this desk is perfect, looking out the window at this river of a bqe, layers of greenery in front of my eyes, a suddenly bright sign in the window

--

to resume my own conversation with myself on a bicycle.

this gorgeous summer, gorgeous, dear friends coming and going, friends leaving town for good, or at least the near future: for cambridge, san diego, tivoli, japan, chicago. warm wind blowing through my hair, right now, and I know that some may have their A/Cs up on full blast but it is a gorgeous cool night right now for me.

maybe my contentness exists in proportion to the amount of wind at any given moment.

--

so. here I am. it is as if, having come back from india, the constituent parts holding together a world exploded into the million different fragments that they were originating from, many different components and pieces scattered together on a ground. You look, and you say: what for? why this? where does this go? how does it fit into my life? with what certainty do I bring it into my being?

everything challengeable, everything challenged. everything questionable, everything questioned.

right now the sodium yellow light outside changes everything and it's the quality of summer here that suddenly puts everything into such a sad longing light. skies are really really high. everything is dark. I see people in groups in profile, silhouetted against car headlight beams, walking along broadway. everyone's tired in the subway. I feel distance so utterly.

and of course.

having turned on brian eno's music for airports in the airport, like so many others probably have, I walk through the terminals of SFO. it is quiet and empty and not altogether lonely, just with the hum of people moving when they need to. there are restaurants one-thirds full, silent people sitting in barstools turning their beer glasses thoughtfully, a kid playing on the ground with his one toy car. movement altogether appropriate and deserved. everything in its place, so to speak.

just before this I am in a plane from seattle to san francisco, lifting off. underneath is a city's worth of houses, streets, and people, shaded orange with the sun-setting-sun. we pass over a used car lot, and instantly I catch an undulating glimmer on the expanse of windshields, side mirrors, chromed grills, shined roofs. here is an image: of flashing, then crashing waves, the image of a school of fish suddenly turning in mid-motion that catch on late-night tv, back when you still watched tv, of iridescent scales on a fish when it's lying comatose and almost-dead on a circular wooden block, ready.

going and flying and lifting off I get this sudden presentness again, the kind I always get in airplanes and in airports, where it is as if everything distills itself to the bare minimum of moment, very mute and unsaid. taking off your shoes at the security checkpoint is just that; taking off one's shoes. I toss a receipt into the trash and it's just that, a flick of the arm and air-resistance-deformed parabola that results. nothing else. the faint hum of some janitor's vacuum cleaner ten gates away. someone's shuffling their feet, checking the departures panel. a girl wearing blue converses sits next to the wall, charging her laptop and reading a book.

at night, in this heterotopia, this special zone of movement, change, where all the lines are being redrawn and people enter this giant machine to be changed, moved, shuttled, transformed, altered, spun around and pointed into different directions -- there is me, pointed, pointing. going somewhere, and that's it; I have this image of a section of the airport, and a series of faint orange arrows overlaid on the scene, this vast multitude of movement. if you look closely there's probably some pattern to be discerned from this all; there's the tour group, going to florida, there are zones of stagnant waiting, for those taking a red-eye (like I am), and there are eddies and swirls and flows.

again, back on this plane lifting off I feel g-forces pressing me gently into my seat like a nurturing hand, almost, and I can't help but think that it's so valuable to move, to be moving, to be going somewhere, to want to go somewhere. more than anything really the kind of movement I embody is desire; to desire, to want, to want to want. how much that is important becomes distilled in this moment all of a sudden, when the vertical motion of the arm of a russian office worker that stamps a visa stamp is directly related to a flight to russia, st. petersburg, on trains. I want to walk, move, be disoriented, not know things. to step outside my self.

the magical moment that occurs when reading a sci-fi novel or opening a map for the first time is the moment of learning, comprehension, buying-into-a-mental-language. I want that vertigo, which is the vertigo of jumping over a frontier and thus creating a new one. I want that. on this plane moving upwards and me, enjoying the sensation of being pressed into my seat precisely because it comes from acceleration and advance.

I sweep up the latent quiet energy that seeps out of the quietest hour on planes, the lazy terminal hours, and pack it away to counter the movement of new york, because sometimes there's stagnancy in always-moving-fast, and there's a startling rapidity in the force with which these airports make me want to go, go, go. all of a sudden I want, am a vector facing new york. I want, I want, and I want, and I want.

