Optic Verve

Tumblr.

2011-10-29T08:15:00.001-07:00

I have migrated to Tumblr. Again, and finally.

Lament by Wayne Koestenbaum

2011-10-23T11:39:00.000-07:00

I want to stop being a person.
If only there were a choice--
a rat or signet ring
one could become--a waterfall

or the rocks the water lands upon, or an alien child
picking up a wet stone, drying it with a pocket rag,
taking it home, and placing it on his bureau top
so that other aliens can touch and admire it.

There is no choice, however.
I dare not answer
the knock on the door, the voice that says
Now you may become an alien,
the table is set.

Isn't it time to reconcile myself
to darkness in the kitchen, the confession "I have darkness,"
all whispered by one person, all forgotten?

Launch party.

2011-10-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

I will be reading from XING tonight at Pete's Candy Store, 7 pm, with Jason Koo and Erin Morrill. After party at Loreley Biergarten, starting around 8:30 p.m.

The Accursed Lot

2011-09-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

(Unrelated, earlier photo of J.C.O., not looking particularly accursed, I admit, but it's such a great picture. Her cat as fat as she is skinny.)

There are those--a blessed lot--who can experience life without the slightest glimmer of a need to add anything to it--any sort of "creative" effort; and there are those--an accursed lot?--for whom the activities of their own brains and imaginations are paramount. The world for these individuals may be infinitely rich, rewarding and seductive--but it is not paramount. The world may be interpreted as a gift, earned only if one has created something over and above the world.

To this, Ray would respond with a bemused smile. You take yourself so seriously. Why?

Always Ray has been the repository of common sense in our household. The spouse, who, with a gentle tug, holds in place the recklessly soaring kite, that would careen into the stratosphere and be lost, shattered to bits.

-Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story

I Heart Maira Kalman.

2011-09-19T12:18:00.001-07:00

I picked up Maira Kalman's Principles of Uncertainty by chance at Powell's Books in Portland last month and fell immediately in love with it. In fact, I loved the book so much it pained me to finish it, and I wanted to savor its pages as long as humanly possible.

I sort of didn't know--maybe my subconscious knew--that she was a New Yorker illustrator. Nor that she was one of the people responsible for their famous NewYorkistan cover.

Anyhoo. Maira Kalman. Buy her books! She's so terrific.

"the purest cinema you'll see all year"

2011-09-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

"Brooding, sophisticated and drop-dead gorgeous, Drive is lowbrow trash rewrit as highbrow treasure. Its clumsy coincidences, unnaturalistic expository dialogue and pulpy themes--vengeance, sacrifice, redemption--are brought to life with elegance and gravitas: it's the action movie treated like art, the cinematic equivalent of literary genre fiction. Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed mechanic with sidelines as both stuntman and getaway driver. He's a stoic loner steeped in Jean-Pierre Melvillean melancholy, possessed of preternatural driving abilities, capable both of honorable service and shocking barbarity."
-Henry Stewart, The L Magazine

RAVE.

BOOK news!!

2011-09-04T17:59:00.000-07:00

Xing is now available for pre-order at your favorite online bookstore, Powell's, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.

To launch the book, I will be reading at Pete's Candy Store in the Multifarious Array reading series on Oct. 14. Please come! Book party to follow (location TBA).

And lastly, Xing and Michael Robins' Ladies and Gentlemen, also due out October 11, will launch Saturnalia Books' foray into ebooks! Hurrah. Now you can read us on your handy lil' handheld devices without that nasty inconvenience of having to turn pages. What are you waiting for? Buy your copy today!

Watching Terrence Malick at Home

2011-08-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

My slideshow review of Malick's four films prior to "Tree of Life" is up at Paper Monument. Low-tech forever.

The edge of the cape, nearly.

2011-08-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

I don't have any particular feelings about the town of Chatham in Cape Cod. It's brimming with money and white people, a little more than the rest of the cape, it feels. You can eat off the lawns, and every inn, house, and boutique wears a fresh coat of glossy paint. But I had wanted to go to the Atwood House Museum, an 18th-century museum I discovered in a little Cape Cod booklet the night before while eating fish tacos at Finbar's in Orleans. Actually, the building, rather one wing of the building, is the oldest house in Chatham, with warped floorboards and an elliptically-shaped basement for storing apples and turnips and potatoes (circles and ovals are stronger than 90-degree angles, yes?) and a borning room near the kitchen for pregnant women and the convalescent. These shells were collected by a Chatham family, not the Atwoods, but clearly they are not native to the area. The shells native to Cape Cod are drab and unremarkable and live in their own little glass case in the middle of the room (unpictured because of their drabness). Is everyone over the Hipstamatic? I still can't get enough. Especially since here the Hipstamatic makes the black behind the displays look so rich, like oil paint laid layer upon layer upon layer.

