Monday - June 30, 2008

 Gesamkunstwerk

 "The artist should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. ... The artist has only to remain true to his dream and ... must see naught but the vision beyond. ... [describing the quest for that vision, he said] Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and there clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing." --Albert Pinkham Ryder  

Sunday - June 29, 2008

 Roar, rage, scream, ocean, please now; no i said no i won't no

 "I don't understand about diamonds, and why men buy them..

What's so impressive about a diamond, except for the mining?"

Sunday - June 22, 2008

 The streaking, the staggering of summer lawns

Cause I've seen some hot, hot blazes

Come down to smoke and ash... 

 DJ's RD.

Tuesday - June 03, 2008

 Truth

 I was just thinking about human experience (I've been reading Romantic poets all day) and was reminded by James Wood's piece in the New Yorker this week about suffering of that time when I walked into Mexico. I passed through a gate in Laredo, traveling across a bridge over the Rio Grande/Bravo with my bag slung across my back, and reached another gate, in which there was a turnstile. I dropped in a quarter into the slot, and circled through. An officer with a very large automatic rifle greeted me. "Welcome to Mexico." This all occurred in two minutes' time.  

I found myself a cab eventually, after discerning (though I was wary) that I did not, in fact, need a transit visa, and as I looked out at the scenery passing by en route to the bus station, I realized anew how absurd borderlines -- along with their inherent implications and intentions of dividing people, thereby denigrating or denying them agency -- were in their arbitrariness. A person is a person. We all suffer. We all feel joy. We all die. 

 In other news, I have much to report. I'm only just beginning to digest the last month of travel. But expect updates in due time.

Saturday - April 26, 2008

 Germ-ane

The World of the Senses

What a day: I had some trouble

following the plotline; however,

the special effects were incredible.

Now this, the

dreaming breathing body

lying right beside

my own, just think—

at any given instant

it might undergo a change so

enormous that nothing is left of it

but mere object, a thing

to be taken away from me, never

to be seen again, never.

- Franz Wright

Thursday - March 27, 2008

Aside

There are no religio-spiritual beggar pilgrims in America.

 Hm.

Sunday - March 09, 2008

 The point now is to look forward, to the revolution

From the introduction to this year's Whitney Biennial:

"While numerous works demonstrate an explicit or implicit engagement with art history, particularly the legacy of modernism, as well as a pronounced interest in questioning the staging and display of art, others chart the topography and architecture of the decentralized American city and take inspiration from postindustrial landscapes and urban decay. Using humble or austere materials or employing calculated messiness or modes of deconstruction, they present works distinguished by their poetic sensibility as they discover pockets of beauty in sometimes unexpected places. ...

Across media, much work in this year’s Biennial concerns politics although its mode of address is often oblique or allegorical. Persistence, belief, and a desire to locate meaning threads through these many modes and activities rooted in what feels like a transitional moment of history. Rather than positing a definitive answer or approach, these artists exhibit instead a passion for the search, positioned in the immediate reality of our uncertain sociopolitical times."

Yes, onward to the revolution, but nonetheless: I feel somehow vindicated by this.

Thursday - February 21, 2008

 Mostly economics; but as always, a pursuit of Truth and The Truest Life

I have seen the best minds of my generation “choosing” being forced into corporations, making millions of dollars at 24.

I have seen the best minds of my generation paying their rent with their credit cards.

I have myself withdrawn entirely from society. And lived right at the source of its pulsing heart.

What is the answer already? Begs,

Isn’t there another, third way? Begs,

Why can’t human societies transcend this situation finally? 

Sounds of the steaming thought train echo deep into recesses.

Friday - February 01, 2008

 Contemplating the Eternal Event of the Circle

Pacing back and forth between Empire and Liberty;

[At least Liberty is blessed by Agency]

Waiting for Godot? 

On va voir. On va voir, toujours. 

 Tous les jours!

Saturday - January 26, 2008

 "Supernumerous existence wells up in my heart."

