melissa fong

Comps Countdown: 14 More days

2011-11-07T22:36:00.000-05:00

Obsession
with all the things that
find it's way
into
the crevices of the mind.
It infiltrates the body
in and through the intestines
until it bleeds out the belly and convulses towards the floor.

Untamed,
it is an animal of your mind
and that alone makes it tepid, trepid, intrepid.
Bursting. Overflowing. Spilling in
and containing out
until you can't consume it anymore.
But you fail to feel the fullness.
Satiated.

Sickness
is almost felt but you know it is more
feigned and an imagination of the
mind that pushes through
to find itself cold.
Chattering, shivering.
Until you look the phantom in the eye
and I just see me.

Comps Countdown: 15 More days

2011-11-06T22:32:00.000-05:00

So I had a productive little Sunday. Note to self: Wine before you're ready to go to bed is not a good idea.
Wine when you're beat and you want to attempt to do more work? Good idea.

I read Nikolas Rose's Powers of Freedom (1999) and I can't believe I've never read it or nobody has recommended it to me before. This is what I've really hated throughout my time in grad school (all of it)- all of the best things I've pretty much had to discover by myself. I shouldn't say all, but at least 50% of the books and articles I have found of incredible value I searched by accident or I had to go through a lot of background searching before I discovered it by myself. I just feel that to be a little lop-sided. One would think that the readings I find intriguing would be the ones introduced to me by my professors or within my classes. I think the only exception was Mohanram's Black Body and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (both of which are so SO good and must-reads).
And the readings that have introduced to me- it might not be that they are bad- but it might be the wrong time in my life to be reading them such that I find nothing interesting or novel about them.
But you know those books that you can't put down and you've read over and over again and each time you read a passage you get one more layer that you didn't know existed prior? Yeah, I was hoping for that. Maybe that's why I like Foucault so much.

Anyhow, I feel like I got a lot out of Rose's book and I'm just thinking about all the ways in which I can mobilize it. Not that it was incredibly new stuff (it WAS written over a decade ago) but it was [surprisingly] just so clear/ easy to read and usable- translatable into everyday life.

I'm feeling good about this.

Tomorrow's goal-
1) Write 4000 words on Lefebvre, Harvey and Castells.
2) Write 2 questions for me to answer for my second list.
3) Prepare food for the rest of the week and write recipes down for future ease of grocery shopping.

3.5) Buy decaf. (I've found that I no longer NEED caffeine in coffee but I certainly need the comfort of the delicious taste. It's also probably not so good of an idea to continue sipping it throughout the day if I've gotten rid of my caffeine addiction...).

Comps Countdown: 16 More days

2011-11-05T18:45:00.003-04:00

Yep, still on essay number one. Why has it taken me so long?

Top three reasons:

1) Social media: Youtube, Facebook, Yelp and even Ebay and Groupon (damn the internet and the easy ability to creep and find crazy deals). I'm so ruined. I need to study. But my need to stalk people I don't care about and find good deals on things I don't even want is even greater. I'm exercising my right to choose : )

2) Struggling with my health and balance. Always this time of the year I get out of whack with my diet, my fitness, my mental health etc. When I get down to write I completely block everything else out (well, except for the aforementioned...). When I zone, I ZONE. But for some reason my "zone" breaks all logic because the things that would make me most happy- I cut out. "Wha? Huh?" you ask? Well it's about time. I feel like all those things take up my time and I need a lot of time to marinade in my thoughts before writing actually comes out. My writing actually comes out pretty quickly (as indicative of my poor writing style aka first draft = final draft). It's the IDEAS that take a ridiculous amount of time. So I stew for 90% of the time and then write the last 10. the only time when I take breaks is when I'm beyond exhaustion and just so damn tired of sitting down. (seriously, it is SO worth it to invest in one of those 1000$ Herman Miller ergonomic chairs when you sit as much as I do).

