oh oh oh
from may 3, 2007.
If I look forward onto myself looking back, will I say, "I wish I had looked more forward, more often, thought about how much more I would have later looked backwards and wished I had looked more forward, more often?"
----->(<----(--->))
from may 8, 2007.
I'm up far too late. I should sleep. Before I do in this interim moment I realize the preciousness of this moment, my acute awareness of my presence, the clarity of focus I am awarded for my youth.
oh oh oh oh oh. oh. oh. oh me, oh this, oh that. oh the presence of mind. oh the diverging curves.
lately everything seems to come down to a point. what is this image? again, an armchair, an incandescent bulb, a wall of bookshelves, a frying pan.
4:41am
How many times have I logged onto this website so late, just to start an entry with the current time? Flipping through the archives I notice a slew of entries written in the dead of night, as if the sieve of late night + residual words on my fingers necessitates writing something light and small on to this website.
I'm writing a paper about an piece of art without depth, that stops short and exists as spectacle, does not permit entrance. In the face of this wall I am forced to turn in circles, negate this work of art, act as negative critique. I don't like this negativity. This is why this paper has been taking so long.
What I would rather be talking about: how do we deal with the fact that papers are by definition coherent and structured? Barthes's death of the author is legitimized by the fact that language is always a social construct, like when Derrida says "there is no outside-the-text" he means that everything is always understood in a signifier-signified relation and so therefore a movement outside of this relation is impossible. In the face of this linguistic definition for the negation of the artist's intention and the birth of the reader, what is then the purpose of a paper that then either falls into 1) ultimate coherence and becomes a proposal of 'correctly applicable' theory, or 2) functions as an ultimately individual and personal viewpoint? The former would be somewhat like Northrop Frye's notion of a Shakespearean green world, in which a plot device operates with certain functions across several works by the same author and so expands our personal understanding of the author in terms of his structuring of 'what has happened' and 'what this plot point does' - an objective scrutiny of these operations. The latter would be like Barthes's definition of the photographic punctum that illuminates just the individual point within the photograph that resounds emotionally and personally with the single viewer him/herself. In the midst of this, how am I ever comfortably supposed to write a coherent, thesis-laden essay about the operation of the punctum -- wouldn't this be a contradiction in terms, trying to objectify the operation of the subjective?
or maybe what I'm missing probably is that an operation of subjectivity is possibly objective, the same way that I can choose on an irrational and faithful basis to be rational ('I don't know why, but I believe that I should be rational'), so this isn't quite exclusive. rationality chosen with an irrational meta-methodology, the same way that democracy is erected on a 'pre-political' or meta-political non-democratic selection process ('who gets to decide the people who get the right to vote?'). Perhaps a scrutiny of this pre-democracy is separate from a critique of democracy itself.
or is it?
how can I ever move beyond the dangers of canonization, of a formation of canonized llterature/art/music? Isn't the notion of marginalization the complement of canonization?
how does one deal with writing about art that was brought into a canon more or less because of the intersection of factors -- aesthetic appeal, art-historical appeal, popularity, financial viability -- several which seem completely arbitrary to the 'merit' of the piece?
to offset this all:
Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores.
James Joyce, Ulysses
thought at the urinal
voiding my bladder I think:
Sometimes, sometimes when I start to write the core of the essay, the center of cohesion that I try to curl the paper around, I start out by writing a very simple formal description, then moving forward, and in a purely aesthetic fashion creating a sequence of words that is appealing for its cadence, its structure, the formation of words in a structure of a thesis. I then look back on this pretty structure and I ask myself -- do I believe in this? If so, it stays. Usually, I don't, and I change it, again following aesthetic arguments and structures, ask myself this question, arrive at this space until I read an argument that I wholly agree with. In this way I am always following aesthetics, the curling linear logic of parataxis and syntax, stepping off when I happen to arrive at a destination.
In mathematics, this would be the sieve method of finding prime numbers.
Whenever it happens nicely I am always pleasantly surprised, caught unawares, finding these sensible yet interesting arguments developing under my fingers. No doubt this probably contributes to some notion that what I am saying is true, really true, and so fuels my essay further with the compressed fossilized fuels of problematics and positivism, the separation of the subjective author from the argument as evidence for the facticity of the argument, et cetera..
stuff calendar: found may 13th
New York Design Week -- May 19th - 22nd
Various places.
http://www.core77.com/calendar/ny_designweek_2007.asp
Bill Viola -- Works from The Tristan Project
until May 15th, 26th st & 10th Av
http://www.jamescohan.com/exhibitions/2007_4_bill-viola/
New York Electronic Art Festival
May 12 - June 10
-- Special Saturday Presentation: May 19, Hisao Ihara / Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
-- 4 - 6 pm at 38 Park Row @ City Hall, free
http://nyeaf.org/
tired
I'm tired, tired, so tired that things seem to be zooming down, moving slowly. Comprehension settles in a second after I look at something, this, then this, then this. Tiredness, tiredness, these things to worry about. Factors, considers, ideas, thoughts.
note: idea: camera pacifier, pacificara..? consolation for cheap p&s taj mahal takers, work-ethic vacationing, progress-bar photographers
--
this is hard. it's hard, it's work, it's effort. the swallowing of pride, to make it happen, to make things work. compatibility underrated, active movement. out of spite sometimes I'd like to slam the door and see what happens and regret profusely, irrevocably, wrongly. what I really need is patience. it's hard, tiring, beautiful, harmonious, stressful.
this night deep, sunken blacks etched into skies less far away from sunrise than I'd hoped.
tired tired tired tired and sitting alone. haven't felt tired in this way, ever. I have work to do. the slowing down of movements. When I open my eyes things rush together out of particles forming images.