every book has its reaching tendrils

Check out one of my favorite writer's influences for his much awaited forthcoming book,

Ray of the Star...

CLICK BELOW FOR SELAH SATERSTROM






CLICK BELOW FOR GUENEVERE SEASTROM

can't hide the love

The academic year is almost over (final quarter) and my brain doesn't want to work anymore in those ways. It wants only to write & finish my novel, which requires summertime. Meeting with students this week, I can't remember book titles and I have not said anything theoretically or creatively valuable. When I look at the 5 books I have left to teach before June, my brain feels like a car that won't start and I do not know where the jumper cables are. A terrible metaphor, which further illustrates my point. This weariness may pass...the 5 remaining books are nervous system waking wonders. Nonetheless, this week I haven't been able to read anything. The only thing I've been able to do is watch these videos, which I have done many times.

The Poet Craig Arnold Is Missing in Japan

Thanks to John Gallaher's blog:
Nothing to Say & Saying it. All of the information below
is directly cut and pasted from his blog.

From Craig Arnold's family:

We have created a Facebook group called "Find Craig Arnold" which will give people the latest info on the search and how they can help.

Those who do not have a Facebook account can go to http://findcraigarnold.blogspot.com/ for bare bones information on the search. However, I will only update confirmed news from family and friends there. Our Facebook group remains the main comprehensive resource for news, suggestions, ideas and updates (confirmed and rumored.) Thus, please encourage people to join that group.

Best,
Friends and family of Craig Arnold

Anne Carson (annotating Roni Horn)

I find this video to be both magical and horrific

Quotes below from Anne Carson's annotation of W ON D E R W A T E R (Alice Offshore)

There are degrees of radicality at borders; some you can cross, some you can’t. The uncertainty is what makes them interesting. Is what makes them borders. A page has a size. A self has flesh. Defy this; if language goes beyond reality, go there too. Of course there is danger. Anyone who slipped would find themselves impaled. Foucault talks about a flash of lightning that harrows the night, a violence that leaps at its own core. You kiss my eye. You cross me. Here is the speechless place. Beget what we are. (pg 86)

*

[Holderlein] wants to name a doubleness that inhabits all things and prevents them from ever actually coming into being or going out of being. Birth, death, these terms are inexact, he says,

But they are the convention so I use them myself.
(Empedokles, fragment 9.5 DK)

Death, desertion, damage are not the point. Arising and existence are not the point. What runs at the bottom of everything is simply exchange…

Reality is a tireless interchange, a mingling and separating, a forming and deforming, a yes and a no, of all the stuff that exists…a twofold motive principle…Love and Strife. Love and Strife are not material themselves, but they cause matter to be what it is and change how it changes. Neither Love nor Strife could exist without the other; they zipper back and forth inside everything like a vast necessary vibration. (pg 117)

*

[on how to do things “fictionally”]

You make something resembling blood.

No use trying to prattle your way into the mystery. But tell what you see, what the blood was like, and maybe a gesture will form. Probably unbearable. Certainly unclean. And then you will go ahead with your exile. (pg 121)

James (& early chat of dreams)

Shary Boyle /2004

Porcelain, china paint, gilt. 22cm tall

Collection of the National Gallery of Canada

On Sunday mornings my friend James and I write together. We are in fact writing a book together.

This is happening now because at some point, I can’t remember when, James suggested we both re-read H Cixous, Insister. The book performs itself and our reading performed the content by becoming it (but elsewhere)...our reading became writing, our writing a simultaneous-reading.

This morning our conversation began like this: Me: J, are you here? I can't sort which text I'm in anymore. J: Yes, I’m here. Let’s chat about dreams. And then our conversation went something like this:

….So much difficulty in distance from “amount” from a count, recounting of more…
….So much difficulty in distance from “coincidence” from coin, the shelling out to dream, the dream as coinshell…

(Me: What is in your coinshell? James: mostly dream, but also tapas!)

And I said to J: Cixous writes: The taste of death remains. Unfinished. Unfamished. The endless attracts you (and later) Responsibility: to 'recount' the division of truth (and he added: therein, division of dream)

J: Division or impossibility?
Are we also taking (tasking?) sides?

It is impossible to keep one's word, to define, find nodes within dream by a plethora of words. succession, sucessation

And I said: Writer +/& process, and the fall-out, the artifact, the work. The “process." The coincidence, but more. The accident. The process as slip-gap - that space where interruption blinks in/blinks out; the event through which our tongues are hybridized so that we uncover (or mutate into) forms to speak the radicalizing experience.

And J said: Yet the experience remains unspoken, or from above, "achieved" or repeated, like suicide...? Or possibly more accurately failed.

Failure fills in that blink, the blink: a failure to see for that moment. So the work: a succession of blinks, a film, a rigorous attention to the frame, not the still, and its portent of flipblink time.

