--and partially it's in prose which is
that thing Jonathan was saying.
I seem to have--
I feel like I've stopped being a poet.
I keep writing in prose.
It's really frustrating.
And I've been working on this.
I've been doing this collaboration with my friend
David Buuck who's--
actually Jonathan mentioned him last night.
He's a-- I don't know, he's a somewhat writer
in the Bay Area.
I think he even would disclaim-- he would get really angry if I
said he was a poet.
And we've been working on this collaboration and it's failing.
And then I keep plugging along at it in some way
and I become kind of interested in writing something
about a failing collaboration.
And there's two paragraphs in here that David Buuck wrote,
and I have to confess I'm not going to read them.
Which is actually part of it.
Part of what I joke in here-- in which David Buuck and I are
these characters in this piece--
is how badly suited we are to collaboration.
So though we're quite close friends and have
a really meaningful exchange and dialogue frequently,
we haven't been working well together.
And the other reason I wanted to read this piece--
in part I wanted to read--
I changed what I was going to read in part from Jonathan's
discussion about very inclusive models here and
or trying to get-- and this is something
that I feel like it's not, it's something
that's not necessarily in the tradition
of ecological writing.
Although it, again, draws from it at various moments.
But I'm staying at The Fig Tree Bed and Breakfast
and there's a fig tree.
So I thought, oh, I should read about the fig tree.
Because I've become slightly fascinated with fig trees
in this.
I don't think it has a title, actually,
and I'm going to skip some sections in it.
So there might be some disconnect moments.
Oh, it might matter to the story,
which is that I live in Berkeley and David Buuck lives
in Oakland.
But we live very close.
We can walk to each other's houses.
It's not that far, but we live kind of on the border.
And one of the running jokes that we've
had in this collaboration is it's something
about the difference between--
because there is no difference between Oakland and Berkeley
when you walk the streets.
You couldn't recognize it unless the sign was there.
But yet these two cities have very different myths
they tell about themselves.
And one of my favorite stories, which I talk about here,
which I'm not going to read, is there's that moment where
the protesters at the UC Berkeley--
it's the free speech movement protest--
and they're marching off Berkeley
and they're marching towards Oakland and the Hell's Angels
are at the border of Oakland with the police.
And they beat the shit out of them.
Which I think-- that's the true definition of the city.
Oakland is bad ass and Berkeley is lefty and about everybody
and the hippies.
And I'm trying to think about what those two
myths mean at various moments.
"The Bay Area can boast of having many great poets
and many mediocre poets.
Among the mediocre were two poets better known as Demented
Panda and Koki.
These two poets thought of themselves
as living life in pursuit of both the intellectual
and the social pleasures of poetry.
And thus they were like most people
who consider themselves poets and unlike most people who do
not consider themselves poets.
It is important to realize that in the time of Demented Panda
and Koki, poetry was an art form that had lost
many of its reasons for being.
It was no longer considered, because
of its ties to song, the superior way for a culture
to remember something about itself.
And at the same time, it was no longer
considered to be the superior way for a nation
to inspire patriotism and proclaim, with elaborate rhyme
and rhythm, that its values were great and universal values.
This is especially true in the nation that
claimed Demented Panda and Koki, without their consent it
is important to note, as among its citizens.
This nation had a government that
realized that the best way to inspire patriotism and convince
other nations that its values were great
and universal was to offer a series of tax breaks
and incentives that encouraged the distribution
in other countries of colorful moving pictures
and songs that told stories that prominently featured,
as representative of the nation, characters
who are mainly consumers.
It was in part because poetry had
lost its cultural and national importance that Demented Panda
and Koki were so devoted to it.
And as they were devoted to poetry,
they met frequently to take long walks together,
and on these walks they talked about poetry
and its particular lostness.
And when they walked, they took up a lot of room
on the sidewalk.
Demented Panda usually brought on these walks his two dogs,
and they tended to yip and yap at anyone
who passed by on a skateboard.
And Koki frequently pushed a baby in a stroller.
