Thursday, November 12, 2009
MAN UP
I wonder if females have a version of the "man up" that I've heard my entire life. I just heard it again today, but this time it was a slight joke (though not exactly). "Man up" is almost always mentioned by one man to tell another man a few things: he is being perceived as weak; that he is not being "man-like" (which is to mean, usually, that he's being emotional in some sense); that the other male or males are feeling uncomfortable with his version of being male. Men are not allowed a full range of emotions, you see, at least not publicly, and especially not in the U.S. (The fairly recent book, Self-Made Man--One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again, offers direct insight into all of this.) Men are allowed to express anger and to show a lack of emotion, and to crack jokes, but not too many jokes. If you tell too many jokes, you're not serious enough, and men must be serious a good part of the time. Fun and frivolity are not things men can be a part of—if they are, one can expect some criticism shortly. Fun and frivolity is the domain of females. You'll see this constantly portrayed in mediated creations, of course: of the comic male (read as "weak") being ditched by the female for the rugged, unemotional male). The male must not show emotion--this is the constant message. Society must have strong males to survive. They must not weep—the enemy of rugged males may invade! We cannot joke about this! This is the message from when a man is a boy, and all of the little gendered side comments about “you shouldn't do this and you shouldn't do that,” and the sideway looks by society if the male is not acting male. The boy mostly adopts this forced world of no emotion, because he sees the adult males telling him "boys don't cry" and "stop being a girl" and, then, later on: "man up". And, through time, through these thousands of little, almost imperceptible judgments, the adults will have shaped the boy into what society wants: a male. A male to carry on maleness. You’d think this carefree abusiveness would be reason to cry, but no longer! The only time the boy will be allowed to cry now after maleness is reached is at funerals, because death is serious, and the crying, then, is serious. The stoical male must take his role of non-emotion seriously, too. (He has to be serious about his non-emotional role—he certainly can’t be frivolous in his duties!) He must do the providing of comfort; he, himself, is not to be comforted. And especially not by other males. He’d most certainly be gay, then. Which is a completely other aspersion hissed and leaked from the mouths of adults: because if a male is too emotional, then he either needs more abusive side-comments to better train him before adulthood and procreation (what kind of woman would want him otherwise?—he’s a mess), or he is gay. These are the two answers: either man up or be gay, but don’t be gay here: go to one of the male-certified United States Registered Zones: San Francisco, Provincetown, Atlanta, or Fire Island.
I wonder if females have a version of the "man up" that I've heard my entire life. I just heard it again today, but this time it was a slight joke (though not exactly). "Man up" is almost always mentioned by one man to tell another man a few things: he is being perceived as weak; that he is not being "man-like" (which is to mean, usually, that he's being emotional in some sense); that the other male or males are feeling uncomfortable with his version of being male. Men are not allowed a full range of emotions, you see, at least not publicly, and especially not in the U.S. (The fairly recent book, Self-Made Man--One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again, offers direct insight into all of this.) Men are allowed to express anger and to show a lack of emotion, and to crack jokes, but not too many jokes. If you tell too many jokes, you're not serious enough, and men must be serious a good part of the time. Fun and frivolity are not things men can be a part of—if they are, one can expect some criticism shortly. Fun and frivolity is the domain of females. You'll see this constantly portrayed in mediated creations, of course: of the comic male (read as "weak") being ditched by the female for the rugged, unemotional male). The male must not show emotion--this is the constant message. Society must have strong males to survive. They must not weep—the enemy of rugged males may invade! We cannot joke about this! This is the message from when a man is a boy, and all of the little gendered side comments about “you shouldn't do this and you shouldn't do that,” and the sideway looks by society if the male is not acting male. The boy mostly adopts this forced world of no emotion, because he sees the adult males telling him "boys don't cry" and "stop being a girl" and, then, later on: "man up". And, through time, through these thousands of little, almost imperceptible judgments, the adults will have shaped the boy into what society wants: a male. A male to carry on maleness. You’d think this carefree abusiveness would be reason to cry, but no longer! The only time the boy will be allowed to cry now after maleness is reached is at funerals, because death is serious, and the crying, then, is serious. The stoical male must take his role of non-emotion seriously, too. (He has to be serious about his non-emotional role—he certainly can’t be frivolous in his duties!) He must do the providing of comfort; he, himself, is not to be comforted. And especially not by other males. He’d most certainly be gay, then. Which is a completely other aspersion hissed and leaked from the mouths of adults: because if a male is too emotional, then he either needs more abusive side-comments to better train him before adulthood and procreation (what kind of woman would want him otherwise?—he’s a mess), or he is gay. These are the two answers: either man up or be gay, but don’t be gay here: go to one of the male-certified United States Registered Zones: San Francisco, Provincetown, Atlanta, or Fire Island.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
It's just occurred to me that mostly any writing can be improved by the simple addition of one word in the sentence: unnecessarily.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Sidebrow & Les Figues invite you to a two-part, two-city reading tour celebrating writers from two innovative West Coast presses.