 And I recall

everything,

everything's 

here ---

what is time? When

is the present?

I'm still here alone in the night hours with everyone.

And everything that once was

infinitely far

and unsayable is now

unsayable

and right here in this room.

 - Excerpted from "Progress", by Franz Wright.

Tuesday - January 22, 2008

 All hail!

The Autonomous Circles!

Especially when they overlap. Especially where they overlap. Especially where they don't.

 Patience. Peace. Joy. 

Wednesday - December 26, 2007

 Jojo, Get Thee... 

 Gardenias.

Wednesday - December 12, 2007

 Eminently Apropos

 "I still, in presence of life ... have reactions -- as many as possible. ... It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions -- appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing -- and I do. I believe I shall do yet again -- it is still an act of life." - Henry James, to Henry Adams.

Wheeling Motel

The vast waters flow past its back yard.

You can purchase a six-pack in bars!

Tammy Wynette's on the marquee

A block down. It's twenty five years ago:

you went to death, I to life, and

which was luckier God only knows.

There's this line in an unpublished poem of yours.

The river is like that,

a blind familiar.

The wind will die down when I say so;

the leaden and lessening light on

the current.

Then the moon will rise

like the word reconciliation,

like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

- Franz Wright.

Tuesday - December 11, 2007

 A blessed unrest

 I have found my torrid current. And oh, how the river is broad.

"The impalpable sustenance of me that comes from all things, at all hours of the day".

Bless you, Whitman.

I am absolutely overwhelmed by gratitude. 

Amen.

Thursday - December 06, 2007

 Resurrection and! La re-naissance magnifique

I stripped it all back down to the true essence of things, the essence of being, finally and 

 I AM ALIVE AGAIN.

And thus beginneth the thriving.

Breath, eyes, memory, eyes, eyes, eyes, taste, touch, wish, thought, desire

and I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC.

Tuesday - October 30, 2007

And half the time, the moldy figism 

 "At present I am a sojourner in civilised life again." 

-Thoreau.

I think of Thoreau every day, particularly since I'm in the midst of re-reading Walden in conjunction with a book on his philosophies entitled "A Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism". How appropriate, then, that he should come up as a topic in the New Yorker a few weeks back. [Note: my parsing of this is as yet unfinished, and I also need to correct the blurred lines between Lepore's, Thoreau's and my passages. It's so very indiscriminate. It was published when still in draft form, and I can't undo it now.]

 "“Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ‘All aboard!’ when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over.""

"Sellers’s paradigm seemed to offer an answer; he had dumped all the pieces out of the box, and put them together, joining decades of meticulous empirical research about Western farmers, Eastern bankers, Southern slaves, artisans, immigrants, politicians, everyone.

"Before the market revolution: Americans grew food and made things for themselves or to barter with neighbors; they were humble but happy, rallying around “enduring human values of family, trust, cooperation, love, and equality.” After: they grew food and made things to sell, for cash, to cold, unfeeling, and distant markets; they were frantic, alienated, untrusting, competitive, repressed, and lonely. “Inherent and ongoing contradictions between capitalist market relations and human needs” plagued the nation, as Sellers had it, and plague us still."  

I don't disagree with this. Actually, I believe it, or want to fervently. I do, mostly because it suits my nature, my world view, and a large chunk of my experience. And to be quite honest I like having my tendencies defended (well, shucks, I might as well be honest, shaint I.. isn't this whole racket of the online presence about that.. but mostly for me I think it is a way to defend myself, because I'm perpetually attacked from all sides for my "behavior."

