An old interview with Kay Ryan. Unsurprisingly she is also a fan of W.G. Sebald, who is right up there with my favorite writers in the whole wide universe forever and ever. I reread and I reread and he only gets better. Sometimes it’s nice not to be a critic and have to be objective and bursting with disclaimers. If I love a writer I can even regard his weaknesses as a curious clue to his other work, though it’s hard to find much fault in Sebald’s writing. I was knocked over when he died in 2001.
Ethan Zuckerman on Argentine maker culture (and steak). This is really exciting to me for all sorts of reasons.
I want to make a very small film, but I am not in the frame of mind for collaboration these days. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s partially feeling that for the moment my personal routine doesn’t lend itself to advanced planning and tidy schedules and it makes me unhappy to appear to behave unreliably. Even working from home the interactions with clients or potential clients in the outside world are stressful enough (mostly because V, the baby, and his babysitter are also working from the same home). I don’t want to pin my schedule in more places than I have to. However, a long-term-part-time consulting job I was lightly planning for just evaporated into a mist of budget cuts and lack of funding, so I may have a bit of time to make something as I wait for another client interested in jumping through my particular schedular hoops. So I thought maybe I’d try to make a little film I’ve been thinking about for a few years now. However I get hung up on the idea of using myself as an actor. I feel as though I don’t entirely own my own image, which is something I thought about a while back when I was looking at a lot the work of Miranda July, who owns her image with a vengeance. I was talking to V about this and he suggested I look at the work of Miru Kim and listen to her speak. There is a fine tension in her work particularly because she has determined to use her own image even as it seems to slide out from under her a bit. In the TED talk, she speaks with increasing confidence then suddenly falters as if catching sight of herself standing on stage, speaking about work that contains her own body. And even as I write this I am faintly vertiginous at the thought of it being read. I thought I’d start writing and only after a while make the writing public, maybe behind my own back when I’d already ceased to trip over myself; but catching hold of one’s own image (or alter image) isn’t such an orderly process. The other morning as I was getting dressed I was thinking of the seeds I have variously sprouting and not sprouting in the south facing window of my bedroom/office/closet/mead hall/copy room. I pulled back the curtain and started squinting at them. Right now my onion seeds look like specks of punctuation balanced improbably atop unstraight threads of green. A few of the cosmos are sprouting happily and a few more promisingly fat, as though they might still split open. Some of the eggplant and peppers have sprouted, only to hang at the clam valve stage with bits of white fluff on them. It is not really very warm yet in my south window. Maybe I gave them to much water. I haven’t grown anything from seed since kindergarten or preschool. I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen and am irrationally surprised when they actually grow. On the other hand, I anthropomorphize the seeds like mad and feel terrible when they rot. So I was wringing my hands and poking around in the peppers and eggplants and trying to talk to them without sounding too patronizing the way adults do when they talk to children, when someone on the sidewalk strolled by talking on the phone, or rather bellowing into his walkie-talkie. He didn’t look up, but his presence a few feet away made me realize with a shock that I was standing there in the open window my underwear… A long time ago people used to send me beautiful emails with long descriptions of bread baking or conversations between fictional characters or the early memory of moving to a new house.
Analogue Books. Better yet, cartoneras. (via MobyLives)
Did I say something about a reconciliation date with the city? So, the date was going okay and I was starting to relax and make small talk when suddenly my date unzipped his pants, gazed off over my shoulder, and started wanking fervently. This is not Mark Doty’s fault. He set us up in good faith, but a not-at-all-metaphoric winner in the park where I was frolicking with my child started not-at-all-metaphorically masturbating right in front of us. Ugh, god, New York—go to your room until you can learn some manners.