3) There is so much more to learn. The first thing they will tell you when you make a list twice as long as it needs to be is, "You can't read everything." And it's true. But how do you say that to a PhD student? Grad school has an over-representation of neurotic specialists who pride themselves in perfectionism. So saying those kinds of things are useless.
There is SO much more for me to learn. Every time I sit down to write a sentence I think of a dozen other things that are mildly related. I take a wild goose chase through 1)Wikipaedia- to get a general idea of what I want to know, 2) Google Scholar- to get the academicized version and 3) The original text of the top people who wrote about x, y or z.
And then I find myself with another branch that I want to fully develop!

So my project tonight? Try not to eat any junk, drink this glass of cab in front of me and read Nikolas Rose's Powers of Freedom.

In other news. I went to the market this morning and I bought an extraordinary amount of groceries. Part of the trouble is the change in season. I'm fairly regimented and good at maintaining a predictable lifestyle. My summer menu, however, is not cutting it. My summer "study" menu involved a cabbage-based salad, almonds, fiber-rich cereals, apples, bananas, celery, coffee and wine. Seriously, that is all that would be in my house ever. For anything else I would go out to eat- which happens to be a couple to a handful of times a week depending on where I am in the city and who I need to see. This has worked very well for the summer.

Enter Winter. Notice that NONE of the aforementioned involved stew, soup, chilli, pie or hot chocolate. Things I seem to crave now that the weather has turned.
So now I have to rehaul my diet and it has been a bit of a struggle to figure out a regimen. But seriously.
At first I was attempting to go with my summer menu and it was so unfulfilling. Then I just went out to eat a lot but you know when you eat out so often that all you want is something boring/bland and homemade again? Yeah, I fatigue easily from restaurant or processed foods. The next logical step would be to get people to cook for me : ) That kind of works, but I don't like relying on people for such necessities especially if I'm in the business of cutting people out during times of stress and crises.

So thank goodness the farmer's market exists and it's KALE SEASON. So excited. I have a serious love for Kale. Why I love Kale:
1)Kale salads- yeah.
2)Kale chips- I know!
3)Kale in stews, soups stirfrys etc AND they keep their consistency and don't break down like those other weak vegetables (I'm looking at YOU, spinach!).

Kale is a tough veggie and PACKED with so much vintaminey goodness. Really. Not a lot of people know how to handle it though. So facts:

1) Kale is touch so don't eat it straight up like lettuce- It can breakdown with some oil+salt, or vinegar, or lemon juice or all. Rub in a little of that and it's good to go if you want to eat it raw

2) Kale can KEEP. After you break it down with your concoction it will also keep in the fridge for almost a week and it just gets better as it soaks! Also, it will freeze raw REALLY well for like..a month. Or if you blanch it and store properly it can keep for 6-8 months! Like, wow.

3) Stirfry that stuff and it will keep a nice strong texture, or add it to sauces..anything really... and it keeps it's texture.

4) And my favourite: Kale chips- AS good as real chips I promise.

I'm also a fan of female chefs who meet women's needs. It's a little difficult to describe what I mean but I've become a dedicated subscriber to the following channels:

1) Dani Spies: http://www.youtube.com/user/danispies
She's pregnant like, NINETY percent of the time on her videos. NOT with the same child. And she's amazing. Teaches basic ingredient 101's and she's also a(n) [almost always] pregnant woman who needs to feed herself. So she keeps nutrition in mind.

2) Angela Liddon: http://ohsheglows.com/
She has an amazing story of bouncing everywhere from eating disorder to the look of health, to health and then finally to happiness. As corny as all of it is I PROMISE you will not be able to read her story and fall in love with her and what she does. She lives a vegan lifestyle and even though I am PRO-delicious-dead-animal, I actually don't eat a lot of meat. Just because I think we over-meat ourselves (very poor idea of what is a proper portion size- ESPECIALLY in the states)- and because I despise the smell of raw meat cooking (another reason why I don't have any raw meat in the house and I ask my housemates to let me know when they are cooking meat so I can open all windows and close all doors that lead to me (*pointer finger on tip of the nose*).