"His experiment was, of course, not a business but an anti-business; he paid attention to what things cost because he tried never to buy anything. Instead, he bartered, and lived on twenty-seven cents a week. At his most entrepreneurial, he planted a field of beans, and realized a profit of eight dollars and seventy-one and a half cents. “I was determined to know beans,” he writes in a particularly beautiful and elegiac chapter called “The Bean-Field.” He worked, for cash, only six weeks of the year, and spent the rest of his time reading, writing, hoeing beans, picking huckleberries, and listening to bullfrogs trumping, hawks screaming, and whip-poor-wills singing vespers. “Mr. Thoreau is thus at war with the political economy of the age,” one reviewer commented, after “Walden” was published, in 1854. But Thoreau wasn’t so much battling the market revolution as dodging it, “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.” ...

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” Thoreau demanded. One question woke him up every morning, as regularly as the screech of the whistle of the Fitchburg locomotive that chugged by his cabin, on tracks built just up the hill from Walden Pond: Were all these vast designs and rapid strides worth it? In truth, no. “They are but improved means to an unimproved end."

Howe, quoting Samuel Morse quoting Scripture (Numbers 23:23), asks more or less the same question: “What hath God wrought”? Howe’s debate with Sellers is provocative and important because the answer to this question ought to explain, or at least illuminate, the historical relationship between capitalism and democracy. The so-called consensus historians of the nineteen-forties and fifties argued that the seeds of capitalism “came in the first ships” and were planted on American soil by the earliest Colonial settlers. With this, Sellers and Howe disagree, but differently. For Sellers, capitalism is the imported kudzu strangling the native pine of democracy. For Howe, capitalism is more like compost, feeding the soil where democracy grows."

 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/10/29/071029crbo_books_lepore?printable=true

Ach, the dichotomies of life overwhelm me.

Now that I have adopted the urbanity, I long again for the thoughts of raising cows and chickens and hogs and horses. 

Wait. I never stopped wanting that. 

Oh dear. Oh, oh dear.

TENNESSEE

?

Tuesday - October 30, 2007

[Brief Digression]

......exhale now. 

 I am homeless no longer.

Tuesday - October 16, 2007

Non. C'est vrai? Ce n'est pas possible! Mais oui! 

Someone gets it!

"In all this shifting, incoherent, disheartening, and (maybe) inspiring mess, the avant-garde artist — or bohemian, or adversial, or simply honest and committed artist — can't rely on the traditional, as it were, tactic of anti-traditional agitation against the status quo. The decadents, the Fauves, the dandies, the Bloomsbury aesthetes, the Dadaists, the Black Mountain crowd, the Beats — they were all several steps ahead of the official culture. They were avant, after all. But nowadays, just standing still, and seeing, and thinking, is a revolutionary gesture. Being avant is for software companies, cellphone manufacturers, and Citibank ads."

Amen.

Thursday - October 11, 2007

Lessened. Loss. Einfühlung.

..

 Delivered, I'm still stung by my abandonment

of those unmeetable

ones who still live there

in Hell.

Tell me.

Could I be allowed

with them

a quiet word?

And what

might that word be?

There must be a way: how

assure them, remind them

they too come from the light at the end of time.

Proved faithless, still I wait

from "I am Listening", by Franz Wright.

 I am listening. I am here.

Sunday - October 07, 2007

Belated question  

Once upon a time, I too was a sullen girl. 

Is it unavoidable as a creative subject?

I'm normally not so slow on the draw (see last item mention).. sad. She is a living distillation, an essence. Incredible to witness. But there was a bit that kid glove phenomenon, which I hate feeling towards other audience members.. a need for fragility.. and a palpable sense of her own teetering state, that things could blow any minute. Nonetheless, few of us could ever deign to match it, that raw potency. Strength is lonely.

Friday - October 05, 2007

Il faut la route 

Menand writes,

 “On the Road” is as self-consciously a work of literature as “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu”—and Proust was a writer whom both Kerouac and Cassady emulated, someone who turned his life into literature. Kerouac read widely and intelligently: he knew what he was doing when he put the scroll into the typewriter, and, just as important, he knew what he was not doing, what kind of book he was not writing—just as (to take a common and apt contemporary comparison) Jackson Pollock knew that he was not making an easel painting, with all the aesthetic assumptions that that implied, when he put a canvas on the floor and poured paint on it. 