I thought of this short story by Hannah Gersen, called “Fox Deceived” (What a fine title!) as I was reading a description of hxaro in the first part of Mothers and Others. Also the following:
Among higher primates, humans stand out for their chronic readiness to exchange small favors and give gifts. Donors often take the initiative, actually seeking opportunities and expending inordinate thought and effort to select “just the right gift…”
For some reason I feel really emotional as I read this book. I think it must be because of how important Mother Nature was to me in organizing the world. (A book the baby incidentally approves highly of. He lugs it out and coos over the “bee-bee” in the Mary Cassatt picture on the cover. I bet you like that one, Mister-ito. All that science giving baby primates leave to cling to their caregivers night and day.) Something about reproduction and family still makes me vibrate, though I am over the hormonal wash of tears that was pregnancy and the first six months after giving birth. For someone whose normal tears occur at intervals of years, it was disconcerting to find myself weeping nearly every day. It wasn’t sadness. It was emotion, biology, and hydraulics. One morning three days after the baby was born, V handed me a bowl of oatmeal. I gazed down at it for a moment and began to sob wetly. He was ecstatic. Right on cue! According to the astonishing but evidently valuable book he’d studied at length (Going so far as to read it on the train, which if you have seen the illustrations of undressed hippies doing things like giving birth, you would understand is really something, in almost any possible interpretation of the word something.), day three postpartum is designated for weeping. It’s hydraulics, he said, your milk is coming in. And indeed hydraulics it was.
Anyhow, the crying was strange but not particularly unpleasant. I have always sort of envied people who talk about having a good cry. (Though I’ve also always sort of despised people who liquefy on cue.) I can grit my teeth and screw up my face but nothing happens and normally when I do cry, it is awful. Much like vomiting, also fabled to make one feel better afterward. Just awful. To be avoided at any cost. (Did I just give something big away there? Was that like talking about a dream involving teeth and snakes? Whatever, I’m cool with snakes and teeth.) The reproductive related weeping, however, was different. The tears just soaked through normal life at intervals without washing any part of me away. After a while I realized I had to temporarily steer clear of normal media outlets as it was just too much for me. I have an idea (not very examined) that it is important for me to be a witness to even or especially things over which I have no power. It seems that it’s the least I can do to give a sliver of meaning to the lives of people who are suffering in some futile way. It felt very wrong to refuse to know about other people’s pain, but I just couldn’t manage it. It was somehow at odds with gestating my own human. Which made me cry of course… I cried over children’s books and babies and very old people and nearly any story about nearly any specific person, but I shed plenty of tears over more abstract thoughts as well. Once near the end of my pregnancy I was sitting in a privileged seat on a crowded train and thinking how much my feet hurt, and soon I started thinking about how an extra twenty five pounds or so is nothing and plenty of good and decent people in the world have to carry more than that up and down stairs every day of their lives and no one gives them a seat on the train for being fat and instead people make all sort of presumptuous judgments about them and all the time their feet must hurt so badly. And soon I was weeping steadily into my handbag.
View from the FDR at night.
More Thomas Browne, this time “Of the right and left Hand.”
A beautiful journal by David Kilpatrick.
It’s spring and it’s raining. Everything looks dirty.
I still have Jillian Tamaki’s long ago free wood panel image on my Mac’s (Culatello’s, that is) desktop. I go and look at her work when I am frightened by color… That, for obscure reasons, reminds me of Ruth Gwily too. More lovely work: Of Life and Death.
Mmm, scanwiches.
I’m quite happy with the iphone as camera these days. Since I often still carry or trail the baby and some baby-related equipment when I leave the house (Actually that’s pretty optimistic. In over a year I still haven’t figured out that I am supposed to bring little adorably shaped snack containers, spare diapers, squeaky toys, sundry bottles of water, changes of clothes, and a lot of other things I’m probably forgetting. I get all caught up congratulating myself for remembering my keys and phone, assuming I do.) I just can’t manage my serviceable Nikon any longer, so despite being so ripe they were falling off the picture trees, staining my clothing, and squishing underfoot; pictures were not being taken/picked, taken home and eaten, pickled, or baked into pies. And now they are. I wish they were larger and a fancier format, and hence more printable,01 but mostly I like the limitations. I like the highly specific little apps that generate such a capricious and chronologically identifiable species of image. I like that those apps are so short lived that the quality of the image will tell me as much about my life right now as will the subject.
