in america volume 20 part 2 - 2010 march-april

work & days: a lifetime journal project

March 22 Ashes and snow, Gregory Colbert and collaborators It's an interactive portfolio Continuous soundtrack Mouse finds small photos you stay on as long as you want, some are movies There's a little x in the corner for exit Requires Flash Player 8 and broadband, minimum res of 1024x768 Uses pop-ups, please turn off your pop-up blocker while visiting Photographs, 35mm films, art installations and a 'novel in letters' In English, Japanese, Spanish Musical collaborators, editor, Rolex Some of the films are half a second Film in a frame over parchment texture - pause button   Do you like this   NO It's fake   But the format's good   - Do you understand that night pain   Is it a serious disease   NO More ginger   YES Aspirin   no Is it related to bp   no Inflammation   no Microcirculation   no Major circulation   no Dehydration   no Supps   no Kidney function   no Stomach   no Computers   no - "We call them her ninja elf strikes, the rapid, little blows that make you rethink your entire perspective." - NYT clipping: Fear Strikes Out The day before Sunday's health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: "Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made ... And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine." 23 Dreaming I'm replying to a packet letter from Jeanne, lying in bed touching pen into a bottle of ink that's tippy on the sheets - dark blue, small bottle the shape of the dry ink cube Nor had me put in the printer. Jeanne has found her way into a rich field of things she likes, I'm feeling she or maybe we should do a book. I'm looking at the face of a mountain whose crest is in fog, standing with other people looking steadily at the detail of the little splits and facets. A little area falls, shatters. A boulder drops and rushes almost onto me. There's an area halfway up that is fascinating. It's like hard flat square maroon fields set together with black borders between them. The light changes. We see they are actually water. And then Uncle Harvey wades in to bathe in a small muddy pool. When I write a dream like that, the difficulty of naming visual forms; "splits and facets" isn't the complex rock face I saw. Always a question why write this ephemeral thing, there's no good reason to. And now in remembering dreams I'm always aware of their fabrication, how one scene or detail riffs off the previous. I'm cynical about these dreams, I see through them, I'm not impressed. I'm wondering whether my brain is too weak now to make strong dreams, or whether my dreams were always so tacky. Listening to Wachtel interviewing Zadie Smith last night, marveling at the speed of both their minds, the readiness of facts and names and thoughts I used to have. An old mind - like the old Dutch guy she interviewed after - depends more on stock thoughts, has to scramble among the old lumber piles. Mary's blankness now, the way she can't be interested. When I read her letters from the Queen's and London days I see that she was always like that. I wrote her as if she was interested, because I had such an energy of telling. I invented her as I needed her to be, and so didn't know I was starved for better attention. Olivia was some of that, and was Mary jealous? She seems to have not known she was, and it didn't occur to me, I just rushed past her protests. And then C and T found me out, but how, exactly, they had no clue of my range, but they knew face to face contact, moment to moment grip. What do I want to talk to Cheryl about. I want to know about my defeat. She was defeated too, later. I want to know what she knows about her own defeat, what it has to do with the way she lives now, 442 friends on Facebook, went up to 443 when I was online, finds her photos in the trash of anyone's webcams. She was so fiercely exclusive and now what is that - successful, kind. Is that defeat? It says no. She's still fierce, but now it's entrepreneurship, she improvises her living in a corrupt market. She needs to schmooze and she does. She's light and fleet and smart and current and keeps an alert distance in herself when she does schmooze. She's socially more mental that I am. She's still wolfish starved. And yet what's my doubt - that she's been willing to conform to the body denials of the art market, its trashiness. Am I right to resist that? She's a courtier, I'm an outlier, am I more defeated? It says no. How is it we can regard each other the way we do and not like each other's work? She needs to be current, I've needed to be something else. What I used to love about her, was what I now am more than she is, we crossed over. Did I admire her more than she admired me? It