Red Thread(s)

parenthetical

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

For the parenthetical S of this blog's title:

S = k log W.

2011-09-17T23:11:00.000-07:00

...fingers trace a scar, a mar-

in the surface. Repeating the figure in the air describes a gesture.

2011-09-14T23:11:00.000-07:00

...or a year.

*

A few breaks in the clouds show not the moon, but the effect of the moon. We would never recognize substance if it were not the bearer of accidents. All surfaces recede: it is the defect that renders them apparent.

2010-10-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

to let a sentence unfold
over an hour

or a season

2010-10-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

"The lights don't go out completely, though. People dozing in orbit see streaks and bursts of bright colour caused by high-energy cosmic rays painlessly slamming into their retinas." -- from an article on life aboard the International Space Station

more Socialisme, more

2010-05-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

Press book (in English) for Film Socialisme here. Via Craig Keller's excellent Cinemasparagus blog. Also, JLG interviewed, (explains the title, originally called Socialisme (which I thought must have been changed by the production company or distributors to avoid any confusion with actually existing socialism) and in conversation with Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
Also, William Lubtchansky died; via Kino Slang.

2010-05-16T11:11:00.000-07:00

2010-05-15T23:12:00.000-07:00

2010-05-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

He types a cluster of random symbols, and two words:
"Unseen. Unsaid."

Roma

2010-05-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

[insert long post detailing Maria José Martinez Sanchez v. Ana Ivanovich match here, with recaps of Jankovic v. S. Williams and Martinez Sanchez v. C. Wozniacki].

diary

2010-05-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

melancholic: 33%
phlegmatic: 27%
sanguine: 17%
vitriol: 23%

diary

2010-05-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

melancholic: 31%
phlegmatic: 30%
sanguine: 26%
vitriol: 18%

2010-05-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

2010-01-05T23:11:00.000-08:00

...so much of the past year given over to the bleistiftgebiet.

2010-01-01T11:11:00.000-08:00

"I am like Montaigne: 'unsuited to continuous discourse.'"
-- Joubert, Notebooks

2009

2009-12-31T20:44:00.000-08:00

Jesus wept.

2009-11-10T11:11:00.000-08:00

"I am sitting on a bench in the park, next to myself, whatever that means."
--Robert Ashley, Private Parts

2009-11-07T11:11:00.000-08:00

voice; constant shifting of voices... writing 'you' as a form of address -- to oneself, to the text, to the reader, or the language itself in its juddering, twisting trail; writing of 'one' -- as if to a particular or imagined 'one,' or the general, wch is no 'one' in particular -- it's a form of distancing. Or an effect of distance; merely the echo of a voice, its over- or undertones. There is some degree of ambiguity. To write to no 'one' out of doubt -- but perhaps a sense of respect? Respect for time, for effort. For trying to span that distance, or simply sharing space. There's a bench in the park. sheltered from the wind. Let's sit there awhile.

2009-11-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

Fretting over a beginning, or a new beginning, one pasues to realize that the worry is not over a beginning, but rather that some process has already started, yet remains inexpressible, unidentified.

Once the draft has been consigned to the fire, the inevitable question -- novel, film, opera, or play -- hangs; a small weight at one's side, a stone in the pocket. Possibly, even, a poem. The leaves are turning, the light is golden, it tapers off, the night falls early. Slowly, you always said, slowly. But now you are wracked with a sort of spasm, the hand judders along the page, one opens one's mouth only to stammer. Crossing out. Crossing out again. Scraping of the pen on the leaf of the page, the scraping of the leaf on the pavement.

After each match has been consumed, you check the head against your fingertip and return it to the box. The box is labelled SWAN. The sticks rattle in the chamber, and you place it in your pocket, next to the stone, a set of keys, three coins and a paperclip. You wash your hands; four, almost five hours' worth of light yet. Llight. Llanguage. You close your mouth against your stammer and you step out into the day, the stars above drowned in light. Orion and the Pleiades have set.

The bells of the chapel ring out noon; this is not a metaphor, it occurs and you note it as you do the date, an arbitrary marker, an anchor. Note what you can verify in hope determining what falls between. You listen unti it stops and you continue to listen. And you walk. Steps. One following another.

2009-11-01T11:11:00.000-08:00

In 1939, Giacometti chose, for a while, to make figures from memory rather than from life, but no matter how hard he tried, the figures kept turning out smaller than he wanted. The problem persisted two years later when he decided to visit his mother, who was then in Geneva, promising friends and also his brother Diego that he would return to Paris with works of a less absurd size.

But with one exception, the figures he made in Switzerland came out tiny, too. He would start over and over again on the same one. It was a sculpture of his friend Isabel standing one evening on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The memory stuck in his head. ''It isn't the lack of a visa that's stopping me coming back,'' he wrote to her. ''I can come back when I like. It's my sculpture that's keeping me.''

It kept him in Geneva from 1941 through 1945. When he finally boarded the train back to France, he took with him three and a half years' worth of work in six matchboxes. [source]

2009-08-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

There's a prefatory note in the holograph edition of of Woolf's The Waves, wch remarks that the manuscript was originally written in purple ink, or black ink that had faded to purple.

"Come into the garden, Maud
And blossom in purple and red."

fading to nothingness, coming to light

2009-08-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

Spurious offers a quote from WG Sebald:

Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off 23 in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.
--W. G. Sebald, in an interview

I think I know the source for this, but I'm mistaken; what I do recollect is a selection of Sebaldian "maxims" from an issue of Five Dials. "Veils of ash" and "veils of rain" are cited in the following essay, wch mentions After Nature, a book I've read once & haven't touched in years. I take it off the shelf, and there's a slip of paper inside the front cover, a receipt -- but it's almost entirely blank; it's only the dimensions and texture that make me recognize it as such. The ink hasn't ghosted onto the endpapers, it's merely faded almost entirely away; odd, as it's been sealed up away from the light and air for some time. I can make out enough to see that it's from the University Book Store, and the date 2004. That seems about right, chronologically speaking -- likely picked up off the mark-down table. Slowly, though, more ink appears: I can fully discern "University Book Store | 2004-2005" and "Retain this receipt." All that identifies my purchase(s)? are some numbers, stock codes at the margin.
Pondering loss lately, it's strange how things come back.

faded almost entirely away, slowly almost everything comes back to me

2009-08-06T01:15:00.000-07:00

4.

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

5.

