THERE NOT THERE

2012-01-29T12:54:00.002-05:00

"The dog is a sort of definitive child, more docile and gentle, a child who could be said to have stopped growing at the age of reason, but it is also a child which will be outlived: to accept to love a dog is to accept to love a being which will, inevitably, be torn from you"

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

(Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory)

2012-01-06T22:24:00.001-05:00

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.

(Morrison, Tar Baby)

ryan mcginely

2011-12-11T21:39:00.002-05:00

Two is the only number that counts. One defines the real, perhaps, but all the others are pure fantasy, pencil lines on a blank white page.

(Auster, from Sunset Park)

2011-12-06T17:16:00.000-05:00

Will Rogan

Silencer (MUM) #2, 2007

altered magazine page

11 1/8 x 8 1/4 in.

2011-11-16T23:39:00.002-05:00

These kind of crack me up. New photography for Velvet Seahorse and here, too (eventually).

2011-11-15T22:57:00.001-05:00

alec soth

After the Movie by Marie Howe

2011-10-23T05:49:00.001-04:00

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.He says that he believes a person can love someone

and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.
Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"
think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You are a nun."

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things of me even if he's not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

past life / life insurance

2011-09-15T21:59:00.004-04:00

(Betsy Lin Seder)

knowing the terms

2011-09-06T22:40:00.002-04:00

one year of turned back.

2011-07-25T00:59:00.002-04:00

leaving utah

2011-07-15T14:28:00.002-04:00

"And for years I believed

That what went unsaid between us became empty,

And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted."

(larry levis, from winter stars)

The last thing my father did for me
Was map a way: he died, & so
Made death possible. If he could do it, I
Will also, someday, be so honored. Once,

At night, I walked through the lit streets
Of New York, from the Gramercy Park Hotel
Up Lexington & at that hour, alone,
I stopped hearing traffic, voices, the racket

Of spring wind lifting a newspaper high
Above the lights. The streets wet,
And shining. No sounds. Once,

When I saw my son be born, I thought
How loud this world must be to him, how final.

That night, out of respect for someone missing,
I stopped listening to it.

Out of respect for someone missing,
I have to say

This isn’t the whole story.
The fact is, I was still in love.
My father died, & I was still in love. I know
It’s in bad taste to say it quite this way. Tell me,
How would you say it?

The story goes: wanting to be alone & wanting
The easy loneliness of travelers,

I said good-bye in an airport & flew west.
It happened otherwise.
And where I’d held her close to me,
My skin felt raw, & flayed.

Descending, I looked down at light lacquering fields
Of pale vines, & small towns, each
With a water tower; then the shadows of wings;
Then nothing.

My only advice is not to go away.
Or, go away. Most

Of my decisions have been wrong.

When I wake, I lift cold water
To my face. I close my eyes.

A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?

Because there are faces I might never see again,
There are two things I want to remember
About light, & what it does to us.

Her bright, green eyes at an airport—how they widened
As if in disbelief;
And my father opening the gate: a lit, & silent

City.

(larry levis, In the City of Light)

2011-07-11T18:07:00.003-04:00

(velvet seahorse, air and earth)

(the coldest month)

(jeremy dyer, haemál)

2011-06-15T14:42:00.001-04:00

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,

and everything dead is dead,

and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,

and the heroine has studied her face and its defects

remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,

as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves

has lost its novelty and not released them,

and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,

watching the others go about their days—

likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—

that self-love is the one weedy stalk

of every human blossoming, and understood,

therefore, why they had been, all their lives,

in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—

except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool

of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic

life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,

faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend told once about the time

he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.

Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.

He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,

the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.

And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”

that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.

No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch

he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,

scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp

along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word

was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise

the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,

and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up

on the girder like a child—the sun was going down

and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket

he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing

carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties

hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.

A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick

with rage and grief. He knew more or less

where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.

They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears

in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”

she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,

a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.

“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”

“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,

“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—

Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—

and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,

and go to sleep.

And he, he would play that scene

once only, once and a half, and tell himself

that he was going to carry it for a very long time

and that there was nothing he could do

but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened

to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark

cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It’s not the story though, not the friend

leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”

which is the part of stories one never quite believes.