I am reading DFW's the broom of the system. it is quite wonderful, to say the least, and there's much that can be read into it, such as the depressed-philosophy-genius figure, or DFW's fascination with institutions of treatment (the nursing home, Infinite Jest's halfway house), or the mechanisms of therapy that are so literally mechanized, or DFW's own self-loathing of over-intellectual over-literary personas (the second-order vainness itself being a multi-order awareness of this second-order vainness and no doubt a tertiary vainness, of being aware of being aware of being vain; also, rick vigorous's florid and (quite entertaining) internal dialogue that is implied to be so closely tied to his literal impotence)). to name a few.

but really sitting in seat 30B on this flight, all of a sudden the thing that pops to the forefront of my mind is the sensation I had when I learned that he died, killed himself, which is most probably the feeling that so many others had. this is vain, yes, I will acknowledge that and dismiss it immediately: to be quite honest the reaction I had was something along the lines of "I could have said something, and he wouldn't have killed himself", or such. as if I had some magic words to say, I think, and then I correct myself and think, I do -- that is, everyone does; that is, to that imaginary author I have these magic words, and to my imaginary author it would have worked, and what I would have said goes something like this:

,hey david, or dave, dave wallace, with your bandana, I'm not going to try to say anything about you, because really the point of me talking to you is quite honestly all about me; I've read many of your works, I don't really write 'works'. but all I want to say is that everything lies not in achieving but in wanting, and I know you've written two brilliant novels. but really lately myself I've been realizing that everything's about the want, not the endgoal. I know you've been stressing out about perfection, and that's why your friendly editors at harper's have been sending you out for piddly-word-count assignments which are really pretenses for you to get over your overachieving self, because really what's great is when you feel like you've already achieved and then comes the fun, the real you. really all that lies there is this drive towards wanting, and before that you're stressing out too much about completing, and all I have to say is once you let yourself want, not want to finish but want to want, then I think everything opens up, and you've got to stop this perfectionism nonsense, because you've flourished in spite of your perfectionism, not because of it. what happens when you don't fully succeed is that the project wrestles itself out of your hand and turns into something else that you could have never imagined. and, dear dave, is how evolution starts. strictly speaking, mutation is what drives evolution. the little epsilon of failure-to-be-accurate is the starting point of all change and progress. so come and write and let yourself down with the best of us and the worst of us.
I am reading DFW's the broom of the system. it is quite wonderful, to say the least, and there's much that can be read into it, such as the depressed-philosophy-genius figure, or DFW's fascination with institutions of treatment (the nursing home, Infinite Jest's halfway house), or the mechanisms of therapy that are so literally mechanized, or DFW's own self-loathing of over-intellectual over-literary personas (the second-order vainness itself being a multi-order awareness of this second-order vainness and no doubt a tertiary vainness, of being aware of being aware of being vain; also, rick vigorous's florid and (quite entertaining) internal dialogue that is implied to be so closely tied to his literal impotence)). to name a few.

but really sitting in seat 30B on this flight, all of a sudden the thing that pops to the forefront of my mind is the sensation I had when I learned that he died, killed himself, which is most probably the feeling that so many others had. this is vain, yes, I will acknowledge that and dismiss it immediately: to be quite honest the reaction I had was something along the lines of "I could have said something, and he wouldn't have killed himself", or such. as if I had some magic words to say, I think, and then I correct myself and think, I do -- that is, everyone does; that is, to that imaginary author I have these magic words, and to my imaginary author it would have worked, and what I would have said goes something like this:

,hey david, or dave, dave wallace, with your bandana, I'm not going to try to say anything about you, because really the point of me talking to you is quite honestly all about me; I've read many of your works, I don't really write 'works'. but all I want to say is that everything lies not in achieving but in wanting, and I know you've written two brilliant novels. but really lately myself I've been realizing that everything's about the want, not the endgoal. I know you've been stressing out about perfection, and that's why your friendly editors at harper's have been sending you out for piddly-word-count assignments which are really pretenses for you to get over your overachieving self, because really what's great is when you feel like you've already achieved and then comes the fun, the real you. really all that lies there is this drive towards wanting, and before that you're stressing out too much about completing, and all I have to say is once you let yourself want, not want to finish but want to want, then I think everything opens up, and you've got to stop this perfectionism nonsense, because you've flourished in spite of your perfectionism, not because of it. what happens when you don't fully succeed is that the project wrestles itself out of your hand and turns into something else that you could have never imagined. and, dear dave, is how evolution starts. strictly speaking, mutation is what drives evolution. the little epsilon of failure-to-be-accurate is the starting point of all change and progress. so come and write and let yourself down with the best of us and the worst of us.