says no. Should I be more the way she is? It says no. I hardly remember her in relation to me, I remember her in passion for T. I feel I saw the only time in her life where she found someone to touch her raw core. Is that true? It says yes. I knew I couldn't touch it but I wanted someone to. T maybe touched mine too, but it didn't matter to me in the same way. Is that odd? I've been moved by fierce starved beings. I feel her courtly succeeding must all be performed over that starvation still. Is it? Yes. "I'll have this because it's what I can have." In her I'm that too. - It's where I went with Jam, I wasn't that before. Is there something you want to say about her   community, honesty, creation, slow growth Now that she has a niche she'll get more honest   I'm not important to her   no Will you say in what way I am   power struggle, competition, processing, illusion In the past   YES She processed illusions   Any way important to her now   no She to me   no Should we drop each other   no Does she feel she's surpassed me   no I her   YES And have I   You mean the doctorate   "What if I'm no longer stupid enough or patient enough to deal with this crap?" says the short abrupt little surgeon when she starts to date after she's divorced. - Page of writing from Zach, he's there, he got there - It had the aura of distilled focus. In that silence, in that blissful, focused attention, a certain kind of love emerges ... a sense of connection, accomplishment and growth. Chris was bright. It is a perfect word for a certain kind of intelligence, the kind that lightens one's countenance with new ideas. The way it's been with Zach, I trusted how smart he is from the beginning, kept mentioning what would make sense for him to do, watched him go off after nothing but red herrings, kept grounding him. Wasn't stupid with him, so he kept trusting me. - Before I think our second advising group I dreamed he was writing for the New Yorker, and here it is, it's a book if he wants. He quoted this: Learning is but an adjunct to ourself And where we are our learning likewise is. What is it I do well, with the brightest students I lock in with them, the way I write them immediately feels for itself how bright they are. I show them how bright they are in how bright I am with them. Zach is writing about what I do and he does. That's another pleasure. I like that he adores me as a teacher, because he knows how to judge. Zach loves. He loves when he teaches. He can write love and that's what he's doing now. - The way I have judgment now, do I have that because of what I did with C and T? It says no, what I did with Joyce. I did it in search of judgment but I didn't get it there. So what I did with them was wasted time and destructive. Yes, Jam was a disaster. But did her company make me smarter? NO. I managed O and Roy but they [C, T and J] demolished me. How many years was it - 1976-1985, my 30s. So am I wrong to call it Dames rocket   no Because it was like being shelled   Feminism was an accelerant   C saw me demolished   YES Was C as demolished   no I have a lot of fight in me   Jam utterly humiliated me   Was it spite   no She was used   Is T the villain   The root of villainy   So then how long was it till I was collected again, 1989 when I started the MA, 4 years? So Notes in o wasn't good?   no It was good but not as good as Trapline, it was some shattered   The In English writing is good   So can you tell me the effect of being demolished on my work   love woman's connection with the community betrayed I went into that community as love woman   It was love woman in the garden   YES Are you saying it was an effect on her confidence   no On her quality   YES She was defeated   I didn't look after her   She was betrayed by me   And that had an effect on the work   Will you explain more   you processed to come through to improved writing Are you saying what improved my writing was Joyce   Before that it wasn't LW's writing   YES Is that what you mean   I'm still puzzled   Do you mean LW lost confidence   no I lost confidence in her   YES For instance in the journal   Was it a mistake to cut my hair   no   So Joyce fixed me and then I went to Tom, is that what a fixed person does?!   