There's something not right about the smell of raw flesh cooking. But there are a LOT of things right with well-season cooked flesh. (And in a lot of ways that's exactly what it is- seasoning- which is another reason not to eat meat).

Anyhow, I could procrastinate more... or I could just get to reading good ol' Nik's book. It's like Christmas...but not.

17 Day Countdown to Comps

2011-11-04T10:55:00.001-04:00

Don't ask me why 17. It has nothing to do with my favourite number and all to do with "just because" that's when I decided to do this.
I'm "training" now I and I thought I'd write about this process because whatever gets you typing (or me) is a good thing. I find there is no such thing as "typing fatigue" - well, except for the type that will give you carpel tunnel. But what I mean is there is no mental "too much" of typing.
I'm on my first (of three) three-day typing/production stints. I decided that would be the best way to train for comps. So I write myself 3 questions- anticipating possible comps questions- and I take three days to write one question a day. And then I take a two day "rest" by editing them a bit and reading the rest of my last list.

If you were interested at all here are the questions I wrote myself for my first round:

1) Critical Urban Geography
a) Gentrification and displacement
b) Regulating public space and flows
c) The Right to the City

1. What are the debates in gentrification? How has it fatigued? Where is gentrification literature going? What needs to be done?
2. How are geographies of exclusion produced and regulated? With what logic is it produced and regulated? What are the formal and informal ways space is produced, regulated and materialized?
3. Lefebvre, Harvey and Castells are often read together. What do they say about “the urban”. How do they conceptualize “the urban” differently? What do they say about the limitations and possibilities for emancipation? How is The Right to the City conceptualized as a theory as opposed to a movement? What are the neo-Marxist historical materialist conceptions of urbanization pertinent to future movements?

I tried to make questions fairly simple and for them to help me review general concepts that I could potentially reuse. I also wanted to cover the thematic bases of the list.

I'm on my third day of my first round and well..still on question one.
Ridiculous. But it's good that I'm doing this because I am discovering a lot about what I will need in my emergency writing process:

1) I need to eat breakfast. I know this sounds ridiculous because it's something that people just do anyway. But I never eat breakfast. I'm not particularly a breakfast person-unless I'm going out for breakfast- then it's more like going out for next-day brunch at 3pm. I dont' get particularly hungry in the morning and I don t in general get that feeling of hunger that most people do. I attribute it to having a high proportion of storage aka fat. You know those super skinny people that get really irritated when they haven't eaten? Yeah.. I'm not like that. I can go the entire day and be like, "meh". But I recently lost a bit of weight and I think I don't have reserves like I used to. So when I got up and tried to start working on my first day mu brain just would NOT work. I thought it was just me wanting to procrastinate again (like me..now) but I think it was just because I had no nutrition in me.
I took a food break- not wanting to stray very far I ate pretty bad foods- I probably ate 2 bagels, a donut, coffee, cereal, took a 15 minute "digestion break" and then all of a sudden I started to type! I was really craving carbs. So note to self: eat breakfast.
As a result, the week of comps I'm going to load up on bananas, make a big pot of veggie soup and tea. Lots of tea.
My general goal is to keep my BMI @20 or under during this process.

2) Leave the house. Consistently I think I can be productive in the house. I can't

3) Don't take a break with friends. I have been a absentee friend in the last...oh maybe 3 months. And so every chance of writing-exhaustion or necessary food break I take I try to also multi-task by seeing a friend. Bad decision. Because I never go back to work after. So during comps I know the end my day with friends but take breaks alone.

Things I'm still trying to figure out:
1) Do I keep facebook active for the week? Yes, it's a distraction, but sometimes it's also fun to write updates and stay accountable to the world. I remember in undergrad when Romeo and I used to call each other every hour to keep each other accountable. The general consensus is 300 usable words/hour. Which makes for 10 hours a day of writing if I want to keep up.