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory's light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future

-- Inger Christensen, from Alphabet

2009-08-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

No posts for July. Seems I didn't do much. The sentences come slowly, when they come. Crawling, broken waves. Seems I didn't say much, either. Kind of a hollow. I worked. I fretted. I went from smoking a pack of cigarettes in a week to one in four days. I began to feel that my use of a computer was an invasion of my own privacy. I ignored emails. I paced. I curtailed long walks due to laziness and the heat. I slept odd hours, waking in the middle of the night to go outside and look at the stars. Cigarettes at 3am. Slow sentences. I catch a glimpse of myself in the glass and wonder how this came to be. A phrase occurs, it sounds good, I roll it around in my head, I don't write it down. This aids in the delusion of writing. Yet there's a cheap paper notepad, corners creased, half-way written through; it's in the bookstack next to this table, its first few dozen pages dogged & curled back. These I can dispose of with no ill will, regard. I saw J. tonight, who asked are you still blogging. Fits and starts. No talk of writing, thank god. It was late. I get through most days with a shrug and a half-smile. "Every thought sholud recall the debris of a smile." - Jean-Luc Godard, Eloge de l'amour. I digress.
I saw that the first of the dahlias are starting to bloom. I read Janice Galloway's first novel, and she's correct: The Trick Is To Keep Breathing. Crawling, broken waves. Sometimes a phrase comes.

2009-06-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

"THERE IS NO NEW WORK. It is the old work rotting and I can't recognise it anymore. It is the old world rotting and I see it for what it is. For the first time maybe. It is departing slowly from me. Waving gently and nodding as though it will all be OK in the end, that it's just nature, just the way of things. The things that made me are in themselves becoming unmade. What appeared permanent and solid and outside of time is coming apart and falling behind itself.

Memory becomes as unreliable as forgetting. Reality lacks the poetry of melting into air. The familiar falls beyond use and lies in the way. I carry within myself an older man. His illness slows me, his dried mouth robs me of speech, his amnesia forces me to live in the today. But after all this I still cannot come to terms with the simple fact that life slips away and time is called everywhere everyday. What some may call a subject or an idea or an answer to the question what is your work about? is only an act of holding on." -- George Shaw, via wood s lot

2009-06-30T11:11:00.000-07:00

In what he writes, there are two texts. Text I is reactive, moved by indignations, fears, unspoken rejoinders, minor paranoias, defenses, scenes. Text II is active, moved by pleasure. But as it is written, corrected, accommodated to the fiction of Style, Text I becomes active too, whereupon it loses its reactive skin, which subsists only in patches (mere parentheses).
-- Roland Barthes

*

I'm writing in two identical Chinese notebooks, cheap, hardbound, essentially disposable. A strip of blue tape on the spine of one distinguishes it from the other; they're internally differentiated by the use of either blue or black ink. One is desk-bound, the other I sometimes carry with me. Tending to work mornings in one, nights in the other but this is hardly a rule, just a tendency. The story, as such, is happening between them -- a writing that dictates its own terms, a story that is neither here nor there. At a certain point, the scissors may come out and a third text will show itself, or, having failed that, something may be fashioned from the remains. Or the books, having served their purpose, will be discarded, & something may follow this duration of writing: a shade of faulty memories, Chinese whispers. As I note this I realize I'm writing what it's not, that it's somewhere behind me, left on a park bench, it remains to be seen, neither here nor there. Parallax: one looks at an object too closely and it cleaves into two. Cleave, a word that's a blade with two sides: cleave to, cleave from.

2009-06-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

"Not to be forgotten: the adjective is a commodity."
-- Roland Barthes, The Neutral

2009-06-22T21:19:00.000-07:00

"Barthes himself had dreams of writing a novel, but was brought up short by the first obstacle he encountered -- namely, the difficulty of inventing proper names for all his characters and then believing in them." -- Nancy Huston, Losing North

2009-06-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

You're going to say I'm straying off topic, that I shouldn't digress, but it reminds me of something at the Sorbonne, Aragon giving a lecture on Petrarch.
To digress, everyone despises Aragon. I love him. End of digression.
So, Louis Aragon lectures on Petrarch. He starts off with terrific tribute to Matisse. He goes on for at least 45 minutes. Finally, a student in the back shouts, "Get back to the subject!" And Aragon, magnificent, after finishing the phrase which had been interrupted, said, "The originality of Petrarch lies precisely in the art of digression."
I'm the same. I'm not straying from the subject, and if I do, that's my real subject, exactly like a car that strays from its usual path because a flood forces it to drive across fields to reach the road to Paris.
-- Jean-Luc Godard / Francois Truffaut, Une Histoire d'Eau

*
This is the 501st post at Red Threads (the count may include posts left behind or relegated as drafts, wch I never review). So what am I to say - that this beautiful excerpt, arbitrarily numbered, marks a new beginning? --Only as far as each post is a new beginning. If I had not encountered the Blanchot quote that remains as this blog's motto, this notebook might not exist. So today, on the cusp of the solstice, I repeat:

"I have never found the phrase. I elaborate with many erasures." -- Virginia Woolf

"The search says more than the discovery." -- St. Augustine

2009-06-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

Tir-aux-pigeons has what I find to be an invigorating & inspiring approach to publishing: their impeccably designed chapbooks are available for free download as PDFs, but if you want the physical, actual paper object in your hand, they can be ordered. I particularly enjoyed Drew Kunz’s Terminals; it limns a space between poetry and fiction. Condensed, but lyrical. Lyrical? I rarely use the word. But it reminds me that Webern wrote songs. Contra Euclid, these are points that have a part.

There are a few blogs that make me glad for internet access. This Space is one. It’s a rare occasion I see something in the review press that raises questions, makes a claim, is devoted not to a market, but writing -- not selling a personality or a product, but to the work. In a post last month, Steve writes a little about blogging and recaps a few years of posts. His review of The Kindly Ones was the most perceptive one I’ve read. Perhaps more from me later; Littell’s book was the most striking read of my spring, but I’m sitting here with a new home computer after scrambling for a few months between staying late at work and using public computers with their attendant distractions and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Technology. Damn. Excuses. Damn again.

