Faces (7-8)

(7) Before him lay an open notebook with black cover and lines written in black ink and a cursive, steady handwriting. His hands with widespread fingers, a slight laugh on his lips, and slow movements of his head, emphasized only the calm of his mind. (8) Her straight hair was bleached and reached her shoulders. The bags under her eyes, her reddish tanned skin, her stretched flat lips, and her coarse, boisterous voice revealed an inclination for addiction.

Les Pensées

Artaud turned left at Saks Fifth Avenue, the area they called euphemistically hedge fund alley, here the rich made and spent their fortunes, and entered the lobby of Rockefeller Center. There he was stunned and admired the mural by Diego Rivera called Man At The Crossroads.

Deja Vu of the Meaning of Life

I am a bit in between. In between what I don't exactly know. But I will soon figure it out and escape it. Every little observation I get trapped between one and the other, but I don't seem to be able to be in perfect sync with what it is that I am observing. This constant feeling of deja vu of the ordinary, the constant thought that everything is happening twice. All that I see for the first time, has a dusty layer of familiarity. The odd sensation that everything has happened already, that I am just an old witness, as if staring at the rerun of an old tv series. The worst of it all is that nothing of it makes any sense. I am staring at it as if I don't understand it. Of course there's nothing to understand. There's nothing to think of what is happening. The old white woman with her black untailored shirt and pants, the young black woman with her distinguished eyes whose toes point toward another, the small groups of New York police academy cadets that cross the street, the yellow cabs that color the road, it all just takes place without a particular meaning.

Inspiration: Interview with Anne Carson

"The form hasn't emerged yet of the thing I'm working on."
- Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, and scholar of classics who lives in Montreal.



Wikipedia: Anne Carson

The Village Post Office

Can't complain she said, her voice barely audible above the ruckus of stapling and clicking from behind the office window. Of course there is my back. The Post Master slowed his stamping. To ignore the comment would bring minutes of blissful silence, to show interest would be nothing less than slow death. But sometimes, he thought, staring death in the face is perhaps preferable to passing your days with nothing but stamp books and the dull clunk of a second hand for company. Others have sports cars and roller coasters he surmised, I have old women. Oh yes, and what's wrong with your back?

Old Friends

Herman hugged his goat as they drove off in the back of the trailer. Bob had Korsakoff disease, he couldn't remember much, he didn't even know what had happened. Herman moved for the tenth time, his last resort was Salvation Army, but he preferred sleeping in his car. When Hermann saw Ben come around the corner he lost his temper and flew at him, his fists taking relentless punches at his face. Jan rambled on about his broken marriage, his sixth, he forgave her, but could not stop accusing her. She never loved him. Jos picked up his guitar and begun singing. Jos had been rejected numerous times by most record companies. Bob died of a heart attack. His wife Hermien had moved back to Jan several months after they had broken up. Hermien was sick, Jan took care of her. She drank. A month later he was arrested. It was around that time that Jos and Jan heard about Bob's death. Herman had started a business in second hand goods, but was closed down after welfare found out he was using his money to run his business. Jos earned money playing Jewish music at weddings, during the day he drove the taxi for senior citizens. Jan was released and lost a lot of weight. Herman lived with a decent woman for a few months. Jos realized he never knew his friends. Jan cried when Hermien called him and told him she missed him. All I could think was that these are real fucking people.

Thought Soup 090610

My CD collection is a mess. No case contains its partnering CD and so listening to music becomes a perpetual game of lucky dip. This stressed me at first but now I'm actually starting to come round to it. So long as I know beforehand that I have no control over my aural landscape it feels good to just throw myself against it. Dazzle Ships, I keep coming back to Dazzle Ships for some reason. Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth moved on from creating Vorticist woodcuts to painting dazzle camouflage for allied ships during the first world war. The figured that since no ship could be hidden entirely at sea it would be better to make their camouflage patterns as confusing as possible. Silence is either horror or happiness but very rarely something in between I think. It is surprising how horrific the Freudian Uncanny can be. Returning home is something like diving head first into a deep pool of uncanny. Everything becomes the same but different, you see yourself at 16 years old walking down the same streets you wandered along at 18 and then again at 28. To double the horror, try putting all of your new clothing to wash and having to wear whatever still fits from your teenage years. The Gothic boy who worked at our local corner store is still there but now he has cut his long hair, is going bald and has grown a beard. he looks like a very respectable 40 year old man but he can only be 22 at most.

The Unhappy Patient

Felix Krull lived on Roebling street in South Williamsburg. He was an artist. That is, many people believed he was. He made post-Rauschenberg assemblages, which sold fairly well, not enough to make a name for himself, but enough to make a living as an artist, and of course he was a photographer like everyone else. His most acclaimed work, which even was featured in an obscure art magazine published in Oklahoma by an independent small publisher whom he had found through the listing in the 2009 Writer's Market and later had spoken over the phone for a long-distance interview, was a guitar assemblage of a M249 toy water gun that served as the neck and a speaker box integrated into the iron cover of an old land mower. Of course, most of his shows had been black and white photographs of his neighborhood and portraits of people whom he met at art gallery openings, exhibited at anonymous cafes and a few bars that he would frequent. The biggest question that lately had occupied Felix was 'Is unhappiness a physical illness?', a question which had not found its way yet into representation in his photographs, and to which he had not found a definitive question yet, but he fore felt that it would occupy a central place in his next series of assemblages.

Faces (1-6)

(1) Her eyes were fully hidden behind her mirrored Ray Ban sunglasses, her flat nose and her pouching lips, crunched into the shape of a fist's clasp, as if she was trying to grab my attention, her perfectly dark olive skin gave her a warm reception, but her boxer's face punched right back in your guts. (2) A white bearded man with a scruffy ball of hair extending to his neck, wearing a baseball cap walked with a stiff torso, but his mousy eyes jittering back and forth, nervously changing and never locking down on any fixed point, seemed to tell me he wasn't very at ease in the city, but he really was never given the choice, and it was kind of too late now. (3) A table down, a pale woman with tanned sunglasses, with shabby upper arms and scattered sunspots, tears a piece of transparent tape off and tapes another receipt on a letter format blanc sheet of paper, dotting down a note, which she encircles. (4) An Hispanic with dark muscled arms, covered with tribal tattoos, swings his shoulders and hips, hustler style, super fly manner, wearing a small hat with a narrow brim, and in the band sticks a gray feather, while his head marked by a hawk's nose and wide nostrils, rotates scanning the periphery of his proxemics to catch people noticing his presence. (5) A lanky Chinaman, with a Vietnamese expression, and greasy hair combed backward, his dark blue checkered shirt hanging down to this knees, leans forward to balance the weight of the shiny trash bag on his back. (6) Her dark eyes looked like soft candy rolling down her reddish, girly cheeks, as she bit her thin lips with her canine teeth, and while she straightened her plain red summer dress, I almost melted for her kind impression, until her voice spoke in a deliberate intention and her straight laughter revealed only a shallow confidence, and I deeply disliked her.

Les Pensées

Artaud woke up in the middle of night, somewhere in the grid of the city in a stranger's bed. In a state of half sleep, he ran through the floor labyrinth of Reims, looking for the virgin at the end of the labyrinth, the woman whore, the vagina dentata that would swallow him, devour him, and liberate man.