I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain

it must sometimes make a kind of singing.

And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—

First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

(faint music, robert hass)

2011-05-30T14:57:00.000-04:00

holes and rough edges

2011-05-30T14:51:00.003-04:00

errol morris

2011-05-09T11:37:00.004-04:00

Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., an engineer from Malden, Mass. decided to become the Florence Nightengale of Death Row — a humanitarian whose mission was to design and repair, electric chairs, lethal injection systems, gallows and gas chambers. In 1988, Ernst Zundel, publisher of "Did Six Million Really Die?" and "The Hitler We Loved and Why" commissioned Leuchter to conduct a forensic investigation into the use of poison gas in WWII Nazi concentration camps. Leuchter traveled to Auschwitz and illegally took brick and mortar samples for analysis in order to "prove" that the Holocaust never happened.

Leuchter fully expected his involvement with Ernst Zundel to be the crowning achievement of his career, but instead it ruined him. Reopening the doors to this century's keystone atrocity. Morris bypasses a more obvious discourse on bigotry to examine instead the origins of evil in vanity and self-deception.

John McCracken, 1934–2011

2011-04-15T10:58:00.001-04:00

alec soth

2011-04-07T09:31:00.002-04:00

barry stone

2011-03-29T10:02:00.001-04:00

david wojnarowicz

2011-01-31T22:45:00.002-05:00

One Thousand and One Possible Nights

2011-01-31T22:41:00.001-05:00

Cris Brodhal

Dennis Miller Bunker

Rivane Neuenschwander

2011-01-23T22:31:00.004-05:00

Enjoyed a refreshing "Tab" soda compliments of James Franco at the Salt Lake Art Center this afternoon. The installation was silly, but fun.

Also, new jewelry -

Noemie Goudal

2011-01-08T23:28:00.001-05:00

Les Amants (Promenade), Colour Photograph, 140 x 111 cm, 2009

Les Amants (Jetée), Colour Photograph, 168 x 190 cm and 111 x 125 cm, 2009

Les Amants (Cascade), Colour Photograph, 140 x 111 cm, 2009

unheimlich

2011-01-04T21:44:00.003-05:00

"The modern nothingness. Interlude on the force of parallel lives"

"He wants to say. That is to say, he means. As in the French, 'vouloir dire,' which means, literally, to want to say, but which means, in fact, to mean. He means to say what he wants. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says. [. . . ] No meaning, yes. But it would be impossible to say that we are not haunted"

"For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins"

"The sky is blue and black and gray and yellow. The sky is not there, and is red. All this was yesterday. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday. All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now. The sky is lemon and rose and lavender. The sky is the earth. The sky is white, and it is not there. [. . .] It was. It will never be again. Remember"

(Auster, The Invention of Solitude)

west

2011-01-04T17:27:00.003-05:00

(Brion Nude Rosch, Untitled)

(Angela Ellsworth, Seer Bonnet VII)

Saw these pieces (among others) on Friday at the Salt Lake Art Center

the possibility of an island

2011-01-02T23:44:00.002-05:00

south of the south

2011-01-01T11:46:00.003-05:00

"Baudelaire: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas. In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world"

"His life had stopped the moment we went our separate ways, and he belonged to the past for me now, not the present. He was a ghost I carried around inside me, a prehistoric figment, a thing that was no longer real. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him, but nothing was clear"

"I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it is in the struggle"

"If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. I can think of no other way to express it. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible"

(Auster, snippets from The New York Trilogy)

saved by old times

2010-12-30T18:49:00.001-05:00

2010-12-30T18:44:00.001-05:00

"I let myself believe that this was one of those islands without an owner. Now I am learning the truth. Now I am learning my lesson"

(Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K)

a ghost from the past

2010-12-25T19:28:00.001-05:00

(William Green, from Portfolio #3)

(un)welcome winter

2010-12-15T12:33:00.002-05:00

simone douglas

chris wiley

jesse hlebo

2010-11-27T00:35:00.002-05:00

"That feeling lasted for only a few seconds, but it was extremely powerful, not a thing of the imagination so much as a real thing, an actual transformation that turned me into someone else, and the moment it started to go away, the worst of what had happened to me was suddenly over."