Doesn't a fixed person find a happy equal love   no Why not   completed work, acts, to shatter the structure of, bad judgment Do you mean in me   YES And others YES Which I've been doing ever since   And have to go on doing   YES Rescue the perishing     He's spared remorse this time   YES 24 Thursday morning, a bit of white in the air. Feeling my loneliness, the grim lovelessness of waking sore, turning on my machines, weighing myself, measuring my waist, taking my bp - I'm ashamed, writing those - making notes in the blue notebook, checking email, where there is nothing, checking statcounter, Facebook, then still longing for some loving message check the highway cams at Beaverlodge and Demmit, the Cuyamaca cam, Katcam in Vancouver, the NASA daily stars site. Then am at the end of my little virtualities and left still hungry - it is a sensation so distinctly of hunger. My big cup of creamy sweetened tea is the one satisfying thing but it is soon over. Later I will cook and make salad, my grim little regulated meals, which if they are not regulated will quickly make me fat. 6 kinds of supps: C, B, turmeric, Co-Q, acetyl carnatine, oregano. I somehow don't mind the daily half hour flashing around Balboa Park, though it is rote, always the same route though I switch directions. All day there'll be the pinch of jeans too tight at the waist. I walk to Starbucks to go outside somewhere and the walking is heavy, stiff. Before I go out I'll put a bit of pink oil on my face for the shine and very subtle color, earrings to feel a bit less plain, spend $3.40 on the Times and a short decaff in a tall cup, sit there under whatever music is on and drill through the paper, then donate it to the newspaper rack and walk the two blocks home feeling the uphill strain. Then I'll have a student letter I resent the thought of, though I get into them when I'm launched. Then the rest of the day is piecemeal, I don't feel at liberty to begin something of my own. Often checking email through the day. Yearning for TV, to be with beautiful smart people rapt in action. Then shower, pyjamas, tooth brushing - which now also has to happen whenever I eat anything sweet, because my teeth will hurt if I don't - and soaking my teeth in mouthwash while I do something else. Shoulder stretches for half an hour. Then the whole reverse ritual, hot water bottle for the foot of the bed or my R foot will be cold, pull the plug on the hotplate because it has been turning itself on, lock the gate, light the candle, turn off the lamps, set up the cushion on the floor, one for my back. Space hotel on the CD player, 15 minutes of slow breathing. Night supps: calcium, turmeric, C, ginger, glass of water. I'm embarrassed to name the regulatedness and mechanicalness of this life, but each of these grim elderly little shifts does prevent or modify a worse thing. I could be proud of myself for fighting as well as I do, except that the result is still just barely holding and I know it will all get worse no matter what I do. - Then also, writing the routine realizing that someday it will be a record, just a record, it's not eternal. Will you comment   subtle, creation, writing, betrayal Is that a recommendation   Is this grim routine necessary   I do really need them   And will need them for the rest of   And more   Is the lovelessness necessary   Being unattractive and unwanted   no That isn't why the lovelessness is necessary   I have to be alone   Because these shifts need so much focus   no Because I can't handle   So do I have to just always be hungry like this   NO Creative project   YES To be able to wake up with joy   YES Something large enough  Cosmic enough   YES New enough   Mind and heart enough   That brings me people   Is it a mistake to go to TO   no Something that lets me quit teaching   As big as Being about   With beauty   YES And true depth   YES Is there such a project   YES I've been an amazing artist - the garden, Being about, the journal project - of unusual scope   It won't be seen in my lifetime   no The Notes in origin show isn't finished   But could be   Is that the next project   YES But make it bigger   YES HDV   YES Make it something different   YES A set of DVDs   YES Canada Council funding   YES So cut the monograph short   Still do Ant Bear   I'd have to make myself for it   YES Can I start it while finishing ends   YES Is it also Orpheus   YES Writing   YES Sound   YES Scan photos at Paul's   Residencies with tech help   Do it in early mornings   YES Will there be enough money   YES I could be making amazing work all the time   That would make all the difference   YES And sing and louder sing   YES Thank you   Then took the bike to Horton's Plaza and bought 1. Beautiful light blue and white striped pyjamas for $70 Nordstrams, 2. two pair of dark green chinos at Banana Republic $80 x 2, 3. New pair of Levis 501s for $50. And then a bigger size of the green Chucks. What to wear in Toronto is my worry - I have working at home clothes and professor clothes but not old distinguished artist clothes. If I were Michael Snow I wd wear some kind of shirt and jeans and running shoes and an old sheepskin jacket but tall old artists can look good in what short old female artists do not look good in. So