I think what I was trying to say while having dinner with a friend tonight about architecture was that navigating this terrain is like walking into a house or an apartment with an identical floorplan, watching with a mixture of diluted horror and fascination as you see objects and components reshuffled, changed, familiar forms of vision and architectonic journeys shifting and surprising at every turn. Such as: going to Tokyo, looking at similarities (or identicalities) in terms of infrastructure, disorientation happening localized at the soles of my feet.

It's hard to navigate and put feelers out while asking the same questions -- canon, judgment, subjectivity, axioms, etc. So far it seems that much of what is seen as "good" architecture (obligatory and necessary scare quotes) is sort of an axiomatic flowering combined with careful and precise adjustment -- an organizing principle or concept that you spring, spread, fling, hurl, scatter across a surface like maybe thousands of dice thrown across hundreds of board-game playing fields, then carefully rotated and organized, aleatory results tweaked to become deliberate. Somewhere in all of this the aesthetic lies as this question mark. I haven't decided yet where it seems to be; the happenstance intersection of the flowering-out and extension of functionality with aesthetic appeal taken as an absolute plus.

It's sort of a hidden addition, the effect of aesthetics maybe more unsaid than not. Diagrams all the more valuable because of the sort of deliberate confusion that aesthetics brings on -- maybe there's this usage, aesthetics as this distancer, not the indifference that Kant talks about but the eye-popping effect itself separating content from form and thus allowing some sort of secondary and new elucidation of content to be extracted from form. Things that look good make you look at them in a new way. From this comes the pataphor that I talked about, the controlled free-fall of creativity ((perhaps) hopefully) leashed to functionality.

here goes a photo of hiroshi sugimoto's.

-

one. bus rides, sun settings, circular tracks spiraling into boston proper, under multibillion subterranean tunnels, zeroing to this place I temporarily call home: where my suitcase is.

two. feeling that familiar sourness behind the eyes after every chapter of 'oscar wao' as my eyes prepare to get ready for starting to tear, and being astonished (but not ashamed) at this sudden welling of emotion.

three. biking along the charles, just during sunset, the contrast between orange sky and shadowed ground reflected in a thousand different ripples and so strong as to be nearly black and white, monochrome journey along this central artery.

four. the last few times I've been walking/biking along the Charles I've been thinking of that anne sexton poem I read a few years ago probably sometime in junior year in high school. here it is:

five. sitting on a rooftop in the east village looking around: other people on other rooftops, all having their own parties, as far as the eye can see, it's a second city up here tonight, watching the indirect glow of fireworks reflected off of faraway skyscrapers, through the smoky haze. in another city this would be youtubed and uploaded, distant thunder tolling and telling of revolution and revolt, masses moving, change in the air, the bottle and rag that constitutes a molotov cocktail suspended hanging at apogee, moving along air-resistance-deformed parabolas. here it's a joyous mockery of this all, over there you see people clumped predictably like ants along the edges of a faraway rooftop. sun sets amongst water towers. I want to cry, almost, everything's set in this glow, I wonder if it's just me or if most people understand this rooftop and this sense of higher-up-ness (is this really just another word for the sublime?) and if so then why people aren't crying out or throwing themselves off the edges of these rooftops in sheer overwhelming awe feeling other monstrous creations of brick, cast iron, and concrete spike up around you watching the sun die westward;

six. new museum, younger than jesus show. it's the middle of the day and inside a gallery but somehow with headphones on watching a video of these dudes dancing around and the sound of soles against snow-crusted asphalt surprisingly loud I all of a sudden have the sense that I am inside, up late at night, watching this video with my face illuminated with the glow of an led (formerly see are tee) display, watching this impromptu dance and feeling like I've touched something sacred in the midst of the profane (not to reduce popular youtubery to the profane or anything but I just wanted to talk about this sensation of passing through to something _else_, like the first few waves of cool air breaking over your face as you step outside that restaurant to the crisp night air and taller buildings) and I think, william gibson would like this, don delillo would like this, this early morning conspiracy, this aligning of stars, this syzygy, tearfully brief moments of coherence,

seven. did I mention tearing up while reading oscar wao?

eight. the crunch of caramelized pork rolling around my mouth at the second bite of banh mi having just hopped off a bus, having just come back to my city, oh one of my cities.