(The Book of Illusions, Auster)

new designs

2010-11-14T15:45:00.001-05:00

Antique/vintage coin rings

new designs

2010-11-14T11:01:00.001-05:00

art sales

2010-11-14T10:48:00.004-05:00

At the November Craft Sabbath (photos by secondhand chicks)

Selling here in December.

2010-10-22T10:50:00.002-04:00

(Erwin Blumenfeld, Le pudeur; The Dictator; Le miroir brisé)

2010-09-12T12:18:00.002-04:00

"It was a complex and disturbing experience for her, and it left her feeling that she had abandoned her life for a kind of nothingness, as though she had been taking pictures of things that weren't there. The camera was no longer and instrument that recorded presences, it was a way of making the world disappear, a technique for encountering the invisible"

"It would be a portrait in absentia, an outline drawn around an empty space, and little by little a figure would emerge from the background, pieced together from everything he was not"

(paul auster, leviathan)

2010-09-09T00:27:00.000-04:00

back to work.

on being there.

2010-08-31T11:24:00.000-04:00

"She was the impossible one, the unattainable one, the one who was never there -- a specter from the Land of If"

"A barren field stretched out before me, a barren, dusty field cluttered with gray stones of various shapes and sizes, and scattered among the stones in that field were fifty or sixty men and women, each holding a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, pounding on the stones until they broke into smaller stones, then pounding on the smaller stones until they broke in two, and then pounding on the smallest stones until they were reduced to gravel"

(paul auster, invisible)

2010-08-27T00:50:00.001-04:00

"You take her in your arms and whisper: I don't want to go. You say it again: I don't want to go. And then you step back from her, put your head down, and go."

(paul auster, invisible)

local artist: matt glass

2010-08-21T01:39:00.003-04:00

from IMPACT aftermath

from memento mori

from The Origin of Waking

from Examples of Absurdity

"But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love."

2010-08-17T10:43:00.001-04:00

I can't write you because everything's
wrong. Before dawn, crows swim
from the cedars: black coffee calls them down,
its bitter taste in my throat as they circle,
raucous, huge. Questions with no
place to land, they cruise yellow air
above crickets snapping
like struck matches. My house on fire, crows

are the smoke. You've never left me.
When you crossed the river you did not
call my name. I stood in tall grass
a long time, listening to birds
hidden in reeds, their intricate songs.

The grass will burn, the wrens,
the river and the rain that falls on it.
I can go nowhere else: everything
I cannot bear is here.

I must listen deeper. Sharpen my knife.
Something has changed the angles
of trees, their color. Do not wait to hear
from me. I cannot write to you
because this is what I will say.

(pamela alexander, letter home)

2,204 miles

2010-08-09T21:26:00.001-04:00

(Aaron Fowler, from Ocean)

slow man - coetzee

2010-07-28T11:36:00.004-04:00

(Thorsten Brinkmann, Donna Delle)

"I may not love whom I choose?"

"Of course you may love whom you choose. But maybe from now on you should keep your love to yourself, as one keeps a head cold to oneself, or an attack of herpes, out of consideration for one's neighbors." (152)

- - -

"Cold, blind. Breathe in, breathe out. He does not accept the charge; he does not believe in its truth. Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. Love sees what is best in the beloved, even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light." (162)

"Love is a fixation." (199)

- - -

"You probably expect me to say it was a humiliating experience, for her and therefore for me. But it wasn't humiliating at all. I would go as far as to call it joyous. And I learned a lesson from it: that love need not be reciprocated as long as there is enough of it in the room. The girl had enough love for two. You are the writer, the heart expert, but did you know that? That if you love deeply enough, it is not necessary to be loved back." (200)

"Your rugby player had enough love for two, you say. Do you really think love can be measured? Do you think love comes by volume, like beer? That as long as you bring a case of it, the other party is permitted to come empty-handed -- empty-handed, empty-hearted?" (201)

- - -

"That is what writing is: second thoughts to the power of n. If you had only been true to your tortoise character, if you had waited for the coming of second thoughts, if you had not so foolishly and irrevocably declared your passion. . ." (228)

(un)finished

2010-07-07T01:06:00.001-04:00

(Miriam Böhm, Unfinished IV)

2010-06-30T11:56:00.003-04:00

(Bradley Pitts, stills from one roll of weightlessness and speed of lights)

(the mirror) + (summertime)

2010-06-17T15:19:00.003-04:00

"Yes, of course I was important to him. He was in love with me, in his way. But there is an important way of being important, and an unimportant way, and I have my doubts that I made it to the important important level. I mean, he never wrote about me. I never entered his books. Which means to me I never quite flowered within him, never quite came to life."