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2011-07-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

Toward the end of dinner, I looked down and saw he had drawn this. "Is this my vacuum?" I asked.

Running into tornadoes.

2011-07-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Francis Alys.

Twilit

2011-07-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

Moving away from rattled towns,
gaining, as a bird in a dishwasher,
an altered view, the owlish lakefronts
with their punch-clock crews

seem less luckless, the lunch-pail
chatter less dim; even recess seems pleasant.
Schoolmates from the third grade call
and nothing since matters,

you leap into kerosene waters
and swim, leaving the nervous talons
on a perch. The past doesn’t hurt,
the past is divine, everyone

the same age at the same time.
Moving is a white lie, a soft arrow.

-Star Black, via The Paris Review

Grounds fo' Sculpture, yo.

2011-07-07T12:04:00.001-07:00

Sculpture by Clement Meadmore.

Twombly, revisited.

2011-07-06T07:09:00.001-07:00

Odd how the mainstream press uses such words as "idiosyncratic" and "inscrutable" to describe Twombly's work and legacy. To me, his work has always seemed intuitive, raw, purely and nakedly expressive. Even the white boxy sculptures, which are mute and ungiving, seem to enact something elemental and human about the impulse to create objects, particularly art, monuments, memorials. The impulse to make something the opposite of oneself--permanent and resolute, open to any and all possibility and immune to death. How does that not translate? Or are these people merely the ones who can never appreciate anything non-representational?

Rest in peace, Mr. Twombly. Your work survives you.

Huh.

2011-07-01T16:01:00.001-07:00

My little painting (see below) has even more resonance today, given the Strauss-Kahn case developments.

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2011-06-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

I never touched her.

2011-06-30T06:33:00.001-07:00

On my way to meet the writers last night, I bought this little painting from J. Williamson near Union Square. For $9. The funny thing is that I already own one of his paintings--a little man dressed to the nines in a top hat and coat with tails, which I got a few years ago as a gift--but I didn't know it until I had looked at his work a little longer. I told him, "I have one of your paintings!" "Oh?" he said, taking a drag from his cigarette. "Which one?" He was a large man, blotchy-skinned and doughy in build, draped in an XXL salmon-colored T-shirt; Rusty Brown immediately sprung to mind. "A little man," I said.

Then I bought this painting. Isn't it a riot? I'm sorry I can't right the photograph. Something is strange with my machine. I know how to do it, I swear, and it appears right side up everywhere else but here.

Blues for Harvey.

2011-06-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

My weekend.

Little-known Muybridge.

2011-06-27T10:55:00.001-07:00

Naked man on a horse, courtesy of my friend Chris.

Wellfleet.

2011-06-20T11:46:00.001-07:00

Hartigan & O'Hara.

2011-06-15T12:37:00.000-07:00

Via the Beinecke Library at Yale via An Ambitious Project Collapsing.

"Facebook Giveth and It Taketh Away" on The Rumpus.

2011-06-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

I am mildly obsessed with Facebook.

New York Young Composers & Improvisors Workshop

2011-06-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

Matt's website for this workshop has launched! You can hear the amazing compositions of his young students (5th graders!) and read their scores... I am particularly fond of Izzy's "Translucent" and Jack's "Simpatico." Lovely, intuitive website built by Oliver Delano.

New York Pelagic

2011-06-15T08:49:00.000-07:00

Artist George Boorujy, who I interviewed for Idiom here, has a blog detailing his newest project, New York Pelagic, in which he is throwing original drawings of seabirds into the New York waterways. We were at the first launching a few weeks ago. This is the back of my head, as I take a picture of George. The first bottle was discovered by coastal scientists! Read his blog for more juicy details.

Joe Brainard.

2011-06-08T13:08:00.000-07:00

Thinking about the late artist Joe Brainard today and his fantastic book, I Remember, which I bought for M a while ago...

Soon. Soon. Soooon.

2011-06-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

A Malick slideshow with text.

A funny piece for Funny Women.

Stories, shmories.

Lane on "Tree of Life," New Yorker.

2011-06-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

"This seraphic strain is present even in 'Badlands,' Malick's first--and still, by some distance, his best--feature film, in which a youthful tearaway (Martin Sheen) doesn't hesitate to shoot men in the back, yet remains erotically aloof, even though his girlfriend (Sissy Spacek) is with him on the lam. We see her buttoning her dress, but that's it, and the whole tale is bent upon the flatlining of desires; we hear it in her unperturbed voice-overs, which established a tradition that has swelled with every Malick film, and that now hits a solipsistic high."

