tomorrow i'm giving a co-presentation on one of my favorite artist-authors, Sophie Calle. such a beautiful book...the one i like so much that i'm posting a picture:


for the presentation, my co-presenter, lt, and i have been interviewing people who have met Sophie Calle - the last one was quite the coup. I'm going to put them here:

*

Friend of Sophie’s

When and where did you first meet Sophie Calle? Could you describe the moment?

1979. It was hard to say anything about her at first. She was a little mousy, brown hair, thin, frail and long nosed. She didn’t have the renown she has now, and even if- I doubt I would have recognized her. Nothing differentiated her from the crowd of young New York girls I saw weave through galleries at the time. Nothing about her spoke great artist, or even, as I admit- the French girl I imagined.

In which details did you fall in love with her?

Really it wasn’t till she said she was from Paris that I started to pay any attention. I was a silly American college student, and there was all this noise about things going on in Paris. I wanted to leave the US- I have never been out of the country, and Paris seemed more charged with answering issues I was interested in, but because of all this I was shy and the only thing I said was something I remembered from French class, which was what I hoped was J’se coule compengee d’ soui toi domer but I must have confused a syllable or two when I said it, because she said to me then that she hasn’t any (to this day I don’t know what she meant or what I had mispronounced that prompted this). But then she said that she could draw it for me on a sheet of paper to take with, since no person should go on without it. So anyways, she gave me a little scribble of parl de conede, and that’s how I met her. I guess you could say she was always very down to earth.

*

Docent for her Paris Exhibition

When and where did you first meet Sophie Calle? Could you describe the moment?

It was towards the beginning of her Paris Exhibition, I think the third week in December. During those first few months she came every day and watched people look at her work. I didn’t know who she was. I was new, and still trying figure out where I was. One day, I went to the drinking fountain (near one of her unfinished films), and when I was done, I turned around and she took a picture of me. I told her flashes weren’t allowed in the exhibit. Then she asked me if I would talk to her after she finished drinking some water.

In which details did you fall in love with her?

I don’t know if you know this, but at a fountain, she lets the water hit her chin. I saw that then—chin first, then mouth. She doesn’t open her mouth very wide. She doesn’t suck the stream either. She just lets it land in behind her lips, right in between her tongue and bottom teeth. When she asked me questions, she was very flat. But demanding. I can appreciate that.

*

Fan of Sophie Calle who has spent some time stalking her

When and where did you first meet Sophie Calle? Could you describe the moment?

Do you mean in person? If you mean in person, it took some time. The first time I really met her though was through Les Aveugles. When I saw those pictures, I felt I knew her. I was very annoyed when other people started knowing her too. Do you understand what I mean? How it is very disappointing, as if something has been taken away from you, when someone you believe in who needs that belief because nobody else is there to supply it, suddenly becomes well-known and everyone takes away from the act only you had previously provided. Before, I had admired her quietly, but when that started to mean so little, I went and met her personally. I tracked her down in 2004, just before M’as – tu vue closed. She tried at first to step around me, but when she noticed my motive, she stopped and wiped her hand across her forehead.

In which details did you fall in love with her?

It was the eyes. Her eyes, their eyes, her eyes through their eyes, her eyes through yours. You can see many people wrapped together sometimes, clustered and hiding until dilation.

*

Art Critic

When and where did you first meet Sophie Calle? Could you describe the moment?

Oh, I suppose I met her in one of those funny little café’s everyone is gathering at. In Paris, a few years ago, perhaps more. I had been sitting by myself, enjoying a cigarette or two, drifting, and suddenly she ran over to me. I distinctly remember wondering if she would hit. I have no idea how she discovered who I was; maybe I was pointed out by an acquaintance. But she hovered over me and explained—in English, for which I was grateful, recently having had to suffer a slew of monstrous mistranslations—how she was very angry with me because I had published a recent article she loved and it didn’t mention her once. She told me, and I remember her words, that I had made a very horrible mistake.

In which details did you fall in love with her?

Falling in love is one of those things. You are inside it and despise it simultaneously. She was one of those, so I will say, it might have been the genuine nature of her ridiculous fury. The red splotches on her neck just where her blouse fell away.

*

Sophie Calle

When and where did you first meet Sophie Calle? Could you describe the moment?