"A gesture of refusal in the face of time."

"The sum of what is left."

"You must have noted how rarely he discussed the sources of his own creativity. In part, that came our of the native secretiveness I mentioned. But in part it also suggests a reluctance to probe the sources of his inspiration, as if being too self-aware might cripple him."

"Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity."

without beliefs we are not human

2010-06-10T00:16:00.005-04:00

There ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the corridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.

(J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello)

time to go west.

2010-06-08T10:51:00.005-04:00

(Daniel Everett, Redactions from Personal Journal)

watching forever, forever.

2010-05-30T21:50:00.002-04:00

(gainesville florida, lomography action sampler, 2007)

manqué ::

2010-05-30T20:50:00.005-04:00

(Christine Rusche, from Fictional Landscapes)

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

(Mark Strand, Keeping Things Whole)

(one foot)

2010-05-24T11:26:00.006-04:00

(Shannon Ebner, Landscape Incarceration)

May 13th or 14th: It takes tragedy to make me grateful

2010-05-17T17:24:00.003-04:00

Past. Present. Future. The rational divisions of the rational life. And always underneath, in dreams, in recollections, in the moment of hesitation on a busy street, the hunch that life is not rational, not divided. That the mirrored compartments could break. I chose to study time in order to outwit it.

(Winterson, Gut Symmetries)

olvídate, dreamer.

2010-05-07T01:42:00.005-04:00

(Jenny White, Hermeneias: Speak My Language, If You Want)

By the time we finished my legs were bloodless, broomsticks inside my rolled-down baggies and as her breathing got smaller and smaller against my neck, she said, I do, I still do

(Diaz, Drown)

reading/watching from spring semester

2010-05-03T10:54:00.001-04:00

reading, spring 2010
drown
point omega
already dead: a california gothic
feminism meets queer theory
bisexual spaces: a geography of sexuality and gender
queer studies: a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender anthology
everything here is the best thing ever
when species meet
truth and beauty: a friendship
autobiography of a face
the powerbook
flirt
the thing about life is that one day you'll be dead
art and lies
reality hunger: a manifesto
lighthousekeeping
sexing the cherry
a common pornography
whatever
undoing gender
looking awry
enthusiasm: odes and otium
the use of pleasure
citizen of
loving sabotage
violence
the will to change
tokyo fiancee
the name of the world
the incognito lounge
modern life
am i that name?
pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human form
incendiary
black sexual politics
let the northern lights erase your name
instant light (tarkovsky)
the water method man
the alchemy of race and rights
and now you can go
juliet, naked
the act of love
the anthologist
the politics of experience
the possibility of an island

films, spring 2010

kick ass
fur
hot tub time machine
Öszi almanach
home
blood on the flat track
whip it
jeanne dielman
werckmeister harmóniák
la jetée
blow dry
intacto
moon
a town called panic
a single man
in bruges
the imaginarium of dr. parnassus

oh, ok.

2010-04-23T14:59:00.003-04:00

(Jessica Tremp, The Mistress Trail)

(Bharti Kher, from inevitable undeniable necessary)

wednesday (dis)ruption

2010-04-22T10:29:00.003-04:00

(Leiderstam, Returned, Hampstead Heath, London)

(Leiderstam, View [Papago Park])

2010-04-19T01:33:00.002-04:00

Light and sound, wordless monotone, and imitation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies (15).

At dinner, over another omelet, he waved his fork and said, "You understand it's not strategy. I am not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself" (66).

(DeLillo, Point Omega)

only a virus

2010-04-18T21:56:00.002-04:00

(North Carolina, April 2010)

strategic upcycling

2010-04-18T21:49:00.001-04:00

II.

III.

(here)

2010-04-14T09:39:00.001-04:00

(Lauren Edwards, 2009 c-print)

6:30am > 4:30am

2010-04-14T06:56:00.004-04:00

We have to be mapping out, not merely contemplating, the unthinkable. Or we can't think at all (129).

