New work from Miranda July: The Hallway. It’s weirdly immersive… I was looking at this piece on her website and there are a bunch of hilarious comments like, I knew her in high school and let me tell you she’s nothing special at all. Whew. I guess we know who hasn’t changed since high school.⁰¹ Thank goodness the rest of us were allowed to. Speaking of comments, I was watching the new Amy Pohler show on Hulu (no comment here) and for some reason stopped to read the comments there too. (I am on a comment and review reading binge. It’s odd. I will stop now. There are so many more interesting things to read.) There was one lengthy analysis of how making fun of Native Americans isn’t funny. Well, well. I guess not.

Douglas Coupland’s Canada House.

Keith Starky, Explaining Twitter, via everywhere on the whole internet. Who actually hasn’t linked to this yet? Still, viola! as they say in Texas.

I need hair help. My adorable little boy haircut has reached an awkward age and needs to be sent away to boarding school for a while. Must commission the interns to read Japanese hairstyle magazines for an Interim Solution.

I am also wondering about the mechanism whereby babies (And possibly the mechanism whereby I presume to extrapolate from my baby to all of baby-kind. Maybe I’ll save that for another day.) forget one thing in the process of learning something else. My peerless aurelian genius child is a chatterbox and has been since before he could even move about much. But when he started to crawl (actually he never crawled, he sort of dragged himself along on his ventral side for a few months, as though ascending a very steep slope) he stopped talking altogether for a while. When he began to walk, he seemed to temporarily lose a lot of his vocabulary, and lately as his fine motor skills are exploding, seems to have forgotten some of what he cared enough about even to discuss in his sleep a few months ago. He used to talk about colors nonstop, but now if I ask him what color anything is, he answers rojo offhandedly, gives a light laugh and changes the subject. Esponja? he’ll ask pointedly.

Sometimes when I look at the work of an artist I like or talk to friend or someone I worked with who has been more single-minded than I have over the last ten years, I get this momentary pain. They’ve built something so tangible now, while I’m still so short of that. For a panicky moment I wish I’d had more discipline, I wish I’d started earlier and stayed dedicated… But I really don’t. I like working this way, it doesn’t feel like work, while the other eats away at the edges of my mind until I feel all crumbly inside. Really the only thing I wish is that I’d realized long ago that the inability to concentrate (or the lack of interest in specializing?) might be an advantage. It might be a good thing to always be pursuing relationships that are invisible to other people. I wish I’d stopped trying to force myself to behave a long time ago. I’m sorry it took so long to learn.

A couple of months ago I was standing on the corner with a friend, waiting for a town car to take her back to Harlem. It was sleeting so we stood there a while before anyone stopped. Across the street in the elementary school, a construction crew was working. I thought they were just replacing the windows, but they were clearly doing a lot more than that. For a moment the high, penetrating rasp of a wet masonry saw eclipsed our conversation. I winced at the volume, though ceramic sounds mostly make my mouth water a bit. (I like the sound of unglazed porcelain pieces clinking up against one another, or the faint grinding a blasted glass stopper makes in a flask.) My friend turned excitedly toward the sound and then apologized over her shoulder, saying that in her house noises like that are music. He husband is a musician and makes some beautiful, but frankly difficult music (sound art?). It occurred to me that as conscious as I am of the visual world around me, I’m only intermittently alert to the aural landscape. When I suddenly notice it, I am suddenly overwhelmed by how much I’ve been missing, the way I was in the Zumthor building in Vals. The Therme Vals is a singular building. It is probably the most completely considered physical environment I’ve ever encountered. Everything is intentional. Materials, light, color, lines of sight, temperature, smell, and acoustics. Yet it doesn’t feel at all overwrought or overdesigned. It feels very pure.