should it be the J Crew jacket which is a bit strange but fitted and slightly contour looking or the old green corduroy? The UGGs or the docs? Or the green Chucks. The UGGs are the only ones I can walk distances in, but it might be slushy. My professor shirts, white, green striped, Façonnable, are nice but they are too tidy. This red linen is washed out enough now, soft blood red, it's good. I love the new pyjamas, they're white-piped and have a good collar and a wide loose elastic in the pants. The cotton is slightly sheer, very light. - No one to share my clothes with, now. Can I lose this 5 lb   Say how   judgment, ready, happiness, love woman Making LW happy   Without a lover   You mean in work   - There I fixed the pockets of the black jacket, it can be the new winter jacket - has a passport front pocket, and the green pants are wonderful, loose, interesting, perfect dark green. Them, with the black tee, the cashmere hoodie. Can wear them with this shirt and the cream cami. About pain: London last summer, physical struggle, pain almost constant, but it isn't there afterward, in what I still have of London. I can think that about this time: what I do in spite of pain I will still have, aching legs after walking uphill is only now. 25 Oh my beautiful pyjamas - 8:30 Thursday morning. Sweet sun, letters done, into Dames rocket in a moment. - Did DR and then after 8 I should stop and summarize the time before Alberta Jan 1975 - June 1978, 3 and a half years vols 1-8. Then after I get back Nov 1980 - May 1985, 4 and a half years 14-24. Then up north June 1978 - Nov 1980 2 and a half years 9-13. 26 Wearing the loose new green pants, in the aft was moving as if I was thirty, the loose fluid well-moving feeling I didn't notice then and now notice with joyful gratitude. I stepped into the bathroom moving like that and there was my big ugly old face in the mirror. Big open Saturday. Lot of bird cheep - I'm on the roof with my little jewel pet plants around me - the pink shell one in its pink pot, the green coral one, the plump-pad red and green one in its green pot, the silver one in its white cream pitcher, the branching little blue cactus in its round clay pot that reminds me of Indian cooking pots, the spiky blue agave in its green urn, the grey-maroon aloe in its maroon pot putting up a long branch now opening orange flowers, the flat jade-blue rosette one, edges pink, in a jade blue Bauer bowl, the little baby-toes looking well because I'd kept it under the eaves through the rains. And what happened to this poor little transparent-flesh cloven-bum one, it's been pecked. Wonderful morning, voices laughing, calm palms, the camphor canopy a glowing cloud. There's a dove modestly scrounging what the house finches scatter. The finches are little robots scrapping for precedence at the bowl but the doves have personhood, they are watchful not anxious, I like their mild pink glow and their decoration of black spots and their ringed sideways eyes. At this moment there's one working in the bowl with a male finch doing what he can from the rim. The finches work in the morning, I rarely see them in the afternoon. I also like the way doves' wings have voices, their little flights squeak pleasingly. Slow breathing every night for 15 minutes. I'm crosslegged on a cushion on the floor, with my back against a pillow, usually with Space hotel on, and just a candle lit so I can see the clock. I start with slow inhales, slower exhales, but then begin to pause with the measure of the music, and in the pauses begin to feel my heartbeat - more than feel it, begin to be rocked by it. Breath gets shallow, just a sip in long intervals. Feeling the heartbeat closely I forget to breathe altogether. Fifteen minutes is enough. I come out of it a sweet soft body that likes to lie down under the covers feeling itself. - Hope it isn't speaking too soon to say it has fixed the hiss at night. 28 Anything you want to say about him showing up   loss, liberation, Tom, integration He's always needing to integrate loss   And that's what he's doing   Any more you want to say   enjoy, coming through, work woman / love woman Is it okay to be so closed   Zenaida macroura - of the colombidae. Marginella western. Western turtle dove, American mourning dove, rain dove. In warm areas up to 6 broods a year. Monogamous, two squabs per brood. Sexes look similar, both incubate, crop milk. May get to Canadian prairies in summer. Vagrant. Nest in trees in cities. - How to organize intros for DR - shd they be 3 separate sections - Dames rocket is really only the first 8 vols. Up north. And what's the last. Edged out. Can it be one section with three subsections. It's the 30s. What intro for the whole - art. - At the Laundromat Carmelo from Puerto Rico, in the navy at the rank of chief, 31, has a 15 year old back home, warm black eyes, in recovery. There was drumming this morning, good drumming. It was Palm Sunday in the cathedral across the street and when I crept onto the roof to look, I could see down into a crowd in the forecourt. In the centre were two young women shaking their breasts. Fertility dances for Easter, the Episcopalians! who then processed up 6th for one block and back around, holding palm fronds. 