Poems, Molecules, Research

So it’s been a while, but the most important thing you need to know is that I am currently in Lisbon on a Global Pinsky Fellowship in Poetry. I’ll also be here through the Disquiet Writing Festival in July. And because I have been lucky enough to have these opportunities, I am sharing some of my experiences here.

Driving into Lisbon from the airport had me in a state of befuddled nostalgia. The architecture looks SO MUCH like Panjim or just Goa in general. It was like experiencing something backwards (hooray EMPIRE!). I kept smelling Goan food all over the city, and I wasn’t sure if it was my sensory imagination playing tricks on me or not. I also realized that I am going to really need to learn some basic Portuguese. This is because people here seem to already think I speak and look Portuguese. I’d go into more first impressions, but first impressions are usually lacking so I’ll ponder on them for a bit … except I will say that in my travel delirium, Lisbon looks like a sleepy capital. The houses are either colorfully tiled or a variation pink, yellow, and blue pastel shades. They looks like clouds. Oh, and there is something that sounds slavic about the accents here. Ok, enough first impressions.

Today I did what any person would do who cannot get keys to their apartment right away after an overnight flight. And by “right away,” I mean I had 8 hours to kill after arriving in the city. So I walked the hills of Lisbon, tried the famous “pastel de nata” (egg tart), slept in a neighborhood park for an hour, struggled my way through a menu (ended up with delicious chicken lemon orzo mint soup), saw the beautiful tiled houses with their rusted wrought iron and sticky moss balconies, witnessed a surprising amount of condemned buildings boarded up in all sorts of imaginative ways, saw the golden gate bridge “twin” (photo below), saw the eiffel tower twin (which is nothing like the original), walked along the river, got a bus pass, took happy note of the abundant  bookstores in Lisbon, strolled a few churches and “piazzas” and fountains, of course.

I’ve been to a lot of churches, cathedrals, terrifying edifices of different religious eras, but the one I went to today was really extraordinary and the photo below does no justice at all. It’s called the São Roque Church situated in the Bairro Alto area of Lisbon. First of all… goldsmithing… is a thing. I am sure of it now. I don’t know why I thought someone had made it up. The experience of the church’s interior is what it must be like being locked inside a jewelery box: dark, ornamental, kind of dazzling and unnerving. And like maybe somebody overdid it a bit… but to be fair, it was kind of an extraordinary feat. All the pieces were commissioned by the Portuguese king in the 16th century, but were actually made in Rome, exported to Lisbon and assembled on site (these are HUGE, detailed pieces). Anyways, the church has an unbelievable organ concert series, the next one on May 26th, I will surely be attending.

Sleep for now.

So a few weeks ago I returned from an epic 2 week research/poetry trip to London and Paris. It was amazing to be back in Paris and to see and drink with those *oh so special* people who I have not seen for nearly 2 years. In case you care, this is how I spent my time:

London: Victoria and Albert Museum Archives, The Royal Institute Archives, The Science Museum Library Archives, dinner usually by myself in my hotel room and later, with Judith Chriqui, trying to convince her that the Indian guy (apparently, we should be best friends) at the front desk had more than one sweater and that the spirits in our room were not going to make the light fixtures come crashing down on us.

Paris: Boat Parties on the Seine, Vegetarian Thanksgiving, Poetry readings, Walking around Pigalle until 5am with my Norwegian friend, sleeplessness, waking up in twitches from events the night prior.

I did get to launch my new chapbook, Organ Speech with Corrupt Press in both cities. Thanks to Rufo Quintavalle for hosting at Poet’s Live in Paris and Emily Critchely who held the London reading at the University of Greenwich (in this building). Ballin’

The chapbook recently got reviewed by Sabatoge Reviews (UK) by Charles Whalley. It is very well-written, generous, and overall, I was very happy and grateful to have his readership.

