VAULT

Amy Lee

Hong Kong television in Chinatown: translocal context(s) and transnational social formations

Map of California College of  the Arts, including building names and functions. Oakland campus, CCA, 2004

California College of the Arts

CCA Oakland campus map, 2004

Painting faculty Mary Snowden with Trustee Tecoah Bruce and student Jose Cartegena(?), 200

Mary Snowden, Tecoah Bruce, and Jose Cartegena, 2004

Marianne Rogoff

Review of Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry
by Marianne Rogoff
water
rain
consciousness
limits
meaning
	From the center and edges of the vast and diverse landscape of contemporary Mexico, whose “boundaries are largely the accidents of history,” the poets in Reversible Monuments ponder the limits of consciousness and search for meaning(s). Aware of the limits yet pressing beyond them they consider love, “A man and a woman stare,/they speak at each other: not understanding  (Antonio Deltoro); God, “the Great All that has no name” (Elsa Cross); and the very nature of words, “Dark dwelling place of meaning,/limits and prisons/of what is given us in silence (Elsa Cross). 
chiaroscuro
lamplight
sleep
mosaic
	The poets collect the light from the darkness and arrange it in patterns that suggest ideas or answers. The many “maps” and “cartography” poems here strive to provide a sense of direction, geography, or destination. The many “mirrors” and “reflections” poems imply perhaps that life on earth might be merely an image of what eternity more wholly could contain.
echoes
specters
memory
	“vague signs and gestures” (Malva Flores)
	“the stupor of after-dinner conversations” (Jorge Fernandez Granados)
moths
butterflies
	“the coming and going of the possible:/its presence in the real” (Malva Flores)
	“that persevering futility: words/airing themselves in the afternoon, the notes/of some imprecise reality” (Malva Flores)

	And, of course, these poets write about ever-present death, in Mexico visible, a neighbor or member of the family.
	“Nothing will remain in nothingness,/Nothing will be forgotten./There is a place in the universe/Where the memories of time/Are written down.” (Juan Gregorio Regino)
	Some of the poems are narratives, strings of long sentences, paragraphs of phrases; some shapely, concrete evocations of rain and reflections; most are lyrical, metaphysical, and grounded in the natural world of their country.
	“and I -- where am I?/I am the woman I always was. The unexpectedness of being/I come to the place of origins where the beginning begins/This is the time/Time to wake up. (Gloria Gervitz)
	The voices are distinct, individual, independent, unified in their humanness, like us, but apart because they are the bearers of gifts, poems, willing deliverers of news from earth and other realms, tireless workers for causes environmental, political, and personal. Young, born since 1950. Ancient, tied to deep roots. Ageless, spanning centuries of thought, language the spindly messenger.
	This volume is unique because, along with writings in the Spanish language of Mexico, it also includes poems from native languages such as Zapotec, Mazatec, and Tzeltal, side by side with English translations. Copper Canyon’s imprint Kage-An Books is new since the year 2000, dedicated to publishing works in translation. The Japanese term “Kage-An” means “shadow hermitage,” reflecting the solitary dedication of the translator who works in the shadows of literary tradition. According to the editors’ preface, the title Reversible Monuments comes from a “Topopoema” by Octavio Paz, perhaps Mexico’s best-known author. “It is a concrete poem in the shape of a rhombus that has different images that reflect on each other vertically as well as horizontally. The poem can be read in many different directions, in the same way one can read poems in translation. The poem is circular, has neither a beginning nor an end. We like to think in these terms about translations, which are never final, and about generations of poets who owe as much to the poets who came before them as to the ones ahead of them who in turn will keep their poetry current. We also had in mind the geographical disposition of Mexico and the United States, and the way the two countries’ poetic traditions have influenced each other.” 
For The Bloomsbury Review, March/April 2003



English

Review of Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry

Painting faculty Mary Snowden with, Viola Frey Visiting Artist recipient, John Bankston in Macky Hall, CCAC Oakland campus, 200

Mary Snowden with John Bankston, 2003

Viola Frey with trustees Tecoah Bruce and Janice Boyce and, recipient of the 2003 Viola Frey Visiting Artist Award, John Bankston at the celebration of the unveiling of plaque commemorating the Viola Frey Chair in Fine Arts, hung in the Macky Hall (Treadwell Mansion