30 Tom Sunday at the farmer's market. I was tight defended. Insulting. Afterwards thought no, that wasn't good - sent a note saying sorry. His reply had his best self, perceptive and fond - he said he hadn't thought of it as nasty. Feisty. I'm telling this story because of what happened when I got this note, a childish flush of joy. I deleted the email ruthlessly but I noticed - it's the youngness of it, my daddy likes me - his note also went too far, into patronizing, and that made me sorry I'd given him an opening. When I feel a little weakness toward the thought of him I remember the look of his naked curved spine and mangy ass. Yesterday I stopped at Scott's to look at the gravel garden. Opened the gate on a shock of color. The California poppies are out, and other things, the incienso, a maroon salvia, a purple succulent, little wildflowers 2" tall, the ceanothus. (Am sorry I looked in the back, was lying in bed with my solar aching at what I saw.) The palo verde is full of round buds. The African sumac, though, was ruined by the plumbers, who cut off a whole trunk. Something I remember is the moment last spring when I said goodbye to Tom's house and my garden on his steps. Stood there in agony looking at it, the home I made. I have tears in my eyes remembering that. Then I took my plants home and later when I brought them back for the summer the garden was never as good and I never felt much for the house again. There was a hope we didn't build on - I'm feeling sorry for myself, how much I need a right little house and garden of my own. I bought him such beautiful kitchen things, stainless steel strainer, lifter. The blue couch, which he stained all over in his piggy eating. The moon lamp. Found him the perfect desk. It's a love nest I said, bringing him to see it the first time. When people came to see him there he got unearned credit for it, and the photos of it on Facebook. The photos of him - I took beautiful pictures of him. I misgave my beautiful talent. Yes because that was better than not giving it. And I had no better options. I'm seeing a deep thing I resent him for, that he didn't make my love good by becoming someone worthy of me. Every time I saw him cutting a corner, lying, reading men's adventure junk, flattering, sleazing out of knowing what was there to know, not having money for food, letting himself get a gut, he made my love foolish, he made me a desperate weak fool for loving him. I was with him daydreaming a much better man, to get away from the shame that this was the man I had. That's heartrending. Yes. My option is that or no one and so now I'm choosing no one and that is sore in the same way. Is it worse? No. Is it better? No. But I'm not locked down. Emilee: "I miss you. A lot." I sat in what had been my glow chair and watched the sun slip over the walls, square panes of water glass light. The coat hung on the back of her desk chair, and I could smell her. I sat and breathed and imagined her shoulders, her hands, they tremble just slightly sometimes. On the collar of her wool coat a single strand of her gray hair, twisted and shining in the late afternoon sunlight. Just so overwhelmed by your beauty and elegance, my star struck mumbling, would sit at your feet for hours with rapt attention and you could say anything and I would marvel at your mouth, the shine of your eyes. Noble, royalty, the kind of artist I wish to be. Yes yes yes and the very deliberate no, the discriminating know, when and how. I am becoming even more obscure and it terrifies me. So basic, that one will not be resolved. They will not love me, I will not be loved, it is that simple, that bewildering. Loving so fearlessly, and yet, and yet. Seeing so much, eyes so full. I see how this has been trying to be a packet for you. There's a level of shame I live with because of my leg. It is objective   YES It's not wrong   I'd be wrong to try to undo it   YES It's right to be physically proud   Do you want to comment   you are processing show growth from evasion The only way I could stop evading is to give him up   So now I understand that I'll always be ashamed   So was I ashamed of him instead of me   Do you want to say more   look, to come through, shattered, early love My