F I R S T L E G : S A N F R A N C I S C O : N O V . 1 4
Featured at the San Francisco half of the series will be Paul Hoover, Vanessa Place, & Teresa Carmody, on behalf of Les Figues, and James Wagner & HL Hazuka, on behalf of Sidebrow.
Saturday, November 14, 7:30 pm
The Green Arcade
1680 Market St. (@ Gough)
San Francisco
S E C O N D L E G : L O S A N G E L E S : N O V . 2 1
Featured at the Los Angeles half of the series will be Paul Hoover & Harold Abramowitz, on behalf of Les Figues, and Amina Cain & Anna Joy Springer, on behalf of Sidebrow.
Saturday, November 21, 7:30 pm
Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, California
+ + + + + +
R E A D E R B I O S
Paul Hoover is author of eleven books of poetry including Sonnet 56, Edge and Fold, Winter, Rehearsal in Black, Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems, Viridian, and The Novel: A Poem. He is editor of Postmodern American Poetry (Norton) and, with Maxine Chernoff, New American Writing. His collection of essays is Fables of Representation (U. of Michigan).
Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press. Information As Material will be publishing her trilogy: Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument. Statement of Facts will also be published in France by éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits.
Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem (Les Figues Press, 2005), and two chapbooks: Eye Hole Adore (PS Books, 2008), and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions, 2009). Other work has appeared in Drunken Boat, American Book Review, Bombay Gin, Fold, and more. She lives in Los Angeles and is co-director of Les Figues Press.
James Wagner is the author of Work Book (Nothing Moments, Los Angeles, 2007), a collection of short stories, and two collections of poetry: Trilce (Calamari Press, New York, 2006) and the false sun recordings (3rd bed, Providence, 2003). His poetry, fiction, and criticism have appeared in such places as Abraham Lincoln, American Poetry Review, Antennae, BlazeVOX, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fascicle, Fence, 5_Trope, Jubilat, McSweeney’s, Mississippi Review, 6X6, and Verse. Current work appears in Sidebrow and is forthcoming in trnsfr.
HL Hazuka's work has appeared in Transfer 81, Cipactli, Fourteen Hills (a 2006 Pushcart nominee), Five Fingers Review, and So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art, in which she was a contest winner selected by Eileen Myles.
Harold Abramowitz’s books and chapbooks include Not Blessed (forthcoming Les Figues), Sin is to Celebration (collaboration with Amanda Ackerman, House), Dear Dearly Departed (Palm), Sunday, or A Summer’s Day (PS), and Three Column Table (Insert). Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs.
Amina Cain is author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues). Her work appears in 3rd Bed, Denver Quarterly, La Petite Zine, Sidebrow, and Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers. She lives in Los Angeles.
Anna Joy Springer has toured the U.S. and Europe as a singer for punk bands and with the legendary Sister Spit. Her first novel is The Vicious Red Relic, Love.
F I R S T L E G : S A N F R A N C I S C O : N O V . 1 4
Featured at the San Francisco half of the series will be Paul Hoover, Vanessa Place, & Teresa Carmody, on behalf of Les Figues, and James Wagner & HL Hazuka, on behalf of Sidebrow.
Saturday, November 14, 7:30 pm
The Green Arcade
1680 Market St. (@ Gough)
San Francisco
S E C O N D L E G : L O S A N G E L E S : N O V . 2 1
Featured at the Los Angeles half of the series will be Paul Hoover & Harold Abramowitz, on behalf of Les Figues, and Amina Cain & Anna Joy Springer, on behalf of Sidebrow.
Saturday, November 21, 7:30 pm
Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, California
+ + + + + +
R E A D E R B I O S
Paul Hoover is author of eleven books of poetry including Sonnet 56, Edge and Fold, Winter, Rehearsal in Black, Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems, Viridian, and The Novel: A Poem. He is editor of Postmodern American Poetry (Norton) and, with Maxine Chernoff, New American Writing. His collection of essays is Fables of Representation (U. of Michigan).
Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press. Information As Material will be publishing her trilogy: Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument. Statement of Facts will also be published in France by éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits.
Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem (Les Figues Press, 2005), and two chapbooks: Eye Hole Adore (PS Books, 2008), and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions, 2009). Other work has appeared in Drunken Boat, American Book Review, Bombay Gin, Fold, and more. She lives in Los Angeles and is co-director of Les Figues Press.
James Wagner is the author of Work Book (Nothing Moments, Los Angeles, 2007), a collection of short stories, and two collections of poetry: Trilce (Calamari Press, New York, 2006) and the false sun recordings (3rd bed, Providence, 2003). His poetry, fiction, and criticism have appeared in such places as Abraham Lincoln, American Poetry Review, Antennae, BlazeVOX, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fascicle, Fence, 5_Trope, Jubilat, McSweeney’s, Mississippi Review, 6X6, and Verse. Current work appears in Sidebrow and is forthcoming in trnsfr.
HL Hazuka's work has appeared in Transfer 81, Cipactli, Fourteen Hills (a 2006 Pushcart nominee), Five Fingers Review, and So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art, in which she was a contest winner selected by Eileen Myles.
Harold Abramowitz’s books and chapbooks include Not Blessed (forthcoming Les Figues), Sin is to Celebration (collaboration with Amanda Ackerman, House), Dear Dearly Departed (Palm), Sunday, or A Summer’s Day (PS), and Three Column Table (Insert). Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs.
Amina Cain is author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues). Her work appears in 3rd Bed, Denver Quarterly, La Petite Zine, Sidebrow, and Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers. She lives in Los Angeles.
Anna Joy Springer has toured the U.S. and Europe as a singer for punk bands and with the legendary Sister Spit. Her first novel is The Vicious Red Relic, Love.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Suzanne Stein
Hole in Space
OMG!
2009
Paperback
$4.00
Is Suzanne Stein herself and/or Suzanne Stein’s Hole in Space a re-enactment-of-one of the bi-coastal, exterior communicative sculpture/art installation Hole-in-Space, created in 1980 by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz? And/or is Stein’s Hole in Space also a re-enactment-of-one of the recently resituated, interior installation of Hole-in-Space as produced by Stein’s employer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)?
In Galloway and Rabinowitz’s original installations one witnessed the exciting interactivity of technology possible when cameras and audio, people and spaces, came together. People in New York could see people in Los Angeles and vice versa, and they could talk to each other in public, as if they were right in front of one another, not separated by 2500 miles. Today, we don’t think anything of it, with the wide dispersal of webcams, but in 1980 it was a stunning technological and artistic achievement, and it is interesting to watch the crowds from both cities try to understand what is actually happening.
Stein is interested in what is happening in a place where people are asking what is happening. She is interested in the intermediacy of space and the positioning of space, and what space—that seemingly unacknowledged agent of art events/poetry readings, etc—does to what is happening in the art itself, how it positions itself as the art. Her art is also interested in creating various meta-stages along the way.
In Stein’s deconstructed version of the 1980 event, she is both the conduit of the art and the art (the human version of the earlier plate glass windows). Stein, a native Los Angelese now living in the Bay, gave a talk in New York (at the Poetry Project) on November 17, 2008, and then gave the transcribed New York talk, textually similar, if very minimally altered by pacing, some pacing words (like “um” and “uh”), and a few other words, at Canessa Park in San Francisco on January 17, 2009, exactly two months later. Stein inverses the bi-coastal audiovisual presence of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s original communicative sculpture and becomes that bi-coastal audiovisual presence herself, along with her text. The audiences at the readings become the text, become the center of the art, as well. Stein, in fact, adds another wrinkle to the piece by including the questions of the audience from a completely different performative piece of hers that occurred years previously at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. So, we have echoes upon echoes, insertions of various space-related texts, site-specific, repurposed, talking to other spaces.
Is Stein, though, simply undoing the technology of today in this piece? If webcams and web-conferencing are ever present, why go through the arduous process of physically being on both coasts to give a talk referencing the easier immediacy of the 1980 art project? Is this talk a sideways critique on the emptiness of webcams and their lack of intimacy even though we see and hear one another quite well? Is this an investigation into false intimacies? What does Stein’s physical presence do that the plate glass windows of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s do not do, apart from the obvious?