Thursday 1978, North of San Francisco in Bolinas. I took a walk with a small dog. At a curb in the graveyard I was uncertain when I looked down. But I took the picture. We did not exchange words. No, that’s not true—I read a grocery receipt floating around. Seeing the photograph later, I was quite certain. I flew back to Paris the next month. On the plane, the stewardess asked me where I was from, and I thought of meeting Sophie.

In which details did you fall in love with her?

This is not such an easy question, is it? * There were the times she was not there, and that might be one such detail. It allows something. * She walked once on a river. At the end, she saw these little pieces of paper tied to a tree. They were closed up, curled, and there was a kind of watching to them. She went down and without looking at the others, took one paper off the tree. This paper, she decided, would be her next project. It never happened, and I can’t remember what was on the paper. * In the evenings I drink coffee. It makes it hard to sleep but one doesn’t always need to sleep. Coffee gives bad dreams anyways. * She wrote me a postcard once, but forgot to get the right stamp. They held it at the post office, and I went down and paid for the extra postage. On the back it said “I never saw the peace dove as a threat.” * Once I saw her looking.

for the past few months or so, i've been waking a few time a week with a new dream-sentence in my head. they always make me happy. that i dream of words and fragments and paragraphs sometimes, every so often a chapter. i think i should start writing them down. so this morning it was, "i'll either get up at 9:30 or 9:45, whichever one comes first."

yesterday in a class discussion, one of my students began a sentence with "The other day in my car I had a used condom..."

and i thought, there is no way in the world this is going to take the class in the direction i was hoping.

but he kept going, "...and I wanted to get rid of it, so I tossed it up through the open sunroof as I was driving along..."

and I thought, oh shit, how am I going to rescue us. a girl sitting next to him, a friend of his i think, put her face in her hands.

then he continued, "...and as it went up, this great white..."

fuck, fuck, fuck, i thought.

"...owl came out of nowhere, grabbed it, and took off. I couldn't believe it, a great white owl took my used condom."

i was thinking.

"So," he concluded, "maybe somewhere out there I have a bunch of great white owl babies. That would be so cool."

i nodded my head.

these are a couple of the pics from mum & cr's trip, which cr sent me. the first one demonstrates my armsize compatibility with Sue the Tyranosaurus Rex's little wing-arms (rooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaahr):


this one is the three of us enjoying a reflection in the rained-upon ChicagoBean's surface:

you know, the kind where everything is lovely but you recognize the nostalgia to come?


mmmm, the mum, the mother figure, the strangeness, the one you can cuddle with and run to in the morning and jump on, the kind you never have to grow up for, other than grow up as in "into yourself," but can always smile and tease and lift arms into light and be teased and remember and talk two-second serious with. because life forwards flashlike and there it is, with all its summerstress, the things that Must Be... as in, accomplished, finished, done, striven towards, cared about, nurtured, ventured, dared, tried out, and failed but accepted.


the truth is, i wouldn't be en este momento without her, and some goes without saying, but the part where i really wouldn't be here, as in the part where i was desperately sad and beyond sad and in my head and lost, and the mum said, "hey, you should go to the Art Institute," and the part where the mum says, "I'll help you go to the Art Institute," because nobody else really knew how really sad and dark-room locked I was but her, and so, here I am, and here she came to visit me, and have the h-blues because I miss all the things that could have been that i wanted that couldn't be that i gave up on that were too much, and found this place i am that truly is right now and content but not rooted, although it passes transient through the thoughts, in what was.


i felt just a bit lost this morning when i got up and she and chuck were gone because it's so much more fun to be for other people, and so much harder to be for otherwise.

it was muggy and hot and i wore shorts again, and felt the green washington well up in front of me, all the times i dream of its ocean, all the moments when i dream of the ex-girlfriendishsorta and her lover bumping up against me and the shores of the post two-years in my dreams... the first night my mom was here, the sand rode in between her toes, caught the drift of our wind and our thunderstorms, roamed around this creaking ancient home that was long before me, and felt between the creases of life remembered. i dreamt of what might be, but who cares? we say no to some paths and try to find hope for others, although hope is a haha kind of Object.