Demented Panda and Koki thus walked down the street
with three other sentient beings in tow,
talking loudly, sometimes like the baby, laughing
and delighting in the sun which is often
accompanied by a cool breeze.
And sometimes, like the dogs, getting in each other's way,
and then being annoyed and snippy with each other
or with the world at large.
During the walks what they would talk about
could probably best be described as gossip, although it
was about poems and poetry.
They didn't gossip about poetry they didn't like.
So they didn't talk much about poetry that tended to portray,
in quiet and overly serious tone with a study that attracted
attention to line breaks for emphasis and a moving epiphany
or denouement at the end, the deep thoughts held
by individuals in a consumerist society.
Instead, they talked about poetry that they liked.
The sort that stretches language to reveal its potential
for ambiguity, fragmentation, and self-assertion
within chaos.
The sort that used to open forums in multicultural text.
The sort that appropriated images from popular culture
and media and refashioned them.
One summer day, a particularly nice, mostly sunny day
of 69 degrees, while on one of their many
walks, Demented Panda and Koki decided to collaborate.
They would, they said to themselves,
write something that they would come
to call A Picturesque Story About the Border
Between Two Cities.
Demented Panda and Koki lived only 1.4 miles
from one another, but they lived in different cities.
They said to themselves that they wanted, in A Picturesque
Story About the Border Between Two Cities,
to think some about urban theory, postmodern
criticism in art and architecture,
debates concerning identity politics in the public sphere,
and the problem of neighbor love and its accompanying
issues that were fundamental to ethical inquiry
and that suggested a new theological configuration
of political theory.
They located their picturesque story
on a plot of land that was between their houses,
and that included the border between the two cities.
This plot of land was small--
around 0.27 miles around its perimeter-- and it
was hard to say what exactly the plot of land was.
They could tell from looking at it
that it was flat and somewhat rectangular
in shape with the distended sides of the rectangle going
north south.
But the plot was not really a rectangle
in any meaningful way, as it had a hump on the northeast side,
and further it came to a point on the southernmost tip.
A heavy-rail public rapid transit system
emerged from a tunnel and traversed the north south axis
of the rectangle on an elevated platform.
On the southwestern corner, 10 lines of traffic
met, regulated by three stoplights and a large number
of security cameras that were supposed to catch
those who ran red lights.
A sidewalk was available for pedestrian access,
and there were benches every so often along the sidewalk.
The wood on the benches was both rotting and recently
painted by children who, for some reason,
felt compelled to feature self-improvement slogans,
such as drink eight glasses of water a day, in their art.
On the south side of the small plot of land,
a series of tiles that featured prints of children's hands
had been embedded in the concrete.
Along the north south axis there was a metal sculpture
on the southwest corner that somewhat gestured to the nearby
border between the two cities as it spelled out the words
'here' and 'there.'
'Here' was north of 'there' and 'here' read north to east
while 'there' read south to east.
In order to collaborate on the writing of A Picturesque Story
About the Border Between Two Cities,
Demented Panda and Koki met several times a week
all summer on the small plot of land.
There they sat in the partly cloudy 78 degrees,
or in the sunny 77 degrees, or in the sunny 76
degrees, the dogs panting at their feet, the baby cooing
with pleasure at each passing truck, and talked.
Those passing by might have mistaken them
for sunbathers or picnickers enjoying a summer's respite
from the hard labor of toiling in the intellectual minds
of the academy.
But Demented Panda and Koki had only one thing on their mind,
and it was the small plot of land.
Their conversations frequently turned
to critique urban theory, postmodern criticism
in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity
politics in the public sphere.
And as they did this, they talked
frequently and repeatedly about how
they were not really interested in the small plot of land.
And then they would talk about how
it made them feel uncomfortable to be
there on the small plot of land attempting
to write about it when they were not interested in it.
And also, they had no right to write about it
because of who they were, although they always
left who they were unspecified.
They talked about conceptual squatting
as an unintended aftereffect of conceptual art.
And they talked about how they did not
want to represent the small plot of land
as uninhabited because they imagined
that people lived and slept on the small plot of land.