Viola Frey, Tecoah Bruce, Janice Boyce and John Bankston

IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES WITH GOD 
ON THE MONK DOWNSTAIRS BY TIM FARRINGTON 
 
The Monk Downstairs is an easy read about God. It seriously ponders the split between 
the contemplative life and life in the world while describing the most bedeviling aspects of 
simple survival on the secular plane. Rebecca is the single mother of a bright six-year-old girl, 
whose ex is a pothead surfer who never grew up and still needs her to bail him out when he gets 
into trouble. She rents out her in-law apartment downstairs to a monk, Michael Christopher, a 
man who has spent the last twenty years in a complex, sometimes contentious relationship with 
God and his brotherhood. In a series of letters he continues to argue with his former friend and 
fellow follower, Brother James, who believes monks need to remain active in their community to 
alleviate suffering and properly answer their calling, while Michael suffers over the very idea of 
God’s existence, obstinate ways, and the abiding mysteries of faith. 
 You ask what prayer is for me now. I used to have so many lovely answers. Prayer is 
communion, adoration, praise; it is the practice of the presence of God. Prayer is abiding in 
love.  I had a catalogue of ready definitions through the whole of my novitiate, all substantial 
and high-sounding, an impressive array. But all that holy busyness seems like a kind of sand-
castle building to me now, and the zeal of my answers is a heap of soggy kelp left by the tide. 
There is a prayer that is simply seeing through yourself, seeing your own nothingness, the 
emptiness impervious to self-assertion. A prayer that is the end of the rope. A helplessness, 
fathomless and terrifying. No matter how holy or well meaning you were when you started out, 
no matter how many fine experiences you had along the way, by the time you reach the point of 
this prayer, you want only to get out of it. 
Marianne Rogoff * mrogoff@cca.edu 2 
 And God? God is that which will not let you out of it.  
 Rebecca is too self-centered, or too caught up in her responsibilities, to engage very much 
in these kinds of dialogs, with herself or with her tenant. A nonbeliever in God and burned by 
love, she no longer seeks after love or God’s potentially redemptive powers, so she initially 
resists the concept that she might be falling in love with a man whose “other woman” is an 
invisible force. Inexperienced and several decades out of touch with the physical world that love 
necessarily inhabits, the monk similarly resists. 
 Yet proximity dictates that they keep meeting, then needing to connect with one another 
just to keep the tenuous ship that is their current existence afloat. Rebecca gets caught at work 
and asks the monk to get her daughter from daycare; the monk needs to take a job at McDonalds 
as his resume has a large gap in the work history area; bills must be paid, the child fed, 
surrounding relationships with co-workers, family, ex-loves tended to. Funnily enough, Rebecca 
and the monk both smoke cigarettes and find each other over and over on the back steps 
sneaking puffs after the child is asleep and the day’s mundane problems are a swirl in their 
minds. It is during these moments of vice that their most sacred dialogs take place. 
 “God, twenty years. I’ve never done anything in my life for twenty years.” 
 “I was no marvel of stability. Sometimes it seems to me that all I really did was keep my 
costume on and attend the events. But it does set up a certain tension.” 
 ... “Why did you leave?” 
 “It’s a long story.” 
 ... “I suppose it’s a little like a marriage breaking up.” 
 “I suppose it is,” he said glumly. “Apparently, I’ve got irreconcilable differences with 
God.”  
Marianne Rogoff * mrogoff@cca.edu 3 
 Does Love happen? 
 Does God exist? 
 They ask and discover the answers in the midst of life’s needs, not apart from it, rising 
from “downstairs,” solitude, and doubt to engage with crises and ordinariness, calling on Love 
and God where appropriate and joy-giving, meshing their lives and otherwise tending to 
business. 
 
For The Bloomsbury Review, Jan/Feb 2003 
 


Irreconcilable Differences with God: on The Monk Downstairs by Tim Farrington

The front page article discusses political art at CCAC in early 2002, focusing on Jose Galindo's Ethnic Studies undergraduate course "Mexican Muralism"  and the mural that the class created on  the Martinez Hall mural wall. Several student muralists are quoted

Smoler, Michael

CCAC Weekly : Week of April 22-26, 2002

Student muralists in front of  the 2002 Martinez Hall mural, created under the direction of Jose Galindo

Galindo, Jose

Martinez Hall Mural, 2002

The front page article discusses CCAC's campus exhibitions and exhibition program, in early 2002.  It quotes Sugene Yang, Coordinator of Undergraduate Exhibitions, for a general overview, and then focuses in specifically on the Martinez Hall mural wall ending with a discussion of the work that was in that exhibition space at the time: a piece by undegraduate Jim Ricks