words written in the week of
May 5th to May 11th
in previous years.
This was 10 years, 10 months, 4 days ago

oh here it comes oh here it comes. in the distance. chugging along. turning the corner.

sudden whiff of summer, full of empty rooms where this internalized superego of a bustling studio will no longer exist, among other absences.

slowly I can feel myself becoming real again. not quite yet -- there's a week left, or two, but it's there. a dehydrated self swelling, absorbing, growing. the anticipation of cool night breezes, walks, bike rides. nights where nobody's around. decisions to be made. mumbai, istanbul, new york, jordan, korea, etc, the building of a machine, the lighting of a bonfire, the opening of a book, hurricanes, farms, books, readings, libraries, ..

This was 13 years, 10 months, 8 days ago

iphone, subway, all from may 9 - may 12


Part of the spark of an idea is that it persists throughout the entire project like the 잔상, a ghostly afterimage on the retina that exudes its own purplish presence wherever you look. A building is a building but if you can get that originating spark to glow enough everything becomes overlaid with the rich dissonace of communal usage. Without it things don't cohere, like a heated series of arguments that never converges into a debate.


Moment, as in brief but also ad in momentum, movement, vector anchored at a start and straining (collar presses against neck fur) forward, that strain being movement, directionality. Movement on a street, on the side of a building, spaces becoming so very optical.


Looking back over my shoulder on dean and Flatbush I suddenly abruptly experience a sort of subiomity that's been jolting me lately. City in my hair and music in my ears. How long does this last, I wonder, then quickly banish those questions and all that's left is a series of experiences to look forward to and to experience now. Accidental grin. Where else could I be? I am blessed to be in the thick of it all, to be running.


A couple (?) sleeps on the train. Sleeps, or is coming up/down. Together they gyrate in slow-motion circles, grasping errant bars, ends of chairs, shoulders of strangers. Rather than squeezing themselves into a corner and molding themselves asleep they've decided to take up most of the seat, and as such they bend, fall, rotate, two
wilting flowers gently being twirled in sticky ten-year-old hands. The coming of their sleep is so tangible that I wonder why I will not be next, my legs giving away as I slowly fall to the ground, eyes sliding quietly shut.

This was 15 years, 10 months, 4 days ago

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:

His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.

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

This was 15 years, 10 months, 9 days ago

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..

This was 16 years, 10 months, 6 days ago

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.