunderstanding of gone.
But how can you already know if you have never yet
been the Twin inside arriving after departure.
A crime of history, a quivering vessel,
my also bones a manic making.
And who am I?
A man inside a bell inside someone else's face.
Fingers that hold a skull or pen.
Well of course, a swan could be an elephant,
or a man could be on fire.
The coffee I didn't drink is pouring through time,
and inside any city 1,000 vowels pronounce themselves.
Every street map has 1,000 pointing arrows flashing,
labeled each, you are here.
But really, who are you at the corner of San Anton and Duende,
dark eyed and holding your empty?
Nobody knows you, hardly arriving and already gone."
I'm going to read to you a little piece out
of my book Orange Alert, which is a book of essays.
But I guess the difference between essays and poetry
is also a stupid difference.
Stupid difference.
Do you see that film Impromptu, with Emma Thompson
and Judy Davis?
Did you see it?
You saw it?
Stupid rain.
Emma Thompson is upset with the rain.
Which is apropos of nothing.
I'm sorry, you are getting a very punchy, silly version
of me today.
I have not made much sense to you, please forgive me.
And you are about to now get, not
the architecture of Muslim Spain, which I do
write about in this book, but Battlestar Galactica.
"When Kara Thrace first appeared on the screen
and it became clear to the audience of the new Battlestar
Galactica that Starbuck was a woman,
one first looked at this new version and thought,
but this character is the same, still coded as male.
The same old wisecracking, cigar smoking, hard drinking,
sexual predator he/she/ze always was.
Like the Cylon enemies, the body of Starbuck in the past--
in this case, Dirk Benedict's body,
defines the body of the future Starbuck, Katee Sackhoff.
Though, she exists utterly independent of him.
One's second thought was to look back at the original Starbuck
character, and ask, whether the sexual tension between Apollo
and Starbuck was always there?
If you look back at those old episodes,
you will agree that it was.
The past writes the present, for sure,
but the present always returns the favor.
A body is like Dickinson's signature,
which she sealed away on a separate card
with her first and otherwise unsigned
letter to Thomas Higginson.
There are a dozen different versions
of the body unfolding around the self, written and overwritten.
Dickinson herself, was of course overwritten,
deleted and edited into limbo.
She has, in a fashion, been restored,
though Susan Howe's complaint that the relineation
of Dickinson continues has been largely ignored,
except in the Paris Press edition of Dickinson's letters
to her sister-in-law Susan.
And of course, the bowdlerized Dickinson's of Bianchi,
Todd Higginson, and Bingham are all in the public realm
and continue to be widely republished, at least one
of addition of those is by a well-respected publisher
and carries a forward by a former US Poet Laureate"
It's true.
"Of all the crew on the Pequod it
is Starbuck who most wishes to disobey his captain.
Both like and unlike his Galactic counterpart,
Melville's Starbuck has a strong streak of rebellion
but is fundamentally part of the larger social order
and continues to support it.
He is unable to make the brutal decision that needs making,
that by murdering Ahab, he will save both ship and crew.
Does the population of the ship, hence the world,
die by Ahab's madness or by Starbucks inability to act?
Higginson himself, known to us as pompous editor,
literary muck-up, and distorter of genius,
was actually hard at work the whole time on another issue.
A dedicated abolitionist, Dickinson's correspondent
put together and led into combat the first all African-American
regiment in the US Army."
He was also a member of the Gang of Six,
that was raising funds for John Browns raid,
and was part of his defense committee.
"Neither scholar nor mentor managed
to speak themselves clearly through the shadows of history.
Is the individual body, whether Higginson's, Dickinson's,
Layla Al-Attar's or Rachel Corrie's,
hopeless against the tidal wave of history,
the universal social action of the mind?
To go back to science fiction, one
is reminded of Neo from The Matrix trilogy.
He wants to know if he has individual will at all
or whether he, like those who preceded him,
is condemned to make a choice solely
based on his experiences and previous circumstances.
In other words, is identity an actual spiritual concept
grounded in an individual soul?
Or is it the body governed by a form of karma?
That is to say, in the case of the soul,
all of its previous experiences will
shape its emotional and spiritual and chemical
responses, and in the case of the body,
all of its DNA and lineage, as well as physical activities
in its present life."
Goes on a little bit OK.