2009-06-12T23:11:00.000-07:00

S. wants to make things other than what they are; H. wants things exactly -- precisely -- as they are. S. dreams of the depths and shadows of a subject; H. dreams of the hardness and clarity of objects. Sometimes it is enough that they both dream, that they engage on some plane, and in these engagement they interrelate. But there is a tension, a separation between them: they stand back to back, spines a centimeter apart, seeing other landscapes, and while they sense each other, nothing can narrow the chasm that separates them.

a point. to clarify:
S. is based on someone I know and some others I knew, with a few characteristics & events of other friends thrown in. It’s a shorthand way of writing about something and not writing about something at the same time; no one can say “I didn’t say that” because they didn’t. Unless they did. H., wch is silent in French, the letter itself pronounced as ash, features principally in a long prose work I’ve been adding to and deleting from for a few years now. Some, not much, of it appearing in translation here. So when I write about a relationship, I’m writing about writing. And when I’m writing about writing, I’m writing.

2009-06-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

What happened to that hunger?-- To laugh over sushi, breath deeply of the scent of night? -- To walk for hours, to talk until the light changed? To walk alone, all the time taking notes, or stopping, simply to be. To pick up a book in the afternoon and read against the fading light, telling oneself “just one more page, then I will get up and turn on the light.” And then, that sweet stiffness as one stands, recovering their height and their body. A cigarette would be good, a walk around the block...

I bought a book today. There was a time when I couldn’t wait -- I’d dash off to the nearest coffee shop or park and delve into it. Tonight it seems enough that I managed to get it out of my bag. But I did have sushi, and I will go and have that cigarette.

*

A new computer, finally. It’s so 21st century, shiny. An alien object, it repulses the clutter & dust of my apartment. Paper generates dust; this polycarbonate and metal shell, mercurial screen-- it comes from a world without dust. It smells like a gleaming future world. But it changes nothing. It’s like desire; it quickens the heart, promises something, but it’s really just grabbing at ether / or an ethernet connection.

Tuesday, I got the the internet connection turned on and the modem connected. Wednesday, I bought new fountain pen ink went to a movie.

Socialisme

2009-05-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

"I stared at the sea until nothing was left"

2009-04-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

"One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened in this way. I was alone in the house. I shut myself in - of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.

Still, in Trouville there was the beach, the sea, the vastness of the sky and sands. That's what solitude was here. It was in Trouville that I stared at the sea until nothing was left. Trouville was the solitude of my entire life. I still have that solitude around me, impregnable. Sometimes I close the doors, shut off the telephone, shut off my voice, don't want anything.

Write all the same, in spite of despair. No: with despair. I don't know what to call that despair. Writing to one side of what precedes writing is always to ruin it. And yet we must accept this: ruining the failure means coming back toward another book, toward another possibility of the same book."

-- Marguerite Duras, from Writing [via Spurious]

weird realism

2009-04-13T23:11:00.000-07:00

Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions - a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door - which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin's Lane, "of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with 'COFFEE ROOM' painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood." That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc," is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects.
-- G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens

sunday evening

2009-04-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

No Comment

2009-03-17T11:11:00.000-07:00

What sounds like an almost ideal reading series:

NO COMMENT is a reading series in which one writer reads a substantial portion of his/her work. No sales, no signings, no schmoozing, no Q & A or song or dance or comment - just the work read by the author. The writer will read for 45 minutes to an hour or so. Then everyone files out quietly.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18: Stacey Levine
7:30 pm, The New City Shoebox Theater, at 1404 18th Avenue,
just off Union Street, Seattle. $5 cash at the door.

time out

2009-02-27T20:19:00.000-08:00

At the present time, I'm without a computer at home; the slow and grumpy antique monolith finally gave up its digital ghost a few weeks ago. It makes the apartment quieter, allows different focii. And renders time a little more slippery. What I manage now is done at work afterhours or at the library; limited by time and tiredness in both places. DVDs aside, mixed feelings about technology persist; I'm resolute about writing in pen and ink, and am presently typing out (via a 1960 Olympia manual) a fair copy of a prosework, something that actually resembles physical labor. But I do miss email. Regarding the aforementioned typescript, the potential of a new machine makes me realize that a spiffy new computer, depending on my attitude and allowing for some infatuation with the new, could significantly change some ways I approach or develop writing-work. Likely not the scratching, pacing-about generative aspects, but there is the possibility of working more things into more finished, finalized forms. (This compliments my as yet unacted upon resolution to "do something" about a box of notebooks, and at the same time conjures up some hideous phrase like "effective data management"). Writing on a computer -- I know, it's like "hey! -- welcome to the 90s!" But I'm slow and resistant about these things, and that may not necessarily be good. But there are some ruts that've been worn deep enough, and it may be time to reassess how I work, how I operate, and to a further degree, how I socialize a writing practice. I have some reservations. Whereas I have no reservations about Chiara Mastroianni singing (the film as a whole, is another matter). The tone, the light, is just right.

anniversary

2009-01-25T11:11:00.000-08:00

Today's the anniversary of Virginia Woolf's birth, and the fifth anniversary of this blogwriting project, notebook, cache of loose ends, loose threads...
Looked through the Diaries this morning, hoping to find a quote for this date -- a good thing about dating things, using the day as a random way of cross-sectioning. But I will fall back on an old favorite:
"But according to Montaigne, one is various. I can't lay down a law for my feelings." -- V. Woolf, 12.I.1924

Tagging entries wasn't an option when I started, and I haven't felt the need to introduce them; however, some possible categories might be:
misreadings; vagueness; the hardness of objects; light; doubt; writing; dust & residue; memories; anti-memories; clouds, mists & vapours; stones & pebbles; pellicula; accidents & occasions; various seas; ellipses

2009-01-22T21:19:00.000-08:00

[accidental couplet]

the sublime is the ring

from the pebble out--

[not a writing; rather, a misreading]

2009-01-17T08:21:00.000-08:00

Let’s call this a diary, then. Register [of] bleakness. The broken ceramic bird cradled in a nest of papers on the desk, the fog that moves outside like smoke. Past recognition... Or: Past. Recognition. Once could stop at any point. A sort of stutter. “The stutter is the plot” (Susan Howe, quoting— Olson on Melville?) The stutter, the full stops, ellipses. Marking. The end of a digression. The beginning of another. Vast spaces within each moment. Each word a hard object (objection), encrusted on the interior of another. And the surface of this sense?
The mist lifts, the dew dries, and the webs become invisible once again; the moths, too, are dormant.

2009-01-16T23:11:00.000-08:00

A line is drawn along the passage; a question mark placed in the margin.