"you are so beautiful," she tells me ardently convincing, and it's not the convincing i need. i'm past knowing i'm beautiful and at the point where i know that life only has thirty-two point four percent to do with effort, and everything after that is the open maybe perhaps and could be. people in iraq are beautiful. people who find holes in their non-existent socks are beautiful. people around on the buses muttering in the night are beautiful. deserve is a word for the midlearn, and everything that happens afterwards is chance and hypertext. how to express to someone who loves you, who wants the best for you, who wants you to yearn, that you've learned that everything one yearns for is fiction, and everything else turns out to be fiction anyways.

we went to: Hyde Park, Field Museum (I growled at the dinosaurs like an egg learning verbs), Pilsen, Evanston, beaches, Art Institute (and after I made a fuss and bitched at the line we shouldn't have waited in, we wandered the surrealist, the Picasso's, the Dali's, the sculptures, the trans-Siberian modernisms, the Bressons, the stained glass, the armored suits from Germany, the children's books, the Americas). we went to: Mexico in Pilsen, Deep-dish in Exchequer, and Japan with c2 and she-who in HamaMastsu. I got drunk at a party in between, saw someone's ass and asked for its context, and then walked home through the mug-fust, talking about the influences of body image and the division between hunter-gatherer and mirror.


today i planted flowers while happy and sad and notingstalgic and foundforgetful and urban and rural and artist and working-class and privileged and abused and lucky and starchallenged and a member of a family too far away and a member of a community of artists in transverse. and when the day comes, the gate opens, the sky chomps down with its clouds, i will mention how well i loved, how i wrote it on walls and on paper and not enough in my stories but felt it when i crawled through the blankets, over the dunes, under memory in order to kiss my mum on all her faces and find these embodied knowledges we know but forget and learn to feel again.

Bush says he'll veto any bill Congress passes that puts limits on his Iraq war in favor of funding for "pet projects that have nothing to do with winning the war on terror." Pet projects meaning actual living people and education and art and senior citizens and healthcare and environment and natural disasters and our nation and everything that doesn't involve fucking war. this man is beyond my plain old Shit List. he's on my Voodoo Dolls Who Get Dangled Upsidedown Out My Window Straight Down into a Pile of Eternal Dogshit Without the Leisure of Death list. fucker.

my mum and her boyfriend are coming and the "s" key on my computer is sticky (diturbing) and i have to do the laundry, clean the house, put everything in order, finish reading, stop reading, plan everything, be prepared. i'm really really excited, and if anyone wants to join us during thurs, fri, sat, just let me know. we're going to the Art Institute for sure, and food for sure, and the lake if it wants to be nice, and i hope everything is absolutely perfect, which i'm pretty sure will be because i made sure to stock up on the gin and tonic for the mum, and will get beer for the chuck, and neiner-neiner, i have a two-day spring break its going to be lovely, maybe not beachy, but lovely. hope ya'll are well.

this is my current favorite blog, thanks to mizzus b. you should check it out because it hits something right home.

It's what he writes about language and art that I like the most. The following piece was written under a pseudonym as a press release for his own work. Funny, Robert Smithson has his fictional writer "Eton" quote him (R.S) at the end. Here’s the "press release," with artificial divisions that I'm putting in there:

Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates.

A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or "cubist" visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars—in short a paradox. Congruity could be disrupted by a metaphorical complexity within a literal system.

Literal usage becomes incantory when all metaphors are suppressed. Here language is built, not written. Yet, discursive literalness is apt to be a container for a radical metaphor.

Literal statements often conceal violent analogies. The mind resists the false identity of such circumambient suggestions, only to accept an equally false logical surface. Banal words function as feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words. Other words constantly shift or invert themselves without ending, these could be called "suspended words." Simple statements are often based on language fears, and sometimes result in dogma or non-sense.

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things. References are often reversed so that the "object" takes the place of the "word." A is A is never A is A, but rather X is A. The misunderstood notion of a metaphor has it that A is X—that is wrong.

The scale of a letter in a word changes one's visual meaning of the word. Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

A word outside of the mind is a set of "dead letters." The mania for literalness relates to the breakdown in the rational belief in reality. Books entomb words in a synthetic rigor mortis, perhaps that is why "print" is thought to have entered obsolescence. The mind of this death, however, is unrelentingly awake.

-Eton Corrasable

[My sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas--i.e., "printed matter." (R.S. June 2, 1972)]

Here is the work this went along with:



If I were to translate what he's saying, an ominous and nefarious process, I'd say he's drawing a distinction between the material form of language, and the perhaps more ephemeral existence of a word as "meaning," a division that is in part justified by French linguist Saussure's distinction between sign, signifier, signified, (and the object being encoded).

