A cool kaleidoscope thing: byokal7 (via geegaw)
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Just finished this book Last Call by Tim Powers, sent to me by Tim. Good Tarot-based mythic page-turner fantasy noir. Much of it was lost on me, since I've never been to Vegas, but now that I've read this book, I have a feeling that the things I notice will be the things that Powers did. Done with that, I now am delved into the concatenated rumble of hilarity and event of Thomas Pynchon, namely, V, his first, if you don't count Slow Learner. And which I read once before, but managed to completely forget. Studying Pynchon's very idiosyncratic style.
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Could someone please tell me what really happened in Memento? Did his wife really die? Was Lenny really Sammy? I don't understand!

Update: My best response so far, from John: "We can't know the truth because the story is from Leonard's point of view and he can't know the truth because of his condition. The film sort of gives it away at the end with his musings on belief and what we choose to believe. And if you think about it, since there were really only two characters apart from Leonard, both of whom were shown to be manipulating Leonard to their own ends, and if you accept that the film is structured to give us only Leonard's point of view then you just can't get out of it to an objective truth."

Of course, this being the internet, it's being discussed all over the place. Judith sends me to this discussion where I learned a bit more.
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Yay! Arrived in Vancouver, sans trouble but not sans hassle. Am eating Weetabix, my new favorite cereal, and boiling water for a cup of tea. Raining here. Hm. I'd not heard of Weetabix until last week, though they do have it at the Market Street Safeway in San Francisco. Weetabix is this kind of flaked wheat cereal cake, that come in these nice little bricks, looking like less dense particle board. Pretty common here in Canada apparently. Weetabix! Weetabix! Weetabix!
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Went with Leanne and Moya and Stewart to see Kristin Hersh at the Noe Valley Ministry last night -- the upstairs auditorium of a Presbyterian Church. ("I know you've always wanted to drink beer in church," the announcer said.) Her voice was showing the effects of having performed five shows that week, but she was marvellous nonetheless. I'd never seen her perform her solo stuff before. I'm surprised at how many Throwing Muses albums are no longer in print.
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A line from The Lord of the Rings (?) that has been echoing about my brain: if you must take something apart to understand it, you have left the path of goodness. (i.e., you have destroyed the thing you sought to understand.)
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Software as conceptual artwork? I haven't tried this yet, but it looks interesting: Signwave Auto-Illustrator.
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Yesterday I sat down and read (in one sitting) "Familiar Spirits" by Alison Lurie, a memoir about the relationship between the poet James Merrill and his partner David Jackson, a story whose basic outlines I already knew -- several of my professors at Vassar were friends with Merrill and Jackson -- but which is a sad, dark tale nonetheless. "Familiar Spirits" traces the trajectory of Merrill's and Jackson's careers. David Jackson, also a writer, also talented, publishes a few stories and essays, but is ultimately unable to publish the four or five novels he has written, while Merrill's career skyrockets -- he wins the Pulitzer and the Bollingen and the National Book Award, and his most notable poem (and the poem I wrote my thesis on) "The Book of Ephraim" was based on Ouija board transcripts that Merrill and Jackson compiled together over 20 years. The real study of this book, however, is the vampiric nature of fame and art, and how those surrounding the artist are often sacrificed upon its altar.

It is also the story of the "wives" of famous men. Lurie laments David Jackson's lost talents, his lost career, his unpublished novels. She describes the stifling role of the 50's faculty wife that she left behind, the role Jackson and Merrill freed her from by publishing her first book. And Jackson became the "lesser" partner, by virtue of Merrill's success, which brought with it awards, press, invitations, attention, adoring fans, and a new handsome young lover-sycophant, Peter Hooten, while Jackson bought love from Florida rough trade, and declined into alcoholism and dementia.

This book is not quite a book, it is really a long essay; nonetheless the story told is as fascinating as it is unnerving.
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Newly discovered portrait of Shakespeare? Hm. I agree that it 'protesteth too much'.