...

The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country—“ramblin’ round,” in the Guthrie song—following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank’s photographs in “The Americans,” taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar affluence and consumerism.

The sadness that soaks through Kerouac’s story comes from the certainty that this world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders—the world of Neal Cassady and his derelict father—is dying. But the sadness is not sentimentality, because many of the people in the book who inhabit that world would be happy to see it go or else are too drunk or forlorn to care. They do not share the literary man’s nostalgie de la boue; they are restless, lonely, lost—beat. “There ain’t no flowers there,” says a girl whom Sal Paradise, the Kerouac figure, tries to pick up in Cheyenne by suggesting a walk on the prairie among the flowers. “I want to go to New York. I’m sick and tired of this. Ain’t no place to go to but Cheyenne and ain’t nothin in Cheyenne.” “Ain’t nothin in New York,” Sal says. “Hell there ain’t,” she says. She wants to get in the car, too."

 More editing and testing of the CSS!

Thursday - October 04, 2007

 Il faut une révolution

 In reviewing the Istanbul Biennial, Schjeldahl writes:

"Echt biennial art is critic-proof, because it eschews formal engagement with past art, providing no basis for comparative evaluation. It is flimsy and ad hoc: here today, gone later today. While often avid for up-to-date technology, it churns academic postminimalist and conceptual aesthetics, continually resetting art’s clock to a noontide—the nineteen-sixties, more or less—of nebulously utopian afflatus. Its themes tend to be off-the-shelf topical and its sentiments well worn: war and commerce suck, love and public-spiritedness rock. Hou, in the Istanbul catalogue, fulminates against “neo-liberal economic power” and promotes an ideal of “new and more relevant public spheres to counter the current trend of privatization and gentrification.” At this point, biennialism is a networking function of and, it can seem, for publicly funded art administrators and curators, worldwide. Those types were thick on the ground at the show’s opening. Dealers and collectors—constituencies of the limousined fairs that dominate the art world in this decade as biennials did in the nineties—were as sparse as objects that seemed plausibly salable. Does it suggest hypocrisy that most of the show’s hundred and seventy or so listed sponsors are corporations? (Others are government agencies and private foundations.) It would, if Hou’s anti-capitalist posturing were meant to persuade rather than to serve as parochial boilerplate that bothers no one. Nor is his show apt to inflame."

He continues,

"Vasif Kortun, a curator of two past Istanbul Biennials, is currently the director of a public contemporary-art space, Platform, on Istiklal Caddesi, the city’s paramount, teeming pedestrian thoroughfare. When I visited him there, he surprised me by saying, “Biennials have consumed their role. Their job is done.” That job was to publicize cultures beyond Europe and America. Kortun added, “It has become almost impossible to not know what’s going on in the world. We’re post-curiosity.” He isn’t the only doubter in a profession whose current buzzwords—“informality,” “the local,” “the multitude”—fetishize audience-friendliness. Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian-born artistic director of Documenta 11, in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, wrote a remarkably mordant essay for the Istanbul catalogue, in which he suggests that contemporary art spaces risk becoming “incubators of amnesia,” devoid of historical recall. His model for the right kind of artist is, of all things, a painter, the Belgian Luc Tuymans, whose reflections on such subjects as his country’s vile colonialist past are subsumed in a sophisticated and beautiful formal enterprise. Form is how memory works. There is almost no painting (and none by Tuymans) in this biennial."

 I will parse these passages and add my thoughts presently, but for the moment, I'm trying to fix my CSS problems.

Thursday - September 27, 2007

 Daily word in my head this morning

Vituperate. 

From the Latin vituperare (verb), from vitium 'fault' + parare 'prepare'.

 By the evening, it made sense.

Tuesday - September 25, 2007

Here's a concept 

Pollock's grave.

 He threw acorns at me.