equals an extra measure of words, letting the sugar piled too high stay on the tablespoon and scatter over the bowl of cornflakes.
I've been testing the waters, measuring the time between syllables, getting my installation/performance ready for art-o-matic...I am not going to waste any space constructing an argument for or against the art show everyone loves to hate...I am participating simply because they are letting me do what I want to do and I have a space that is all mine.
-- good enough for me to go ahead --
a few short thoughts (from the drawing board):
1. A staging area for sex is trapped under the bed of my skin, your skin
2. Speed believes no truth except the shortness of stride and the shortness of breath
3. A lack of color produces more light, less vision, tastes great
4. Can you produce more than exhaustion? Does heat become the enemy of comfort in the cold of a room that remains to be full?
5. Volumes reside in white tides of blankness. stillness.
6. HOW TO read a person like a book, by the book. Chapter 2 - Shifting While Leaning Forward Means Feigned Interest.
10.31.2004
10.26.2004
a bland white space envelopes while the noise closes in color saturated with the promise of progress flavored by NEW! commerce
here, in this oh-so-hopeful new space, i think of the people i am closed off from by the geography of space, time, and the chalk-tasting architecture of this building that chokes more than it creates
..//..
what bites into my tongue is the sliver of a thought that a movie scene could begin with an absence of color, a remoteness of place, and lastly, the loss of a breath breathed too shortly into my ear, just behind the ear, right where the hair starts and the skin disappears...
..//..
what bites into my tongue is the sliver of a thought that a movie scene could begin with an absence of color, a remoteness of place, and lastly, the loss of a breath breathed too shortly into my ear, just behind the ear, right where the hair starts and the skin disappears...
10.24.2004
In response to September 16.
For a number of years I have kept this piece of paper with me, tucked in between the pages of various books and other places (I think -- I can't remember where else it might have lived, though it feels as if it was in a box at somepoint, and not just the pages of a notebook...). I found it again in my art project book earlier today, and I knew I had put it in there to remind me of something, but I can't recall what that was. All I could do with it this time around was read it, then type the words out into world with my last blog post, thinking I needed to crawl inside them to recognize their life.
The page is a standard 8x11 laser print-out, courier font, point twelve. I had folded it in half, half the other way, then half the first way again. It has four main creases that were defined more strongly by squeezing the folds with nails, not just fingertips. At some point in its history, the bottom left corner of the paper was folded in and back, adding a triangle to the topography of the page. The title, September 16, is in bold and finished by a period. There is a slight tear an inch to the right of the period, just hitting the top of "resilient" in the first sentence of text.
Whose text is this, I cannot be sure. When I found it again, before putting it in its current archive, I thought it was mine and read the words as if speaking the name of my child over and over again to a kid on the playground -- no response, no matter the persistance and repetition. And with a deep wave of disappointment over the empty pit of discovery, I remember I never gave such birth: This text is not mine.
Again, whose text is this? Who belongs to these lines, the metaphors? The adjectives? The nouns? For a short while when struggling to identify with it as if it was mine, I would say yes, this line makes sense, I could have thought this on a wet wet gray morning (this had to have been first written on a wet wet gray morning -- an Ithaca morning, a wet tree trunk morning, like suddenly stepping your sock-wearing feet into the puddle made by the shower). But the stiff-necked drama of words like "Victorian daggers," "One" and "beautiful" are not my voice at all, especially these references to age -- teenagers, children, "mess of a life." (I don't like such overt references to time.) Such perspectives on time had to be written by someone more my elder, or, someone who is young but creates their identity and life around the notion that they are so tragic their ability to write from a perspective much more experienced is merited through such naive melancholy. Besides, this text seems too worked, too revised. Over worked, over produced. It is easy to tell that it was born with an audience in mind, not just directed to the self, or the individual inhabited by the "you," by the "our."
I like parts of the text. I don't like a lot of things about it. I am glad it is not mine, but I added to the end of the last line. Can you tell? Which part is me? The difference between one person and the next is certainly more than fingerprints and hairlines --- Vocabulary, and the candor of its employment, are just as defining.
We all have our favorite nouns, verbs, expressions, metaphors, ... all these discursive allusions to experience we live and share with others to make life feel more real...