2) Caffeine- how much? I've had a healthy to unhealthy relationship with caffeine intake in various forms and I'm trying to figure out what works best for me. During paper time I always overload with caffeine (coffee, coke, redbull) and then take downers in the evening (red wine). I'm usually WAY wired during paper time.
In the past year I have reduced my caffeine intake drastically. To maybe 8oz of coffee a day on average. (I used to take in 20-50oz EASILY)
I've also been experimenting with caffeine pills. Which has been an interesting journey.
I'll write more about caffeine and its effects, uses and abuses later. But this is also something I am experimenting with.

3) Relationships. This usually isn't a problem. But it has become a massive problem in the last year about managing relationships during work times. I have a very firm commitment to my work and to my career. I have a very pathetic commitment to relationships. But I have a considerably strong commitment to the potential of a good relationship. So given that- it has become a problem in the past year.

ok, back to writing...

edm

2011-09-23T04:16:00.000-04:00

placing a disconnect
when the music hits your ears,
the bass hits your drum
and the space around you is a
slow motion implosion.

What is productive

2011-04-10T06:04:00.002-04:00

I think we often forget how actions are productive. The "pre-discursive" and discursive are sites of production and affirmation of the self and ideology. I'm always impressed* with the ways in which people are able to reduce discourse and action to moments of individualized ignorance or as somehow apolitical because of its scale. To dismiss these as mere moments that are not successive, productive or cumulatively significant is myopic. Not to mention such a stance is also a claim to the apolitical (which is both offensive and untrue- there is no such thing as apolitical in real life- the act of claiming to be apolitical is political and has political implications in itself).
So what I'm saying is that we..or YOU, should pay more attention to people. Why do they do what they do? How do they accomplish it? And who do they step over, inflict violence upon or erase to do it?

*I use "impressed" sarcastically here- Not many people understand that is often how I use it.

Ring around the rosey, Part I

2011-01-11T02:07:00.002-05:00

Circumscribing this feeling is possibly the most difficult thing I'm asked to do. It starts from the chest. Not the heart. not the lungs. Just behind it; beneath it. It presses down and has this heavy yet fleeting quality to it. It's the same feeling of,

feeling compassion when nobody else around you feels it.

Because it feels like everyone knows of it, sees it from the corner of their eyes but refuses to acknowledge it. It's that feeling you get when you stare it down and it stares directly back, not in combat but, in submission of the same feeling

that you might share, but you don't know you share.

There is the day after when you think that it has become mild. The tepid clamminess of both fog and feigned ignorance of the significance of what had happened

-just the other night.

File it away and push it into your subconscious for another day.

It shouldn't matter now. It can't matter now.

But as the day wears the sheath thins and exposes the buffer that is in between you and the world that was before this foggy education. It clamours to be known and you explore it with your every being. Cast away this heredity.

I want to know me through you. I want to experience you slowly, sensually from the facets that become round

Unexplainable surfaces synchronize to find a calming understanding of one another. But this feeling doesn't go away, because it only seeps with more confusion of the next day and the next and the next and the next and the next

and the next.

Until we discover that this is mutually experienced; and exclusive.

This channel finds no water too cutting;

because I will never meander from circumscribing this feeling.

Consider staying awhile

2011-01-04T04:16:00.001-05:00

I can't imagine that you knew what it meant when I gave you my attention today.
I can't imagine that you knew what to do when I walked away for that
in.determinant amount of time.
But I do know that fowls upon foul attack your insides as if the prey
and the war and the fighting
chance, romance to enhance
the Varying ways in which this rolling
ball of fire
gains momentum
in your mouth and you say,
"Stay awhile."

Allen Ginsberg on poetry

2010-12-21T00:00:00.001-05:00

Ginsberg, Allen. & Clark, Thomas. (1966). "Interview with Allen
Ginseberg, The art of poetry no.8." Paris Review, 37. Retrieved
from: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4389/the-art-of-poetry-no-8-allen-ginsberg