They talked a lot about how they didn't
want to bother these people, but they
didn't want to ignore them either and the ethical issues
around this sort of neighbor love.
But as they spent more time on the small plot of land
they began to realize that no one bothered to live or sleep
on the small plot of land.
The small plot of land was probably both too isolated
and too exposed.
So the people that they imagined lived and slept
on the small plot of land, and that they talked about not
wanting to bother, either only passed
by the small plot of land, despite its many park benches,
on their way to slightly more accommodating plots of land
like the corner where Koki lived that had both more foot traffic
and also hedges for privacy.
As they talked about the small plot of land
they also talked about themselves.
They talked about how their writing can sometimes
do the right kind of political work
but still leave them dissatisfied.
And they talked about their tendency
to write things so as to show others that they themselves
had the right attitudes about various things.
And they talked about the fickle nature of observation,
about how they would walk to the small plot of land,
not really noticing anything.
But then once they got there they
would perk up and begin to put on their picturesque story
mindset, and then look around for things to write about.
And they wondered if they should go through life using
the picturesque story mindset all the time
or if they should refuse the picturesque story
mindset when they were at the small plot of land
or if it was OK to use it some of the time and not
other times.
They did not even know what to call the small plot of land
that they had settled on for their picturesque story.
They agreed that it was not a park
despite the presence of park benches and trees and grass.
It was certainly never used as a park
because it was surrounded by large amounts of traffic.
And every few minutes the heavy-rail public rapid transit
system careened through it with its decibel high-pitched
screech.
But they were also hesitant to call it a median strip
because it was a little wider than most median strips.
And so they kept on referring to it as a small plot of land.
So this is how they spent their summer,
talking about themselves as they talked
about the small plot of land.
And then the more they talked about the small plot of land
and themselves at the same time, the more
they begin to consider this talking their art practice,
an art practice of meeting in the partly cloudy 78,
or in the sunny 77, or in the sunny 76,
and while they were doing some talking
instead of doing some doing.
Demented Panda and Koki, in setting their proposed
picturesque story on the small plot of land,
were somewhat right that nothing much dramatic
had happened there.
Even the story of the heavy-rail public rapid transit
system that passed through it-- a story that
in the city of Demented Panda was accompanied
by the raising of vibrant, multiethnic working-class
communities-- had not been that dramatically controversial
as it had replaced an already existing railroad line
that had been in place since the turn of the century.
Yet looked at another way, the plot of land
had all the histories of the surrounding areas.
Some of them sad, and some of them triumphant.
It had for thousands of years--
3,000 most said-- been populated by various humans,
by various animals such as rabbits
and other small rodents, large deer, elk, and antelope
and by various birds, some migratory and some not.
The humans hunted these animals and they burned the grasslands
regularly.
And they harvested roots and tubers that they planted.
They called themselves various names
and spoke various languages.
This history Demented Panda and Koki were not
able to know all that well and was only vaguely told
in their time.
But the history that came after they knew fairly well.
And the quick telling of this history,
despite the humans who had for 3,000 years
been hunting the animals and burning the grasslands
and planting and harvesting the roots and tubers,
the land had been considered unclaimed
and unpopulated by an expedition of people
sent by another nation far away who then claimed it
for yet another nation.
And then a representative of this nation
gave the land that included the small plot of land
to a member of an expedition.
From then on different nations and many different people
claimed the land.
There were many lawsuits.
A couple of armed skirmishes.
And various deals were made and continued to be made.
The land was now claimed by an entirely different nation
than the one who sent the expedition
and now supposedly owned by many different people,
as long as they defined ownership
similar to the nation who now occupied the land.
To return to Demented Panda and Koki.
As they sat on the grass of the small plot of land
in the partly cloudy 78 degrees or in the sunny 77 degrees
and talked a lot that summer, when
it came to the writing of poetry,
Demented Panda and Koki were badly matched.
Their un-a-likeness could be seen in the accouterments
that they used in their writing life.
Demented Panda carried at all times a notebook,
but a notebook that might be called
the littlest of notebooks.
He kept his notebook in his front pocket.
And it was so small that there was never an unsightly bulge.