There's no shaking and shouting in that case. There was nothing to ascertain. Do you understand? There was nothing to ascertain, nowhere to ascertain it, nobody to ascertain it about. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. That's what I found in there. That's what you created (282).

(Denis Johnson, Already Dead)

on missing (what you never had)

2010-04-03T23:47:00.003-04:00

. . .coherence means interpreting together what had been seen only in mutually contradicting terms (243).

If we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism, then we know that becoming is always becoming with--in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake (244).

(Haraway, When Species Meet)

liking (un)popular films

2010-04-03T23:38:00.007-04:00

(Steven Shainberg, Fur)

(Arbus, Untitled)

maybe love is (a willful) release

2010-03-27T13:09:00.008-04:00

(Alberto Borea, from Maneras de Caerme)

2010-03-24T13:27:00.004-04:00

"So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all"

"My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort"

(Winterson, The PowerBook)

(im)possibility of wanting: month 7

2010-03-22T18:35:00.000-04:00

(Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman)

2010-03-16T22:33:00.002-04:00

(Weiner, As long as it lasts)

"Time that taunts you taunts me"
(Winterson, Art and Lies)

2010-03-16T21:48:00.002-04:00

(Bryan Graf, from Album and Wildlife Analysis)

2010-03-15T01:36:00.006-04:00

"Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time." (2)

"Why could he not turn his life towards me, as trees though troubled by the wind yet continue in the path of the sun?" (51)

"I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn't use language to make a war-zone of my heart." (58)

"No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value." (154)

"And even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light." (167)

"On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love . . . or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not know it, habit behind a great binder.

I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing." (79)

(Winterson, Sexing the Cherry)

on (reaching) a threshold

2010-03-15T01:16:00.004-04:00

"Art is not truth; art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth." (32)

"Memory loves to go hunting in the dark." (60)

"He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue." (105)

"We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (136)

". . . Or rather, among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself?" (152)

(David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto)

(Sophie Calle, Les Dormeurs)

2010-03-14T16:54:00.002-04:00

(Béla Tarr, Werckmeister Harmonies)

(mis)communications

2010-03-12T11:38:00.001-05:00

(Michael Huey, Ancestor)

2010-03-09T22:54:00.001-05:00

". . .and the gates of the future were closed"

slow learner

2010-03-08T18:54:00.004-05:00

Saw this installation by Shih Chieh Huang at the Jepson Center in Savannah

(Betsy Cain, parted day)

2010-03-04T17:52:00.002-05:00

"I am not sure I know when mourning is successful, or when one has fully mourned another human being. I'm certain, though, that it does not mean that one has forgotten the person, or that something else comes along to take his or her place. I don't think it works that way. I think instead that one mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance. So there is losing, and there is the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned" (18)

"Let's face it, we're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something" (19)

(Butler, Undoing Gender)

2010-03-03T23:32:00.002-05:00

"The sketch, that is a word which awakens in me a great thought. In the violent transports of passion, a man omits the links, begins a phrase without finishing it, lets a word escape him, utters a cry, and falls silent. Nevertheless, I have heard everything."

(Diderot)

2010-03-03T23:16:00.004-05:00

". . .For I am new here in these plosive pairs. Please. Let the notion born from a proposition be formed in a living sound that shall not perish, probably, shall not inherit the asterisk clause. The procedural is processional and shall rise up to stand on its two hind legs, vice and versa, here or hereabouts."

"Where do we go

from here? To a substitution that is usually incorrect

and the call to evening roulette

whose interest attaches us to what is not

ourselves but our everyday lapses."

"We pick up where I left off

in every matter, measure. But you are full of it

matter, I mean. 'Water, upon which waves, upon

which a bundle of sensitive particles, woman or

ventricle through which the spectacle of a capital Man rocks the touch

of the free radical at a hard

time.' Yet it is not so co-eternal with you

this most ridiculous structure

fallen on latex and line

this the case (she or he)

who always stands where a beginning was"

"The bed being a better esoteric set-up for a functionary to forget in

without addition or subtraction something

has to be done looking in as clouds do

on the residues of our ambushed heroes here

crumpled on a point where canonical landscapes converge

and we can all partake in the blue return

of a salty individual shooting fortified raindrops

to be recognized as stars in a tangle

eternal to the one false move of he art

form of our time. That is,

raising oneself up wholesale

from a nugget to the pantleg of an angel."

