Rebecca Bollinger’s Book of Stains*

A project and a catalog of ideas all at once, the book of stains is an album of images of objects blemished with unwanted color, stains. 

The antithesis of purity, these stains represent the failings of the ideals of the clean and pristine.   Gentler than a scar or amputation these stains are no less disfiguring and permanent.  Or is it refiguring and an assertion of impermenance?  

Does intention make the violation of the stain different than the violence of creation? 

The violet ink soaks the white linen fabric in an expression of a failure to hold, the breaking of a seal, the compact between pen and ink undone. 

The fabric forever altered/changed to something other than its prior pure white. 

The change is unexpected, unintended and unwelcome.  The stain ruins the shirt and in its runination the shirt becomes other.

The artist wears her paint spattered clothes as a badge of honor.   Fabric bearing the stains of her craft as a soldier’s uniform bears the medals of his.

The shirt pinned to a board or crumpled in a vitrine is remade again in a reframing/naming of the object.

“White with Purple Pierce”

History re-written to reclaim the shirt and the stain as an expression and act of making meaning.    The stain no longer a violation but a violet medal of meaning informs the white purity of the possibilities of purple.

The stain ascends to art.  Becomes an accidental artifact.  A marker of meaning.

Stains are evidentiary.   Blood stains especially so.

We prefer to curate our evidence to frame the narrative to our advantage.   Unfiltered evidence clouds the story.   Creates confusion and conflict.   The unintended and unexpected stain is unwelcome.   The intended stain is a lie.    Are these statement both true and the inverse too?

 *Rebecca Bollinger’s Book of Stains refers to the artists notebooks of images relating to stains which she generously shared during one of Dodie Bellamy's writing workshops.   This is an initial meditation on the concepts of stains as expressed in this book(books actually).   Stains will be part of an ongoing project in parallel to my consideration of the Colonial.

Hotel Theory Continued

OK.  About half way through the Hotel Theory part of the book(s).   Built of small meditations/mediations on hotels based on hotel literature, hotel movies, hotel/space theory, hotel art all mixed in with Chopin, Hotel Theory is starting to coalesce for me. 

I have come to accept the concepts of hotel-ness proposed as simultaneously true and false--especially as they contradict each other.   When I am finished reading I will propose my own Hotel Theory.

Hotel Theory

Reading Hotel Theory by Wayne Kostenbaum.  Not sure what I think.  I like the idea of Hotel Theory and some of the posits he makes along the way but I am also disappointed by the surface skimming and dancing around the topic he does.  Of course I might just be reading it wrong.

There are two books or texts set side by side.  The one of the left is Hotel Theory and more or less that is what it pretends to be with weaving in and our of Heidegger, popular culture, history and any and all things 'hotel.'  The one on the right is Hotel Women a self described pulp or dime store novel employing a not articles device to tell a story of Liberace and Lana Turner staying in the Hotel Women.

Two texts relate thematically and physically by the structure of the publication but do not read across as a unified text or overlapping dialogue might in a play.  So like a book full of marginalia one text competes with the other.   How is it meant to be read?   One book and then the other?  Together alternating lines, paragraphs or chapters?  I tried various versions of merging and/or overlapping the texts but then gave up on that and read first the Hotel Women story and now am reading the Hotel Theory as way to re-read Hotel Women.

I may have made a mistake.   I am even more impatient with the discursiveness of Hotel Theory after scene filled Hotel Women with a sufficient hint of plot and tension as to pretend to story. 

But then the problem may largely be my own unmet desire to read a theory of hotels that would posit something I might apply to my experiences of travel and place.  A Hotel Theory that would unpack the complex hierarchy of the Hotel.  The class system with the staff and the divide between guest and staff.   The modeling of power structures mirror the cities and societies these hotels occupy while dislocating these structures inside and outside of history and place. 

I want to be reading how the Hotel is homunculus more magical and mysterious than any alchemy can imagine.  And how this little fully formed being is itself representative of and actual.  I want to assign terms and systems to the Hotel that attempt to account for being both place and idea, human and a profane representative of humanity.

The Post Compositional Space Or How Writing Precedes Typing

Today I am writing it out or down or otherwise committing pages and pages of writing in notebooks to documents.  In this post compositional activity I am urgently driven to compose.   To fill the remaining pages of these notebooks (mostly Japanese or Korean these days) with new writing.  I won't resist for long.  That writing, the writing that happens in carefully selected notebooks with particular pens (currently black ballpoints of various thicknesses collected from five star hotels in San Francisco, Moscow, Seoul, Bangalore and Tokyo) is the real writing.  The typing and incidental editing is for me the lesser work and so accordingly I resit doing it for months sometimes years.

The Colonial State Or the State of the Colony

It's all still about colonialism.   Occupation.  Segregation.  Control of people and resources.

This is a theme I am thinking a lot about, especially as it relates to our experiences of place and power dynamics.

I will start to share here some of my observations and musings on the colonial based on my last year plus traveling to and working in places still very much shaped and being shape by being colonies of the old and new imperial powers.