He carried a notebook at all times because he was a poet.
But he carried a littlest notebook
because he didn't want to have to commit to writing anything,
really.
And the littleness of the notebook
made him unable to write anything
even if he had wanted to.
Koki, on the other hand, carried with her
at all times a backpack.
And in this backpack she kept no fewer than five identical pens,
lined up for easy access in the pen holder section.
And in the backpack itself she always
kept at least one large and thick notebook and a book
for reading, in case she was stuck for some reason somewhere
for a long period of time with nothing much
to do, along with the usual detritus
of modern female life like lip balms,
and tampons, and small tins of painkillers.
But even with their different approaches,
they both worked all summer on A Picturesque Story
About the Border Between Two Cities.
And they both wrote the same amount on it
which was more or less nothing.
It is true that by the end of the summer
Demented Panda had some notes in his notebook
that he kept promising to type up
and send to Koki along with audio recordings he
had made of the traffic on the small plot of land.
But he never did.
And it's true that Koki had written pages and pages.
But her pages were so wandering and incomprehensible that they
were the same as nothing.
So the days wore on.
It was a sunny 78 degrees one day,
and then a partly cloudy 77 degrees the next,
and then a more sunny 79 degrees the day after that,
and a slightly sunny 76 degrees, followed
by a mostly sunny 75 degrees.
And then finally the summer was over.
And Demented Panda and Koki agreed
to meet one last time on a small plot of land
and talk one more time about A Picturesque Story
About the Border Between Two Cities.
Demented Panda decided for this last meeting
that he was going to do a spell and mumbled something about
how the first poems were probably spells.
And Koki mumbled to herself that of course Demented Panda
would choose a spell because spells are short
and do nothing.
But nonetheless, she eagerly agreed to be a witness to it.
So one day she walked to the mostly sunny 76 degrees
one more time to the small plot of land
and there met Demented Panda.
Demented Panda's spell was a simple one
to gather energy from the place.
And Demented Panda thought to himself
that because the place didn't have much energy, as it just
had a lot of traffic surrounding it,
when the spell did not work it would, of course, make sense.
And then he would write about that in the littlest notebook
that he kept in his front pocket.
To begin his spell, Demented Panda
sat down and crossed his legs and then adjusted his stomach
over his lap and then reached down and pulled his ballsack
forward so he could really clear his mind
and become one with himself.
After he cleared his mind, he cleared his mind again.
He felt that he really needed a clear mind
to make the spell work, or as he figured it, not work.
And then he held up two of his arms or legs
and made his paws into fists.
And he felt then some sort of energy,
perhaps the energy of the universe like the spell's
instructions promised, enter his recessive paw
and flow up out of his ballsack and through his body
and into his projective paw.
He let the energy build up in his projective paw
until he felt he had an immense amount of energy.
And then he flung his paws to the right,
opened his projective paw, and while doing this he envisioned
the energies flying.
He then recited a quick chant, one that went 'give orange give
me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.'
A chant that was something Nim Chimpsky, the famous chimp
who'd been taught sign language by human caretakers,
had liked to sign when he was hungry for an orange.
Demented Panda had decided to use the mumbling
signs of Nim Chimpsky as a chant because they
were slightly absurd, slightly meaningless, and reeked
a little of dubious science.
All of which seemed the perfect combination
for his goal of performance art, not alchemy.
Despite Demented Panda's skepticism and his desires
of performance art, not alchemy, the spell
worked in a certain sense of that word.
And what happens next began rather mundanely.
Although it can best be described
by resorting to the language used
by Tommy Lee in his description of a party
that Pamela Anderson threw for him for his 33rd birthday,
and various first person accounts
of the Woodstock concert of 1999,
and Livy's description of the Bacchanalia
in his History of Rome.
What happened next began with shit.
Raw sewage began pouring out of the heavy-rail public rapid
transit system tunnel and collecting
in a series of small pools or lakes
at the small plot of land.
At first Demented Panda and Koki just
sat there, as if slightly stoned from the shock of a spell
working, and looked at the pool of sewage
seeping up and out of the small plot of land.