From what I understand of Saussure's theory, which is not a lot, a "sign" is composed of the "signifier"—a word, for instance—and "signified"—which is the concept(s) that arise in the mind of the reader, writer, speaker, etc. And whenever you have a signifier, it will give rise to different signifieds in the minds of different people. On some base level, we might see a similar object in our minds, but we will probably interpret the signifier differently on a metaphoric, personal, and/or compositional level. That is, although we may roughly agree what the word "tree" indicates in the material world, "tree" nonetheless means something different to you than it does to me, as I have different experiences with trees than you do.

This theory also points out that there's no material connection between a word and the object being encoded; thus the word "tree" has nothing to do with trees in a physical sense—the word is not made out of wood, has no leaves, is not growing, and so forth.

Anyhow, back to Smithson's deal, within which I think he's drawing a distinction between the material presence of a signifier (a word on a page, for instance)—which he calls "literal," and the immaterial presence of signifieds—which he calls "metaphorical." This isn't totally accurate either, as he points out that the literal form of the word can in itself create a radical metaphorical meaning.

I often feel that various writers, artists, and speakers place different importance on the literal or metaphoric capacities of words. A designer, for instance, is often more interested in the literal composition of words on a website, in a brochure, on an ad placed on a billboard—in order to spring a particular literal signified out of viewers of their design, whereas writers are all too often myopically concerned with how syntax develops a metaphoric meaning not having to do with literal form.

I noticed this in the letterpress class I took, where all of the other students in the class were in the Visual Communications department (a fancy term for graphic design artists), and I was the only writer. Most of the other students were far more interested in the design and placement, the development of context for language, than I was initially; and vice-versa, I was far more aware of the metaphoric, narrative, etc meanings of the language we were using. This turned out pretty nicely because we were able to help each other look at the possibilities differently—as sometimes I might have an idea for what word might be more appropriate/open for the context that they had already decided upon. Yah, that is, we tended to work in a upside-down fashion from each other, in that they first had a general idea, a design idea, and then worked on putting together the text, whereas I had an idea, wrote it down, and then worked on finding the appropriate form for the text I had already written (or had in mind). Of course, this wasn't absolute, and I modified my text as I went to better fit the form, but coming from the text created a certain rigidity towards formal considerations—something that I hope becomes more flexible as I keep learning.

I think that Smithson is, in the above statement, creating a half-manifesto, a half-explanation of the possibilities he finds in language, in particular the literal form of language. In the fourth section I pared off, he points out what might happen when a word is stripped of its metaphoric meaning, and simply has the literal form (signifier without a pinnable signified)—nonsense words would be a strong example, and they are "incantory" because they are sounds, or they are images, that create visual or audio response but no language meaning (I think of the evangelists or the prayers that were spoken by Russian Orthodox over and over again until a certain kind of sense was stripped away and it became a mystical chant).

In the third part, he points out how you could create a rupture if you were to, say, visually rope a word into a form that jars with its metaphoric meaning... a cheesy example would be to take the word "tree" and design it into a form that looks like water. What? Is it tree or is it water, and what is the relationship? But he says there are more radical possibilities for doing this sort of work, for playing around with the divide the opens up between a literal and a metaphorical meaning. And of course, this radicalism has to do with re-arranging our perceptions of reality, and how we think things relate.

He notes, in the second section, how this is a matter of context, of how the words are placed, and how the contexts, both physical and personal, are sites to play with the radicalism of language... and its power, a power formed by the inherently different reads of language.

Anyhow, in the fifth section he elaborates on what happens when these possibilities and differences are ignored, and language becomes rote or stupefied because we just use it in this way or that way without giving thought to the way in which we use/create language. Towards the end, he mentions advertising, which I think would be a good example of form dictation – and how scale of language (a big font, a big shout from our despicable President) is manipulated without sufficient thought to what the content means to our constructions of life.

Actually, and I do think this is related, one of the geniuses of the current government is its near-stranglehold over the form that information takes, to the point that it doesn't matter what the fuck they are saying—war, lie, cheat, kill, commit treason, change our Constitutional rights—and all that matters is that they say it over and over and over again, naming it whatever they want, each time become more bombastic, hugely-scaled, designed by their own parameters, and thus manipulative of our understanding of their words' meaning (dogma or non-sense, as Smithson puts it).