What are you smoking, Anthony Lane? If that's not the daftest, most tone-deaf critique of "Badlands," I don't know what is. It's true that the "seraphic strain" has veered somewhat into solipsism in the later films, but if that's all you can say about Malick's earlier work--Spacek buttoning her dress, of all the startling and rich and original images of the film??--, you really don't deserve to be a film critic.

Also, "by some distance"? "Days of Heaven," mister, "Days of Heaven."

And lastly, of the fact that Malick has not set any films in the present day, Lane writes, "It is no sin to veer away from your own time...but the suspicion lingers that Malick finds something distasteful in our current mores." Seriously? That's like ignoring the constellations in order to criticize the spaces between stars.

"You can't go around expecting diamonds."

2011-06-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

This Arlene Slavin painting circa 1972 is on my radar.

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2011-05-26T08:07:00.000-07:00

Nice synagogue. Very "Space Invaders."

Oh, the pain...

2011-05-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

... of not being able to have this. And the one on the left, as discovered on ebay by Brick House. Maybe if I look at them every day on my blog for a while, the desire will be dulled. Dull, desire, dull.

Raven Poetry Circle of Greenwich Village

2011-05-21T20:08:00.001-07:00

Participated in this today, commemorating the 78th anniversary of the Raven Poetry Circle of Greenwich Village's open-air poetry exhibitions. Thanks, Jason Boog and Elissa Bassist!

Photos found by Jason Boog.

Kayla Plosz.

2011-05-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

A collage and oil painting by emerging artist Kayla Plosz. I bought the collage on top. The hole in the middle is even deeper than it appears in photo. A way to enter.

Alexander McQueen at the Met.

2011-05-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

He was truly a master at work.

Sunday morn.

2011-05-16T05:55:00.001-07:00

I am turning a new leaf and trying to write every day. Steadily, instead of madly and obsessively for several days, and then nothing for weeks.

Some sausage and challah French toast to help the endeavor.

Saturday night.

2011-05-14T19:08:00.000-07:00

Sakura Matsuri.

2011-05-05T13:33:00.000-07:00

"Very Vivid and Horrible Dreams"

2011-05-05T07:28:00.000-07:00

I had very vivid and horrible dreams
All night long when my mother was trying to kill herself
In one dream, there was an assailant who had lined the steps of my walk-up
With forty versions of the same exact piggy bank I got when I was four
And then throughout the dream he kept looking for me so that he could kiss me, but I was so unkissable
In the next dream I just showed up in Seattle and Monica and Travis had to deal with me
Patiently, they put on the tube and made me some bread
Until I abruptly left in a white truck
And sailed through the sky to a large amphitheatre filled with idiots
There was a blonde there, a beautiful blonde
The kind of woman I have always wanted to be
And of course my mother loved her better than me
"She is an illusion" I cried and struck the blonde across the face
Until her dimples melted into thin air
Then I screamed and hollered
And threw my cape upon myself
And went flying through the hall in extremely graceful pirouettes
So that they could all not help but smile
At how sweet I was
But also all-powerful too
I woke up and I knew all the dead people
That had haunted my life from birth until that period
I knew the men in the boardrooms that had been fighting a different kind of war
Only to one day die as frail as they came
Only to one day die! I left this life and went into the next
Where I was myself, but a skinny self
A better self
A more ferocious self that no one expected of me
Not even my dead mother lying there
Telling me it was all my fault that we had been born in a dustbin

-Dorothea Lasky, from Black Life

Overgrown.

2011-05-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

On Vanderbilt Avenue.

You are inadequate and overexposed.

2011-04-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

...

5. You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

...

10. Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

-from Will Self's 10 Rules for Writing Fiction, The Guardian, February 20, 2010

Dorothea Lasky.

2011-04-27T07:21:00.000-07:00

My interview with George.

2011-04-25T13:48:00.000-07:00

"Charismatic Megafauna: An Interview with George Boorujy" on Idiom.

New Hope, Easter.

2011-04-24T14:49:00.001-07:00

A lunch poem.

2011-04-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

Every story begins with desire.

2011-04-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

Any Moron.

2011-04-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

-Lynne Tillman, Lease on Life, 1998

Stranger than Fiction.

2011-04-15T08:15:00.001-07:00

First line of a story.

2011-04-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

In the blackest April downpour, at a pizza parlor, Mr. Tires, of Mr. Tires Autobody, laid some of his smoothest lines on me.

JK's dream last night.