The sewage appeared to be 20 feet long and perhaps a foot
deep.
And soon it flowed over the laps of Demented Panda and Koki
and into the intersection where cars continued
driving through the sewage.
The smell of raw sewage seemed to only intensify
Demented Panda's spell throwing desires.
And so he got up from a seated position
and stood in the middle of the small plot of land,
whirring his arms overhead as if signaling
to an invisible fleet of helicopters
that it was time to land.
And as a result of this whirring,
there suddenly appeared two rows of flame stretching out
for hundreds of feet in front of him.
And then, just as suddenly, midgets
appeared all around him.
And they sang 'give orange give me
eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me
you' over and over as they unrolled a red carpet
between the lines of fire.
Clowns and acrobats materialized,
filling the air with confetti.
A giant on stilts dressed as the devil
walked through the tangle of midgets,
parting them like a sea.
There was a Ferris wheel, roller coasters,
contortionists in boxes, caged lions, and bubble machines.
Demented Panda looked around and he
noticed all kinds of stands filled with hawkers
of food such as Dove bars, frozen lemonades, iced mochas,
orange mango drinks, Sprites, Pepsi's, Cokes, nachos, tenders
and poppers, jelly buns, fat-free soft serve ice
creams, gourmet butter salt potatoes, caramel apples, Jelly
Bellys, and donuts.
There were excesses of all kinds and the small plot of land
was surrounded by mobile production trucks.
And in the shadows behind mobile production
trucks were empty buses parked in double rows
stretching out for at least a quarter of a mile.
And then in the darkness behind the buses
were oversized tractor-trailer trucks,
the kind that transport forklifts and boilers
and other heavy industrial equipment
on superhighways at night.
And all these vehicles had brought all the excesses
to the small plot of land.
And all these trucks and buses had their air conditioners
and refrigeration units running, so they gurgled
as they idled, spewing fumes.
And soon the small plot of land was
covered with a dense brownish-yellow hazy
cloud filled with the oxides of nitrogen and hydrocarbons.
Demented Panda and Koki wandered through the small plot of land,
muddling their way through the lakes of raw sewage
that were slowly filling with empty pizza
boxes and crushed Sprite bottles, watching all of this.
The scenes they watched were part
of a larger story of their time, which in turn was
a very minor episode in the history of debauchery
and excess and civilization.
And as the night wore on, impertinent beings
in white face and breasty girls in top hats
began to practice debauchery of every kind,
as every person found at hand that sort of enjoyment
to which he or she was disposed by the passion predominant
in his or her nature.
Nor were they confined to one species of vice,
such as the promiscuous intercourse
of eating high levels of refined sugar, white flour, trans fat,
polyunsaturated fat, and salt or the burning
of excessive amounts of fossil fuels
by endlessly idling buses and trucks.
From the storehouse of villainy preceded the punching
and slapping and kicking of detainees,
the jumping on their naked feet, the
videotaping and photographing naked male and female
detainees.
The forcibly arranging of detainees in various sexually
explicit positions for photographing,
the forcing of detainees to remove their clothing
and keeping them naked for several days
at a time, the forcing of naked male detainees
to wear women's underwear, the forcing of groups
of male detainees to masturbate themselves
while being photographed and videotaped,
the arranging of naked male detainees in a pile
and then jumping on them, the positioning of naked detainees
on an MRE box with a sandbag on head,
and touching wires to fingers, toes and penis
to simulate electric torture.
The writing of 'I am a rapist' on the leg
of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped
a 15-year-old fellow detainee and then
photographing him naked, the placing of a dog chain
or strap around a naked detainee's neck
and having a female soldier pose for a picture, the allowing
of a male MP guard to have sex with a female detainee,
the using of military working dogs without muzzles
to intimidate and frighten detainees,
and in at least one case, biting and severely injuring
a detainee.