2009-01-13T23:11:00.000-08:00

"But in what sense can we say that those two times, the past and the future, exist, when the past no longer is and the future is not yet? Yet if the present were always present and did not go by into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity. If, therefore, the present (if it is to be time at all) only comes into existence because it is in transition toward the past, how can we say that even the present is? For the cause of its being is that it shall cease to be."
--St. Augustine, Confessions

2009-01-11T23:11:00.000-08:00

mist] Writing this longhand because I don't want the noise of the hard drive, even. Occasional raindrops fall -- not as rain, but from the nightmist that has condensed at the ends of tree branches, until gravity breaks the surface tension, the skin of the water droplet. Tiny fixed points of light.

recollection] "See what was..." I was in Cleveland, a night a long time ago, drove up to see some band or was with some band & we stuck around after the show, two of us finally getting into a van, one of the last in the parking lot, down in the Flats, next to the river, a light rain falling or a mist in the air. Amazing to be down among the steel mills, 3am or so, turning on the engine and the radio comes on with it and it's The Fall's "Garden" -- and the two of us just sitting there, not moving for the duration of the song, looking out at the fog-veiled lights on the bridges.

receipt] A few weeks ago I received a receipt in my mailbox for a package left at the post office, something I had to go to the post office to sign for, or pay postage due, who knows?-- I was expecting no packages, though this was the holiday season. When I went to the post office, nothing could be found, despite lengthy searches by two clerks. I was allowed to keep the receipt, some small, rain-wrinkled document of a failure of the system, a blank marker impossible to cash in.

journal] I debated buying a diary this year. I find the pocket-sized Moleskine page-a-day diaries can be useful; I can get about 150 words per page (script creeping toward the Walserian) -- but I've found it to be enough to sketch out what's necessary, working out a few ideas, a few rightly set sentences. And it enforces a sort of discipline -- esp. in regards to writing at night. I seem to have this mental block / fixation that only the morning hours are productive. And that something ought to change. The diary sits on the desk, still in its shrinkwrap. Technically, it's not blank because it remains unopened. It remains a possible object.

necessity] Is this necessary? Is this enough? I think there was something else, something that occurred to me earlier, outside in the mist, composing this post as I wandered down the alley. An unusually warm evening (hence the mist). A moth flutters around a bare lightbulb on the backstairs. The night the stairs the light the moth, the breaking drop, the matted leaves. Backdrop of night; not eternal night, not eternal light, but an occcasional moth. That'll do.

GARDEN GARDEN
small, small location
see what flows
from his mushy pen

2009-01-04T11:11:00.000-08:00

2008-12-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

2008-12-25T00:11:00.000-08:00

Robert Walser, who had abandoned writing for the asylum, went on a walk Christmas Day, 1956. Children at play in a field found his body as if he had laid down to rest; Robert Walser, dead of a heart attack, a light snow falling on the scene.

*

Prose Piece

Between snowflakes and leaves there are resemblances. At the sight of snow falling one thinks that one is seeing small flowers that are falling from the sky. Why is foliage dying in the autumn secretly golden, and why does one think of springtime flowers having tongues, to shape some kind of conversation? Seeing leaves one thinks of hands, their finger-inesses are budlike. Birds’ feathers, leaves on a tree, the delicate, feathery, fingery snowfall in winter -- one rightly tells oneself that they are related. The wind seems to be an undependable blunderer; its lull is as sweet as compliance, blissful in itself, flowing round itself, feeling itself beautiful. Does the wind feel that it is windy? Does the leaf know how beautiful it
is? Do the snowflakes smile and do flowers charm themselves, and do curls know their curliness? A river in its motion resembles a limber wanderer in a hurry,
the watery mass of a lake in its repose a beautiful woman in white gloves, with blue eyes. The profusion of leaves hides the enchanting finery of the branches. It is a pretty thought that pretty things exist. The shapes of waves and branches are snaky, and times do come when one knows that one is no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or, as it certainly longs now and then for release from its uncommonly graceful confines, the leaf.

-- Robert Walser, from Speaking to the Rose

2008-12-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

2008-12-21T23:11:00.000-08:00

He shakes his head, puckers his lids, his lips... “No, positively no, that won’t do.” He stretches out his arm, bends it again... “I tear out the page.” He clenches his fist, then his arm drops, his hand relaxes... “I throw it away. I take another sheet. I write. On the typewriter. Always. I never write by hand. I re-read...” His head moves from side to side. His lips are pouting... “No, no, and again no. I tear it out. I crumple it. I throw it away. And so three, four, ten times I start over...” He pucker his lips, frowns, stretches his arm, bends it again, lets it drop, clenches his fist.

And now she, his self-effacing mate, is staring into the distance contemplating a mental picture... “The entire study is strewn with it.” She is speaking very softly, in a colorless voice.... “He throws it on the floor. He comes out reeling. Sometimes he is dripping wet. When you speak to him, he doesn’t hear you.”

His arm is like a joined metal rod that folds and unfolds. I tear it out. I crumple it. I throw it away. The rod bears down, digs. The repeated gesture becomes engraved. Again. Again and again. I take a new sheet. His fingers are tapping. On the white page words and sentences form. Miracle. How do we do it? It’s a great mystery. His eyes move from line to line, he shakes his head. No, and again, no. And so I toil day in day out. Sometimes I awake in the night, I question myself. What is the use of all this struggle, this endeavor? Why, in heaven’s name, for what?

-- Nathalie Sarraute, Between Life and Death

2008-12-18T07:34:00.000-08:00

5 1/2 x 8 1/2. A sense of loss is pleated, crumpled,
then pressed onto the page,
texturing the bond with shadowy lotteries.
Is it shredding or building: neutral, engaged,
morph and/or decay?

Yes.
The condition of being
under the changeable sun in the,
although smallish to us, vast
and lustrous spaces
of accidental time, lithic
melancholy,
and milky wrinkles
is--what it is.