Of course, the critic took some issues… one really… about an elegy for a friend who passed away some years ago… which stung a bit. Especially since I don’t really write elegies, sentimental, or autobiographical poems ever.

Luckily, I had an appointment with my professor (a celebrated poet who shall remain anonymous) that day and I told him that I had a strange sensation of seeing my name in third person: “Fernandes”. He was very sweet, said “the sooner you learn that this third person ‘Fernandes’ is someone else than you, the better. She is still a part of you, but she’s different.” 

Well, she sounds like a whiny bitch to me.

Next post: Archival research post about John Tyndall, 19th century molecular physicist.

Want a sneak preview? You do…. you really do.

“Here, men of science had to work their way from darkness into twilight, and from twilight into day. There is no solemn of continuity in science. This is not given to any man, to rise spontaneously into intellectual splendor without the parentage of historical antecedents. Great discoveries grow.” (1879)

Reading the Cavalier poets this week and that means taking some cheek from Robert Herrick. Came across a website dedicated to Herrick’s work that included this lovely piece (one of his many Julia’s poem):

UPON THE NIPPLES OF JULIA’S BREAST

HAVE ye beheld (with much delight)
A red rose peeping through a white ?
Or else a cherry, double grac’d,
Within a lily centre plac’d ?
Or ever mark’d the pretty beam
A strawberry shows half-drown’d in cream ?
Or seen rich rubies blushing through
A pure smooth pearl and orient too ?
So like to this, nay all the rest,
Is each neat niplet of her breast.

And then, in case you couldn’t picture it, this:

Nice. Somewhere, Julia’s father is crying.

So the part of my research that is bringing together science and design studies has led me to a new field of study called “proto-cellular” architecture. Proto-cellular engineering (it seems that an “engineer” and “architect” have become almost interchangeable these days) attempts to make inorganic matter act like biological matter. This means matter that is capable of metabolism and all those perks that go along with having metabolism (repair, reproduction, growth, movement, sensitivity). Proto-cellular technology (called “Living Architecture”) is DNA-less; instead, it is based on a chemistry of oils.

What can it do?

Save a sinking city, apparently. Researchers are saying that this technology could create an artificial reef around the decaying wood foundation of Venice by depositing limestone (or growing limestone, really, by accretion and crystallization). The project “Save Venice” is literally land reclaimation… and the marine biologists seem to think it is eco-sensitive.

If you are interested (and how could you not?!), look up Dr. Rachel Armstrong. She is TED Fellow and a professor at the University College of London in the Bartlett School of Build Environments.

Poem to Line My Casket with, Ramona

Come practice your whorish gestures in the graveyard, Ramona.
Come sharpen your teeth on the tombstones.
Cough up the roots if you know what’s good for you.
When coyotes are teaching their young to howl,
ghoulies rehearse the Courtship of Wristbones.
When you hear clawing at the square of styrofoam
serving as a window in the caretaker’s shack,
then you must count each step going up to the mausoleum,
and my ghost will appear in the churchyard.
He’ll kiss the back of your knee in the moonlight.
These are not promises, but eerie enough, regardless.
You must count out loud, Ramona, the steps,
because this is the time to watch what eats you.
I used to love the way the wind whistled through your teeth
when you drove the back roads, above your legal limit.
I used to have these poses. They turned into habits.
I used to love the folks that loved me.
And they’ve been sad ones, my years since being dead.
And they’ve been coming, the folks who claim to love me.
And I hardly recognize myself. There aren’t mirrors, as such.
The drum section rattles it out, down by the high school.
I hear them, or is it the caretaker drunk in his wheelbarrow?
You used to play the wheelbarrow, I recall.
You used to wash your underwear in the sink.
Above ground, the wind whistles through the tombstones.
Below ground, the wind sleeps and has colors.
Below ground, colors are how I dream of making my comeback.
There’s a difference between a white dress and the white dress.
You used to strip off the white dress in a highly professional manner.
You used to dangle the remote, and I’d come get it.
You used to skip church. You used to skip dinner parties.
Now you’ve been seen hoisting condoms from the pharmacy.
There are twelve condoms to a pack. A pack of lovers mills outside your door.
A pack of the dead are heading toward the showers.
A pack of dead lovers is referred to as “a creep” of dead lovers.
More than one dead lover is weeping. But oh, how it was me who loved you then.
You with your cracked lips, with your love and your otherdefilements kept alive in a bucket.
When I first died, I stole a lock of your hair while you slept.
Now I dip it in ink when the mood strikes,
and the times you visit and kneel so pretty on the grass above me,
that’s not scratching you hear. It’s writing.

