Which is why I haven’t been around a ton. I have a hard time reconciling my inner and private life (which is complex, contradictory) with an online life that at its best is often still flat and dimensionless. That I am making poems/objects/pictures/books and also I am worrying about the lives of the people around me, the ones I know and the ones I don’t. (Thanks, Juliana Spahr.)

But I have been working on things, and I will try to be present here more often. I just want to find a way to be here that acknowledges all the things I am thinking about, and just posting photos of nice stuff doesn’t really do that for me. On the other hand, making things is part of the way I am in-the-world and it’s part of (and formational of) my ethics. I just don’t want to contribute to a blithe ignorance of the privilege I (we) have to live like this.

We were in Belgium and then the US and then Belgium again (this time joined by friends for New Year’s). I got pneumonia the day we walked off the plane in Minneapolis. Wow. So that was what that was. The first time I’ve ever felt like I would really never get better. Made me appreciate antibiotics; another first. Then back to Nottingham and the semester started almost immediately. I’m teaching three different places for a little while. It’s exhausting though I like the time on the train and I like the walk through Leicester (one of the places). And I like the teaching. But the two weeks I was meant to slow down didn’t happen so I feel like I’m on a roll without brakes, just scrambling to catch up or keep up with this thing that’s much bigger than I am and that is running faster and faster.

I think one reason it’s running faster (or feels like that) is that about two weeks ago we found out I will, with about 90% certainty, have to leave the UK in July. My visa will expire, and due to some administrative snafus at the university, I won’t be able to reapply. This wasn’t the plan–I even submitted my thesis early to make sure I’d be in time for getting a new visa. But. No. That’s not what’s happening (apparently). Okay. Happy New Year. So we are making new plans. Plans for another time zone. It will, as always, be fine. Just trying to wrap my mind around the (90%) fact of leaving this (difficult and often disagreeable) place which, nonetheless, has somehow become home.

The final one is a bookshop in Gent that also sells artists’ books, prints, some very ‘serious’ ephemera…I love it. It is owned and solely staffed, as far as I have made out, by a man in his 70s. Extremely crabby. Smokes in the back room. Does not like you to touch too many things. Or look too closely at the prints. Or, God forbid, breathe on anything. The last day we were in Gent it was pouring rain all day and I was walking with some friends and took them there, but only to look in the window, since I can’t imagine the looks and tttttt-tttt-tt! noises we would get for dripping on his floor.

It is kind of my ideal future shop, too.

I am making a project for 2012. It will have one piece every week. I will be able to show you soon (even though I don’t have the web-space set up, I have been doing the project. Pneumonia [! yes.] got in the way of my end-of-year plans). So far the year has been full of bad news. My friends says it is like a box of chocolate: you eat all the bad ones, then you know only good ones are left. I hope so. Anyway I have lots of plans, and two fingers to the bad news. I will make my own luck and I will be brave.

Happy new year!

When the royal wedding took place in April and the whole country was shut down for a day no one said it would ruin the economy, despite the fact that taxpayers in the UK subsidised it. So why does a public-sector strike for one day bring up predictions of scuttling the economy? Strikers today are in public services (teachers, firefighters, nurses, construction workers), and all in areas which the current UK government has threatened with ‘austerity measures’. Basically, this means that these workers would get less money when they retire–and have to work to an older age, and pay in more each year, to get it. This is how the UK government wants to save money. Not by asking the financial sector to clean up its act, or asking people who make, say, over £60000/yr (the City is London’s financial district) to take a pay cut. By asking people who make these figures to lessen their pension. How fair is that? To me it is not right that a nurse might–at her peak–make less than half of what a banker does. But beyond my personal valuation of a nurse’s work over a banker’s, it doesn’t seem right to me that someone–anyone–should have to give up their post-retirement security (or have to work longer or pay more than other people to get it). I am sure there are people who would argue their own willingness to work til they are 70, or to work 80-hour weeks, or whatever it is. And someone else has already answered them better than I could. But I don’t want those things. I don’t want them for anyone else, either. I would like to live in a world where people can work until a reasonable age–maybe 60?– and then retire, and be taken care of. I don’t think that’s impossible. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of money. There does seem to be a lack of equitable ways to share it. So that’s why I’m in solidarity with the strikers here today. This isn’t only about the actual effects of these potential cuts. It’s also about the kind of society those cuts symbolise. I don’t want to live in that society.