dad was ashamed of me   Tom never was   Mary never was   Instruction   Jam was   T and C were   I can never be a really sound whole person   Can anyone   I can be a jagged uneven offbalance person   Does Emilee see me wrongly   no Given that structure can I come through   If I had been ashamed of me would I have been ashamed of him   no Is this important   Is feeling shame what would bring me through   no I have no clue how to do that   YES Can you tell me   recover betrayed energy in practical ways Do you mean recover love energy   Practical - do you mean physical   no Beautiful clothes   no Art success   Is that what you mainly mean   no Find people I can honestly love   no Do you mean find the work   no Do whatever I can to be attractive   no Do you want to explain what you mean by practical   slow growth, in quest, of withdrawn, winning Anywhere I'm not winning now   YES Be like when I first went to college   YES I need to win to love   YES Do you want to say more   no Would it make my health better   no Feel shame more   Recognize it   The quality of it   Is shame something else at depth   no Basic   Shame - low energy, tension, normal sense of competence gone, sadness, anxiety, tentativeness. Found a bit of vision writing on newsprint roll that was cleaner, had no memory of writing it but transposed it after the ickier Cheryl sequence. Working on DR is a drain, the reams of worried mentation, love pain grinding out language on and on, poor creature unhelped, trying, confused. 31st Wonderful day, transcribing vision writing then out to Sean's where they were placing the fountain - motorcycle cop stopped me for speeding but liked me and only gave me a ticket for not having my proof of registration in the jeep, $25 rather than $275. The fountain is subtly perfect, wet dark with gold specks in the gritty clay. I dashed to Mission Hills [Nursery] and found what I wanted and proposed to Sean he give me a free hand with $150. He doubtfully did, and I got beautiful stuff which he loved - a single white rose, a single yellow, an artichoke, a cistus ladanifer, a salvia buchananii, a Cleveland sage, a lavender, a marjorum, and a little maiden tree to put behind the group, a Mexican redbud - put in his foxgloves with the rest and there it was, a finished little square, yellow, white, silver, dark pink, light pink, dark green, light green, and water reflecting spilling sheeting sounding, subtle and glittering in the midst. Oh a ravishing fountain. 1st April Thursday. When I woke in the dark water crashing on the roof. Four days till I leave. Going through Dave's ms fixing little things. He began it as the story of Sexsmith and then got into something realer about himself as a bachelor. He is guessing the story of one of the beer parlour bachelors of Sexsmith and then he edges into connections with Sturgeon Lake Indians, there's a Native woman he calls the bachelor's soul mate. He's working something out   no I mean he's alluding to something     Mary Moses is body   The bachelors had post-traumatic   He has it second generation   And for him I'm body   Transcribing blue pages. Was there anything true about my sense of spiritual improvement   no Was it all an artifact of dope   no Dope and reading If it had been spiritual rebirth would it have been like that   no It was basically about needing therapy Which cannot be tied up with sex and competition and drugs! That's the simplicity of it And art! Seeing about the prenatal was real ground The photos were The writing at the end If I'd been already put together wd I have gone anywhere near them   no Wd I have liked Cheryl But I wouldn't have fallen in love with her Did being with women screw me up   no The simplicity is that I was off my rocker The religious reading was about that I put myself much too much in harm   YES   Should I hide all that   no Show it as madness I would never have been with Jam 3 How to organize Going for broke / DR intros. What needs to be for the whole section, what for DR.   Going needs: edit comments lovers and friends money film and photography writing the times reading DR needs: drugs house, city consciousness 4 On the couch mid-aft reading the Times magazine, the room shook and I thought oh good. Then it kept shaking. The lamp was rattling on the filing cabinet. Things all over the room were rattling. Surely it will stop now. It didn't stop. Maybe a serious one. I wanted to be outside, got onto the roof and sat down in the chair and it was still shaking. The world was rubbery. By then I could feel fear in my throat, which wasn't fear of the building falling, because the shaking wasn't hard. It was fear that the world had changed permanently, that it wouldn't stop shaking and that that would end everything. Sirens howling like dogs all around. A car alarm. Later on the radio, calls saying that on I-8 all the cars had stopped, "the freeway was like a parking lot." A guest at a hotel described water crashing over the sides of the pool, first one side, then the other. 