What I'm Thinking About

Here in Connecticut on this Autumnal Day the magical leaf color popping out all around, I am thinking of compositional states and means of writing.  These days I most often write by hand in notebooks.  For some time I was a slave to Atoma's mostly B-5, now they are rare and I am either writing Russian exam books (super skinny) using a very thin Russian ballpoint pen.  Before that I was a slave to Japanese notebooks of all sorts and remain addicted to tiny back pocket notebooks with a tiny Zebra pen tucked inside.  The same type I used for the Pocket Poetry Project.

Writing in notebooks by hand means I then need type up the writing, to digitize it so I can share it.   The typing is a different more meditative activity than the writing.  The writing is closely tied to the time of composition so the re-reading during the typing up becomes a kind of mediated time travel back over a few months or if the notebook is much older, over years.

The writing is shaped by the notebooks and pens as much as by the place of composition and my state of mind. The pens and paper in play create the physical relationship between my hand and language.   The skinny Russian ballpoint pen retracts as I write, retreating from page, requiring an active twisting open to continue to compose.   This engagement with the pen, slows and focuses my concentration on the descriptions and language I scribe onto the examination book pages.  Because the examination books are bound, stapled together as a complete compact unit, I think of them each as a single project.   Where the Atoma notebooks allow pages to come in and out and whole notebooks to refilled with new pages,  allowing them to more fluid and porous in their structure.   I can and do write many things in these notebooks and comfortably extract out the parts and pieces of most interest for typing up, allowing the rest to remain pages bundled into the cardboard cases of the most recent refill.

Visual Landscape

The cascade of textures in the post industrial frame--A re-frame of the idea of art.  A constant remaking-- restating.

The academy of Lewitt--apostles making the lines over and over again--

An aging Anselm Keifer--  The Iron(Y) of war----

The artifacts of argument and display--

                                                              Why the  $$$$$$
of Visual Art are so "interesting"

A visit to MASSMOCA--

AMAZING AND PERFECT

Only to be interrupted as if on queue by a false alarm of FIRE at the CORNER--An assertion of place and family narrative (by device) over a nearly decade long effort to go there.

ART WRITING

As a Russian Composition Book -- An examination Book -- Soviet Style
_________________________________________________________________________________

A Poetic...

8/14/16

Play on writing and observation around art and commerce----

The Intersection of Queens and queerness--or where ware met counter couture met mall fashion and forbidden passion.

The 10 Project: Sad Irons

Consider the sad iron.  

Write a story of a life involving the use and discourse of the sad iron.  

Consider it's functional and decorative use.  Imagine the user.  Describe her place in the story.  Subject.  Actor.  Teller.  

Remove from her the use.

Imagine the transformation that came with the steam iron.

Wonder at the useful object made decorative.  

Wonder at the change in her labor and continuity of the sad iron.

The 10 Project: Recipes of Recreation & Restoration

Take a vintage cookbook from the first half of the 20th century.  Using only the recipes found in the cookbook, construct a menu for a dinner party of 11 guests.

Invite 12 guests.  Purchase the ingredients for the menu and ask the guests to arrive early to help prepare the meal.  Do no cooking yourself.

Assign the extra guest the role of archivist.  Provide no requirements beyond the need to present an archive of the event the week following.

Refuse to eat any of the food.  Insist you are not hungry.  Secretly resent the other diners.  

Publish the archive.

The 10 Project: Landscape

Look at the landscape in front of you.  Study the plants, trees and characteristics that make up its composition.  Consider your favorite flora.  Note what appeals to you about a particular tree or plant. Think about what that thing means to you.

Look again at the landscape and imagine it in the past with fewer or smaller plants and trees.  Imagine the decisions made in the care and creation of the landscape that led to its present state.  Consider what the landscape might look like without your favorite tree or plant.  What if that species were entirely absent from the landscape?

Imagine a plan for the future of the landscape.  Consider the lifecycle of the trees and plants.  Determine which trees and plants will continue to grow in the landscape and how they will mature.  Decide which plants and trees will die and disappear.  Which ones will be replanted and continue anew but differently.

Take this imaginary future of the landscape and compose it in some form that can be shared with fellow gardeners and landscapers as part of a proposition of possibility for the landscape.

The 10 Project: Time Traveler

Take a travel book from another era, about a distant place or city you know,  want to visit or have some idea of, real or mythic.

Leaf through the pages of the book, read chapter headings, opening paragraphs, let sentences catch your eye.  Read on as you like.   Allow the feeling of the book, its sense of the place, the time, fill you.

Notice observations of change within the text.   Notes of regret, nostalgia and delight for what remains and is discovered new.  

Imagine yourself into the narrators voice, his or her viewpoint, perspective.

Begin to write of your city or place as though you were this writer.  See your place through their eyes,  tell of it in their language.

The 10 Project: The Younger Lovers

Write down the name of past lover.  Someone whom you haven't thought about for a long time. Look at his name and remember him.   His body.  The sensation of his touch.  The feel of his lips.

Hear the sound of his voice calling your name, crying out in passion.

Imagine him there with you now.  Think what you might say and do.

Write your lover a love letter telling all the things you felt as if this were then and he were there and still your lover.

