"A body is the withdrawal from self that relates a self to itself as it exposes the world.  My body is not just my skin turned toward the outside; it is already itself my outside,the outside in me and for me--opposed by me to myself in order to distinguish me from unity.  A stranger to others and first of all to this other that I become thanks to it. Where am I?  In my foot, my hand, my genitals, my ear? Where am I in this face, these traits, traces, eccentricities, tremblings?  Who am I on the contours of this mouth that says 'I'?"

--Jean-Luc Nancy, from Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality

This past weekend I received an email from Jean Vengua.  She's starting a new online journal devoted to art and literature.  It's called Local Nomad.  The first issue is on the theme of Migration.

Jean asked if I would submit something.  I wanted to but wasn't sure I had anything interesting in me to say on this theme.

I read Jean's email  fairly late at night, just before bedtime. So, before I went to bed, I looked up "migration" in the dictionary.

I woke up in the morning with a six line poem ( a double hay(na)ku) rattling fully formed in my head.

Jean accepted the poem and wrote that she loved that it appeared in the migration between sleep and waking!

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Appearances is an ungainly machine of improbable devolving beauty.  It's never not in the mix for me.

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"There is neither unity nor multiplicity.  There is the one and the other, the one to the other, the one beside the other between the one and the other."

Jean-Luc Nancy, from Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality (Fordham University Press, 2013)

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I enjoyed this Zizek passage at Ecology Without Nature.

Out late last night.  My friend Branton and I caught a Wilco concert at the Akron Civic Theater. It was fabulous.  I arrived home tired but wired and inspired, guitars and lyrics clattering in my old head.  Branton and I were outliers.  Most of the audience was 20- and 30-somethings.  I feel like I'm sleep walking today, but it was a great, great night.

Trying to learn music at times impedes my ability to enjoy hearing it.

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Floor and ceiling fans are holding humidity at bay.

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I'm wrestling with Appearances and thinking through a friend's selected essay manuscript

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I woke up in the middle of last night wondering if I had just ventrilloquized a fart.

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Poetry is always going to be a problem for those that care about it.

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Lately I have been writing blog material which I delete instead of posting.