5 Cleaning photo scans on the big monitor tonight listening to the Emperor Concerto, chasing specks on photos of Opa and Oma in their late prime, maybe early 60s?, and Ed and Mary in their early 30s, the couple photo in front of their first house maybe 12 years into their marriage - or maybe it was their 10th anniversary photo. I haven't been interested in the Emperor since I was 18? But it was getting to me, the tender curving of the melody, I was singing with it feeling how sexy death is - was thinking of Opa and Oma looking at us when we were young and already knowing what we didn't know, that we wouldn't always be beautiful and strong. And there was Ed smiling with his mouth shut to hide his missing front teeth, smiling deliberately because he has thought out how to look good in a photo. Mary beside him wearing socks with high heels and her full skirted seersucker dress, deep bosom and good shoulders, a young woman with four kids. She's standing next to him but they aren't leaning into each other. He's standing as if he's alone, presenting himself, just him. She is standing a little turned toward him but the look on her face is disgust, disillusion. In Opa and Oma's photo Opa is presenting himself stoutly, he doesn't think he's handsome but he thinks he's a good man, and she is nestled into him although also looking straight and proud. She has regard for him. - Sexy, I mean the fact that we get old and die is thrilling. Toronto, 7th I look nice in my new pyjamas, slender - Toronto at the window, cabbagetown, junky, brick-imitation siding, lurid big daffodils in weedy little yards. It's early spring, bare and dirty. This kind of street in England would look so much better, why. It wouldn't be so miscellaneous. Postal truck goes by. Bad design. Letter carrier's uniform, bad color, battleship grey. I'm at liberty. Horrible Andy's essay, I'll do that and then go walk around. The flight yesterday, hundreds of miles of deserts, the perfect drawings they are, tints and scribbles, seeps, once a cloudy blooming-up of pale grey into sand, shaped like the clouds of cream rising in tea. Once many shades of flamingo in seeps and drifts. Coming north into late afternoon the pilot edged around a gigantic anvil tower, a solid boil of white and dark blue, ferocious. And then later in calm twilight high above a vast curded cloud deck I was feeling - I mean feeling - the universe is god and we're in god and cannot fall out of god, and god is beautiful and immaculate and doesn't care about us, or does in the sense that we are evolved lawfully, but doesn't care personally, or might, in some way we haven't discovered. And now I'm thinking that the books and objects in this house are about human making, expertise in history of human making. I asked Paul at his kitchen table last night in lamplight about what Judie said, I think maliciously: that they were told to give me special consideration because I had polio. He said that never happened. He said she'd told him she'd decided she didn't like her family and doesn't want to know them anymore. She's made another family of her own. - I thought, it means she doesn't like who she was in our family, she has reinvented herself by will, which is admirable but also self-hating - isn't it? [experimental media congress schedule] 9 OCAD café, nothing to do until 5. Who there's been: Chris Kennedy and Kate Mackay, Paolo de Ocampo, Mary Daniels, Barbara Hammer, Mike Hoolboom very briefly, Adam Hyman of LA Film Forum, Cheryl l'Hirondelle, Brigit Hein, Stefanie Schulte-Strathaus, Pip Chodorov, Nicole Gingras, Steve Anker, Michael Zryd, William Wees, Dont Rhine, Jeremy Rigsby and Oona Mosna (Windsor festival), Barbara Meter's Loutron - video Greek bath - undergroundish pool - two women singing in the water - Trapline feel sometimes - light in water, reflections and things, but naked woman, old man's head - nice titling. How bored I am when these young art student people speak, they talk about their 'practice' and have that zombie trained sound - I like this Chilean speaking almost English better, the halting people. Gianfranco Foschino "visual simple video." [Opposite page: Polycarbonate. Exterior surface sanded, covered with two layers of fiberglass roving set in epoxy. Breckenridge perfect cottage. Christopher Deam lengthwise RV. Up and over door that opens to a balcony. Reinforced at the joints, screws rather than nails for transport. Plywood treated with phenolic resin. Mathew