2011-04-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

"Kuan and I in a creative writing workshop. Kuan turns in a 'story' that is actually about six rectangular tin containers of food squashed one on top of the other. Mostly tins of Mexican food but some other stuff too I guess. These are the 'pages' of the story we are supposed to have read (she gave it out the previous class). People start turning the pages, totally puzzled of course, getting food all over their hands. Debbie tells us the title of the story is 'Satyricon.' Nobody has any theories about what she’s up to…the teacher goes into a routine to see if people have read Kuan’s story. Teacher asks one student to summarize and the student dodges the task. Teacher asks, 'OK, if you had to say this story was most like one of these three TV shows, which would you say?' The student picks the show that, for some reason, convinces all of us he certainly has NOT read the story. Teacher continues to put him on the hot seat. I start to see connections between the story and Fellini’s 'Satyricon,' but I can’t remember much of what happens in the movie, so I start asking the class what the plot was. Eventually I come up in my mind with a pretty good interpretation of the story in relation to this film, but I never get as far as saying it to the class. Instead, I tell them that we will have to start referring to Debbie as 'SatyriKuan.'"

Convergences.

2011-04-13T07:18:00.001-07:00

Map drawings by Eve Andree Laramee.

Perhaps April is not the cruellest month.

2011-04-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

Lunch outside Tavern on the Green today.

Badlands.

2011-04-08T11:08:00.001-07:00

The Bisti Badlands in New Mexico. I really want to go here.

George Boorujy.

2011-04-07T08:40:00.001-07:00

Doing a studio visit with George Boorujy this weekend. Incredible, incredible work.

Interview to come.

The Super.

2011-04-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

My super died this weekend, alone, I assume, in his apartment. His name was Billy. I don't know his last name. According to some tenants who have lived in my building longer than I have, he was born and grew up in our building. His mother used to be the super. These few blocks, which I saw him walk so many times, always as vacant as a zombie, had been his entire life.

By all accounts, Billy looked like a homeless man. A castaway. Worn, wizened, abraded by what could only have been a lifetime of drink and wretched loneliness. In winter, he wore a giant North Face jacket that looked like a gift--the only newish, contemporary thing about him, the only recognizable thing about him that seemed to connect him to a larger, functioning society. It overwhelmed his scrawny body. He shuffled in and out of the building wearing it. Every morning he greeted me without looking at me directly. "Hey," he'd say, coarse and gruff, as he always was. I didn't know where he was going, from where he was coming, what he did with his entire day.

No one could understand how our landlord--a lovely man who lives in Long Island--could entrust Billy with the tasks of fixing our radiators, separating our trash, collecting our rent. He looked like he could barely feed himself.

Once M was parked outside my building, waiting for me to come downstairs, and he saw Billy standing in his front window, just staring out. At him? At nothing? With his windows wide open, we could see that there was almost nothing in his apartment, just the barest of furnishings.

The last time I talked to Billy was last week, as I was trying to park M's car a safe distance from the hydrant in front of our building. He walked past and reassured me, "You're good."

Now there is a police sticker placed over his door that prohibits anyone from entering. It looks more like a quarantine than a death notice.

As I began to write this, I realized that Billy reminded me, in many respects, even physically in his hunched posture and lack of chin, of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan--the poor, suffering anti-superhero who lives alone in his austere one-bedroom apartment. What a cruel twist of irony that Billy's job was to be our super.

You're good, Billy. Rest in peace.

Atlantic Ave.

2011-04-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

Hand chair at The Horsemen Antiques. Makes me miss "Arrested Development."

Butter Consignment sells butter shoes. I like those zipper blue ones.

Every weekend, on my way to buy groceries or go to the gym, I have the pleasure of passing by the windows of these and other fabulous shops and boutiques (many of them specializing in mid-century secondhand furniture) which are right around the corner from where I live. The furniture's a bit overpriced for secondhand, and my apartment can't hold anymore anyway, but I have gotten one or two great deals, and the visual stimulation is always totally free.

One Year.

2011-03-31T12:16:00.001-07:00

M & I met at Bookcourt a year ago today...!

(Image by Noemie Goudal.)

.

2011-03-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

Note to self.

2011-03-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

"Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity."

Via. The first time I read this particular column, it was the paragraph about "useless days" adding up that comforted me most. Today I read it again, because a friend sent it along, and this sentence hit me the hardest. I want to post it in my bathroom and read it aloud every morning.

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2011-03-23T12:04:00.000-07:00

"I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be."
-Clare Keegan, "Foster," The New Yorker, Feb 2010.

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2011-03-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

"Interiors" Interior.

2011-03-15T06:15:00.000-07:00

Via Design*Sponge.