I'm also curious about this apparent assisted suicide in England. They'd've been better off if the daughter'd written in her suicide note that she wanted, in this specific instance, to die, and had for this purpose enlisted her parent's aid. Listed the specifics of how they'd agreed to do it. And gotten it notarized. There was a mention of a suicide note in the article, but it only said she'd (bitterly and sarcastically?) blamed the British health services.
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I am packing up my whole house. And my studio. And everything. And moving. Wow. I am so very tired and have so very much to do.

Last night, on a much-needed break, I went to Suppenkuche with some of my special genius friends, Stewart and Ben and Eric. Eric, currently homeless, has been living in his office and bathing at the Kabuki Hot Springs. And might stay here (again) for the last two weeks of my tenure here.
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Eric Costello's glish.com joins the list of recently closed weblogs. (some heavy dhtml action happening there, and a lovely blinking eye.) This is becoming a trend, as noted on synthetic zero, who pleads: "anyone reading this, I implore you also to keep your voice in the world, find the truth as best you can, and speak it loudly."

Then goes on to note that even a seemingly unimportant thing, posted daily, is worthwhile, and at this I wonder. I remember finding a diary once in the street. It was a woman's diary, chronicling what appeared to be her college years. Her name appeared nowhere, and there was no address or phone number. So I took it home and looked through it to see if there was any info which might make it possible for me to return it. It was the most bracingly tedious thing I'd ever read, and I've read VCR manuals. Now, perhaps, it being her diary and all, she was trying to entertain no one, and was recording everything to jog her own memory in coming years. But jeez, with even your future self as the sole audience, shouldn't you provide yourself with something better than "Dance practice uneventful. Went to biology got a B on the midterm. Talked to Janice and Claudia on the phone, procrastinating on my paper. Waited for Mom after work." Page after page of this stuff.

I mean, it's fine. And there are admittedly a lot of weblogs out there saying this kind of thing. I've defended them myself, in major metropolitan newspapers, no less. (" 'But even drivel has its readership, Fake says. "Sure there are a hundred teenage boys typing, 'I'm bored. School sucks' every three hours, but their friends read them -- and that's their intended audience.' ") But maybe we'd be better off, as Eric says, writing letters to our grandmothers.
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Judith at calamondin is doing a mail art project. 20 things. 20 people. 20 days. The first twenty are already in, but she might do it again:

"Calamondin.com is hosting a swap meet, a mail art project, a limited edition art exchange. The premise: you make an edition of 20 of something (size restrictions: 4 by 6 by .5 inches). You mail those to me along with a self-addressed stamped envelope. So do 19 other people (well, ok, 18, since I'll be the 20th). I do lots of sorting on the floor of my living room, then mail you a package of 20 delightful pieces of art. It'll be fun."
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Barbershop hilarity.
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wsssss. That was a test. Actually, it was a placeholder.
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Caterina.net was remiss in not relaying the news that Perry Como, who penned the caterina.net theme song died last week at his home in Jupiter, Florida. Who knew that he started out as a small town Pennsylvania barber? What a sweet, casual crooner! We'll miss him here, for sure.
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"Sociolinguists are fond of noting that the etymological root of conversation is the Latin convertere to turn around."

"Utterance is place enough." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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I already blew my one hour online chatting with eek. "Blew" isn't really the right word. "Happily and obliviously spent" is more like it. OK. Buckling down.
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My New Regime: One hour a day online. Tops. Since I'm working on offline projects now, I need to focus. Focus!! The internet is, as I've said before, a weird digital parasite feeding off my life, which, if you take a Dawkinsish perspective, is not implausible.

Stewart and I think that Paul Perry spends just the right amount of time on the internet. He seems to only write once a day, and since he mostly writes about offline things, and doesn't seem to do a lot of idle websurfing (for example, you could have spent several hours perusing the Kaycee thread on Metafilter instead of reading a book) and doesn't provide a lot of links, he leads a pretty thoughtful, artful, bookfull life. Which I have not been doing, living so much online. I realized this when I was in Santa Fe.

