Rock for Refugees

I was once a girl refugee. Eventually, things turned out fine for me because I had support from my family, friends, teachers, and mentors. As I was transitioning to adulthood, I had cousins who were also refugees and who were 10 and 11 years younger than me, and I helped them out too. Of course, in that shitty last decade of the 20th century in former Yugoslavia, we were all too busy with daily survival to realize we were mentoring and were being mentored.

It's only in retrospect that I realize that's what Mike Watt was doing by corresponding with my brother and me from 1991 on. He mentored us from afar, just by reading and responding to our letters. He's the one who always says "start your own band," which I took both metaphorically and literally.

My college professors were just doing their job, you could say, but Dusan Kvapil in particular made sure I had all the opportunities possible to thrive as a student. I never got to thank him. Even before I knew him, I was watching Czech movies with his subtitles, which lead me to read Bohumil Hrabal, which lead me to enroll in Czech Studies at the Philological Faculty of the University of Belgrade.

Belgrade's Women's Studies Center was an oasis for a lot of us, refugees or not. Dubravka Djuric, Jasmina Tesanovic, and Jasmina Lukic gave me books to read and resources beyond what they signed up for in the first place when they agreed to teach a few classes in a converted apartment in the Dorcol neighborhood. I ended up at the Central European University in Budapest, which determined the shape of things for me as an adult in many ways.

This is all to say: there's a benefit coming up, sponsored by Packingtown Review, and featuring my band Rent Party. Rock for Refugees will raise funds for GirlForward, "a community of support dedicated to creating and enhancing opportunities for girls who have been displaced by conflict and persecution." Help spread the word, and come out if you can.

My New Yorker Life, April 24, 2017

A connection at first touch.
Learn more.

What if technology could help
on the stink highway.

Name & name
a mushroom.

Stay well.
What is your succulent?

Rarely the one you expect.
Trespass when it comes uninvited:

Brand. Brand.com
Artists of the south,

the great glass elevator: the world.
This tableau is positioned to contrast

the man behind the mind.
A sturdy stance and a blurred head,

the more ways to wear,
live your life

heavy metal.
Towering sets, ornate costumes,

thanks for finding us.
To evoke a single arc

for an original mix
as spare and unconsoled as anything

overgrown with facial hair,
she makes narratives out of gestures,

half-buried in a mound of sand.
Every spit take and sight gag,

what would that sound like?
Blows the stuffing out of seashells,

the temples of the southern state.
Who purchases a book will receive a rose,

the heart of a puntarelle.
Start planning

alarm at what they say, shock
like a woke hieroglyph.

Trigger the question
in my childhood bedroom,

smell even better in the future.
I wish my life was that free

with the culture, the attire,
the most precious vehicle

people want to see.

My New Yorker Life, March 27

This is the second installment of a project I started on March 13.

Where to go, what to do. A couple embarks on a marital experiment. They must explain. Let the lipstick fly! Reconciliation, however well meant, turns out to be an elusive ideal. This pre-Depression world is dominated by the wealthy. This show is about stage magic itself.

This is the final performance. This bilingual group slugs through brawny no-wave shows with little concern for personal safety or noise-induced hearing loss. All those women flinging themselves around in great swaths of fabric. It’s a method that can be dissatisfying, when the strangeness and desires turn out to be humdrum. A downcast female figure in profile, walking in low heels—she appears both illuminated by acid-yellow light and bathed in lurid red. Oh, yes, I go there all the time. Master an art that improves every realm of your life. I like things done in an orderly manner. If only everyone could have access to this! The bread would be tasty.

This whole thing of making bronze statues to last five thousand years—if everyone did that, there’d be no space left. Snowmobiling is popular, and people leave their car doors unlocked while they’re at the grocery store. It requires constant vigilance. This is not a drill. He owes it. It’s a magnificent place, with eighteen-foot-high ceilings and a working fireplace. Both crave attention.

It’s outrage of the hour. We’re not sure if we’re middle class. We put all our focus on the wrong problem. Like a giant vac with nine nozzles. The warning is clear. Both apply for a job in management. Can I give you a piece of advice?

We’re these two bug-eyed kids who’ve been told to stick to the conductor like glue. You don’t see the poverty, but it’s there. A kamikaze candidate abandons the usual talking points. In my view. I’m happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody. A cat has value. The whole family is very determined. Intensely secretive and filled with people with Ph.D.s, it has been sensationally profitable. Their brains are almost too strong. They’re just sheep. She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos. Things that she thinks put lead on the target.

Broken Records: The Playlist, or, The Three Brunettes

On or around March 21, 2016, punctum books released my hybrid memoir/discography Broken Records, in which I recall what it was like to be a teenager, and then a 20-something, and then a 30-something during and after the break up of Yugoslavia, and all the wars, secessions, and nation-building, from about 1991 to about 2008. As ridiculously huge and heavy as all that sounds, the memoir is less than 190 pages long.

To mark the anniversary, here's my YouTube playlist with all the 49 songs from the book. It's possibly the most random playlist ever, but it will all make sense to my readers.

The opening song of the playlist, by the one and only Sabrina, isn't mentioned in the book directly, but it's an example of Euro disco pop which I do reference as the garish musical wallpaper of my childhood.