There are various formats that Stein’s Hole in Space existed and exist in. There were the live events of the readings, the physical spaces of the Poetry Project and Canessa Park, with real, live humans, which are now gone. There is the recorded event of the Canessa Park reading, which is the repurposing of the New York reading and a new reading all-in-one. There is now, also, the transcribed version of both of the talks, which is this chapbook from OMG! But none are the same.
The narrative of the text is wandering, funny, hesitating, theoretical, filled with pauses and speech breaks and diversions, anxious, productively reproductive, self-aware, exuberant, fearless, open, challenging, unknowing, transcribed, and engaged. It is purposively improvisational, and it is descriptive of her thinking about the Hole-in-Space installation at SFMOMA, her larger artistic concerns, her talking about the very talk that she’s giving, how she would go about it, her various feelings related to each of these things, the CCA audience questions, and much more.
Stein states in the text that she did not like the “quite cold” atmosphere of CCA and rather enjoys the warmth of seeing the audience, as at the Poetry Project, and having a nearer experience, by acknowledging the presence of the audience. She further states that she wanted to “top” the space and to submit to the audience—two dueling considerations, it would seem, or a multi-zoned, hierarchically ranging experience.
Is it a matter of wanting different things to occur simultaneously? Is it all an elaborately schemed wish for direct connectivity? Is this text simply an account of the art that has already passed on? Is it detritus? Was the art in the rooms? Is it all a test of a system—the system of expectations at a poetry reading, of writer and reader and room behavior/s?
Stein especially exposes the questions in the piece—and these here, for that matter—as being freighted with situated conclusions, with the hope of answers, of solidity in them, and so one wonders about many things and the answers one comes up with show not so much truth but the psychology of the answerer. The questions that Stein lists in the piece from the CCA reading are actually not re-answered—they are simply treated as a list of questions—a flurry of unknowing and quest and freedom. They exist apart from their answers, the answers no longer given, the answers that were once given and then forgotten.
Stein ultimately desires to question our thinking, our preconceptions, our receptions, if sometimes fiercely, if sometimes gently. Perhaps the questioning ultimately is her answering. Perhaps the certainty of answers is what she is examining with such exquisite abandon. Perhaps our answers are just holes in space.
Hole in Space
OMG!
2009
Paperback
$4.00
Is Suzanne Stein herself and/or Suzanne Stein’s Hole in Space a re-enactment-of-one of the bi-coastal, exterior communicative sculpture/art installation Hole-in-Space, created in 1980 by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz? And/or is Stein’s Hole in Space also a re-enactment-of-one of the recently resituated, interior installation of Hole-in-Space as produced by Stein’s employer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)?
In Galloway and Rabinowitz’s original installations one witnessed the exciting interactivity of technology possible when cameras and audio, people and spaces, came together. People in New York could see people in Los Angeles and vice versa, and they could talk to each other in public, as if they were right in front of one another, not separated by 2500 miles. Today, we don’t think anything of it, with the wide dispersal of webcams, but in 1980 it was a stunning technological and artistic achievement, and it is interesting to watch the crowds from both cities try to understand what is actually happening.
Stein is interested in what is happening in a place where people are asking what is happening. She is interested in the intermediacy of space and the positioning of space, and what space—that seemingly unacknowledged agent of art events/poetry readings, etc—does to what is happening in the art itself, how it positions itself as the art. Her art is also interested in creating various meta-stages along the way.
In Stein’s deconstructed version of the 1980 event, she is both the conduit of the art and the art (the human version of the earlier plate glass windows). Stein, a native Los Angelese now living in the Bay, gave a talk in New York (at the Poetry Project) on November 17, 2008, and then gave the transcribed New York talk, textually similar, if very minimally altered by pacing, some pacing words (like “um” and “uh”), and a few other words, at Canessa Park in San Francisco on January 17, 2009, exactly two months later. Stein inverses the bi-coastal audiovisual presence of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s original communicative sculpture and becomes that bi-coastal audiovisual presence herself, along with her text. The audiences at the readings become the text, become the center of the art, as well. Stein, in fact, adds another wrinkle to the piece by including the questions of the audience from a completely different performative piece of hers that occurred years previously at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. So, we have echoes upon echoes, insertions of various space-related texts, site-specific, repurposed, talking to other spaces.