I think Smithson's little X=A=X-ity deal is again a re-iteration of the signifier, signified, represented thing. As I read it, he disagrees with our forgetful notion that Sign = Object/Thing-Encoded-In-Language/Actuality (A = X) and is pointing out that a Sign (word) is only a Sign (word) and not the thing itself (A = A). An example might be Bush's constant naming the current war "The War on Terror" until we actually think his title really is what we're doing (!why, by jove, we are waging war on a horrible abstract concept like terror!), when the actuality of what we are doing lies in an area separate from the language anybody encodes it in.

In the last section of this passage, Smithson kind of points to the drawbacks or reasons for why we might perceive language the way we do – for instance, our love of visual design and literalness stripped of meaning might have to do with our postmodern lack of belief in a one reality that can be touched by all of us; so we just reject our responsibility to be attentive to the literal and metaphoric levels because we don't believe any more that we can ever find it. How disheartening.

And on the other hand, books books books, a potentially live creation but only if a mind brings the text's meaning to life, back from the tomb. I'm not sure if that's what he's saying, but that's how I read it. I do remember thinking in class yesterday that if this is true, it's like a cerebral big bang and the history of a universe eternally expanding and eternally shrinking takes effect every time we pick something up and read.

All of this gives the most compelling justification ever for hybrid art—in these new spaces, form is meaning, both literal and metaphoric, and context is being "built" and not simply assumed.

Labels: form, hybridity, Robert Smithson

later today in my novel workshop we will talk about the post-liquified novel i was writing once upon a time. i'm really embaressed and nervous about that work, and don't even know how much i want to work on it anymore. for the life of me, i can't write linear narrative anymore, not even in semblence, and the language of that piece drives me nuts - or at least one of the voices, which is too all over the place, and annoying more than half the time, to really know what to do. if i keep working on that piece, i almost need to start over from scratch, and so i guess the best thing to come out of this workshop would be an idea of how to do that, how to approach the gibberish.

but i'm nervous and feel weird about it, and wish i wasn't. i don't like workshopping things that i feel weird about. thank god my advisor is the workshop leader, who knows my stuff pretty well by now (although she's never seen the frappe).

on a brighter note, yesterday was just about the most gorgeous day in the world, and i got to walk around barefoot in my house, and sit out on the deck reading with only shorts and goofy sleeveless shirt on, and see how white i've become. everybody so incredibly happy and talky and an energy took hold.

right before i got on the bus to go home, this tall guy with a hankerchief on his head started talking to me about my tattoo, and how he liked it, and he was very touchy, would put his hand on my arm, and got close to talk to me. at first i was startled and reserved, but he wasn't creepy really - i think he was queer, and didn't seem to be hitting on me, just wanting to talk, just wanting to tap my shoulder with his palm. he was chewing gum and when he talked to me, little bits of saliva would fly out of his mouth, and even that didn't creep me out. i liked him. he told me about the places in the midwest i had to go, and he was emphatic like that, had to, had to, had to. turned out we were going home on the same bus, and so he sat next to me and we talked the whole time, or rather he talked. a jazz musician who has gigs at the Green Mill, he gave me his email and said i should write and he'd make sure i was on the list by the door when he gave a gig--me and one other person. when i asked him what the Green Mill was like inside he said, "i'm not going to tell you that" in a very sultry voice, flux, and then said, "what i will tell you is you'll like it, and it has a corridor that opens on up to a room with a stage." soon after, he left the bus, and as he did so, he planted a huge kiss on my cheek and i laughed.

as soon as he got off, a woman sat down and she started talking too. about hats, and gloves, and how she'd put them away, and she was glad because they mashed her hair down and didn't look good on her. i told her i couldn't pull off hats either, or at least not very. and watching the windows, the dogs playing, the ice melting even as you looked out there, and dogs wading into the ice water. shoosh, it felt past spring, springy spring, and i thought maybe i could be very happy here in the summer, which was a really nice thing to feel.

now it is windy and rainy-looking, and it's supposed to get cold, but the tease teased me happily, i'll get my frappe workshopped, and then i'm going to meet someone who might be a friend, just maybe. the thought about how when the sun comes out, maybe i'm a just a bit like a reflective surface.