Paul Perry is my webidol. Alamut continues to be my favorite weblog of all and Alamut is responsible for introducing me to Stewart, or more acurately, to (the sadly semi-defunct) Sylloge. Maybe I'll meet Paul in person one day.
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How to Hide a House in the New York Times. An entire house inside an enormous industrial shed. Look at it. So profoundly weird.
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Writing Workshop in Santa Fe. Well, I can't type enough "wonderful"s to express how wonderful my week at the writing workshop in Santa Fe was. I wrote tons of new material, finished up a story I've been laboring on for over a year (Genius Without a Penis) met 22 amazing women, spent time with my (brilliant, fabulous) friend Maura and came away completely inspired and ready to write even more.

The way the workshop worked was the opposite of the way most writing classes are generally run. Instead of writing a first draft outside of class, and bringing it to class for revision, we wrote the first drafts in class and expanded and revised them on our own outside, later presenting our finished work in a formal reading setting. What this inverted process did was teach me a new way to figure out how to write and what to write about, which are sometimes the hardest parts of writing. Eunice Scarfe is a terrific writing teacher. I recommend her workshops to anyone who writes, even if you are writing just for yourself, without the intention of publishing. I'm sending my sister to her this summer in Edmonton.
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Worst Travel Day Ever. After some 20 years of regular travel, I managed to have the worst possible flight experience on the way from Santa Fe to San Francisco. No, I take that back. Once I had motion sickness on a 30 (!) hour flight from New York to Asia, in which I used at least 12 barf bags, and another time I had a vicious hangover and had broken up with my boyfriend at the airport just before departure and was seated next to a family of five -- who sat in the two seats next to me -- in the row in front of the exit row where the seats didn't recline...but I could go on.

Yesterday's flight, which included 8 hours of delays and 4 hours of actual flying time, involved a woman who was so completely psycho that she went to the front of the plane and opened the door of the cockpit and yelled at the pilot. This after screeching in the (very small) cabin. (It was a plane with only 12 seats.) It boggled the mind. I'd tell the whole story, but I have to figure out where my luggage is. Athens? Tijuana?

In the interim, you can even read about what was going on at my apartment while I was away. Car was broken into, and repaired, before I even got back, or even heard the news. I love my friends (Eric) and neighbors (the Sabas).
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Sante Fe! Off to terracotta and pastel land. Will be dodging New-Agers. Adios!
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A charming thing they do in Mexico, that I just remembered, excuse my faltering Spanish:

you sneeze once, they say 'salud'
you sneeze twice, they say 'amor'
you sneeze thrice, they say 'dinero'
you sneeze four times, they say 'y el tiempo para gozarlos!'

In other words, 'health, love, money, and the time to enjoy them!'
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I am gathering all my short stories together in preparation for my trip to Santa Fe, where I will do nothing but write for a good long week. Looking through them, I am surprised at how good some of them are (consternated, of course, at how bad some of them are) but in general, pleased.

Big purge: getting rid of things feels like dropping ballast. And, sadly, I gave notice at my much-loved but infrequently visited studio after five years of occupancy. Onward. Relinquishing things, letting go, paring down, cutting back. Lot of that going on right now in San Francisco, now that people here have been dehired and are no longer "monetizing eyeballs" or "tenbagging", god help them (us).
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James Ensor: A Haunting Beauty in a Carnival of Follies. Like they say, appalling or fantastic.
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Television's Dismaying Sameness:

• "The rise of trash TV over the last decade can in large part be accounted for by the fact that Nielsen now rates shows based on what people actually watch, as opposed to asking people what shows they like. ....The problem with that is that it's a closed loop. No one can create a show and insert it into the Nielsen ratings, so what you end up with in that system is just more of the same. " -- from the Feed interview with Cory Doctorow, creator of Opencola.