The Weighing of the Heart.

2011-03-03T08:58:00.001-08:00

For larger image and for description of the events depicted, go here and here.

Abelardo Morell.

2011-03-03T07:50:00.000-08:00

from "Camera Obscura."

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2011-02-28T19:31:00.000-08:00

New additions.

2011-02-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

Design*Sponge had a yard sale this weekend and I scored this beautiful Danish teak dresser and Italian vintage glass lamp! The orange tulips were for M (from his students' parents) for being the best music director ever :)

Possibly the most amazing paragraph I have ever read.

2011-02-25T07:09:00.000-08:00

Asked by M. if I fear death. No, I don't. He who doesn't desire anything can let it all go. My hopes of being a little old bald tubby man with money enough to eat oysters every day are shot. There is all this pewter-colored hair that sits like a cap on my skull, and I cannot afford oysters. Eyesight fading, I'm as nearsighted as a sturgeon fumbling along the bottom with its whiskers. I have heard no laughter in years. Certainly none of my own. Now my dream is to have nothing whatever to do and make love to a fat girl.

-Richard Selzer, from Diary, excerpted in Harper's this month (March 2011)

On getting real.

2011-02-24T10:33:00.001-08:00

Catherine Murphy, "Moire Chair," 1991.

Catherine Murphy. "Eric," 1990.

Roger White on realism in contemporary painting.

Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.

2011-02-23T08:09:00.000-08:00

The last time he had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor's words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded, had not an envious fellow patient thought he was learning to fly - and stopped him. What he really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.

The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly, but long before that she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. "Referential mania," Herman Brink had called it. In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such are glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.

-V. Nabokov, "Signs & Symbols"

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2011-02-16T17:06:00.000-08:00

This morning I find only darkness in me/Where yesterday I saw through countless eyes.
-Donald Revell, "Lay of Wood"

Chapter 4. Faith.

2011-02-15T07:28:00.000-08:00

"In its extreme form, the inhibition I've been describing ends in writer's block, not so much a failure of faith as a failure of will. The writer suffering writer's block can think of good plots and characters, or anyway he can think of good starts, which is all a healthy writer needs, but he can't persuade himself that they're worth writing down or developing. It's all been done before, he tells himself. And if he does, by a supreme effort, get down a few sentences, he finds the sentences disgustingly bad. In effect, a Platonic dream of what fiction ought to be has thrown its dark shadow not only over the actual rough draft the writer has begun, poisoning the writer's eye and robbing him of the strength it takes to transform the crude rough draft into a polished work of art, but over the very possibility of creating art. ....

"The writer should remind himself of how his writing went when he first began: tortuous labor and revision and gradual improvement, and first drafts at least as bad as the one he faces now--except that in those days he saw the faults less clearly, felt more excited by the possibilities, and was tricked by the exhiliration of new love. ....

"Fiction does not spring into the world full grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original and profound. One cannot judge in advance whether or not the idea of the story is worthwhile because until one has finished writing the story one does not know for sure what the idea is; and one cannot judge the style of a story on the basis of a first draft, because in a first draft the style of the finished story does not yet exist." (italics mine)

-John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

Deborah must have been watching me through some secret peephole this weekend, pacing my apartment and on the exasperated brink of tossing my laptop out the window, because she sent us this last-minute reading for class. It's hard for me to be convinced of that last italicized line, because I have always written quickly, propelled by some magical or demonic spark whose provenance remains, after all these years, as mysterious to me as ever. If I am in touch with that enigmatic thing, the sentences are not disgustingly bad at all, they are surprising and golden and I like them. A lot. In fact, I'm in love with them. It is for me as Flaubert said: style is content. If I'm not excited by the style, I can't move forward. Or maybe I don't move forward, because style isn't what is imposed by polishing a draft. Style is, in my mind, what begins the draft.

And therein lies my problem as a fiction writer. No patience, no forgiveness, all self-flagellation. I can't get from A to B--I am too ready to lose B as a casualty--because the line I'm drawing isn't interesting enough.

I have to change my whole process, my whole way of being. And yet.

Last week I turned in what may qualify as my most workmanlike story to date--a piece written exactly as Gardner up there recommends: laboriously, with many revisions, nips and tucks. And I tried to impose a style--well, at least, polish up the sentences--after the entire story had been written. Line by line, reworking, rewriting. I turned it in. But after it got workshopped, and I saw all my blind spots and knew exactly what I needed to improve, I lost all motivation. I didn't care about the story. In fact, I sort of hate that story. There are some good things about it, but overall, it's not worth saving. I wouldn't want my name on that story even if someone wanted to publish it. Stylistically it's just not up to snuff.