nine. staying up all night working, making. we are in the process of building cities and organizing routines, establishing phenomena. changing people, the dictatorship of having people conform to a space, or vice versa? these questions. one thing that I think about all the time lately is how architecture in this studio, at least, is like studying done through pataphor, controlled free fall, endless spiraling-offs maintained through twin tenuous leashes to a) functionality and b) core vocabularies or orders. the blockage of creativity in the face of orthodoxy and convention means that you step off stepping offs; orthogonal angles off of orthogonal angles no longer going parallel, drifting off, doing some sort of random walk akin to a situationist derive going away, exposure to liminal states and the breaking-beyonds of these liminal states -- and so on. controlled free fall, I just said. in the midst of this self-adjustment processes comes inspiration and creation and that's really why the reason these exercises are done in the first place, I think; this is what I think; the silent reason behind these things that isn't mentioned ever this way and most probably so because to each h(is/er) own, you trace out the surface of your own metaphors, your own carvings above your doors, rice flour kolams marking the dawn of each single new day.

ten. managing half-deliberately to write about everything but that which is most important: dancing around the core of that-which-is-going-on, the whats-up, around that which really shakes me now. buzzing. sitting alone or lying awake I wonder: did I do this right? there are no right answers, she says, and I suddenly imagine myself with a machete bushwhacking through a jungle, finding paths wherever I see an annihilable plant or tree. to which way? I don't know. there will be ceilings to stare at and maybe a few more cigarettes to be smoked or something and I wonder and I wonder and maybe I'll find some sort of grace in all of this, some sort of peace and grace in the midst of all of this where there is no right answer or no unifying internal coherence that lends this disorientation and confusion some systematic unified rationality. what happens makes things happen. I am walking around and stopping and turning around and stopping and thinking all the meanwhile. I walk to 110th and broadway and jasmart is fucking closed and I can't find any more ramune and all of a sudden I am very sad just because, somehow this little supermarket having embodied all of the other 'ethnic' supermarkets in the iowa citys and lawrences and greenfields and miltons that meant home, a little improvised home -- but not only that because of something else that I can't quite pinpoint, something that goes with the impossibly good weather and the lingering remains of a hug and the skies (always) impossibly higher thanks to its surrounding buildings. et cetera et et cetera.

I would like to know what to do and where to go and things are slipping out from underneath and I am doing the sleeping. on the subway today (new york, not boston) I dreamt of a cat and I flung my arm out to stop it, ended up throwing my phone on the ground. as I stretched out in a newly awaken haze to pick the phone up I got this taste of my mouth that said something like "hey me, drifting me, this is a now in which archetypes and memories are being formed: new york summers laced with emotion." where to? I'd like to know.

in a strange place.

absolutely awesome. running, rocking, sliding, jumping. music characterized by verbs and the expenditure of energy, whether silent or active.

Los Campesinos! - You! Me! Dancing!

Dan Deacon - Crystal Cat

This is like looking for sublets (the same intense familiarity with craigslist) except with more precision, less abandon, each time I see a place the occuring internal projection of [that place] into a [home?], [if I could just spackle and paint over a bit would that look nice oh and the windows cleaner? Would that change everything].

Sometimes I wonder whether buildings and rooms have home-ness inherent in their structure. Do the angles at which these walls intersect and the shape of these rooms -- do these things without the presence of the habitant, do these things automatically create home? A single room defined -- either home or not home? I have this image of an apartment, resisting assimilation and adaptation into a home, standing staunchly and stubbornly against tenants moving in. Hereafter lies periods of uncomfortability, the sensation of homelessness, and John and Jane always sleep with their guard up and their ears pricked and they go to sleep at night lying on their sides with the fists curled up to their chests like a resting boxer between fights. Trying to stop against the overwhelming sense of -- Not Home. Home, Not Home, Home or Not Home.

--

All the while I'm worried about things I'm passing by, time to do things this summer. All these ideas lolling about in my head, while productivity and looseness and errands and things to do stop things up. I would to make these things, these obj, p.b., l+c, passive/active h.n., think about these things, have them be aesthetic and mental objects, with presence, give birth somehow, time running out all the while I feel..

To want to do and to not to be able to achieve

and a desire to create to make and to make it my own

formulation, a desire to make things formulate, reify, create, present, exist. as an object, as images, presentation, perception, aura.

--

I'm sleepy. time to go to sleep.