Only a couple more weeks until school starts back up again. I've not yet hit panic mode, but am instead intently focusing on inspiration. Trying to recollect what inspiration consists of... reading old readings (I pulled out an old stowaway rainyday file that smelled of Chicago, having held stashedaway handouts, photocopies, student works, gathered newspapers, and many given items... items that others told me were inspirational for them and they hoped maybe for me too. Most of them were from JS née JW, and many from fric-frac and Beth Nugent. I liked the ragged edges of most of the handouts, the ripaways, the darkening paper and the little glints of dust motes that had collected in some photocopier somewhere, years ago, and been registered and recorded as an invasive particle in the dissemination of inspiration.) I figure my adviser (BN) would remind me what a silly notion inspiration is. Or would she? Maybe she would have me find a system, and test it, and play with it, and I think she'd be okay with me reading alot, frantically grabbing and tossing new books, used books, advised books, found books, picture books, crummy books: Love in a Dead Language (so far, I think Pale Fire and Lolita covered it more succinctly), 6 Memos for the New Millennium, The One Marvelous Thing, The Hungry Tide, 84--Charing Cross Road (the closest to inspiration maybe, in its utter sweetness and humanity), Geek Love, The Verificationist, Robert Smithson, (panting panting), Female Trouble, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (did you know that he wrote "The Owl and the Pussycat"?!!), an interview with Amy Hempel, stories by Peter Marcus, Borges, Spicer, (panting panting), and because that is not enough (I still haven't found It): new music, old music, re-arranging music. And literary journals, personal journals, my friends' writings, people I don't know's writings, the news (panting panting), written scraps from the collage piece I'm working on (in French, which I don't know!). Ok, I might be in panic mode... but more than that, I feel hungry for something I can't find, I feel like a match poised between fingers, I feel like someone who might not understand what words are when I start typing, like I'm hunting for what the local soil might be composed of. What would BN say? Pick words from a dictionary - write from one to the other? That has often worked (a good strategy, nonsensical and farcical both) but I want to work on several pieces that I've already started and I don't know how to breathe into them again, breathe for them, awaken them to the ideas I have set aside for them, my arm around their shoulder, steering them this direction, pointing out the ocean, finding the path onto the beach that has its arm around that ocean, following the chain, convincing them to be inspired to listen to me, their wishful parent, their wistful friend... their lonely friend. Alas, woe is me, mea culpa, e tu Brutus, and You made a woman meow, and if you think life is a vending machine and you put in virtue, and get out happiness... All that business.