Perhaps the only reasonable thing to do is to accept that, working the way I do, I simply will not produce as much as I could otherwise. I will discard much and be frustrated often. I will have to accept that my irritatingly exacting standards will bring me unhappiness. My only consolation is the firm and enduring belief that, given the choice on any given day, I would rather be Terrence Malick than Woody Allen.

Well, but. About this being Malick. How to work on that...

Happy V Day, Love!

2011-02-12T12:24:00.000-08:00

I miss ze desert.

2011-02-09T11:09:00.000-08:00

Via.

Life under the sea.

2011-02-07T09:29:00.001-08:00

Underwater hotel in Istanbul.

Desks for Making.

2011-02-04T12:18:00.001-08:00

A good desk from Handcrafted Modern by Leslie Williamson.

Basia Bulat on NPR's Tiny Desk Concert.

Posts from Cairo.

2011-02-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

Friend and former colleague, Elijah Zarwan, who now works for International Crisis Group, reports from Cairo on NPR a week into the mass protests. We haven't been able to reach him online for days now, naturally, but now we can hear his voice.

"Another Year" review for Idiom.

2011-01-27T14:35:00.001-08:00

Here.

KGB reading

2011-01-25T10:23:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you would like to hear some fiction read aloud at a little Russian-themed bar this winter? You are in luck. I will be reading with Humera Afridi and Martin Quinn at the KGB Bar this February 4th, 7 pm, at the CUNY Writer's Institute reading curated by Jonathan Galassi.

"Another Year"

2011-01-18T11:37:00.000-08:00

Pitch-perfect and uncommonly rich. Review to come.

On black.

2011-01-06T07:29:00.000-08:00

(The primordial darkness of the universe at the moment before creation, as represented in a plate in Robert Fludd’s 1617 Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica, atque Technica Historia (The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds, Namely the Greater and the Lesser).

The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following Aristotle, remarks that the fact that we see darkness means that our eyes have not only the potential to see, but also the potential not to see. (If we had only the potential to see, we would never have the experience of not-seeing.) This twofold potential, to do and not to do, is not only a feature of our sight, Agamben argues; it is the essence of our humanity: “The greatness—and also the abyss—of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness.” Because we are capable of inaction, we know that we have the ability to act, and also the choice of whether to act or not. Black, the color of not seeing, not doing, is in that sense the color of freedom. 

-Paul La Farge for Cabinet

Faux Naivety: My Interview with Michael Perrone

2011-01-04T11:45:00.000-08:00

... is up on Idiom today.

Flow Chart

2011-01-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

"Constellations of consumer choice were studied by research institutes such as the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) based at Stanford, an elite private California university. Founded by Stanford trustees in 1946 to support economic development in the region, SRI International, as it is now officially known, currently describes its mission as “discovery and the application of science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace.” It was forced off the university campus into stand-alone status in 1970 by students protesting against its military research.

“Lifestyle,” an index to the changes in the terrain of consumerism, was a neologism of the 1960s that quickly became comfortable in everyone’s mouth. In 1978, SRI announced a lifestyle metric, the Values and Lifestyles (VALS) “psychographic,” dubbed by Advertising Age as “one of the ten top market research breakthroughs of the 1980s.” VALS today seeks “to find out about a person’s product ownership, media preferences, hobbies, additional demographics, or attitudes (for example, about global warming).” (Its categories are innovators, thinkers, achievers, experiencers, believers, strivers, makers, and survivors, which articulate in primary and secondary dimensions.) The VALS website establishes its connection to other survey vehicles that provide in-depth information, among other preferences, about how each of the eight VALS types uses, invests, and saves money. Such detailed data helped marketers early on to determine how to tailor their pitches—even for matters that should be subjects of debate in the public square."

-Martha Rosler, from Culture Class: Art, Creativity, and Urbanism, e-flux

Meaningful Love, John Ashbery

2011-01-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

What the bad news was
became apparent too late
for us to do anything good about it.

I was offered no urgent dreaming,
didn't need a name or anything.
Everything was taken care of.

In the medium-size city of my awareness
voles are building colossi.
The blue room is over there.

He put out no feelers.
The day was all as one to him.
Some days he never leaves his room
and those are the best days,
by far.

There were morose gardens farther down the slope,
anthills that looked like they belonged there.
The sausages were undercooked,
the wine too cold, the bread molten.
Who said to bring sweaters?
The climate's not that dependable.

The Atlantic crawled slowly to the left
pinning a message on the unbound golden hair of sleeping maidens,
a ruse for next time,

where fire and water are rampant in the streets,
the gate closed—no visitors today
or any evident heartbeat.