• From this week's New Yorker, in the article about Alan Ball, TV writer (and the same guy who wrote American Beauty): "Ball says he left the meeting thinking, God, I've become a hack! Without realising it, he had followed many of the schematic network conventions for hour-long drama. These are: have a teaser preceding your four acts, a quick shock that grabs the audience. The most urgent story line should be made clear within five minutes, and each "act-out" moment before a commercial should be a cliff-hanger or an emotional crisis...The most important act-out is at the half-hour (when viewers could switch to another network). Underlying these rules is a single anxiety: Don't touch that remote!

• And from a New Yorker article from last year about George Meyer, the primary writer for The Simpsons in the March 23 edition: "On most shows nowadays almost all the characters are stereotypes, or they embody one basic trait and very little else. And you have shows where all seven characters talk exactly like comedy writers. All the characters seem to be constantly cracking jokes - and, specifically, jokes meant to injure other people."

  "I asked him why TV comedies changed. "One of the main reasons is the tyranny of live studio audiences, which I think have ruined television comedy. ....With a live audience, you always end up with hard-edged lines that the audience knows are jokes. Audiences hate it when they have to figure out whether something is funny or not -- I think because people have an anxiety about laughing in the wrong place, almost like a fear of speaking in public."

Sorts? Completely out of them. Anyone got any?
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More Hopkins. Everyone is sending me their favorite Hopkins poems -- it makes me think that I must've been cutting class on those days we read Hopkins, cause everyone else has not only read him, but has favorites: Pied Beauty is a favorite of Judith's and Higgy's and is becoming one of mine. Shannon sends me this one: Heaven/Haven. Higgy (I hope he doesn't mind my calling him that) also writes to say that "Hopkins had an elaborate personal theory of poetic rhythm that almost no one understands, but people try to explain it anyway" and that a Hopkins crit portal can be found here.
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Humbling Media in the Headlands. Last night, after a particularly brutal headache subsided, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by artists Tony Discenza and Rebecca Bollinger at The Headlands where Tony has a residency. They were introduced by Harrell Fletcher, who remarked that both artists worked in "high tech" but both had a way of "humbling" or "personalizing" the media.

Bollinger showed slides of her work which uses what she calls "database residue". One notable installation at Yerba Buena involved printing photographs of people she'd found on the web onto cookies with a cake-printing machine. Nilla wafers and graham crackers were printed with thousands and thousands of strangers, packaged in plastic bags and mounted on cardboard with what Bollinger called "grease halos" surrounding them. The cookies were then pinned up on the museum walls and stacked in cake boxes.

For another set of installations and drawings, she collected imagery from online stock photo libraries, running searches for such things as "romantic sunsets" -- of which there were an incredible number -- and tracing the thumbnails with colored pencil. A search for "important" resulted in pictures of aliens in UFOs, boardrooms, and portraits of men. And her work for the De Young museum, in which she projected all 65,000 pieces in the DeYoung collection in order, had a lovely tendency to sort itself visually by color and composition -- the images tended more towards the monochromatic as they went back in time; the silhouettes of their glass collection changed chronologically.

Tony Discenza talked about image saturation in contemporary culture, how images used to be thought of as rare and precious objects that were only seen rarely -- paintings and engravings. He thinks that the current excess of imagery is toxic to us, that television creates a second environment with its own nefarious designs. Tony showed the work that he did in collaboration with Torsten Burns, the "Halflifers" series, a kind of science fiction of crisis, a pandemonium of mylar-suited characters in a super-staturated emergency environment. Then he showed his solo work involving video compression -- he would take, for example, 7.5 hours of television, unedited, with all the commercials and everything, and compress it down to a few minutes. This resulted in distorted abstract colors and shapes, in which fleeting ghosts of people and legible text were occasionally visible, though neon colored and jagged. The effect is mostly of a violent image assault, though a couple of his pieces such as "Phosphorescence" and "At the Borderlands", though frantic with television urgency, have a kind of meditative effect.