--Rachel Blau DuPlessis

line and shadow

2008-12-17T01:11:00.000-08:00

a cut becomes the wound, gives way to the scar, wch, in time, fades. So it comes as quite a shock when, from deep beneath the surface, the initial spasm flexes itself once again...

compacted

2008-12-16T23:11:00.000-08:00

A day or two after the snowfall, gravity wins out: the crystals coalesce, the snow collapses on itself. The snow is tired. Holes appear, the white shell recedes into crusted edges; the uneven lines of the shingled rooftops affirm their unyielding form from below. The pattern, the sheet, the ragged edge,

*

two wounds, never any mention of a third [...]
two wounds, always only two wounds, never a mention of the scar,

--Thomas Bernhard, On the Mountain

2008-12-15T08:43:00.000-08:00

In the morning, standing on the fire escape, I hear the sound of a jetliner, wch barely registers. Sometimes the sound, like that of a train whistle, brings up an immense longing to move, be elsewhere. But this morning I’m simply content to stamp my feet in the snow, in the stillness in the wake of the plane, & feel the low sun on my face. And then, after some time has transpired and my thought has drifted on to something else, my eye catches what I take to be a star amidst the blue sky. This bright tiny point is the plane, banking, catching the sun, already well over the mountains.

2008-12-14T00:41:00.000-08:00

I pace the room. I orbit a single crumpled ball of paper.

2008-12-13T23:59:00.000-08:00

A gesture. No, not the gesture, but rather what lies beneath it. The subtly shifting mood or sensibility beneath a phrase; a stress, a minute thing at the center. And a name, held like an object, like a stone in one's mouth. Nathalie Sarraute.

2008-12-13T23:41:00.000-08:00

Walser, Celan, Flaubert, Proust, Kristeva, Pascal, Bachmann, Genet, Green, Beckett. Henry Brulard. I run my fingers along the edges and spines, set them in stacks, in rows. I square my shoulders, straighten my spine. There's snow on the ground and in the branches, the moon just visible between the clouds.
Or: Tulli, Kafka, Oppen, Leiris, Mansfield, Howe, Redonnet, Nancy, Barthes, Sollers, Austen. Walser: The Walk. I move from shelf to shelf, stack to stack to table, hoverring, settling, ordering. Again: Tropisms. Martereau. The Planetarium. The Age of Suspicion. The Golden Fruits. Between Life and Death. The Use of Speech. Here. Lists come easy. And in the ease of making a list, one realizes that they catalogue not so much accumulations or accomplishments, but deficiencies. And the overlooked, uncredited -- something that, through accident or intention, escapes. The moon -- here, then gone again.

2008-12-11T23:11:00.000-08:00

Maximus, to Gloucester: Letter 2
by Charles Olson

. . . . . tell you? ha! who
can tell another how
to manage the swimming?

he was right: people

don’t change. They only stand more
revealed. I,
likewise

[...]

via Flowerville, "no loss of small detail"

2008-12-10T23:11:00.000-08:00

On 27 October, No Answers wrote:

There are no answers, only choices.

On this note, I think this blog has said as well as it was able what it was it wanted to say, and so this will be my final post. [...]

*

I bookmarked the page, meaning to go back and read the blog from the beginning, now that it had reached and ending. When I returned to it, I see that another choice was made.

"In the garden beside the fountain the invisible grey girl says today: 'I did it. I did it. I did it.' Last week, when I returned, she was saying: 'And so it was. And so it was. And so it was.'"

*

And so it is.

2008-12-01T11:11:00.000-08:00

to the Ides

2008-11-13T23:11:00.000-08:00

from The Ides

milky ink
slow tide

walked through
it

blue-black

bells in the distance

*

Dream

a mark erased

*

water-stained pictures

memory-word

FALL

*

iron gall

in the morning

a peculiar quality

of local light

point of pen

hoverring

*

the end of
daylight

evening

a single

star

*

flower

within the threads
a coil of wire

a bead of water
holds it

*

strings,

lines

*

curve of
garden theory

salt-edged
crown
beds

*

ever fast
ever slow

Tilda in the bluebells

*

distant sounds

a sign
a sigh

a breath upon the page
stirs it

and moth dust

*

I reckon
by leaves

patterns of ash

a single feather
in the wake

of it

Smoke

the ebbing line.

burn everything

2008-10-28T23:11:00.000-07:00

For all the claims of ease of communicability made on behalf of the Information Age, technology has made forgetting so much easier. Not only does the torrent speed past and sweep so much away, but e-mails, memos, blogposts, photos and novels can be disposed of with two simple clicks. In the olden days, disposing of a letter took some degree of thought and action: tear it apart or burn it. (One does not idly throw away a letter). The physical action this entailed always gave one the opportunity for second thoughts; the letter could be taped back together, pulled from the flames. Once, on a hike into a remote area on the coast, I packed in a bundle of 5-10 years of writing, and after dinner, sat by the fire and watched as they were reduced to ash. We’ve all seen filmed images of burning pages curling back & blackening; this was personal. At one point I was seized with a fit of misgiving and grabbed my notebook, writing what escaped from the ever-increasing margins, writing at the edge of the fire. Some of this was shredded or sifted into other poems, other books. Some silted down into the boxes of papers that, should this building catch on fire, I’d stop in front of and wonder: really, is it time to let all this go?

the shingle at my feet

2008-10-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

S., with whom I had a somewhat brief and unusual friendship at around the time I discovered Woolf’s story, “Solid Objects,” (in brief: small town; long walks, long letters), once sat me down at a table in the basement of the boarding house where she lived (its dreary “common room”) with an antiquated anthology of poems and requested that I pick one that meant something to me and then to defend it. It was Arnold’s "Dover Beach"; one of the few things I was taught in high school that made resonance. Was it the bleakness, presentiment, or blind chance? But somehow, “...that grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling” still lingers in the subconscious; re-reading the poem now, I recognize the riptide in it in the films of Derek Jarman; it lingers through Woolf; I see it in the “naked shingles of the world” that the moon lights up when I take a walk down the alley; I now attach it to my last trip to the beach. I might well still have the letters, somewhere -- a foreign shore they would find, no doubt, were they to make landfall again.

2008-10-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

in quotes in the original

2008-10-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

“So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps
the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.”

--Clark Coolidge, The Crystal Text

thing, writing

2008-10-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

One could start with Ezra Pound’s three “Imagist” criteria for poetry:

1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

-- allowing that “the musical phrase” extends to those of Webern, Feldman, etc. The most important word used by Pound?-- CONDENSARE. A poem a stony lens, a melting bead of water. But while lists and manifestoes are useful tools, it’s rather pointless to set down rules; each writing will make its own. No doubt centuries of rain have erased inscriptions in Gray’s English churchyard; it doesn’t rewrite the poem. And I am sure the stones are very fine objects in their own right.