Is Stein, though, simply undoing the technology of today in this piece? If webcams and web-conferencing are ever present, why go through the arduous process of physically being on both coasts to give a talk referencing the easier immediacy of the 1980 art project? Is this talk a sideways critique on the emptiness of webcams and their lack of intimacy even though we see and hear one another quite well? Is this an investigation into false intimacies? What does Stein’s physical presence do that the plate glass windows of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s do not do, apart from the obvious?
There are various formats that Stein’s Hole in Space existed and exist in. There were the live events of the readings, the physical spaces of the Poetry Project and Canessa Park, with real, live humans, which are now gone. There is the recorded event of the Canessa Park reading, which is the repurposing of the New York reading and a new reading all-in-one. There is now, also, the transcribed version of both of the talks, which is this chapbook from OMG! But none are the same.
The narrative of the text is wandering, funny, hesitating, theoretical, filled with pauses and speech breaks and diversions, anxious, productively reproductive, self-aware, exuberant, fearless, open, challenging, unknowing, transcribed, and engaged. It is purposively improvisational, and it is descriptive of her thinking about the Hole-in-Space installation at SFMOMA, her larger artistic concerns, her talking about the very talk that she’s giving, how she would go about it, her various feelings related to each of these things, the CCA audience questions, and much more.
Stein states in the text that she did not like the “quite cold” atmosphere of CCA and rather enjoys the warmth of seeing the audience, as at the Poetry Project, and having a nearer experience, by acknowledging the presence of the audience. She further states that she wanted to “top” the space and to submit to the audience—two dueling considerations, it would seem, or a multi-zoned, hierarchically ranging experience.
Is it a matter of wanting different things to occur simultaneously? Is it all an elaborately schemed wish for direct connectivity? Is this text simply an account of the art that has already passed on? Is it detritus? Was the art in the rooms? Is it all a test of a system—the system of expectations at a poetry reading, of writer and reader and room behavior/s?
Stein especially exposes the questions in the piece—and these here, for that matter—as being freighted with situated conclusions, with the hope of answers, of solidity in them, and so one wonders about many things and the answers one comes up with show not so much truth but the psychology of the answerer. The questions that Stein lists in the piece from the CCA reading are actually not re-answered—they are simply treated as a list of questions—a flurry of unknowing and quest and freedom. They exist apart from their answers, the answers no longer given, the answers that were once given and then forgotten.
Stein ultimately desires to question our thinking, our preconceptions, our receptions, if sometimes fiercely, if sometimes gently. Perhaps the questioning ultimately is her answering. Perhaps the certainty of answers is what she is examining with such exquisite abandon. Perhaps our answers are just holes in space.
Monday, September 14, 2009
THE MOUNT WHITNEY SUMMIT READING
*CALL FOR A SINGLE LINE OF WRITING*
I may be going with a friend in October to climb to the top of Mt. Whitney. Mt. Whitney is the highest peak in the 48 lower states, topping out at 14,496 ft. It is not as difficult as climbing Mt. Shasta (14,162 ft), which I did summit in June, so I am expecting to make it.
If I do make it, I would like to read a single work compiled of individual lines from any poet/writer who would like a bit of his or her writing to be read on top of Mt. Whitney. Let's keep it to one line/sentence per person (and ease up on the dependent clauses!). There will be no editing of any text. Time of response will be the editor. First person to respond: first line. And so on.
If you are interested in this, you can simply reply to this post and put your line in there, or you can email me your line at wagnerjjj (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you are leaving the note on Estherpress, please give your full name.
I plan to record the reading of the collaborative work and post it on Youtube, if all goes as planned.
All best,
James
9-15-09 Note: Thank you to those who have already emailed me lines.
9-23-09 Note: Thanks again to everyone who has sent me some lines. The climb will happen on October 24, so I'll need entries by the 22nd at the latest. Best, J
Saturday, September 12, 2009
REDUCED TO CONDENSITY 8
One can continue to go to school to learn forever and ever about facts and figures and vocabularies, so one can talk about facts and figures with vocabularies, but I've learned--pretty late in life (it might be unmentioned)--that it is the abstract and emotional relationships between people that is most interesting to me now, the most worth caring about, for, on, with, because this is exactly where our wars and economies and loves and everything existent begins, and ends, or begins-ends again.
Why is not finishing something considered a failure?