Me: Is it failure to see or the sucess of having seen? I said: I have never liked the word 'success' and resisted learning to spell it as a child and as a woman, its spindly letters breaking in my mouth.

Among French phrases used in England, late 19c.: succès d'estime "cordial reception given to a literary work out of respect rather than admiration" and succès de scandale "success (of a work of art) dependent upon its scandalous character."

But what it comes down to is the double-c followed by the double-s; the soft 'e' as lilting bridge. The proximity of these doubles roasting gorgeously in the heart of the word.
So why does it bother me so?

And James said: to smell roast, to sniff "charm" in a misleadin' lilt to suicide, to ignore ahhhhhhhhhhhh, and it's telegraph.

(me: Yes, that is it exactly. Work as a succession of blinks, the portent of flipblink time.)

Sharry Boyle / 2005 Porcelain, china paint. 20cm tall.

Collection of the National Gallery of Canada

J said: The narrative speed of a digital "postcard." How different from a telephone: first, the lack of ceremony, strange, I began to write 'ceremony' and typed 'crem'..., and thought "cremation," in spite of all the other suffixes. Not in spite, no animosity, but possibly as dream: want without writing...calling the heeding…an altered meeting place...an altered time for touch...

(and he added: I had a dream about my mom, more of a nightmare, I don't think you want to hear it, but there is something in the...recounting)

(in the middle of all of this, a note arrives from Kristen that says:

Forms move from inorganic to vegetation
to selves endowed with spirit
through the urgency of every love
that wants to come to perfection.

- Rumi)

(me: but I want to know the dream, the one about your mother. Always that is the dream I want to know.)

J: Let’s call the text between the first discussion of gap and this one interruption.

Meanwhile, me: thinking about becoming the event
event from evenire
"to come out, happen, result"
from ex- "out" + venire "to come"

(to be - or - to come? I mean: if you had to choose…)

Shary Boyle / 2004. Haunt. Porcelain, china paint, gilt. 24cm tall.

Collection of The Paisley Museum, Scotland

(Once J sent me a postcard that read: Dear S: Yet we work (dirty mot) at revealing the performance yet still veiled. I find the performance to be dream, the inability to coincide, yet the acceptance, even pleasure of this midcoincidence...)

Frank,

well I said, I don’t know about that (most people don’t know the special fiddle story). At a certain point I wanted to shout: get over it! I mean, if there is that much fire, let it burn. What did the anima say to the sola? A: let it burn. Memory (therein is a worth prisoner) keeps coming up (but that’s memory isn’t it? A regular cork). Lots of Roni Horn, who is less interested in the scope of her work, only its pervasiveness (to celebrate the urgency to make it over the need to understand it according to the limits of one’s identity-at-the-moment). She speaks of the erotic: contact + ambiguity = the erotic. (Diederot in a letter to his lover, 1759: where ever there is nothing, read that I love you"). She speaks of being hunted by her subjects, and says metaphor extinguishes mystery (thus drawing attention to the double-edged sword that our language-tendencies always are...discerning when we are at the exhaustion point of our limit of language (where we might say something...Blanchot) v/s when we are being lazy. Trespass v/s identity-buffering). Tonight in the workshop, talk of "the recipient." Who hears, watches, gets the message? All I could say was that the risk is that there might not be a recipient (but there might) (and what I mean toward is between the suggestions). Later I said to a friend: language let language let our bodies let language, as in the archaic technique. I dreamed of you last night. In the dream, you, me, Emily, Lisa, Adam, Ellen, and that other kid were at that bar across from Naropa – the very same place where we actually all were having beers last summer though perhaps in different configurations though you were always there, dear. I thought: it’s just like last summer! Except (but not incongruent with the fact that) the windows of the bar suddenly became thick tree trunks and then we were in a Viking style banquet hall. A long, dark room with huge wooden thronechairs and bejeweled goblets, etc. and I said to Lisa: wonderful; this is my favorite kind of atmosphere, Viking old-timey! and Lisa said while clapping her hands, "Mine too!" But more or less, the conversation never skipped a beat and eventually you started talking about my novel (the one I am working on now, in waking life). In the dream it was finished and you’d just read it – as you always are one of my first readers - and you were going through it section by section in detail – long, languishing sweeps of language getting to the “atmospheric universes” of each of the section’s narratives. When I woke I thought: I am going to finish this novel. Then I realized I could remember your commentary and also be a first reader of that book, thus reading it (by proxy) before I have even written it. So that I might. And then I thought: what was it Frankie was saying? & took some notes. In reading the book I haven’t written (through your midrash of it) now I can trespass into the what-is-next. (Today I was just saying to Eric about his ugly picture of the sidewalk: how charming, to reveal the secret by performing it). I would like to dedicate this video to you. Thank you, in all the ways. x selah