Films by Joseph Cornell.
Improvisations by David Shapiro.
I updated my layout here to be a bit simpler. Links are over here now and I’m going to try to update them more often. All my highest recommendations for distraction, all in one place.

30% off orders in my shop with the code ALMOSTDECEMBER. Calendars ship free with code SHIPFREE11. Both codes valid til 2 December.

I think about the bodies in Tahrir being put with the garbage by a union between police and military. The hours of tear gas. Hours. Of. Tear gas. Those are some mother’s children, those are someone’s brothers and sisters, those are someone’s husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends.

I think about the nameless-to-me people in Syria who despite the deaths of their kin and friends continue to resist a government they find reprehensible.

And these are just the things I know are happening, this list.

The students in California who took batons in the abdomen or pepper spray in the face.

The people who have been willing to sit or stand in a public place and ask for what they believe in.

My neighbor, who left Libya with her family when her husband was threatened for resisting the government there.

The poet gunned down in public in Moscow last week.

The fact of depleted uranium in Iraq being a contradiction in terms: that it does not ‘deplete’ but will remain in the environment for as close to forever as this human brain can conceive.

My teenage students who have already been told for years that they are not good, not capable, not smart, when they are smart, are good, are capable.

I want to state plainly what I believe in: I believe everyone has the right to a beautiful, meaningful, just education. I believe everyone has the right to healthcare, and that this should be provided by taxation. I don’t believe wealth has to do with righteousness. I don’t believe in bootstraps. I believe in responsibility for oneself and also for others. I believe that violence in all its forms is an improper and immoral approach to the human being, which is sanctified and holy. I believe that our first duty is to care for those who have least. I believe that our material needs and desires should do as little harm as possible. I believe everyone, everywhere, has the right to a dignified life–doing work that supports them and does not threaten their health, living in a house that keeps them warm (or cool) and dry, with food and water that don’t make them sick. I do not understand why in the abstract this is acceptable but in the concrete it is threatening to those who already have what they need. I do not understand people who have enough arguing that they need more, or that they are unwilling to share. I don’t get what is so threatening about people asking to be considered. I don’t understand how you get to the point where a distant body you’ve never touched is somehow less human than your own. I can’t conceive of what a million dollars, or several million, would feel like to own. I can’t understand how in those millions there can often be no room for justice or the needs of others.

Coretta Scott King: “I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting schoolchildren is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”

I realize that by posting this there may be some of the few of you who still come here who won’t anymore. But it feels false to go on without stating a position at this point.

I don’t agree with everything about Occupy Wall Street, or the Occupy movements more generally, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that I also don’t agree with things as they are now. This video is the closest thing I’ve seen to articulating my feelings regarding the movements now: “Love is the expansion of the self to include the other. And that’s a different kind of revolution.”

It’s turning into winter by light only here.

Most of the leaves off the trees. But it’s relatively warm. I haven’t had the heat on, except a few sporadic hours once or twice. The geranium on my windowsill keeps flowering crazily, totally exuberant. I can feel it’s getting toward winter, too, by how tired I am from teaching. The lemons outside our neighborhood shop are bright yellow in the low sun. Lots of days are gray from wakeup to sundown. I’m thinking about how I want to spend 2012, thinking mostly about books. Thinking about how to make the work I want and how to make the world I want. Thinking about where we’ll go if we leave England. Thinking about how big things work, like publishing houses and bookshops and schools.

Almost time for candles. Almost time to go back to the deep snow.

There are some new cards in the shop today. Encouragement. Luck. Little red and blue riding-hoods. Tree. Snowman. Grandmas with bunnies on their heads.

From The Good Machinery, who I originally found on flickr, and whose photos I really enjoy, this golden-legged horse.

Almost anything Cecilia Afonso Esteves makes. I have a Lunario; it is beautiful.

This camera case from Therere Workshop is really nice, if someone you know has a camera to fit.

My feet are always cold, and I really like high socks. Oh, and cable-knit? Ideal. These are made in Estonia. Add a pair of wool shoes for maximum warmth. I would bet 90% of people reading this also like long, beautifully knit socks. It would be a bet I would win. Take THAT to Ladbrokes.

I like this rabbit. I like her bicycle. I would really like to give this to a certain bicycling couple in my family. Hmm. Or any cyclists with a sense of whimsy, really.

I hear that Martha will have metallic scarves soon, for an undoubtedly shortshortshort time (she sells out FAST). They’ll be here and they’ll be well-made and beautiful.