Seal the letter up.  Mark the seal with wax.  Place the letter on a table by the fire.  Consider the artifacts of love.  Letters unwritten,unsent, lost to the vicissitudes of time.

Take this artificial artifact, pick it up from the table and place it in the fire.

Watch as the fire consumes the letter, unmaking your re-making of an affair.

The 10 Project: Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Find a mirror at least a hundred years old.  Look at the glass, the bevels (if present), the frame. Notice the quality of the reflection/representation.  Consider the imperfections, the distortions, the darkness from the loss of silver.

Imagine the gaze captured in the mirror, the reflections lost in the darkness of the imperfections. Notice how the distortions created in the mirror transform and reform the narrative of the the room.

Turn away from the mirror and imagine the now invisible reflection.  Place yourself in that reflection looking out and see the room as the mirror and as yourself.  Consider the collision of perspective and the mirror in the contortions of history and narrative.   Tell the story of the mirror as your story unfolding and unfolded.

The 10 Project: Coin of the Realm

Find three old coins of different denominations.   The coins can be in any currency.  Obsolete currencies are best.

Consider the three coins.  Examine the markings and engravings on each side of the coin.  What do tails look like on your coins?  Whose head adorns the front?   An artist?  An activist?  A King or Queen?  A ruler?  What was the head meant to represent?  What does it mean now?

Consider the value of the coin, its denomination, date of issue,  material of manufacture.  What was the value of the coin when it was issued?  What is the value now?  Is the complex abstraction of value to currency still supported for this coin?

If the coin is obsolete, how does value exist now for the coin?  As an artifact?  A curious object?  A measurable amount of a precious metal?  Gold?  Silver?

Take each of the three coins and toss the into the air shouting "Heads I win, tails you lose!"

Examine the results.  Consider the power of chance in the life of the coin,  the history of governments, economics and society.

Consider the realm of the coin.

The 10 Project: Foundations

Consider the Foundation

Locate a foundation in the landscape.  Consider the foundation’s history, prior and present use.  Note the material, condition and estimated age.  If the foundation no longer supports a structure imagine the missing structure, its material, shape, color and use.

If the foundation still supports a structure consider its condition, material, shape, color and use.  Tell a speculative history of the foundation, include personal or character elements humanizing the foundation.

When I Write of the Body

When I write of the body I try to tell an emotional truth, an intellectual truth though physical states of being.  The sex is choreographed as a dance piece.  Sometimes classical.  Other times modern or even experimental.  Bodies at play, sensuous and silly play always ending in some kind of death.

Rhythmic Writing - A Proposition and an Example

Experiments in rhythmic writing involve the use of rhyme, meter and/or syllabic constraints of construction to evoke layers of meaning in conversation with the semantic.

Gradual grammatical.

Sentences slip smaller.

Syllables simmer silently.

Language lists leeward.

Words without worth wobble.

Ontological offal overwhelms.

Queer queries;

Provoke persistence,

Refute resistance.

Grammar graduates.

Something settles.

Silent steps slumber.

Losses linger.

Wonder wanes.

Ovations of

Questions quiet

Pothumus promises,

Religious reliquaries.

Grammar gives.

The 10 Project: Time Travel

Take a volume of writing (perhaps a book, magazine or journal) from a particular period.  Read and envelope yourself in that period and a particular moment in it.

Recreate yourself in that period and moment as a fictional character with particular agency.  Use that agency to change history.

The 10 Project: Edition of 1

Restore an old manual typewriter. 

Place a blank piece of 8 ½ by 11 Onion Skin paper into the typewriter.   Roll the paper to the typical starting place on the page for a document.   Type continuously, returning on each link until you have reached the normal stopping place at the bottom of the page.   Remove the paper from the typewriter. 

Using a rectangular two tone rubber eraser, compose words and phrases through erasure.  Be sure to sue the pink side of the eraser so as to not tear the onion skin.  When you have finished this composition of erasure, insert an 8 ½ by 11 piece of ecru linen paper into the typewriter.   Roll the paper to the correct height and retype the composition of erasure as a finished work.   Remove from the typewriter.

Date and sign using a Parker ballpoint pen.  Add any embellishments, doodles, drawings you see sit.  Announce the publications of this edition of one.                

The 10 Project: The Hearth is where the Home Is

A narrative of the development of use.  Or function within the structure of TEN.

The known-the unknown.  The known by assumption-history.  The known by rumor or story -- myth. The unknowable aspects of the knowing.

Hearth Cooking with and without a beehive oven.   An instruction:

Cook a meal in a fireplace.  Prepare the food as if this were the only source of fire/heat/cooking available to you.

Share the cooked food reluctantly as if with an unwelcome guest.  Observe the layers of hostility and hospitality.

The 10 Project: Instruction 1 for Ralph -We are a sufficient audience.

Bring out a vintage matchbox or book from a now gone restaurant, bar or club.   Consider the matchbox design, graphics, logo, text, information. 

Notice what is strange or different.  An old phone format, an old fashioned graphic, anything that strikes you. 

Write down your observations on a piece of paper. 

Open the matchbook, take out a match, strike it.

Light the paper on fire.  

Watch the paper burn.

Consider how the objects:  matchbox, matches and paper are as ephemeral as the thoughts, observations and memories they evoke.