I never watch television, and never have -- we were forbidden to as children -- so whenever I enter a room where a television is on, it makes me terribly nervous, and I need to get away as soon as possible. I can't stand the urgent message of consume! consume! consume! in those (incredibly loud) commercials, (I think the volume of commercials goes up 25% over the normal programming?), the weird force field between you and the television news reporters staring you down as if in an alpha/beta male baboon standoff (this is the way Dan Rather always made me feel), all the excess of female flesh undulating everywhere. Television makes me anxious, not sedated, so I feel as if the intended violence of Tony's work must make other people feel the way I feel about unmediated TV.
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Fabulous! I've never read Gerard Manley Hopkins before, but tonight I came upon this:

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hint: Read out loud in your most bombastic oratorial tone. Neigh like Boanerges! This is one of the best sounding poems I've ever heard. All his stuff seems characterized by "sprung rhythm", weird enjambment, and really marvellous and odd-sounding word combinations. Very Donne-like. This is probably the most accurate versionof this poem (see the indentations). And if you want to go all out on a Hopkins kick, here's an index of first lines on Bartleby.
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Recent Consumerism: it's the American way. Bought one of those old-style digital clocks whose numbers flip over at a design emporium in Victoria. Next door, some Eros and Vanilla Mariage Freres tea. But there are always more things to want. This is how you are enslaved. Be ever-vigilant.

Received from Tim: Last Call by Tim Powers. Thank you!
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I adore the New York Times Writers on Writing series. This one is particularly good, by Jonathan Rosen: A Retreat From the World Can Be a Perilous Journey "...You can only advance by retreating," he says, and quotes Walt Whitman: "Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it." Happiness is to be a wide-open, unblinking, slightly vitreous eye, to paraphrase Nabokov.
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Sometimes even when you're exhausted you can't sleep.
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For the past several months, since I quit my job, I've been sleeping extraordinarily well, though I've slept badly for most of my life. But this morning I was up early after barely sleeping and my brain is addled.

Naptime!
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"To appropriate something means basically only to manifest the supremacy of my will in relation to the thing and to demonstrate that the latter does not have being for itself and is not an end in itself....This manifestation occurs through my conferring upon the thing an end other than that which it immediately possessed. I give the living creature, as my property, a soul other than that which it previously had; I give it my soul." -- Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Hegel is referring to slavery here; but I'd been thinking about the report on the Doors of Perception website from the CODE conference in Cambridge about the ownership of ideas, private property and what ought to be owned, the quote from Bill Gates where he says that "Open Source is UnAmerican."
LINK | 3:12 AM |
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What I did yesterday Hopefully, you've never been to and will never visit an Emergency Room, but yesterday, around 8 a.m. Stewart woke me up, blind and howling in muffled agony from beneath a full-head turban fashioned from a towel. Apparently his eyes were so photosensitive that the dimmest light -- fridge light, light from beneath the crack of the door -- was unbearable. It had happened to him before -- a species of iritis, no doubt exacerbated by his keratoconus and having accidently worn his contact lenses in the wrong eyes. A niagara was pouring from his tear ducts, and his eyes -- when he could force them open, crying out in pain -- were as red as Darth Maul's. I put a coat on him and led him, stumbling through besuited yuppies en route to bank jobs, to the St. Paul's Emergency Room two blocks away.

The room was painted institutional lavender. A logjam of gurneys lined the hall, with people in various levels of distress strapped into them. Two ambulance dudes were wheeling in a guy from the city jail who'd had a stroke, accompanied by four paramedics and two jailkeepers; a junkie with nazi tattoos was talking on the phone to his lawyer, or his lawyer's secretary, explaining that no, he didn't want to change his plea, he just wanted someone to help him. He kept on saying that, "I just want someone to help me," in the whiningest, most abrasively plaintive voice imaginable, simultaneously ogling another toppled and barely-clad junkie sleeping on the waiting room chairs. It was impossible to find a place to sit, so many junkies were passed out on so many chairs. Orderlies mopped up spilled blood. Stewart clutched his head, blind, moaning, while the admittance nurses avoided making eye contact with me, though I was doing my best glower. Distant screams from distant rooms punctuated the nervous air while outside it seemed as if a klaxon orchestra was tuning up -- later when i went outside I found that members of the nurse's union, on strike that week, were holding up signs that said "Honk if you Support Nurses."

