we bent everything to suit our needs

was that not godlike?
last year for the fourth of july i was with the boy in ithaca and i had just 1) returned from paris and 2) had my wisdom teeth (four) pulled out. he made hamburgers (with avacado!) for my arrival but i couldn't really eat them and every time i brushed my teeth they bled. it hurt to kiss, i remember. we sat out on his fire escape and watched the colors burst over ithaca college's two huge towers. i wore a lot of skirts that summer.
this year, i'm going with my family (including nancy and chip) to d.c., home of the smiley face firework. by that time, i will have been to the best taiwanese restaurant in maryland (tonight), packed up books to send to california and seen the adorable tai shan* and his mom in person.

*http://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/GiantPandas/

Were we godlike as you promised?

I bought a plant in January, to serve as mascot for my new growth. It is now at least two feet longer than it was then and threatening to reach my bed (growing down from the ceiling). Me, no taller. I was looking at it when I woke up this morning; it has grown in small odd delicate turns. I thought, I don't think I have it in me to make something that beautiful. A reproduction of it, for another, would just be another line drawing of a plant--Ellsworth Kelly did some that are pretty. There are already so many nice things in the world, and maybe I don't want to draw attention from these things, which are already better for being found and not proud.

K. and I went to the Cultural Center to see Jeanne Dunning's exhibit there. In a hallway before, we found an installation by this collective, Guerra de la Paz ("War of the Peace," I guess I should tell you). Socks, shirts and sweaters hung, tied and clumped to make a sort of rainforest bog with big trees, lazy green reeds and a blue lakepond. It's this little Oasis--that's actually the title--in a hallway of industrial carpet, unexpected, out of place. Wool sweaters are rolled into tight balls to look like smooth stones. Sock lace for petals, bath robe belts for vines. K. and I agreed that we wanted to leap into the soft pile of it.

a tale for every occasion

you're going home and i'm going away.
are you looking to create a particular sort of experience or is it more the idea of new environments? last time our basement flooded we found there was a dead bird near the drain by our window. a small dead bird and some live hoppy frogs. there were also black shiny mushrooms growing through our carpet. that was a new experience. but not one that i created, nor was it created to give to me.
i never really talk to my parents about literature. what will yours say to your art? what ever happened to canvases and brushes, perhaps? when i came back to the u.s., i stopped being fascinated by trees. so maybe it is about newness, or at least, in part.
i wish i had something to make, jess, to keep me company.
kant was in my dream last night. he looked a little like that blond guy in buffy (but less evil and more german; with shorter hair). and was wearing a big red velvet cloak, like in, of course, little red riding hood.

(bio)graphical habits

we went to a concert in grant park today, at the pavilion gehry built. yo yo ma said, as musicians we have the chance to make memories. because music is temporal, experiential. i want to make experiences through environments. i drew the plans for an installation in my swimming pool at home. eventually i'll show you some underwater pictures. i wonder what my parents will say--they who so want me back--when i invade with my paints fabric tissue paper thread glue pencils. i'm saving old leaves in my textbooks and making paintings out of the patterns in my bathwater. you can find it anywhere: tony tasset found a dead blue jay on the porch and had it taxidermied.

http://www.nwdrizzle.com/drizzle/0305/images/ci/bluejay.jpg

i hate poems that end

but that is our idea of perfection--all that is necessary
and nothing more //// but i , at once. need everything,

i meant to visit that certain strain of stillness--where you remember having experienced meaning--and called on that place where i once turned too, opaque & motionless. sucked into the text where every flicker of a flame registers, a thing for words to play with. /// a heartbeat is easy to remember; these patterns, less so. yet i find that i have been stuck to these strange figures, sprawled out to form constellations of method and of disorder. but, mostly disorder, i would say.

that of an oeuvre, any ouverture, a product(ion)

i found out i'm no longer allowed there. did you know that in two of my last complit classes we read nothing but theory? theory not as fiction, i would say

You are a book, and I will take care of you

"not grace kelley, but they were beautiful from inside like joan of arc, with that kind of radiance that faith makes, and the kind that love makes. / the kind of radiance that suddenly comes over you when I look at you dressing or shaving or reading and you are suddenly more than the daily self we must live with and love"

--s. plath, 1/11/56

Vicki,
I copied that little bit for you out of Plath's journals onto an old book endsheet that I saved from work. Then I painted on this endsheet--bright blue ovals squished against each other, bleeding into each other--but it looked ugly, and it corrupted the niceness of the words. Here it is for you fresh.

I love the book lab, V, love it love it. Yesterday I spent three hours working on one book: sewing endsheets, glueing the spine together, mending pages, and I still didn't finish. I had to write on the chart, Completed Bindery Prep = 0. All this for a book that will probably get looked at once, twice in the next five years, in its lifetime. Karen says though, every book deserves care simply for being a book. Equality like with people.