hot diggery dog, this dude thinks ho-mo-sex-e-ality is immoral (based on his upbringing). absolutely. and since we're on the topic: as i've said so many times before, i personally think that copulating rabbits, cucumbers, sneering, basil ice cream, green eyes, lip piercings, dictionaries without prefaces longer than ten pages, short sentences, plastic, war, non-biodegradable diapers, plants with no flowers, black curtains, cold weather without snow, teletubbies, american idol, yellow (in general), turtlenecks, blank faces, that light that sneaks in under a closed door when you want it dark and need to sleep, pop-country, misrepresentation*, peeing while on the phone, violins, orchestra pits, peach pits, armpits, ample spaces, cow liver, critique panelists who get paranoid and think they're on trial just because someone's taping them, craigslist personals, non-sushi foods, jellyfish, grime that gets caught in your eye when you aren't around a mirror to fish it out, mean people, being mean, those people who enjoy mean people or being mean, blowoffs, blowhards, hardasses, asses that aren't hard, blubber, the word flensing, judy blume in general now that i think about it, non-agnostics, grey clouds (unless they have a silver edge), toni morrison, that look my sister gets which means she's going to say something that's going to be so completely true and unflattering that i won't sleep for three days, the word blog, blog stalking, stockings on blonds, bullshit about morality**, card games, not winning, lack of second dates, patchouli, excess of chest hair, foot odor, the odor particularly attached to my foot, coughing, other people coughing, lumpy beds, hairless cats, little dogs except my sister's, rainbows, alarm clocks, people who listen to bullshit about morality***, rain, sun, peanut butter on celery (what an S&M contraption that one is), S&M, raymond federman, my plants when i've forgotten to water them and they wilt and remind me how forgetful i can be, iTunes, time as experienced in the third dimension, art i don't get, language i don't understand, language i do understand but for some reason doesn't jibe with my mood, and panty liners are all incredibly immoral (this list is based extensively on my unbringing).

ban 'em. ban 'em all to hell.

*/**/***some of these items misrepresent what i really find moral or immoral, which according to a strange conjunction of starred items, means that this very post is immoral and that you, by extension, are immoral for having read it, and thus you and i must also be banned, or at least not allowed to serve this beautific nation without sufficiently hiding any immoral character. but then we'd be misrepresenting ourselves, so then we'd need to hide that we were misrepresenting ourselves, and hide the fact that we're hiding our misrepresentation, and then hide the fact that we're hiding the fact that we're hiding our misrepresentation, etc.

(don't forget: jesus loves you.)

why beauty?
why seperation?
why do we create systems?
magnolias?
is every crevice inhabited?
why do we want to live?
why can't everything we love, love back?
what percentage do we understand (in relation to subject)?
if the world is hybrid, why do we resist?
if we are born alone, why do we feel loneliness as troublesome?
what does the fourth dimension look like from the fourth dimension?
why the gravitation towards duality?
why must so little be known?

Miro dynamic
dramatic “decodable”
horrorvacuii space

setting us free—root
release life, a desire to
create inhabit

child state, chemical
release (drugs)—apperature
sleep, idiot or

primitive, a word
an almost category
the enraged changing

is a life without intensity just something numb? or is there really another justifiable way of being out there?

Labels: genuine question

what a bunch of stuff, yo.

my mother would say it helps me build character. i'm sure it does. but man, just go go go... and with very little verifiable result. it's not like i'm actually writing shit or anything, getting myself into the zen of flow. it's just reading and reading and transcribing and reading and talking and so forth. and i am really not sure where all it's leading.

i got an email today from someone i went to school with before. haven't heard from her in three years, and it's kind of odd, because she was one of those people: a little young, the type to get drunk and forget to pay the bill (i cleaned her puke off the pub floor once, and smoothed her brow more than that), somewhat insecure, and the last time i saw her she was weeping about how we all move away from each other, and then lose contact, and move on, and life is like that. but of all the friends i've kept in touch with, she was the one to simply disappear. as for me, i've found that i can't shake the need to hold on, to keep checking in, to pump so-n-so for information on so-n-so, very hard to simply let go. just who i am, and yeah sure, i've cut people out but that's different than releasing...

and i haven't yet talked about this here because i feel weird about it, a new style of being n all. but i had a friend this winter break who really upset me. she basically wrote me an email saying (subtle subtextual paraphrase) that i am not, nor ever will be, welcome in her home or to hang out with her in the vicinity of her home because we flirted over a year ago, which hurt her boyfriend's feelings. she actually said that life is complicated, she's pregnant, blah blah, and i just felt like: wow. see, i understand that life is complicated, but who says that one person's life is more complicated than another's? i sort of feel that all her words were in one direction, and all the truth was brooding somewhere else: which was, she made a choice--this is what she wants: X, and this is what she doesn't: Y. but she's going to make it all formal and meaningful by sayings she's pregnant and life's complicated, when the truth is that what she's talking about is not complicated at all. it's the simple path. she wants the simple path. and sure, i understand this, although i do not even a little subscribe. she doesn't want to have to deal with someone who she has mixed feelings for--shame, whatever, weirdity, ghostliness (this is the life of the L-word, the Thing she didn't choose), annoyance, and how uncomplicated is that?