The problem is, where it gets to literature, is this. We all talk
among ourselves and we have common understandings, and we say anything
we want to say, and we talk about our assholes, and we talk about our
cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we're gonna
fuck tomorrow, or what kinda love affair we have, or when we got
drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in
Prague—anybody tells one's friends about that. So then—what happens if
you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you
tell your Muse? The problem is to break down that distinction: When
you approach the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with
yourself or with your friends. So I began ﬁnding, in conversations
with Burroughs and Kerouac and Gregory Corso, in conversations with
people whom I knew well, whose souls I respected, that the things we
were telling each other for real were totally different from what was
already in literature. And that was Kerouac's great discovery in On
the Road. The kinds of things that he and Neal Cassady were talking
about, he ﬁnally discovered were the subject matter for what he wanted
to write down. That meant, at that minute, a complete revision of what
literature was supposed to be, in his mind, and actually in the minds
of the people that ﬁrst read the book.
***
It's the ability to commit to writing, to write, the same way that you
. . . are! Anyway! You have many writers who have preconceived ideas
about what literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to
exclude that which makes them most charming in private conversation.
Their faggishness, or their campiness, or their neurasthenia, or their
solitude, or their gooﬁness, or their—even—masculinity, at times.
Because they think that they're gonna write something that sounds like
something else that they've read before, instead of sounds like them.
Or comes from their own life. In other words, there's no distinction,
there should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we
really know, to begin with. As we know it every day, with each other.
And the hypocrisy of literature has been . . . you know like there's
supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different
from—in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our
quotidian inspired lives.
It's also like in Whitman, "I ﬁnd no fat sweeter than that which
sticks to my own bones," that is to say the self-conﬁdence of someone
who knows that he's really alive, and that his existence is just as
good as any other subject matter.
***
The poetry generally is like a rhythmic articulation of feeling. The
feeling is like an impulse that rises within—just like sexual
impulses, say; it's almost as deﬁnite as that. It's a feeling that
begins somewhere in the pit of the stomach and rises up forward in the
breast and then comes out through the mouth and ears, and comes forth
a croon or a groan or a sigh. Which, if you put words to it by looking
around and seeing and trying to describe what's making you sigh—and
sigh in words—you simply articulate what you're feeling. As simple as
that. Or actually what happens is, at best what happens, is there's a
deﬁnite body rhythm that has no deﬁnite words, or may have one or two
words attached to it, one or two key words attached to it. And then,
in writing it down, it's simply by a process of association that I ﬁnd
what the rest of the statement is—what can be collected around that
word, what that word is connected to.
...
Usually during the composition, step by step, word by word and
adjective by adjective, if it's at all spontaneous, I don't know
whether it even makes sense sometimes. Sometimes I do know it makes
complete sense, and I start crying. Because I realize I'm hitting some
area which is absolutely true. And in that sense applicable
universally, or understandable universally. In that sense able to
survive through time—in that sense to be read by somebody and wept to,
maybe, centuries later. In that sense prophecy, because it touches a
common key . . . What prophecy actually is is not that you actually
know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It's that you know and feel
something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe
articulate it in a hint—a concrete way that they can pick up on in a
hundred years.

Why not?

2010-05-12T04:16:00.000-04:00

Go here: https://sites.google.com/site/melissafong/

Dreaming of Europe

2009-03-04T04:16:00.005-05:00

thistled lights,
strung across the lamps of deep green.
chipped paint shows the layers
of grit.
tempting windows lined with brass
curling, adorned.
roads cobbled, with rivers between
and tapered glass to sip from.
Stirring with irksome chambered noise.
there's no there
there.

On conflating oppression

2009-02-09T04:16:00.002-05:00

I want to focus on I.M. Young’s reading on the "Five Faces of Oppression". I feel it is important to understand the nature of oppression and what it means to be within an oppressive system. I think that oppression is often conflated with discrimination or marginalization. I view oppression as the greater system that alienates us as human beings, whereas discrimination and marginalization of some groups are a result, or symptom, of oppressive systems. For example, many workplaces with anti-discrimination policies will seek to ensure their employees are aware of differential experiences of marginalized groups. “Sensitivity trainings” are not uncommon. However these workshops do little more than create awareness of “white male privilege” and, I feel, create a situation of “white [male;straight;wealthy] guilt.” And let me get this straight, there is nothing wrong with awareness, but if we think that is the extent to which social justice should occur we are dead wrong. Imparting guilt on people who experience privilege does not solve the problem and, I would argue, makes the problem worse by making people feel negative and not giving people a sense of self-efficacy to be able to transform the world.

