Monthly Archives: August 2010

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Last night I dreamed about the man from Kyoto. I was swimming in a sun-drenched ocean, but the tide was coming in, waves crashing crazily all around me. I could not swim hard enough against the force of the ocean. I was, predictably, beginning to flail and becoming more and more terrified of sharks (unpredictable, splashing movement mimicking an animal in distress–easy prey, murky water–) He was still in the water, though nearer the shore. He offered his hands; I seized them; he towed me in. When my feet touched the sand again I let go of him and he winced. What’s wrong I yelled, over the roaring surf. It’s my shoulder, he yelled back, It’s really nothing. At the joint where his humerus met his shoulder grew a patch of dark green mold, with red stripes streaming down, the way the flesh is shot through with red around the original wound as tetanus develops. Why are your tendons molding? I shouted. He reached over with his good arm and pushed the wet hair out of my face. I don’t know. It’s really nothing.

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Les yeux bleus, cheveux noirs, arrive dans le courrier. I am going to be a translator.

& Jez sez, don’t worry, you’ll find the mother.

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NERD SAUCE

My very first fully conjugated french sentence:

Avez-vous des livres en francais?

AHAHAHAHAHA GLEEFUL LAUGHTER.

Gleeful laughter, part 2:

Tonight we did the final copyedit for 37.1 and it just looks absolutely GANGBUSTERS. So gorgeous, so diverse and interesting in terms of content, so much good art and music! It is going to be really really incredible. I cannot cannot CANNOT wait.

The semester is just shaping up to be wonderful. I study french cognates and vocabulary for 3 hours a day, I work in the office, I merrily giggle through my classes, I come home and bang away at the typewriter for hours and then go out laugh bawdily at the pub. I am–of course–tired, but I am feeling happy, healthy, focused, and deeply tied to the people I love, here and everywhere.

The life I’ve been building here for a year is finally really starting to take shape, and it’s just gorgeous.

Marginally related: I’ve booked a flight to NYC Nov. 22-Dec. 1. Here we go MOMA, here we go Met. Here we go Guggenheim, here we go Apiary. Here we go Momofuku, here we go magic.

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You Know the Way

What he wants from me is numb, it is crushed
inside the dark hole of the last place you’d ever look.

I have practiced dreaming. It works sometimes.
My heart is there, somewhere thrilling away.

I can’t kiss anyone for just this reason.
And there’s just the voice in my ear, which says:

I’m looking for one rusty black bike
one rusty thing to take me down the road

Saskia Hamilton

Have been trying to work on a homework assignment, but I just can’t seem to focus. Stomach all twisty and irritable. Frustrated and tired, overly self-conscious, irritable. Hormonal. Maybe it’s time to make some tea and write.

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The langour and stir, the warmth and weight and the strong feel of life from the deep centres of the earth that comes always with the early, soaking spring, when it is not answered with an active and fervent joy, gives always anger, irritation and unrest.

Gertrude Stein

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Last night I dreamed The Lovers.

They were embodied by a pair of friends who just got engaged to each other, but there they were, unmistakable, another archetype passing through, and away.

refusing to let the ends justify the means

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iv.

The dictionary I have in my hand
says that death and burial
are the same in meaning. I have not obscured
my relation to you as lover
sans beloved. No pages
torn from books. Sheer, with the minute print
of the bible. They came, and they were heroes,
and they tore away branches all oblivious to
fruit. They saw us light this up with sulfur–
and make pulp and mill the paper of secreted
documentary.

v.

Now a maiden loves a dragon,
and the dragon might
come upon a quality
of moral rightness and adopt it. The dragon
might be one of surpassing beauty, of
indeterminate gender, might have
precise appetites. Circular wall. The dragon
reads on the throat of the maiden words
she cannot view herself. There are rules here,
you understand, that will not err
and cannot forgive.

Elizabeth Robinson

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The aesthetic self is not a divining rod to the wellsprung self or the blotter paper of everyone else. I am not I and I am not the other. I am others and I am I. In the doing and undoing and make-over of me, there is neither the excretory birth of a single consciousness, which is the baked story of biography, nor the splintered self of woodcut history. I am a frozen gesture. I am the raw breath of the back of the neck, and the stifled rising sigh. I am refraction, a rose window slatting your sons and daughters, I am ecriture feminine et masculine, I claim abstraction and realism, time and waste, the screaming whole of the atomized race, I clot the mouth of this double-vaulted god…

The better aesthetic argument swears not by the testicular tooth of a single truth, even that single truth of multiplicity, but to the constant tension between expirations, to the thievish shuttering of subject and object, that, like the lead-lined mirror and the serpentine self, is both word for word and the chiaroscuro in the machine.

Vanessa Place