While almost any thing or any writing sets up echoes -- sometimes as a slapback report, at times a long, distended tone (trains at the switching yard at the edge of town produce a rumble often mistaken for thunder) -- and while most everything is dirtied, shadowed, or occulted by associations and contexts both intended and accidental, sometimes I think of a kind pure writing, or a “purity” (a loaded word, but one that will have to suffice) -- beyond subject or object, neither speech nor text, medium and material, particle and wave.

The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void. This discomforting language of fragmentation offers no easy gestalt solution; the certainties of didactic discourse are hurled into the erosion of poetic principle. Poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation. Poetry is always a dying art but never a dead language.-- Robert Smithson

Subject or object, speech or text, medium or material, particle or wave, one sets down to write what one does not know. From 25 Aug 1982 to 9 June 1983, Clark Coolidge sat down at his desk each day with nothing but paper and a piece of quartz in front of him; The Crystal Text is what followed. Poem, meditation, daybook; it is a book, and as such, it is an object and a becoming; the genre is immaterial.

“Rearranging all the things into forms of face
pressed into the air. Not knowing what to be there,
nor budging from it. Image as negative
off the “real” world. Impression in what?
Vacuum of ignorance? I am accoutred
with knowledges. But they seldom make an
inroad. The image is what I have forgotten
the painter prized. It curls itself out of semblances
of silence and the unaccustomed nerve.
Bloat is the result and knowing takes no hold.

The crystal brings sided air to a water standing.
Quartz is the original untampered word.
When I propose a live reading of a poem I think of
going up there to cut some fine edges.

*[...]*

What I need I will get.
But the supplies must be reduced.
These words here are already too much.
Many words stand for a vast emptiness.
The only way it may be reduced to sense?
Few words to be a hugeness of forms.
Also those words to be tiny pockets
contain the things that are enough.

--Clark Coolidge, The Crystal Text

2008-10-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

Obviously you're working some things out, a friendly critic might say; your problem is that you're a materialist and a daydreamer.

"which I hold sometimes if I am feeling bleak"

2008-10-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Why a poem like a stone, when there is the stone, there on the desk: its beachworn form; grey on grey, its striations, crystalline flecks; what it signifies and what it repudiates: the weight of it in one’s hand. The physical presence and unspeakable distance it radiates, just sitting there.
Was I 19, 20 years old, then?-- when I read Virginia Woolf’s story, "Solid Objects." Like an epiphany; the shock of sympathy and recognition I found there, not only in the language, but in the character of John. And I sensed that I was somehow lost, then. In truth, John had been that day to Barnes Common, and there under a furze bush had found a very remarkable piece of iron. It was almost identical with the glass in shape, massy and globular, but so cold and heavy, so black and metallic, that it was evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a moon. It weighed his pocket down; it weighed the mantel-piece down; it radiated cold. And yet the meteorite stood upon the same ledge with the lump of glass and the star-shaped china. And so -- to a lesser extent -- objects occupy my desk; stones, dried leaves, a section of rebar; a glass box with silver fittings (a gift from a friend) contains others; the bookshelves hold miscellaneous large fragments, postcards, and a coffee can and a box are filled with paperclips found on the street.
I remember reading one of those Guardian pieces on writer's rooms; a friend had read the same article, by Hilary Mantel, and remembered it to me. I knew immediately of what she spoke, though I -- to this day -- know nothing of Mantel or her work, only her work space. Funny that one detail struck us both so: "My desk was made in Norfolk in serviceable pine. It is arranged in layers, as a working model of my mind. The surface is dull, plain and tidy. The only ornament is a tiny, chipped pottery cat in a basket, which I hold sometimes if I am feeling bleak. In the upper drawers are half-used notebooks, fossils, crystals, seashore pebbles, a pack of tarot cards, my five-year diary, a steel measure, a stop watch and a last letter from a dead friend."

Objects and their kin; unposed rhetorical questions. You roll a stone across your palm, finger a string of small blue beads, a piece of steel with an unusual patina; you remember the quality of sunlight, the tone of a voice, scents of sea water, freshly cut hay, rosewater. Rain after a dry spell; streets slick with tire-hammered oil. You hold a ceramic bird, a salt shaker broken from its base. The bleakness. The tide comes in and the tide goes out. The sun goes down and you walk away with a stone in your pocket.

2008-10-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

"something like storm and like sleep"

enclose the noise
of another tongue
adding to what falls

"something like sharpening a knife"

outside it
no levity

[...]

fable that nourishes

unbeknownst to them
we bring forth

unwonted acts
buried in the hand

-- Claude Royet-Journoud, from Objects Contain the Infinite

2008-10-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

I date the page “20” and go back, draw a line through the zero to form the number twenty-one, but the circle stands, cut-through, negated -- symbol for an empty set.
A mistake, I think, to have placed my desk by the window. Facing a blank wall makes me feel claustrophobic, though. It helps to have some space; I seem to need some depth of field.

First image of the day: a crow on the opposite rooftop, a bone in its beak.
Later: sun breaking over the trees and falling on the rooftops out back; the tarpaper nightblack with dew, wch burns off in wisps and sheets of vapor. From where I stand on my building’s fire escape, I’m just below the roofline, so I see the edge and the mist stream off in profile, licking around the edges as it rises and evaporates into the day.
I dreamt something last night, and while I wonder at this sight, so material-aethereal, I realize I’m losing any wisp or trace of the dream; no ruin, not even the shadow of an image.
Another cigarette, and the mist still rising, copiously. I move up a few steps wch lends a view onto the roof, a black sloping wing, smoldering. Nearly finished, I shred the butt of the cigarette between my fingers, raining down brown dust lit gold by the sun. The ashy tip dangles from the end, then drops, falling through the shimmery field, smoke trailing in its wake. An anti-meteor: a smoking, black earthbound ball. It falls without a sound. A jet banks in the distance, catching the sun for a moment, a point on its arc. By the time I’m sitting at my desk, marking off an empty set, it’s passing overhead.

like a mislaid letter

2008-10-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

the tide comes in and the tide goes out

slowly

2008-10-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

no; more slowly

Out of the heaviness of late summer...

2008-09-15T19:20:00.001-07:00

No matter that it's been warm, lately -- there's an undertone to the air that's unmistakably autumn; up late enough and I can see the Pleiades. Spent a good deal of August wrapped up in a long prose piece. Usual twinging, nattering voice accompanies, moth against the screen; my fundamental dislike of narrative in most of its forms - memoir, psychoanalysis, other people's stories. To be fair, I do not care much for my memories -- a somewhat uncharitable view to take, but I'll take it, yes please, with a glass of flat tap water. Aftertaste of the word brittle.