The taking of photographs of dead detainees,
the breaking of chemical lights and the pouring
of phosphoric liquid on detainees,
the threatening of detainees with a charged 9mm pistol,
the pouring of cold water on naked detainees,
the beating of detainees with a broom handle and a chair,
the threatening of male detainees with rape,
the allowing of a military police
guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who
was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell,
the sodomizing of a detainee with a chemical light
and perhaps a broomstick, the using of military working
dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees
with threats of attack and, in one instance,
actually biting a detainee.
Many of these audacious deeds were brought about by treachery
but most of them by force.
And they served to conceal the violence
so that none of the cries uttered by the person
suffering violence or murder could be heard abroad.
While all of this went on around them,
Demented Panda and Koki joined in, holding their thumbs up,
contorting their mouths into idiotic grins, whimpering.
Demented Panda, as if bereft of reason,
uttered complaints with frantic contortions of his body,
mumbling over and over to himself
that all he wanted to do was write nothing
about an unremarkable place, write a picturesque story
about a pastoral plot of land.
Koki was silent for a long time and then
she looked down at her hands.
Koki's hands were normally fuzzy, with sharp black claws,
but one of them had now mutated into a pink and fleshy handgun
that was oozing and dripping amniotic fluid.
Koki knew this dripping flesh handgun well,
for a hand oozed and dripped with amniotic fluid whenever
one, for some absurd reason, thought
they were immune from whatever was going on around them.
Koki thus suddenly knew her role.
And in the habit of Bacchantes, with her hair disheveled,
her claw now a flesh gun dripping and oozing
amniotic fluid, went down into the tunnel
that the heavy-rail public rapid transit system used.
And she began shooting from her flesh-gun hand
an unextinguisable flame composed
of native sulfur and charcoal.
And as she did this, Demented Panda
followed along behind her, plaintively
asking her what she wanted.
And she looked at him for a moment
and then shrugged as if the answer should
be obvious to anyone who has spent the summer visiting
a small plot of land in an attempt
to write A Picturesque Story About the Border
Between Two Cities.
'I want to burn it down,' Koki said.
And Demented Panda found it hard to argue with that.
And so he sat down beside her, his eyes
alight with the simple anticipatory
pleasure of throwing more wood into the fire.
Eventually everything burned.
And by the time everything had burned and all that was left
was smoldering ashes, the spell ended.
The mobile production trucks, buses,
oversized tractor-trailer trucks,
and careening ambulances vanished,
but the raw sewage remained.
With nothing holding them together,
Demented Panda and Koki sat in the raw sewage,
aware that all that was left was the feeling
of sitting in raw sewage and knowing aloneness deep
inside them.
There is an analogy, although far from perfect,
that may shed some light on what went on that day.
Imagine Edible Fig.
Edible Fig was first domesticated
outside his native region in Mesopotamia
and the Valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
in what is today Iraq.
And then he traveled to what is now California,
beginning in 1769.
It is not clear to Edible Fig, nor to anyone else, how
Edible Fig spreads into preserves and wild areas,
but he does.
And then once there he grows quickly
and spreads vegetatively by root sprouts,
forming dense thickets that exclude most other plants.
This story though is not just the easy and obvious one
of invasion from afar.
There are other ways that this analogy works.
Most figs are dependent on a species-specific agaonid wasp
and Edible Fig is no exception.
So one afternoon, fertilized Female Wasp
squeezed through the scale-covered ostiole
at the end of the syconia of caprifigs of Edible Fig
and laid one egg in each of several
of short-styled female flowers that Edible Fig was growing.
Eventually, still inside the syconium,
Adult Male Wasp emerged and quickly cut into the flower
containing Female Wasp larva and mated with her.
Female Wasp then gnawed her way out of the syconium
two or three weeks after this.
And then she searched for another younger syconium
and squeezed through that narrow opening
to reach the flowers inside.
This opening was so small that some
of the pollen on the body surface of Female Wasp
was scraped off as she passed through.
There she inserted her ovipositor down the style tube
to deposit her eggs.
But the styles of Edible Fig were so long
that the Female Wasp could not easily deposit her eggs.
So she had to insert her ovipositor down the style tube
again and again.
And as she attempted this again and again
she deposited pollen and fertilized the flowers
vigorously even though she realized that she would never
be able to leave the syconium."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]