Finally they signed us in. Stewart's record, while otherwise accurate, said that his primary language was Portuguese. We followed the orange tiles to the "Emergency Fast Track" section, and were followed by the Nazi junkie, Pride of the SS, who asked very politely if it was OK if he watched the news, and flipped channels, simultaneously ogling another passed-out junkie (what a place to scope for dates!). We sat and I read a bad Canadian magazine called McLean's while Stewart suffered. The board said the other patients were suffering from stroke, back pain, anorexia and something unpronounceable. Finally we were ushered into a small examination room where we sat in the dark and listened to the teenage girl in the next room (anorexia) scream, What the fuck am I supposed to do? to a nurse and a half hour later a doctor -- a veritable Bilbo Baggins -- couldn't figure out what was wrong with Stewart and sent him up to the Eye Clinic. All told, it took only two hours to get to the opthomologist, a Filipino doctor with an Australian accent, the very model of brisk efficiency.

Stewart is fine now, if you're wondering. Right now at an appointment with another opthamologist, but doing fine. Seeing fine, feeling fine, no longer weeping, or howling, or suffering. Doctor says it's not infected, and gave him eye drops should it ever happen again.
LINK | 2:12 PM |
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Shhh!
LINK | 12:13 AM |
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Vancouver is strewn with cherry blossom petals. Gutters are filled with pink. Soft, loose carpets floating up when you take a step.
LINK | 2:54 PM |
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Insomnia! Which manifests itself in being awake at six a.m. Lately my usual sleeping hours are 3 a.m. - 11a.m. Am eating some lasagne for breakfast with some ginger cookies. Reading about Gordon Matta-Clark in Object to be Destroyed by Pamela M. Lee. I >heart< Gordon Matta-Clark, this week's favorite artist, known mostly for cutting entire buildings in half, famously, a house in a New Jersey suburb. (Matta-Clark was working during that period of "urban renewal" when all the beautiful old (derelict) buildings were destroyed -- such as the original Penn Station and all those pasteboard monstrosities went up that are decaying around us every day. Also: period of maximum suburbia: nuclear families isolating themselves there, creating a culture of privacy and independence, the loneliness and despair of housewives trapped in such domiciles...enter Matta-Clark with his chainsaw. Many critics have said there is a terrible violence in this work, a rape of the domestic, a crime against women, whose domain this is, but like Lee, I disagree. I see it more as a liberating act, a "hatching".

Back for another attempt at sleeping.
LINK | 7:36 AM |
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Even after yesterday despairing that my head would ever be clear again, sat down and wrote a good beginning to a short story about Josephine, a Houston socialite with a predilection for barely-legal gas station attendants.

I am about to leave the house to buy a glue-stick, a tea-ball and a stud-finder. Which implies another set of particular, possibly peculiar, predilections.
LINK | 12:52 PM |
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I actually gasped out loud when I read this line of Robert Frost's just now:

The old dog barks backward without looking up

because I knew exactly what he meant, it was so vivid in my mind, and one of those things you know without knowing that good poetry reveals. It was said so effortlessly; "old dog" sounds very old and doglike, the "d" of "old" muttering against the "d" of "dog" and "barks backward" sounding a lot like barking, with the double b's and k's and that barking backwards thing, you know, dogs just do that, just barking for the hell of it, without looking at anything. I haven't read the rest of the poem, just that one line. Don't know if I want to.
LINK | 1:55 AM |
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