I am hung over with exhaustion today. Baby was possessed of an mysterious feral energy between 3 and 5am and wanted to run about the room shouting for shoes and toys and other things I can’t recall. I could use a hangover remedy: (Austin) Tex-Mex migas with nice thick homemade chips and tons of cheese melted over the top for a moment under the broiler. There should be refried beans made with a lot of bacon grease and a very spicy michelada… Instead I’m sitting here trying to think about graphing and proposals and not really succeeding at all.

An interview with the director of Treeless Mountain, So Yong Kim, a woman I once worked with and liked very much in the way I can’t help liking people who make beautiful things that appear rigorously organized in some mysterious personal way… I can’t wait to see this movie.

Koyuki, a person with whom I am acquainted three dimensionally, writes about how the structure of her life has changed permanently now that she has a child. (The yoga class was enjoyable mayhem. I don’t think I got through a single asana without my child throwing someone else’s to the floor, screaming for a bola or a pelota, trying to announce to the teacher “thisisa…itisa…it’sa…goodie vela!,” or deciding that it was time to drape himself over me and try to nurse. (Woo! It was something like spring break on South Padre Island.) Afterward we walked around Harlem and I yearned quietly for fancy running shoes. We had a fine time. I instantly decided that, since I don’t work Fridays, I will bring the baby every week. And one of these Fridays I will. Nearly everyone I know who has a child describes a profound change in herself… I don’t know. I think I am more myself, the way I am after a big or particularly intense experience (and jesus, giving birth was certainly the most intense experience of my life), but I don’t feel either any sense of loss or at all like a new person. The structure of my life has changed a bit, but it hasn’t occurred to me to think even that has changed permanently. Some essential things are different now, but they don’t actually affect the structure of my life much. (e.g. I am temporarily afraid of dying because I can’t bear to imagine what my baby would do without me. Of course he’d survive, but even though much less intense than it was a year ago, his need for me is still so sprawling.) I’m still me. I’m still the same person I always was. I am deliriously, unspeakably happy to be A’s mother but when I identify myself, I would almost as soon define myself as someone’s mother as I would have defined myself as not-anyone’s-mother beforehand. I don’t feel diminished or ruined or triumphant or… really anything besides myself. My life and my person had a trajectory before the baby and the baby hastened some things (besides gravity’s claim on my body) and emphasized others, but didn’t change the trajectory much. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Probably neither. Or a little of each… I can’t get enough of reading or talking to women who find it utterly different.

The León Ferrari and Mira Schendel show at the MOMA is pretty wonderful, though as usual I didn’t care for the MOMA chitchat. (Is it that I am getting older, more confident of my own readings, so I have less interest in being told what art means? Maybe. I like to talk and read ideas though. It can’t be only that.) The change in León Ferrari’s work in recent years is really interesting. It is suddenly fierce⁰¹ and unambiguous in a way that’s most interesting because of who is he and his years of beautifully cloudy previous work. And aside from the work (which prompted a sketchbook page full of frantic notes and secured a few flyaway ideas about type and handwriting I’ve had in the last year), the pictures of the two artists set beside one another, each with an edge of work in the frame, are pretty great. Like a black and white gender lesson, he with his pointy structure (haha!… ha!) and she with her knotted textile (which makes me think of Eva Hesse). The two of them are a good combination, their work not particularly related until you see it together. Also Mira Schendel was adorable.

The Whale Hunt. For once I’m not talking about Moby Dick (though it features in the story), which, based on the conversations I’ve recently overheard, has a cheerier ending than I recollect. Baby has seen me reading the Penguin paperback with the woodcut (is it? can’t recall) of the breeching whale on the front, and arrived at his valuation of the book accordingly. I had to fight him for it by the last few chapters. He would snatch it away from me and take it to his father who will discuss the tiny pingüino on the spine and the carro (!?) on the front and tell him nice stories about la ballena Moby and how his nose is higher than his eyes and everyone drank tea and lived happily ever after with the fishes, as I suppose a number is true, if you aren’t too literal about living or happily.