Typing the words out this morning, knowing they were not mine...it is an act not unlike the experience of wearing a friend's clothes or the pleasure of using your roommate's shampoo. Trying them on, something new without the commitment of actual change ... imagining another life ... when my roommate waits on people, he invents stories about their life, imagining the house they live in, the friends they have, if they are funny and witty or not ... i mostly wonder about what they are like in bed, what their sex style is ... are they frigid and timid? lights off only? is it jackhammer sex? who is a talker? a moaner? an Oh God or Fuck Me person? i have a theory about reading an individual's sexual style by the way they treat their paper napkin when eating, but that is for another time...
What was it about the folds of the paper I kept returning to? They mark out the history of the page, and more importantly, how many times this stranger's words were read by me, another stranger (the original writer doesn't know I exist). I think this page came from Ithaca, from college. Working in the computer lab in undergrad gave me the opportunity to be a written word spy...Like trying to see what the title of a book someone is reading on the metro, or listening in to the faintly audible noise from someone's white iPod headphones. Curiousity: What does this person think about? How do they use their words? Would I expect that sentence from her if I just saw her in the hallway? What does the subject in that paragraph really mean to him and would he come back to that idea again? What is in her Works Cited?
I believe I first found this lost text from a pile of left-over print-outs never picked up at the lab desk. I surely had it that long, (the folds are so many and so deep). The intrigue of its origin must be why it has survived so many moves to different towns, different apartments. It just keeps resurfacing.
When will it disappear again?
Where will it go?
The page is a standard 8x11 laser print-out, courier font, point twelve. I had folded it in half, half the other way, then half the first way again. It has four main creases that were defined more strongly by squeezing the folds with nails, not just fingertips. At some point in its history, the bottom left corner of the paper was folded in and back, adding a triangle to the topography of the page. The title, September 16, is in bold and finished by a period. There is a slight tear an inch to the right of the period, just hitting the top of "resilient" in the first sentence of text.
Whose text is this, I cannot be sure. When I found it again, before putting it in its current archive, I thought it was mine and read the words as if speaking the name of my child over and over again to a kid on the playground -- no response, no matter the persistance and repetition. And with a deep wave of disappointment over the empty pit of discovery, I remember I never gave such birth: This text is not mine.
Again, whose text is this? Who belongs to these lines, the metaphors? The adjectives? The nouns? For a short while when struggling to identify with it as if it was mine, I would say yes, this line makes sense, I could have thought this on a wet wet gray morning (this had to have been first written on a wet wet gray morning -- an Ithaca morning, a wet tree trunk morning, like suddenly stepping your sock-wearing feet into the puddle made by the shower). But the stiff-necked drama of words like "Victorian daggers," "One" and "beautiful" are not my voice at all, especially these references to age -- teenagers, children, "mess of a life." (I don't like such overt references to time.) Such perspectives on time had to be written by someone more my elder, or, someone who is young but creates their identity and life around the notion that they are so tragic their ability to write from a perspective much more experienced is merited through such naive melancholy. Besides, this text seems too worked, too revised. Over worked, over produced. It is easy to tell that it was born with an audience in mind, not just directed to the self, or the individual inhabited by the "you," by the "our."
I like parts of the text. I don't like a lot of things about it. I am glad it is not mine, but I added to the end of the last line. Can you tell? Which part is me? The difference between one person and the next is certainly more than fingerprints and hairlines --- Vocabulary, and the candor of its employment, are just as defining.
We all have our favorite nouns, verbs, expressions, metaphors, ... all these discursive allusions to experience we live and share with others to make life feel more real...
Typing the words out this morning, knowing they were not mine...it is an act not unlike the experience of wearing a friend's clothes or the pleasure of using your roommate's shampoo. Trying them on, something new without the commitment of actual change ... imagining another life ... when my roommate waits on people, he invents stories about their life, imagining the house they live in, the friends they have, if they are funny and witty or not ... i mostly wonder about what they are like in bed, what their sex style is ... are they frigid and timid? lights off only? is it jackhammer sex? who is a talker? a moaner? an Oh God or Fuck Me person? i have a theory about reading an individual's sexual style by the way they treat their paper napkin when eating, but that is for another time...