- Eight (Form)

"Rain on its way in a way disarranged

love by its return deranged

from a sleepover beyond the shackles

of whatever is waking."

- Twelve (Perilous Night)

(Jean Day, from Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium)

olympia

2010-02-28T14:36:00.004-05:00

guitar with humbucking bridge pickup - fuzz - wah - overdrive - mixer (with heavy reverb)

accordion - microphone - looping pedal - mixer

stylophone - microphone - mixer

drum machine - mixer (with subtle reverb)

field recording played on computer speakers - microphone - tremolo - echo - mixer

mixer - keyboard amplifier - portable microcasette recorder

hear it

"citizen of"

2010-02-25T11:59:00.003-05:00

he reads me to sleep at night when

the wind floats the house out

from under my skin into the stars

eating so many holes

in the island the sky the weather

a sweater falling apart in my hands

(Christian Hawkey, from Hour)

If things of sight such heavens be

a video of lost footage

recovered in the act of reading

& when you look up, a film

projected on the wall, called Wall,

& the woman in white, hands

trailing green thread

& a purple wreath of leaves around her head

entering, there

where a door should be, an absence,

spliced. If a skywriter, write clouds.

Some words, unless photographed,

never drift apart.

(Christian Hawkey, from Small Repairs in the Sky)

2010-02-24T11:51:00.002-05:00

(Haris Epaminonda, Vol IV.)

"Sometimes, hatred is the only proof that I really love you. The notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight: the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law, the domain of the violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love."

(Zizek, Violence)

Salt Lake City

2010-02-22T10:23:00.005-05:00

Saw shorts by Helga Fanderl last night, including many of these.

Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l'autre, vous êtez foutu!

To tell someone that it is over is ugly and false. It is never over. Even if you are no longer thinking about someone, how can you doubt that they are still present? If someone has ever mattered, they will always matter.
(Nothomb, Tokyo Fiancee)

2010-02-20T23:04:00.002-05:00

(Joelle Dietrick, Timely Preparation for Future Eventualities)
Saw some of her work today at 621 Gallery in Tallahassee

2010-02-19T16:20:00.007-05:00

(Baptiste Debombourg, believable)

(Marlon Kowalski, from Projections)

(Savannah Kvist, from People 2005-2008)

match day; matched

2010-02-19T11:37:00.005-05:00

(also,

i recognize that

there is something

so very

'mrs habersham'

in continuing

to water

plants

long dead

from the frost.)

2010-02-18T13:15:00.001-05:00

. . . Look at the light through the windowpane.
That means it's noon, that means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.

(Richard Siken, Scheherazade)

2010-02-18T12:54:00.002-05:00

(Ben Grasso, Ascending House)

(Ben Grasso, Edifice)

2010-02-14T22:28:00.002-05:00

(Myoung Ho Lee, Tree #1, from the series Photography-Act, 2007)

2010-02-12T11:51:00.001-05:00

(Caris Reid, Under Said and Over Sung)

(Marni Horwitz, Untitled)

voluntary deep end.

2010-02-12T00:29:00.004-05:00

What brought Flower Cannon to mind right then I don't know, but I have to say that the passing parade put my recent experiences with her into a kind of perspective. The experiences were mostly about seeing her, laying eyes on her--not about hearing her words, certainly not about touching her. And now I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness. The difference being tht I didn't take Flower for a message, but a ghost, the ghost of my daughter--yes, and for a while she came and went in the flow of events like my Elsie in the silent cataract of memory.

(johnson, the name of the world)

. . .And so does my life tremble,

and when I turn from the window

and from the sea's grief, the room

fills with a dark

lushness and foliage nobody

will ever be plucked from,

and the feelings I have

must never be given speech.

(johnson, now)

. . .And what they say

blends in the tarantellasmic sway

all of us between the two of these:

harmony and divergence,

their sad story of harmony and divergence,

the story that begins

I did not know who she was

and ends I did not know who she was.