The very last song, "Because the Night" by Patti Smith, is the song I sang in Belgrade as NATO missiles were about to strike their first targets on March 24, 1999, when I was 25. Again, my readers find all this completely reasonable.

My New Yorker Life, March 13, 2017

On the day I turned 43, I retyped 43 sentences from the first 43 pages of the March 13 issue of The New Yorker. I didn't want any sentences with names, titles, or place names, and so I'd just read until I found a sentence on each page that fit my criteria. This both a lot like and very different from My Life by Lyn Hejinian, and anything by Conceptual Writers.

How refugees escape to safety. She is working on a novel. As if we need data to prove that human reason has its limits! Create something personal for your home with one of these needlepoint kits. He has already rethought the cavernous 808 drums of his city’s sound. It blends the romance between the son of an oyster farmer and the daughter of an aristocrat with a criminal investigation into the disappearance of several tourists. The comic action – set against the backdrop of war and chaos sparked by governmental folly – involves traumas and comas, grief and anguish. Best show on television. Dance music, with its easy beat and ever-expanding appeal, has influenced all kinds of musicians, banging sounds and styles into rigid form while working through new tones in real time. They changed the face of a nation. Who said there’s no more music on television? We’re bringing you art + ideas that inspire and provoke. It is time to rattle the cage. And the cast was charged with obscenity. We’re in the late eighties, with appropriate music cues.

Just when you thought you’d seen it all. Best of the year! Its curiously symmetrical composition has a flattening effect. Opera and dance have a long history as bedfellows, though since the late nineteenth century they have been more or less estranged. The tall man puts on the chignon and the little voice again. According to the legend, the impish goblins like to materialize in dark, humid corners, mostly after dusk, and sometimes when the air moistens with rain. My no. 1 color combination – as featured in my collections dating back to the 1960s and now revisited here in spring 2017. See: museums, monuments and memorials. Catch the blossoms. The month-long celebration of international cultures offers two embassy open houses. We’re familiar with the contours of the story.

A man of few intimates, he often cites acquaintances. We’ve been told that a few of the ticket holders are planning to cause trouble. But I’m a human first.

If nobody comes here, it’s not the land of the free. A dozen or so people show up each day, looking for advice, protection, and a place to sleep. My life here is so hard and dangerous. The accommodations are clean, if rudimentary: creaky wooden floors, clanking radiators, leaky bathrooms, and steel-framed beds. Behold, as I guide our conversation to my narrow area of expertise. The real story, in real time. Does this feel calm? I am going for the unknown. I don’t have enough money in my wallet. More people are making hasty decisions. Is this normal? I always have my own rules, and I can bend them if I want. Like heaven.

Packingtown Review: Volume 8

I helped found this Chicago mag back in 2008. It has taught me how to edit serious literary works. It's been introducing me to writers from around the world, and it's teaching me how to code. Volume 8 is up.

August Notes

(photo: Dnevni Avaz)

1. At my core, I'm a stranger to passion. I've seen it in others: a passion for soccer or partying, for example. I've messed around with passion myself. Passion is another word for despair.

2. Commitment is what I know more intimately. I recognized it even as a child whenever I saw pensioners playing bocce or chess in the street. On that patch of dirt in the otherwise leafy park, heavy balls hardly moving, the players were calm and focused. On that folding table covered with a plastic tablecloth with a garish floral pattern, the only pattern the chess players saw was the checkered board and black and beige figures. That has always made sense to me.



3. Even though I only began teaching part-time at the age of 28, and full-time at 38, it's the line of work I knew I'd fall into one way or another. As I write this, I'm 42.

4. For the first 14 years as a teacher, every August, I'd write my syllabi and get excited about the semester to come. I knew my syllabi were fiction, a fantasy of a meticulously charted and (about to be) perfectly executed plan to help a group of strangers, teenagers who had just become adults, take control of language. I'd feel like teaching is my passion. This August, that feeling is finally gone.

5. For most of us, being a teacher involves thinking about teaching non-stop. That thinking is usually not in the forefront: it's more like a quiet but incessant background hum, like the sound of traffic behind closed windows and doors. I used to resent that.

6. For most of us, being a teacher involves knowing what your balance of money and time will be only one semester at a time. If there's enough money, that means you've strung together three or more part-time teaching jobs and will be able to pay for your health insurance, but will have no time to read anything other than student papers nor write anything other than feedback for those papers. (This is a problem when reading compelling books and writing the best work you can is the source of your mental balance.) If there's enough time, it means instant ramen and no health insurance. (The two can be a lethal combination.) I used to fear both scenarios.

7. This August, I feel no excitement, resentment, or fear. In their place, there's detachment.

8. What's the difference between resignation and detachment? In resignation, I'm frustrated and desperate. My ego is wrapped up with my day job, and it's never even remotely satisfied. At the same time, I plunge into a hobby—in my case it's neither a spectator sport nor partying, but that doesn't matter—with passion bordering on desperation.

9. But in detachment, I'm able to do my day job competently, and commit to my work of reading and writing and music with a sense of calm and focus. There might be a hum going on in the background: folders of papers, appointments and trainings, several work inboxes full of emails, ideas for future classroom activities, thoughts about the state of higher ed. So be it. Every day, I plug in my guitar with no other reason but to play it. I put lines on a page with no other reason but to convey images and ideas in a way that surprises me. I open a book for no reason but to experience images and ideas I am not able to convey myself.