No "twitch upon the thread," more of a twinge when I think of memories. How tiresome.

*

When I hear about David Foster Wallace's death, I recalled something I heard he said in a public discussion with Rick Moody, I think it was; an internet search brought up this. I'll leave it at that:
"...Wallace still maintained that a work of art that was unabashedly sentimental was more of a revolutionary act today than embracing the hip and edgy in contemporary art."

2008-09-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

First Gent. How class your man?-- as better than the most,
Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak?
As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite?
2nd Gent. Nay, tell me how you class your wealth of books,
The drifted relics of all time. As well
Sort them at once by size and livery:
Vellum, tall copies, and the common calf
Will hardly cover more diversity
Than all your labels cunningly devised
To class all your unread authors.

-- George Eliot

2008-09-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

“Have I read the gesture of your left hand correctly? If so, give me your poems; hand over the sheets you wrote last night in such a fervour of inspiration that you now feel a little sheepish.”
-- Virginia Woolf

“I feel my arm and in a queer way I should now like to say. I feel it in a definite position in space; as if the feeling of my body in a space were disposed in the shape of an arm, so that in order to represent it I should have to model my arm, in plaster say, in the right position.”
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

“One language-game analogous to a fragment of another. One space projected into a limited extent of another. A ‘gappy’ space.”
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Someone has torn up a letter and thrown it away. Picking up the pieces, one feels that many of them can be fitted together.”
-- Sei Shonagon

“The narratives have dropped away like those rockets that disintegrate in the atmosphere once they have placed their small payloads in orbit. Detached from their original settings, each scene is now the satellite of the other. Each echoes the other, increasingly merges with the other, and I experience a kind of fascinated incomprehension before the hybrid object they have become.”
-- Victor Burgin

“Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.
There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once. She bent down and took a wing the entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon.”
-- Henry Green

Fragment

2008-09-05T23:11:00.000-07:00

The fragment deserves our attention for a moment, if only by virtue of the fact that for some it causes a technical discomfort.

The life of the classical elegiac poet is a life in the past and a life in the passive voice. It has been shattered and the elegist, sighing, collects its fragments, odds and ends, bits and pieces.... These fragments represent for him what is left of a disappeared original state, one to which they recall him constantly. The elegiac poet rehashes and takes pleasure in it like the Chinese dogs "that gnaw on old bare white bones that haven't had any meat on them for a long time. But by gnawing them, they tear their gums and end up with the taste. The taste of their own blood."

To the eye of the reverse elegiac poet, whom one can also call the tragic poet, (V. Cave canem), the fragments don't reflect a disappeared origin or context or unity that would guarantee their meaning. What in the fragments fascinates him is not their causal link with events of his past life, but rather that they are so vivid they blow away all biographical context. They shine in the present with an unimaginable brilliance, with a brilliance of their own.

These decontextualized units -- decontaminated, I should say -- are floating propositions in the image of European currencies during a period of crisis: propositions returned to an autonomous state that no context need legitimate further and whose sole guarantee is my gaze, as though I am seeing them now for the first time.

I select them empirically (V. Elegiable) like the terms of a discrete series. George Oppen says, "...that there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction."

These fragments do not link together but attract each other by "affinity," by a kind of necessity or ludic and happy intention, by gay science. When two fragments meet, their affiliation engenders a kairos (V. that word).

-- Emmanuel Hocquard

Joy Without Harm

2008-09-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

The knot at the heart of it is the question of representation (represent or represent one's self). Heidegger, whom I do not like (to quote, said "thinking is presentifying, not representing).

The reverse elegist flees representation. Except in the sense of to copy (V. Literal, literality, literally). His activity is essentially ludic. Which does not necessarily mean comic. But he plays (V. Childhood). He plays with things as they exist (V. Zukofsky), with language as it exists (V. Wittgenstein). That is, as he meets them, before him and around him. He does not turn back, he does not dig. He gathers. His game consists of effecting (or not) unforeseen connections between the objects of language that present themselves, be they already representations (Cf. Reznikoff), which he treats as surfaces, for he is irreducibly superficial.

And when he achieves a good connection, a bold connection, he rejoices for a moment. Aristotle would speak of it as a joy without harm.

-- Emmanuel Hocquard, from "This Story Is Mine: A Little Autobiographical Dictionary of Elegy.

swan rot

2008-08-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

2008-07-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Received a letter from V. yesterday, wch I read over coffee this morning. Truly correspondent, she writes, "I love ruthless editing."

2008-07-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

"What have we overlooked / Nostalgia is another name for one's sense of loss at the thought that one has sadly gone along happily overlooking something, who knows what / Perhaps there were three things, no one of which made sense without the other two [...]
What was the Greek word for that, the big chance for each event - kairos?
-- Lyn Hejinian, from Happily

2008-07-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

a scene not in the script
The funny way things flow, and follow... I came across this interview with Claire Denis again today, and her phrase "write scenes which are not in the script" resonated so, I wanted to post it here; I cut and paste it, and when I look back at this page (I thought I might have copied something out from a book of Proust criticism, or written something about Derek Jarman; I know I've meant to write something about Genet for awhile now) -- I look back at this page with its sage green background and I find that I haven't been here in awhile, and this quote follows a still from Hong Sangsoo's Woman on the Beach -- in wch a director is writing his script -- the juxtaposition is quite unintentional. But these are the red threads, I think, I have my interests and obsessions, repetitions... sketching around works becomes the work, the process. Marking, indicating space as a way of saying what is, indicating what is not.

Working through paratexts; Denis speaks of writing a character's diary for Beau Travail, and working out the screenplay from that; Godard might direct an actor to "read this book, go to the museum and look at the Rodins" as a way of preparing for a role; Rivette shot much of Celine and Julie Go Boating on a day-to-day basis, based on his actor's dreams from the night before. The work, film in these case, constructed out of paratexts.
Perhaps I can say that in a sense, when I write here it's as if by a character walking into a scene. But also, Wednesday night, I wrote a post late at night, tired & on the edge of sleep, wch is not my usual working method. This text exists, it may be transcribed -- at least I intended to do so at the time. It's an integral post nonetheless, hoverring at the periphery, subtly shading what may come: "a scene not in the script" that may in the end even be lost to me; my handwriting's terrible.