—Josh Bell

Put this on. Do things. Listen.

You may find that animals will begin to follow you, maybe they will make you a dress.

You may find yourself on the hardwood floor paralyzed.

You may find yourself making your office spaces theatrical. You may then realize that you are unemployed and have no real office space. This might help you get a job.

You may not like it, but then you’d probably be dead.

look up V2: The Institute of Unstable Media (http://www.v2.nl/), an interdisciplinary research center that focuses broadly on the relationship between art and technology. They are a project-oriented center (many different lab groups consisting of both academics and artists) that put on conferences, installations, and publish some wild collections in their Theory and Art/Design series. One thing I noticed: They like Ruskin. They like to talk about him. Also, Worringer.

So the good thing is that while they will write about things that were built… like…10 minutes ago (you really do feel like you are getting a pre-screening of the art/tech world when you peruse their site), they also give you a good foundation and genealogy on which they build their theories.

One of the best things about V2 is that they offer summer residencies around three different “subjects” each year and the chosen lab groups use materials (ink, wristwatches, foil) to produce the most strange and amazing art pieces (and possibly products in the future).

If you like affect theory (there are so many of us), the Heartbeats Timepiece (http://www.v2.nl/archive/works/heart-beats)  and the Sentient City Survivor Kit (http://www.v2.nl/lab/projects/sentient-city-survival-kit) are pretty fun.

When I look at this, I think to myself: “I need more skills.”

Here is something I am researching about…

Neri Oxmen runs the material ecology lab at the MIT Media Lab. (http://web.media.mit.edu/~neri/site/index.html) Her research focus group is called “Mediated Matter.” The statement from her site describes their work much better than I could ever paraphrase:

The Mediated Matter group is dedicated to the development and application of novel processes that enable and support the design of physical matter, and its adaptability to environmental conditions in the creation of form. Our research integrates computational form-finding strategies with biologically inspired fabrication. This enables mediating synergies between objects and environment; between humans and objects; and between humans and environment. Our goal is to enhance the relation between natural and man-made environments by achieving high degrees of design customization and versatility, environmental performance integration, and material efficiency.

Oxmen has degrees and expertise in medicine, architecture, and digital design, and when she isn’t being an MIT professor, she is exhibiting her art at the Centre Pompidou (the above image is entitled “Fatemaps”) and giving talks at the Sorbonne.

Her ideas about engineering synthetic materials to “act” more like organic matter are important in rethinking the relationship of matter to experience (old school phenomenology) but also, the ways in which organic design aesthetics actually try to address how materiality mediates interior and exterior environments.

I will never look at the skins of buildings and objects the same way after reading her work.

Steel Bananas, an art collective from Toronto, just released their Winter 2012 catalogue (http://www.steelbananas.com/sb28/). SB publishes chapbooks and runs several reading series including the Artichoke Revue and the monthly Eggplant (they like their produce, I guess). In particular, the work of the creative director, Karen Correia Da Silva, is worth a look.

first post? a poem by Louise Glück from her collection Meadowlands. The book is about a contemporary New Jersey divorce between Penelope and Orpheus. The Telemachus poems are from their son’s point-of-view…

Telemachus’ Detachment

When I was a child
looking at my parents’ lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.