I got rid of the book of fairy tales,
pawned my old car, bought a ticket to the funhouse,
found myself back here at six o'clock,
pondering "possible side effects."

There was no harm in loving then,
no certain good either. But love was loving servants
or bosses. No straight road issuing from it.
Leaves around the door are penciled losses.
Twenty years to fix it.
Asters bloom one way or another.

from Where Shall I Wander

Wunderland.

2010-12-27T10:37:00.000-08:00

Happy blizzard!

More time.

2010-12-26T17:20:00.000-08:00

"And though when I was younger I believed I wanted to have a child, I was not surprised to find myself at thirty-five, and then forty, without one. Maybe it seems like ambivalence, Your Honor, and I suppose in part it was, but it was something else, too, a feeling I've always had, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that there is--that there will always be--more time left for me. The years went by, my face changed in the mirror, my body was no longer what it had been, but I found it difficult to believe that the possibility of having my own child could expire without my explicit agreement."

-Nicole Krauss, from Great House

Light and Moment in Monet

2010-12-16T11:16:00.000-08:00

"Monet painted the facade of Rouen Cathedral thirty times, each canvas seizing a different and new transformation as the light changed. He painted the same two haystacks in a field twenty times. Sometimes he was satisfied, often he was frustrated. Nevertheless he continued, searching for something more, determined to be more faithful, but to what? To the passing moment?

"Like many innovative artists, Monet, I believe, was unclear about what he had achieved. Or, to be more precise, he could not name his achievement. He could only recognize it intuitively, and then doubt it."

-John Berger, "The Enveloping Air: Light and Moment in Monet," Harper's, Jan. 2011

For Matt.

2010-12-14T09:26:00.001-08:00

Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan (panel excerpted above).

Michael Perrone, (Re)Visited

2010-12-10T08:02:00.001-08:00

Doing a studio visit with Michael Perrone this weekend..! Here are some of his older acrylic paintings. More to come.

Shampoo Sacrifice

2010-12-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

I dreamed that I was in the woods before a large tree stump, waiting with a small group of people to find out which of us was going to be sacrificed for an unknown purpose. The woman giving the verdict did so by placing bottles of shampoo one by one atop the stump. If your brand of shampoo appeared, you were spared. One by one, individuals saw their shampoo bottle and crumpled to the ground in relief.

My brand of shampoo, people? My brand of shampoo did not appear.

See. This is why you shouldn't read Jung Chang's Wild Swans before you go to sleep at night. Nor, while we are on the subject, should you watch "Saving Private Ryan" in the same day.

Fucking brutal.

Streaming.

2010-11-24T11:05:00.000-08:00

"Even if you are writing stream-of-consciousness, it still has to go somewhere. It isn't 'pool-of-consciousness.'"
-Jonathan Galassi

Judging a book by its cover.

2010-11-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

The image I chose for my book cover has been approved! Hurrah! To be revealed next year...

But this one is pretty brilliant. Maybe when I have a selected poems edition, I will do three sides of my face for the cover, as old Lenny did.

Actual Invented Harper's "Findings"

2010-11-17T07:34:00.000-08:00

I always flip to the back of Harper's when I get the magazine to read the often absurd scientific findings. Here's my send-up on The Rumpus.

I will read... something funny!

2010-11-10T12:47:00.001-08:00

Nov. 17. 7:30 p.m.

Bar on A.

The Guerrilla Lit Series.

Chris K. Palmer, Origamist

2010-11-04T07:42:00.001-07:00

Shadowfolds.

"To the Measures Fall," Richard Powers, New Yorker, Oct. 18.

2010-10-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

On rereading:

"You take [the book, To the Measures Fall by Elton Wentworth] down and browse. You stop to fix dinner for your husband, who, an invalid of high modernism, cannot fix it for himself. But you're back at Wentworth until 4 a.m., when you end up at the bottom of the South Downs gravel pit, 1920, your throat feeling as if you'd been taking swabs at it with a pipe cleaner. You don't know what hurts more: the swirling moral turbulence of the book or the belated discovery that everything you thought about it was wrong. You missed it all: register, mood, irony, ambiguity, subtleties of characterization, narrative arc, even basic plot points. You can't read. It's like finding out, at thirty, that you're adopted."

I was dying of laughter reading this on the A train home. The "You can't read" part, especially. Re-reading and discovering that apparently I can't read is the story of my life.

"Invalid of high modernism"! Hee, hee.

Ignatz Domesticus, by Monica Youn

2010-10-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

Then one day she noticed the forest had started to bleed into her waking life.

There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.

She thought to brush her hand against his thigh.

