February 28, 2005

manyfeathers

(favoritfrase)

like manyirons in the fire

tiny curlbirdfeathers in my driveway this morning
a small explosion of fluffy gray commas
I wish I wish I had been there to see it happen
or at least had the presence of mind to take a photograph

isn't there a saying
manyarrows to my bow?

many whistling arrows

Posted at 01:26 PM

February 26, 2005

slight peccadillo

More chinar concepts:

"Druskin invented the chinar term a certain equilibrium with a slight peccadillo in 1933. Its meaning is deliberately vague, but the peccadillo is, as it were, departure from dead symmetry by either aleatory or voluntary error that constitutes creation in both the cosmological and the artistic senses of the word."

  • The English words are very clunky, I wonder if the Russian are any better. Nevertheless, I find myself repeating this phrase to myself.
  • I am in love with the idea that creativity comes from being just slightly off balance.
  • I am fed up with the idea that achieving "balance" in life is a good thing. What is balance?
  • I know what equilibrium is, it's the ability to stand up.
  • I love the idea that creativity comes from error.

"Messengers. Another important chinar concept, referring to creatures from world A whose presence may be felt, but not ascertained, in world B."

Posted at 02:55 PM

chinari

A discovery, courtesy of jubilat volume nine:

"The philosopher Yakov Semenovich Druskin (1902-1980) belonged to an underground philosophical and literary circle that was active in Leningrad in the 1920s and '30s. Its members, who called themselves chinari, included the philosopher Leonid Lipavsky and the poets Nikolai Oleinikov, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. (The latter two were also the founds of the short-lived literary association OBERIU.) It is only somewhat inaccurate to describe the thought of these five people as Russian absurdism."

p 88, translator's notes Eugene Ostashevsky

more on OBERIU by Ostashevsky

Posted at 02:47 PM

February 10, 2005

Madison / Park midday

Tiny dogs (two, one fat white chihuahua and one pouffy black Pomeranian)
Manikins made of sheets of clear plastic, cunningly cut to make three-dimensional people that presumably fold flat for storage
Manikins made of shiny shiny silver metal with extravagant molded hairdos
A man in a camel hair coat puffing so heavily on a cigar that he traveled in a billowing cloud of smoke
A woman wearing very fine pale brown fishnet stockings, so fine they made her legs seem more than naked in the cold
Fake shrimp - tofu shrimp?
A blind woman painstakingly crossing the busy street with a white cane and exploratory footsteps
A German couple, stylishly dressed. She wore a pink tweed coat and knitted pink cap and asked him on the corner: "Was ist das?"
Tiny black velvet torsos used to display jewelry
The clear outline of a plastic knife embedded in the asphalt
Some babies brave and contented in the cold wind, others crying. Red nose above pacifier.

Posted at 03:09 PM

found / fond

Ana Becciú wrote this in Ronda de noche: "Love happens when we stroke a textured surface, when something is told with the hands or with the mouth. The mouth uses stories to stroke, causes scattered textures to appear, textures that can be read out loud. But almost no one knows how to read."

A Reading Diary,
Alberto Manguel
p 43

I wanted to stop a woman and examine her sweater in the A&P checkout line. It was a densely textured weave, looked like crochet, but very tight and flat and irregular, with sparkly paillettes threaded in. The colors shaded randomly from green to pink, with traces of brown and purple. I'm not sure if this was really the sweater, which I barely glimpsed, or my imagination of the sweater. What a sweater could be.

Posted at 02:56 PM

February 09, 2005

complications

technical - the interface should disappear, shouldn't it?

people are always surprised when the interface disappears

sometimes I want to draw attention to invisibility

interfaces can have textures, like hair and skin

a message from another book - love is stroking texture

quoting is a means of observing the interface

eating ideas is making them your own substance

still visiting the statue of Stein

Posted at 05:21 PM

February 03, 2005

oh "my"

You would like to remove the layer of your opinion about everything, your habitual thoughts. I am tired of living amidst the muddy ruts of my habitual thoughts. I would like everything that I write to be a work of art. Or at least an attempt toward a work of art. Or at least a fragment of a personal philosophy. Fragments are not involved in making -- that would be a word like "components" or "raw material." Fragments are involved in destruction. And thus -- everything I write is involved in (the destruction of) a personal philosophy. Collapse -- or mining among the ruins -- of my habitual thoughts. And still -- the "my"

Posted at 10:18 PM