why is it that the older i get, the more symbolic i mean? but complication; oh yeah, that pregnancy thing. the rest of her life, a little kiddling, etc etc. is that complication? because fuck, i thought things were complicated in my life too... probably bound to a life of solitary oldmaidhood, and yeah sure, i bet that's not complicated at all. you know shit's weird when Jane Austen is someone whose life you look to. but somehow motherhood promotes a potential bubble, to be used or not: hey, i'm changing my life radically and i've thus somehow realized The Way. but so few perspectives open for us who are looking at a life without reproduction. and maybe it's not that i've even chosen to be without reproduction. so's to say: i love children, and babies, and generation, and little details, and hearing about birth, and how the body changes, and how so many different lives grow. but i'm probably not going to have that (with the exception of my little s-godchild and any nieces/nephews), and it would be nice to have a model to help me be happy and helpful... rather than having someone yank "complication" on me, and make me feel like a little turd pile for the choices i'm not even sure i made. so here's a choice for you:

a) this is okay; tell me i'm not worth making the effort for. i'll hang out and we can smile, and life will be good, and awkward lunch with nothing attached is soooo cool, and i won't ask to hang out, and i won't hope you say something nice, and nobody needs to go out of their way for another, blah blah blah, this is the life we lead, so very hefty, full of the flesh of my body, the flesh of all yours...

b) no, this is not okay: 1) finagling, whining, begging, attempting (not for sex, but for a friend); or 2) tell her what an uninvited bum-fuck deal this is, or 3) move on, move on, move on. I.E. life is weird when you realize that silence is the only ethical way to open your palm.

but back to where i was. post anger. post complication. post decision making.

a friend got in touch with me today, and i danced this evening because hot damn, what a deal the body is (i've asked my students to consider dancing alone with their eyes closed versus the dancings they might do with others--and yet not one of them commented in their journal about the difference between being a body and being perceived as a body, and here i am trying to get further inside). i'm tired and numb and full of information. i was happy to hear from someone i hadn't for awhile--the happy drift did me well.

and i've been going to playwriting interview lectures - for the tenure track position here at SAIC, and boy, does it make me wonder. i need to get off my ass and make shit, because i think i'm smart enough sometimes, but i haven't found my way to this deal: publish, publish, publish, and then you have the chance to try to live within the kind of questioned existence and collaboration you shed like light, and breathe. i could be a good teacher -- i mean, i sometimes am, when i am most myself being a person with masks, and less myself as a person nervous. that's hard to phrase differently, but teaching is performance, and the more you perform, the better the class goes, and i don't mean the empty kind of performance, but the kind where you stand up there alone and unsure, and pretend you are nothing but brave. it has not so much to do with knowledge and brilliance, and everything to do with the vulnerable willingness to be present. ah, teaching.

oh, and oh, i want to talk about the crit i transcribed, which blew my mind. but you'll have to wait for that... because. i have to go do a little work before i fall asleep. so, this is me, letting go in the moment.

read a novel (mostly)
write a novel (um... this actually merits a discussion... as in, a novel? who am I kidding? can an ADD extremist write a novel?)
transcribe a 40-minute critique

(oh, and write a fashion response)

since she lives in Germany, it was gangling late into the night and i was feeling tired, so i ended up quitting the conversation earlier than either of us wanted to... so nice to hear the voice of a best friend, one i have in a black-and-white photograph, stretched out on the sand under a beachdrifted log, near my bed in the small album of dear.

but off i was. and then there she was calling me back after i had turned off the light and settled down to drift.

when i picked up, she had me on speakerphone (ahhhhhhh), and then she and bl, her husband, asked if i wanted to be the godmother to their little baby girl.

"it's a big thing, so you can think about it for awhile."

i didn't need to think about it at all.

but what i now need to do is discover how to be the best and sassiest godmother ever (and also figure out if this gives me "fairy" godmother powers... rats to coachmen and back again could come in handy someday).

Labels: very happy and humble