She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail.

The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixellate around the edges, to become a kind of grammar.

Soot amassed in drifts in the corners of the room.

She placed a saucer of sugar water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as they drowned.

A soft brown dot loomed large in her concern.

She pressed her thumb into the hollow of his throat for a while and then let him go.

via The Paris Review

Letters to Wendy's.

2010-10-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

August 7, 1996.

When my head hurts I don't need a doctor to tell me why; I know it's because there's nowhere to put it. Where it's put dissolves, and then there is my head, scorching, freezing, dripping against a simple insistence on temporary limits. Today was just so. I felt such revulsion looking at my fries, each one exposed so much like myself, but even needier, trusting me, my head, belly, for shelter. There's no shelter here, friends.

August 21, 1996.

It is important to be no one. To be someone--isn't that like being one of those candles that's shaped like a lion, or an altar boy? For a candle, how strange it is to worry over keeping a distinct shape? I see so many of these worriers--blind twisted forms melting under their tiny flames. My flame is huge; at the tedious party of Relative Difference, no one wants to sit near me.

--Joe Wenderoth

Roger White at Rachel Uffner.

2010-10-21T14:02:00.001-07:00

Roger White's second solo show at Rachel Uffner opens Oct. 29 and runs through Dec. 19.

This watercolor gets me quite excited.

Bitten.

2010-10-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

The mosquito bite on my knuckle, like the one on the back of my hand, and the one on my shoulder, and the one on my forearm, and the three on my forehead, and the one on my cheek, and the one under my chin, is wrong.

It is mid-October. There is a crisp chill in the air. My apartment is cool, in the last days before the blasting inferno that is New York central heating begins.

And yet, every night, without fail, I hear the buzzing of that most infuriating of God's creatures in my ear.

I have killed one in the bathroom and one in the bedroom. But my walls are a white, and during the day, there are none to be found.

Curses!! @#$@#%)(*#$@_(*_^*!

Tonight I am armed with DEET, organic DEET, anti-itch cream, and one of those refills for the little OFF! fan you can wear on your belt (the drugstore only carries the refill, so maybe I'll put it near the bed and aim a fan on it). So pathetic.

Why "Badlands" is so radical in its premise.

2010-10-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

"The film is also perceptive on the nature of a human being's relationship to his or her world. Here, a phenomenon like alienation again is not given an explanatory angle: Kit and Holly's loneliness and detachment from their world are not due to some particular psychological reasons or their places in a society. Rather, experiences such as alienation, anxiety, and listlessness are shown to be fundamental facets of human life, as life oscillates between the stable everyday world and its tasks and the realization that its stability is not based on unshakable foundations. Malick is insistent that human action is not always motivated by psychological causes. In effect, he challenges the traditional notion of the “character” as primarily defined by psychology, deeply buried within a person's mind, instead preferring to envision human beings as by nature tied to (or being robbed of) their worlds, which forms the basis of any sort of human experiences. In fact, the freedom that Kit and Holly experience, as they retreat more and more from society, is an oppressive, unbearable one."

-Hwanhee Lee

DeKalb.

2010-10-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

I can't get off at that station anymore, because doing so means I have to walk through downtown Brooklyn and get followed by scary-ass men. Last night, a man followed me--a little to my right and half a step behind--saying, "Hey, sister, slow down. I just want to talk to you. I don't bite." I lost him two blocks later by joining a cluster of city workers (maybe) who were talking on the street corner. A very tall black man, like 6'7'', in their group said, "You okay? Was he following you?" I thought it was astute of him to have noticed, because it was late and dark, and who the hell notices people following other people when you're having a lively convo with your colleagues on the street?

A few weeks ago, coming home on the same route, a man driving a van followed me, hanging out of his window, going about 5 mph. For two blocks. That doesn't seem like a lot, but two blocks, when you are being followed by a predator in a van, is a loooooong time.

I guess one still needs mace.

Kindness.

2010-10-06T07:09:00.000-07:00

"There are people, I now know, who have been granted happiness as their birthright, and who, believing that every mystery in life can be solved and every pain salved, reach out with a savior's hand."

-from "Kindness," Yiyun Li.

I don't recognize the stoic cruelty of a world like Li's, because I was lucky enough to grow up in America, but I always recognize the Chineseness--the embarrassment that comes from sharing an emotion, especially with family; the awareness of the judgmental gaze of a community, which, internalized, invariably compels individuals to ruin their own lives; and ultimately this belief that optimism and happiness are a kind of impudent foolishness, best stamped out early lest they cause even greater disappointment--and it wrenches my heart. I come from that. I know exactly what that is.