(johnson, sway)

2010-02-11T14:49:00.006-05:00

(Jon Pylypchuk, I will wait for you to get up/ you will wait for a long time)

2010-02-05T01:06:00.003-05:00

i cut the package open with the same knife that slit three throats today
and i am sorry but i don't know when i'm coming back because lonely
as i am i wake most mornings thinking i cannot leave this

(matthea harvey, frederick courteney selous's letters to his love)

2010-02-03T22:09:00.003-05:00

What I saw was just the wind blowing. It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but too old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we in fact create

(michael cunningham, a home at the end of the world)

2010-02-02T21:22:00.003-05:00

Come to me and we will blow the world back together WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY.

(chris cleave, incendiary)

2010-02-01T11:25:00.002-05:00

Our brains—
despite modern medical investigation
re: synapses, folds,
left and right hemispheres,
gendered predilections,
sparks and cold facts,
digits and firm predictions—
are not reasonable.

They’re crimped and spliced
to conduct our days
along their coppered circuits
until they reach the night again,
that’s all,

and though we think it’s logical
to open our eyes each morning,
butter the toast,
lift a spoon,
our brains—
despite all the elemental charts,
the skeletal diagrams,
the building blueprints
and -ologies of a priestly kind—
are not wired
to survive our hearts.

(Julie Larios, Conduction)

2010-02-01T11:05:00.000-05:00

Isabel del Rio
b. Santiago, Chile, 1956
2244 Módulos [2244 Modules], 1997
Plaster (2,500 bricks)
@ Blanton, Gift of the artist

oh, deceiver

2010-01-25T21:13:00.001-05:00

(Ben Grasso, By the Bulrush II)

2010-01-25T20:49:00.004-05:00

(Paulo Ventura, from Winter Stories)

(Kate MacDowell, Casualty)

The Possibility of an Island

2010-01-06T21:57:00.003-05:00

"people had often spoken to me about show business, media projects, and micro-sociology; but art, never, and I was filled with the presentiment of something novel, dangerous, and probably fatal, from a domain where there was--a bit like love--almost nothing to win and almost everything to lose." (106)

"Entity nondivine,
Animal of tenderness." (129)

"Unrequited love is a hemorrhage" (218)

Fall 2009: reading/films

2010-01-06T21:52:00.002-05:00

BOOKS:
the history of sexuality vol 1
the elementary particles
will you still love me if i wet the bed?
buddha's little finger
the properties of light
world war z
knots
in this way i was saved
existentialism is a humanism
atmospheric disturbances
unfriendly fire
nausea
the life of insects
her fearful symmetry
she came to stay
refusing heaven (gilbert)
crush (siken, reread)
after (hirshfield)
tremble + ennui
the accidental indies
love's executioner (reread)
deviant bodies
the schopenhauer cure
the yellow arrow
the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society
the theory and practice of group psychotherapy
gay issues in the workplace
portland noir
a reenchanted world: the quest for a new kinship with nature
the fountain
where angels fear to tread
epistemology of the closet
pride and prejudice and zombies
jailbait zombie
the little stranger
rivers of a wounded heart
cat's eye

Favorites: After reading Platform a couple of years ago, I've had a love/hate relationship with Houellebecq; Elementary Particles tipped me further onto the love side. I also really enjoyed parts of Atmospheric Disturbances and The Properties of Light. Crush will always be a favorite collection of poems. The Accidental Indies was a random library pick that ended up being an amazingly epic poem about the fictional/hypothesized life of Columbus.

Painfully bad: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Knots (the pressure to read something by Laing drove me to try this - I should have opted for his essays instead), World War Z

FILMS:
before stonewall
coming out in the developing world
the gay marriage thing
trembling before g-d
in the loop
lorna's silence
eagle v. shark
for the bible tells me so
away we go
semper fi
jennifer's body
harold and maude
daddy + papa
baby mama
heathers
florence and robin
pierrot le fou
mysterious skin
une femme est une femme
new moon
zizek!
masculin feminin
human nature
dangerous beauty
humpday
revolutionary road

Favorites: Pierrot Le Fou. Humpday. Human Nature.

Painfully bad: there was nothing that I regretted watching, even Baby Mama made me snicker a couple times and New Moon made me snicker countless times.