Deeply saddened to hear that Leslie Scalapino has died. I feel fortunate to have spent time with her on a couple different occasions--in San Francisco and here in Ohio. I've some things I want to write down about what Leslie's work has meant to me, but later when I don't feel like crying.

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Am listening to the new Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden collab, Jasmine.

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Geof Huth's new blog 365 Ltrs offers up a poem a day in the form of a letter to a different addressee. I was the soft target of poem #2 and received a signed hardcopy version in today's mail. It was one of the most thoughtful gifts I've ever received. Again, I feel a little weepy.

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I've been on something of a tear reading work by and about Ralph Waldo Emerson (who, by the way, shares a birthday with Geof Huth). Just finished On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson by Branka Arsic (Harvard, 2010). I really like this passage:

"Rather, as Hegel claims in complete agreement with Emerson, philosophical thinking is about affirming something by exposing the subject to the 'predicate'."

Which reminds me, I need to decide what to do with my "unpublishable" manuscript Exposures.

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Connections and disconnections. That Emerson was not systematic in his thought, that his thinking was relational--performative--has a lot to do with what attracts me to him. Just as Leslie Scalapino's work always seemed to me a kind of phenomenology of the present, unfolding like a moment of really experienced conscious time.

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I'm groping. With no sense of destination, no place to go.

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