Must admit that my interest in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology is becoming a bit of an obsession. Thank you, JB-R, for starting me on the road.

Just started dipping into Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology or What It's Like to Be a Thing.

*

Listening as I type to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne.

*

Lots of ideas swirling, but feeling isolated, discouraged, cut off.

*

It’s hard
To think

Out loud
And be

Present to
Whatever, who-

Ever might
Be there,

Here, I
Don’t know.

I just
Doesn’t know.

*

The Body
Is virtual.


The Body,
You know,

Is not
A known

Thing or
Social construct.

It is,
For sure,

A sentence
Or wilderness.

*

The precision
Of thought

Is a
Sad illusion,

Is a
Haiku trying

To be
An opera,

Is a
Film trying

To be
An organism.

*

One has
To try

To do
The impossible.

Or just
Try to

Make out
With all

The palimpsests
One can.

*

Writing is
The weirdest

Archaeology one
Can do.

*

Where can
One go?

What is
Our Project?

Are there
Any answers?

*


It comes
To sex.

To rubbing
Against others,

The frictive
Sometimes fictional

Others one
Can’t help

But want
Or want

To be
Occupied by.

*

One of the most important questions, to my mind, that Timothy Morton asks in The Ecological Thought is "What if, finally, Nature as such, the idea of a radical outside to the social system, was a capitalist fantasy, even precisely the capitalist fantasy?"

Reading that bit I'm reminded of when I was a fellow at Djerassi and the powers that be rejected my proposal to paint the following poem on an asphalt path that connected the writers' house and the artists' barn:

NA
TU
RE
SC
AR
ES
ME

It was too irreverent, apparently, to be semi-permanently affixed to the premises. So I wrote it large in sidewalk chalk.

*

"The Ister"

This afternoon watched a long film called The Ister . It's a documentary with a river snaking through it which is about philosophy,technics, history, poetry, nature and a confluence of other things. It takes an essay by Heidegger on a poem by Hölderlin as its point of departure. I'm going to be thinking about this film for a while. Find the stamina to check it out. It's an interesting voyage.

*

Listening to Regina Carter's reverse thread. Gorgeous, textured music.

*

Went to Grandparents Day at Andy's preschool this morning. Attempted the hokey-pokey for the first time in 30+ years. And a hula hoop. Whew. You know you're old when...

*

Magnolia trees in full bloom here (in March, for goodness sakes). It's eery, weird.

*

I'm not thinking about, not writing poetry. I'm thinking about and not writing my "novel"--Appearances. What's wrong with this picture?

*

I am reading a lot though. To the point where my eyes are always tired.

*

Did a lot of yard work over the last week. Raked leaves off the flower beds. That amounted to 20+ thirty gallon bags of leaves. Which I took to the City compost site.

*

Some of the problem with Appearances is that there is no map. I'm trying to feel my way, improvize a path as it goes. There is no predetermined structure, no grid. So I throw out constellations of Characters and concepts and try to jam with it. I'm making something that, first of all, I hope I want to read. Reading the 30 pages I have so far, over and over again, it becomes really hard to see. That, however, is the only path open to me. It's not showable now.

*

I think my discouragement over the progress of Appearances (am currently stalled on manuscript page 30) is going global. Probably doesn't help that one of the things I'm currently reading is Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence. Out of Sheer Rage is about Dyer's inability to write a book about D.H. Lawrence. It's exhilarating and depressing at the same time. I'm reading it after just having finished Dyer's latest, Zona, which is a blow-by-blow account of, and improvizations around, Tarkovsky's great film Stalker. Zona is likely the most profound personal response to a film that I've ever read. Just as Out of Sheer Rage is likely the greatest account of how writers torture themselves.

*

Watched videostream this morning of a conversation with Ron Silliman. Enjoyed it, mostly. Except for buffering issues and a preponderance of meandering questions. I just find a lot of academic star contexts problematic. I think I would have done a better job as an interviewer. And I say that knowing that I don't have the so-called credentials. The right letters, that is, after my name.

*

I'm thinking about public appearances lately-- because I have time on my hands, and because it's been over a year and a half since the last time I read in public (at Ohio State)--because others have mentioned my last reading lately. That sentence was fucked up.

Thinking out loud about one's "appearances" is fucked up. And I write that knowing I'm currently struggling with a manuscript called Appearances.

*

Out:

I'm listening to Africa/Brass by the John Coltrane Quartet. The volume's up, the windows are open. It all feels pretty good.

*

Earlier today I planted peas. I'm no kind of farmer, but I love me my peas.

*

One of the books I'm loving now is Timothy Morton's The Ecological Thought which is finally out as an affordable paperback. It's sort of a prequel to Ecology without Nature, and like movie prequels was written after the fact of the latter book.

I can't urge you enough to read either, but preferably both, of these fine books. Check out my interview with Morton at Ask/Tell if you need encouragement.

Morton is great at refiguring, rejiggering, making strange, what it means to be within the mesh of material circumstance. Consider this bit from The Ecological Thought:

"At the basis of 'life' there is DNA, and it has no specific flavor. There is no chimp-flavored, no human-flavored DNA; we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimps and 35 percent with daffodils." (66)

Consider this bit, too:

"Organisms are palimpsests of additions, deletions, and rewritings, held together mostly by inertia." (64)

*

New From Otoliths--Resinations--By Javant Biarujia

Now out from Otoliths

Resinations
Javant Biarujia
72 pages
Cover design by Sheila E. Murphy
Otoliths, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9872010-1-0
$13.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/shop/javant-biarujia/resinations/paperback/product-18929536.html

& perhaps to whet your appetite for this exciting new publication, check out this interview by Sheila E. Murphy with Javant Biarujia at E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S.

This
is how
one might think.

This
is how
you will sing.

This
is why
philosophers are oysters.

This
is why
flowers are monsters.

This
is what
one will _____.

This
is what
one will compartmentalize.

This
is what
one can't see.

I'm proceeding apace with my year long project, Appearances: A Novel In 365 Fragments. Drafts completed of 76 fragments thus far.

It's an interesting undertaking, kind of an extended collage or thought-tapestry.


*


I'm reading a lot. My eyes are always burning.


*


Watched video this afternoon of a Miles Davis concert in Germany circa 1987. Off the chart brilliance. Love his minimalism. Love how he got the most out of every note. Love the respect he showed for his fellow musicians. Love his attention to nuance and tone.


*

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