What was it about the folds of the paper I kept returning to? They mark out the history of the page, and more importantly, how many times this stranger's words were read by me, another stranger (the original writer doesn't know I exist). I think this page came from Ithaca, from college. Working in the computer lab in undergrad gave me the opportunity to be a written word spy...Like trying to see what the title of a book someone is reading on the metro, or listening in to the faintly audible noise from someone's white iPod headphones. Curiousity: What does this person think about? How do they use their words? Would I expect that sentence from her if I just saw her in the hallway? What does the subject in that paragraph really mean to him and would he come back to that idea again? What is in her Works Cited?
I believe I first found this lost text from a pile of left-over print-outs never picked up at the lab desk. I surely had it that long, (the folds are so many and so deep). The intrigue of its origin must be why it has survived so many moves to different towns, different apartments. It just keeps resurfacing.
When will it disappear again?
Where will it go?
September 16.
Only the resilient milkweeds are left standing in the garden; cocoons hang from their leaves like forgotten ornaments. A few shards of terra cotta punctuate the uniformity of the dried soil. The rosebushes have shriveled. There is no trace of the beautiful hibiscus that we planted. Sawgrass and dollar weeds have overrun everything. They're as stubborn as the birds that continue to visit the ruins of our backyard and die there. I found three carcasses, almost bones, impaled by homemade stakes, probably carved with Victorian daggers. (Wouldn't that be our tool of choice?) Doubtless, the work of teenagers as unruly and gloomy and sadistic as we were. A garden of dead birds -- how excited you would have been at the sight of this. Of course, in some sense, these ruins, the intrigue of homespun murder perfuming them, are perfect. They explain what has become of us. Surrendering the garden to merciless elements, we've tended its disintegration the way we have tended our own -- with beautiful abandon. There is something in these ruins that speaks about us, and to us, in a way that the repulsive periwinkle of roses and sickening lavender of orchids never could. We were always children of overgrowth, of sloppy excess. Disorder breathes life -- and its opposite -- into us.
One would have to know that there once was a garden behind our house to find it. So little is left of it. One finds it the way I find you: in small bits, in cryptic transmissions. Some things are obvious, naturally, but others may be just a little interference in the background that one has to zero in on. It's not that I can't picture you running through this house, or sitting in the garden, or locked up in your room (you were always locked up in your room). It's just that there has to be more than that distance between us, that blankness that separates us like morning fog. A distance that is not so much between us as it is us. I take you in slowly, in tiny bits and try to put you together. But you exceed the meager version that I come up with. You're like the sawgrass and dollar weeds that spead over every border they reach, swallowing up more and more space. At least, there is some consolation in knowing that what is responsible for this mess of life is a forced simple logic and a broken imagination that can't get their hands around a circle that isn't closed.
One would have to know that there once was a garden behind our house to find it. So little is left of it. One finds it the way I find you: in small bits, in cryptic transmissions. Some things are obvious, naturally, but others may be just a little interference in the background that one has to zero in on. It's not that I can't picture you running through this house, or sitting in the garden, or locked up in your room (you were always locked up in your room). It's just that there has to be more than that distance between us, that blankness that separates us like morning fog. A distance that is not so much between us as it is us. I take you in slowly, in tiny bits and try to put you together. But you exceed the meager version that I come up with. You're like the sawgrass and dollar weeds that spead over every border they reach, swallowing up more and more space. At least, there is some consolation in knowing that what is responsible for this mess of life is a forced simple logic and a broken imagination that can't get their hands around a circle that isn't closed.
10.06.2004
Well, i felt something should be here now
given all of the thinking i've been doing ---
here's something composed during the last 139 seconds (that's two more than you, Rod):
Can we stop fussing about with all of these names?
Let me use lead
As a litmus test
For all other tastes
Fall to the left of sweet and the
Right of sour
If the taste cuts like the blade
Of a sharp piece of green grass
sliced through the tongue
Then it is pure
It can be called Real.
Not a drawing.
No canvas.
Pixel-less.
Blank. Beautiful. Sharp. Green.
here's something composed during the last 139 seconds (that's two more than you, Rod):
Can we stop fussing about with all of these names?
Let me use lead
As a litmus test
For all other tastes
Fall to the left of sweet and the
Right of sour
If the taste cuts like the blade
Of a sharp piece of green grass
sliced through the tongue
Then it is pure
It can be called Real.
Not a drawing.
No canvas.
Pixel-less.
Blank. Beautiful. Sharp. Green.
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