In effect we are all oppressed in systems of capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy. We are also all complicit in reproducing these systems, whether we experience marginalization or not. We may be the (generalized) beneficiaries of an oppressive system, but it is oppressive to all nonetheless. For example, women are the ones who are more greatly affected by poverty due to patriarchal systems (i.e. “ the dual day”, equity in roles of marriage, expectations of the female gender), but we must realize that men are also constrained by patriarchy and expected gender roles (i.e. popular conceptions of masculinity, expectations of being the main economic provider). And while men, overall, are the beneficiaries of patriarchal systems (as compared to women), they are still oppressed people from the unjust nature of patriarchy. Women who do not address, seriously, the problematic of systemic oppression of gender duality and heterosexism (for all genders) cannot call themselves practitioners of "anti-oppression".

As practitioners of “community development”, we cannot have tunnel-vision in our understanding of the multi-layered and universal nature of oppression. Such a myopic move would produce movements such as “Black Capitalism” (seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Capitalism) which seeks to have a marginalized group make gains by ‘working-the system’ rather than deconstructing the system which creates ‘winners’ and inevitably ‘losers’.

“But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed,instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.
But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired but their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction; the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole” (Freire 1970: 29-30, emphasis added).

what happened.

2009-02-09T04:16:00.001-05:00

It followed a year of my life.
I fell in love with this man who had some sort of illness. I'm not quite sure if it was terminal or not. And there was something questionable about the permanence of his being in my life, or vice versa. As if he, or I, was a visitor. This was during the fall.
He wore a 50s houndstooth tweed hat and had a moustache (note- not indicative to my preferences). He was well dressed and used his style to cover up the fact that his body was fragile and breaking down. His smirk made me nervous but excited.
He would talk to me with a self-assured manner and I would mirror his confidence back but I was really shrinking inside scared of what to say next.
By spring we became very good friends. His presence was easy, never needing more than I could give. I think it made it easier that I knew that he was sick. I listened without ever questioning and it became an easy crease which deepened with every new anecdote.
It was the best romance that never happened.
By the end of summer we spent most afternoons sprawled across the linen in the canopy bed. The heat enabled listless bodies.
The last evening we had was oddly silent. There was something wrong but I didn't want to say. I was hoping if I didn't have to say it it wouldn't become real. Irresponsibility, feigned.
He passed me a note with a multiple choice question. Scribbled in his illegible writing.
The first choice was forever. I passed it up quickly knowing it wasn't right.
I couldn't read the second choice but I knew it was just there to be judicious. But what if I had checked it? What would he have thought? What would it have meant?
The next one I considered carefully. And then the next.
The next three were nuances of the first three. There only for greater caution. He had thought about this carefully.
Surely I went back up to the third option. My eyes gleaned the metphor.
I took the tiny yellow Ikea pencil off the side table and checked it off.
"see you again one day."
It wasn't running, it was waiting. Appropriating the appropriate.
We fell asleep together and when I woke up he was gone. I had a moment of panic but I also couldn't fool myself into not knowing it would happen.
I ran about the room trying to find some evidence of his permanent leave.
I saw the phone.
The message light was flashing. The vertical receiver on the old style phone was uninviting.
I picked it up nevertheless and I let it know I was ready to hear its message.
The phone replied with a grunt. It wanted a passphrase. The code to receive the message.
But it was not my phone, nor my home.
I didn't know what the code was.
Why didn't I know the code? Did he know?
There was a message, but I couldn't receive it. The last remanent of somebody I would hope to see again and I couldn't have it.

Observations from North Beach

2007-07-23T05:10:00.002-04:00

car.car.car.car.horse.car.car.
the horses make the left turns with the cars
when traffic speeds up the horse speeds up..when it slows down the horse slows down.