I’m the worst when it comes to fixing Leaks, see for yourself. I’ve seen maps with circular Walls. I love color jet packs. But you’ll need paper For a lively discussion with a white stripe Down the middle of perception. Pointillist Dots and washes create white swirls Of cloud enjambments. So why look at the moon?
What I’m Reading:
“Which snowflake triggers the avalanche? A house explodes; a star. In your spouse, so apparently resigned, murder twitches like a fetus.”
Algorithmically Filtered Prose Poem Farrago or: How ‘da Machine Reads My Handwriting
HAD I BECALE DE FANTASTICALLY LOST MANCULE AVE BEEN LOST TOR SOME TIME – DECADE,• ACTUALLY – IN A LARAAINTA. MY OWN MAKING I DIDNT DEVE THIS MINATION IN SOME GREAT MASTO STROKE, LATTE DID I KON ThAT As I WHNDERED ute THAT I WAs BUILDING THIS FANTASTICALLY GABORATE TRAP. I HAVE DES SULARMINGIN INTENDING TO DO SokEstNY My to contra re I GAMBOL ABET-6Ur 1 MEANIE ELUDES ME -大2NT DO ANYTANG BUT GRAPPLE ABINT AT tte ArR CHENGHING AT NOMINE. ALL PROGNODLY ABSURD. I AN PROFOUNDLY PERTURbED AI MY STATE. I KNON I All Last, But 4亿 UNSURE AS I ARRIVED AT MAS STATE – AND AT A LOSS AS TO How TO PROCEED. I’VE WALRED I’VE WALKED MYVELF INTO A CORNER AND CANT RANK OUT OR CLIMB UP NUT OF THIS SELF- INFEJED PRIVON. JAVEMY JeAT.
A: It’s my dream / S: I’m crushed
What I’m Reading:
“No one asks what Mozart means. Or an Indian raga or the little tripping dance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to “Cheek to Cheek” in Top Hat. Forget about making things that are understood . . . All art comes from love — love of doing something.”
— Jerry Saltz / “Jerry Saltz’s 33 Rules for Being an Artist”
Then there was the sickness— So hot. The vault of heaven darker, Then darker still, A black sun At end. It was succeeded by the shadow Of the shadow— Spreading Nearer and nearer to the pin prick Of light Destroyed. Distant, To the west, A white effluent— Soft and yielding— Fades.
What I’m Reading:
“But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”
Our salad days are filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots— Not so much a salad, but a melange Of weeds and thistles— Indelicate things in our mouths. Every bite a mouthful of rot and offal— Awful offal. The kakistocracy is installed in the cupboards The cups are off on a two week vacation in Marienbad. We are mystified and malnourished. Now I’ve had my wine… And you look better than you did twenty minutes ago. And you say: The sky is a massive hole tonight— My precious lucida is eating the universe: Inside-out. I can lay down and go to sleep. The lights are receding And the darkness is strangely pleasing.
What I’m Reading:
“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.”
Like a van garde avant. Like drinking tea filtered through a Russian soldier’s underwear. Like speaking through saxophone skronk. Like drying your back with nettles and swallowing a chaw of thistles. Like bored sawing through panel board. Like watching Window Water Baby Moving backwards. Like finding a nubbin of your desiccated umbilical cord pressed between two cotton balls thirty years later. Like finding a random head in your Tupperware Cake Taker. Like coming of age at 37. Like throat singing in Spanglish. Like pressing your ear close to an ambulance siren. Like walking off a pier because you hear the mermaids singing. Like, why would they be singing to you? Like, huh?
What I’m Reading:
“I write in the knowledge that there is nothing to lose by saying the difficult thing in common/uncommon ways, knowing that the beauty of a line lies in the alchemy of doubt, adrenalin and risk. Mainstream judgement of what is ‘good’ is based on elite opinion, curated over years. It is necessarily corrupt. I’d rather write an ‘ugly’ line, to such eyes.”
This is what April will look like . . . Easily digestible thoroughly detestable, or:
Make your own favorite artist inspired project:
You might glue colored papers into Sister Corita Kent style shapes and write aphoristic sentences to please your soul.
You might ink intricate line patterns and blocks on graph paper in DW’s Mountebank style and affix phrases cut-out of magazines around the figures.
You might layer words upon a short film.
You might paint a neat Ellsworth Kelly-like green blob as on the cover of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour.
You might make a book of Leanne Shapton-like images and text conflations.
You might gather pictures found at thrift / antique shops and mount them with fortune cookie fortunes affixed on the lower margin.
You might make “the easy project”—a series of atrocity exhibition pamphlets.
A: It’s my dream / S: What horror!
What I’m Reading:
“RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.”
— Sister Corita Kent / “Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules”
The moon wanes as we drop our rock into the darkness. Our rock unbroken; in dust, in mud, over spur, in sag, over scree and talus — unchanged. The rock, infrangible, rolls.
What I’m Reading:
“It’s a strange sensation to yell out: This is me! / In every place I’ve watched / caravans of sorrow— / I run like all the other men, chasing my / shadow down alleys.”