2008-07-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

"There are films where you need to rehearse, but it's true, I don't like rehearsing scenes that I'm about to shoot. So there are times when you need to rehearse something a little different. Jean-Pol and I write scenes which are not in the script, just for rehearsal purposes. Because I'm too afraid, if I rehearse a scene, that I'll find myself saying during the shoot: it was so good earlier, now it's gone."
-- from an interview with Claire Denis

2008-06-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

2008-06-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

2008-06-16T05:34:00.000-07:00

2008-06-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

2008-06-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

from an interview with Cy Twombly:
I work in waves, because I'm impatient. Because of a certain physicality, of lack of breath from standing. It has to be done and I do take liberties I wouldn't have taken before....

on The Bacchus paintings:
These were all done in a couple of months. It was just very physical; it's a process. I tried to do one since then, but it didn't work. It was the sensation of the moment; you can't warm it over, unless you want mannerism. When it does come, it's natural. I don't force it.

I'm not a professional painter, since I don't go to the studio and work nine to five like a lot of artists. When something hits me, or I see a painting, or when I see something in nature, it gives me a thing and I go for it. But I don't care if I don't go for three or four months. You know, when it comes it comes.

above: Untitled VII from Bacchus Series

a constellation, not a system

2008-06-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

The “true” -- if I may use what I am generally told is an outdated, if not outright suspect word -- seems to reside in the margins. In matters of presentation, style, etc. -- distrust of all showiness.

The work, unfathomable before its encounter, recedes once the book is closed. The “work” then, in terms of my recollection or commentary, is that of remnants.

*

“The really real thing that I have absolute faith in is the stars” says Moonsook, a character in Hong Sangsoo’s Woman on the Beach. When we look at the stars, we may notice very faint ones out of the corner of our eye; if we turn our gaze upon them, they disappear from view. The trick is holding them in the periphery.
And then there's the relativism of direct sight -- look at the blank space between two familiar stars through a pair of binoculars and the blackness opens up into a field of more and more stars. And nothing destroys our perception of a constellation more readily than a clear, moonless night in the country. Based on a few clear points, what we think of as a constellation is really more of a suggestion; something like a gesture, open to interpretation.

2008-06-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

2008-05-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

Regarding sequencing: if I do not look here for awhile, wch tends to be the case -- but if I use this as a notebook, transcribing things here as I might write in project-oriented notebooks -- the red notebook, the blue and orange books; the green one for dialogues... I discover a process of drafting [draughting] at work; moods and breezes dictate a general climate or tone. One item suprisingly connects to its lost predecessor. Another gesture might echo across lines months from now. Somethings lost in the flurries and mists.
To proceed with doubt as a general rule,

2008-05-28T18:10:00.001-07:00

"But according to Montaigne, one is various. I can't lay down a rule for my feelings."
__ Virginia Woolf, Diary, 12,I.1924

2008-05-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

on memory; from memory?
I cannot say for sure.

2008-05-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

I thought/wrote earlier this morning, that "if I think for a moment that I write in order to remember, then I am mistaken, because I rarely look back. I must write then, in order to forget."

Been thinking a little about information technologies, and how all this apparent wealth of information has nothing to do with memory (although sites of "passive narcissism" such as Facebook and Myspace ensure that more drunken foolishness and more kittycats have been documented over the past month than in the whole of human history). Not sure where I picked up the "passive narcissism" phrase; on memory I borrow a little from Kristeva: memory requires interrogation.
"What Plato and St. Augustine referred to as memory was a permament doubting."
-- Julia Kristeva

2008-05-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

If I write here to remember things, or to concretize them in verbal form, then I'm mistaken and my intentions are flawed -- for I never go back; I write but I do not read, so that the process of remembering becomes the process of forgetting.
I write not to remember, but to forget.

2008-05-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

"...if I'm not writing The Brothers Karamazov while I read it, I'm not doing anything."
-- Jean Genet. Found here.

2008-05-17T17:12:00.000-07:00

I dreamt last night, & vestiges of it have stirred up during the day, the way a slow breeze moves the surface of a pond so that a slip of water laps up against the far edge catching and reflecting the light for a moment -- or maybe it's the sound of it that draws your eye; the effect of some event displaced from its center, some unseen area, to the periphery -- and only a sliver there. Drawn to it, that space at the edge, its ripples having already fanned out, the sound already faded, so it's merely the sense of displacement that remains, an absence.
You worry at it like one does at the edges of scab, but you can't re-create, reincarnate the wound; one cannot will the revelatory effect of an involuntary memory.

I went to the library looking for a particular quote from Genet to post here, but that volume was missing. This, I wrote instead.

2008-05-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

To be immersed in reading; to be outside of time. I love the slow feeling, the shift that takes place when I come out of its undertow and feel the tautness in my neck and shoulders; a mild, somewhat sweet morose delectation in my upper body's stiffness, the physical awareness that time has passed. Closing the book, I notice how far the bookmark has moved -- or, in later opening it, I become conscious of the thinning distance between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand -- lightening in the incremental shift of pages from hand to hand. I try not to look at the last page number, avoid doing the borderline-obsessive counting thing -- how far to the end? (Esp. difficult towards the end of Proust, the process of wch was its own little drama). I feel this bother, this business of getting to the end is distracting, and -- though I do it -- quantifying my pace in any way feels somehow beneath me. I want to be in the present, absorbed by the work & free to flit back and forth, double-checking things that resonante, or simply being there. Maybe it's why I tend to be more interested in the way things are told -- be it book or movie -- than what the story is. The turn, the break, the oddly placed scene, stray thought. Maybe it will make sense later; but for the moment, simply to be drawn into that fold.

The dream, then, of a book without page numbers -- or to read as if there were none.

2008-05-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

"The priest wanted to admonish him to stop this absurd searching. Well, said vapeur, maybe you'd like me to work in the filature, like all the other blockheads, and maybe you'll say that as I know something about machines I might even become a foreman. But I don't want to become a foreman, I like sitting in my shed looking for something that can't be found."
-- Louis Paul Boon, Chapel Road

Happy International Workers Day

2008-05-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

2008-04-12T23:11:00.000-07:00

The light
Of the closed pages, tightly closed, packed against each other
Exposes the new day,

The narrow, frightening light
Before a sunrise.

-- George Oppen

brighter

2008-04-04T23:18:00.000-07:00