In Madison, at school, taking the School of Journalism test (JUT) for the second time. Entering my fourth year of school, already 18 credits (out of 32) into my planned degree. Everything moving toward the School of Journalism. My life would be this way. I would be a journalist. I had several years invested in this. Arriving at the door of Journalism, looking at the dot-matrix printout taped to it, glancing down the list to my name to see if I had passed, so that I would be fully allowed entrance into the school. Seeing my name, scanning over, seeing the number, and then doing this over and over, in disbelief, realizing that I had failed by one point. One point. I would be entering my fourth year that Fall. I could retake the test in one year, or I could decide upon a new major this late in the game. I decided upon a new major. Considering Film, Art History, and English for quite awhile, I finally decided upon English, and my next four semesters were mostly all English courses. Shakespeare, American Poetry Before 1800, Chaucer, James Joyce, Critical Theory, etc.
CMOS means Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor
If I had not failed the Journalism Usage Test by one point in the summer of 1990, I would never have gone into English. Because I went into English, I became more invested in my infrequent writing of poems. I met one of my best friends in an English course in Madison. Another through a twist of this, through a Poetry reading in Madison. I would not have applied to Creative Writing Programs in a couple of years. I would not have been accepted at Syracuse University. I wouldn't have gone if I had passed the test. In Syracuse, I would eventually get sober and meet my wife. I wouldn't have met her otherwise. Because of her, we are now in California, where I am studying about pixel dimensions and dynamic range and lossless compression.
Because of one point.
One can continue to go to school to learn forever and ever about facts and figures and vocabularies, so one can talk about facts and figures with vocabularies, but I've learned--pretty late in life (it might be unmentioned)--that it is the abstract and emotional relationships between people that is most interesting to me now, the most worth caring about, for, on, with, because this is exactly where our wars and economies and loves and everything existent begins, and ends, or begins-ends again.
Why is not finishing something considered a failure?
In Madison, at school, taking the School of Journalism test (JUT) for the second time. Entering my fourth year of school, already 18 credits (out of 32) into my planned degree. Everything moving toward the School of Journalism. My life would be this way. I would be a journalist. I had several years invested in this. Arriving at the door of Journalism, looking at the dot-matrix printout taped to it, glancing down the list to my name to see if I had passed, so that I would be fully allowed entrance into the school. Seeing my name, scanning over, seeing the number, and then doing this over and over, in disbelief, realizing that I had failed by one point. One point. I would be entering my fourth year that Fall. I could retake the test in one year, or I could decide upon a new major this late in the game. I decided upon a new major. Considering Film, Art History, and English for quite awhile, I finally decided upon English, and my next four semesters were mostly all English courses. Shakespeare, American Poetry Before 1800, Chaucer, James Joyce, Critical Theory, etc.
CMOS means Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor
If I had not failed the Journalism Usage Test by one point in the summer of 1990, I would never have gone into English. Because I went into English, I became more invested in my infrequent writing of poems. I met one of my best friends in an English course in Madison. Another through a twist of this, through a Poetry reading in Madison. I would not have applied to Creative Writing Programs in a couple of years. I would not have been accepted at Syracuse University. I wouldn't have gone if I had passed the test. In Syracuse, I would eventually get sober and meet my wife. I wouldn't have met her otherwise. Because of her, we are now in California, where I am studying about pixel dimensions and dynamic range and lossless compression.
Because of one point.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
REDUCED TO CONDENSITY 7
Every deifying statement made by someone of an alcoholic writer should immediately kick up a comment from someone in that writer's immediate family.
Facebook is the dream of celebrity bestowed on the masses, with each person each other person's audience, and so on.
Suddenly, one morning, irrespective of all others, one decides to buy a white noise machine.
One cannot read the first page of the newly translated Robert Walser novel The Tanners and not keep going.
They found, the digital archivists did, a box of old media and no longer a device to play any of it on. So: no record.
Like on Facebook, and the histories of defriending.
You can listen to RAIN on the machine, and it is very difficult to notice any difference at all with real rain.
Every deifying statement made by someone of an alcoholic writer should immediately kick up a comment from someone in that writer's immediate family.
Facebook is the dream of celebrity bestowed on the masses, with each person each other person's audience, and so on.
Suddenly, one morning, irrespective of all others, one decides to buy a white noise machine.
One cannot read the first page of the newly translated Robert Walser novel The Tanners and not keep going.
They found, the digital archivists did, a box of old media and no longer a device to play any of it on. So: no record.
Like on Facebook, and the histories of defriending.
You can listen to RAIN on the machine, and it is very difficult to notice any difference at all with real rain.
