u/badybadybady

Juliana Spahr looks miserable when she isn’t performing but when she starts reading, I know I don’t want to be anywhere else.

We’re in David Buuck’s kitchen, and he didn’t know me when I walked in the door, but a friend of a friend of a friend had passed along that Charles Bernstein and Juliana Spahr were reading there and passed along the Berkeley address, and now I’m here, listening. The living room looks like a gallery and the kitchen looks like a galley, bottles stacked up six deep on the kitchen counter. People are stacked up too, and I spill out to the back deck to chat with a San Francisco State student who is working at the Poetry Center and having a cigarette and a writer from Alameda who gives me his zine. Juliana’s only making eye contact with the exits, and definitely doesn’t care to make small talk with fans. Some poets like parties and others don’t want to be in a crowd of chatty acquaintances. That’s why they put words down on the page, to avoid the talkers. Readings are their endurance events. Unfortunately for them, with writers whose words fit inside me like a missing bone, I begin to alert, to perk to them. I follow them around, drinking by ear everything they see fit to deliver. I can’t get enough. However great on the page, it’s the voice ringing and wringing and bringing us all together I’m after—please sir, can I have another?

"while Merritt so successfully created a beautiful watery center for his city that the lake would be named for him in 1874, the people moving to Oakland brought with them their own daily rhythms and movements: “Civilization brought toilets,” as the Lake Merritt Institute puts it. “Lake Merritt became a harbor for ‘the necessities of nature.’” And as almost all of the city’s sewage flowed into the northern arms of a lake now dammed off from the ocean and unable to flush itself, the stench grew powerful. In 1891, a city engineer reported that it was filling in by about an inch per year, and by the time Oakland’s population peaked in the mid-twentieth century, decades of industrial tampering and human excrement had left it with a new nickname: “the lake of a thousand smells.” Boating was prohibited and signs dotted the shores urging people not to swim in the lake."