Craford 2009 Shop class as soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work Penguin Standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion ... a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good. "key element in the new economy's idealized self: the capacity to give up possession of an established reality" quoting Sennett cognitive richness of manual work knowledge of their nature acquired through disciplined perception Kojève intro to the reading of Hegel Mike Rose the mind at work a yeoman aristocracy: those who gain knowledge of real things manual competence and the stance it entails toward the built, material world How does this affect the prospects for full human flourishing?] 10 What is it about Cheryl - the things she always says many times in any visit, that we're socially constructed, and that recognition in the art world is never for quality, always for reasons of social pull. She is very presented and in ways that make her look worse than she'd need to: thin hair dyed black and standing up as if in fear, lipstick on a thin mouth. She hustles socially, is quick and responsive, talks to whoever is famous in a room but at home is online from the moment she wakes peering into stranger's houses. At Tom Chamont last night I was thinking of her old super-8 movies, how electrifying her story with Trudy was and how afraid she would be to show it, how she would refuse to show it. Social fear, she keeps saying 'the world' is only interested in x and y, and one has to conform to its interests - she was a child whose mother forced her, it has to be that. She was afraid of her mother, her mother enforced compliance. And that happened with Trudy, she felt Trudy that way and it freaked her. People our age should look like Rhoda, nobly natural, naturally noble. C looks freaked, she acts easy. Here's old Mike Snow, what's he wearing - jeans but not sneakers, a red cotton jacket not sheepskin. I feel sorry for artists when I see them in a crowd. Their self consciousness. Rhizome - Jean Gagnon said software, catalogue raisonné. "Future humane secularism," "something more urgent than beauty," Michael Mitchell 11 Paul's dinner party and talking to him this morning - talking about our ambition - I said I have immense cultural ambition and not much social ambition - I want to be among the greats and I don't much care whether I'm seen to be among the greats. He has had cultural ambition too, his books say. - In the wrap-up I walked bravely to the mic and said what I needed to say, though no one would want to hear it and the conference closed over it as though it had never been said. Young women stood at the mics and went on confidently and vacuously. They wore black and looked nervy. I faded away after a sentence, they were so abstract and correct. I didn't know I would miss the patriarchs I used to resent. I missed them because they were heavies, they had topics bigger than this grey fog of worry about money and territory. The rumor about Ellie Epp, I've discovered, is that she became a philosopher. Paul this morning said that at the international conference in the Ukraine, on the Mennonites in Russia, people were greeting him with joy, because he was an Epp in a lineage of distinguished preacher leaders. The Epps have class Michael Mitchell said at the dinner table. No, they don't, I said. So was Peter Epp's dignity based on something we didn't know? We didn't know we had a lineage, which is to say we didn't know which thing we should carry forward as our particular gift. I'm feeling something about this, the cost of interrupted lines in self-ignorance. Would I have tried to publish Being about if I'd known my line had been distinguished in large framing (which may not have been what it was, I don't know)? I'm in the Gladstone and soon will see Shirley-Tia, who on the phone has a loud coarse Peace River Country voice, not the voice of the letters. Anne and Harvey last night two gentle civil accomplished people who spoke and listened. Harvey was sweeter, nearer and realer than I've seen him. Now we're elderly together I said as he was driving me home in his cherry-colored Camry. Anne's taste in Can lit wasn't quite mine. She didn't love A complicated kindness and hadn't read David Adams Richards, but she liked McLeod. She liked Atwoods I don't, and she liked The English patient more than she should. We gossiped with energy as Harvey drank wine, he's interested in any of Anne's family and sweetly generous to Anne. - Tia who's really Shirley, a big old blond, was 6' and bosomy with a big jaw, strong. - Why do people wear me out after so short a time, I was wanting to escape the meeting with Barbara after was it five minutes, and Shirley was enough long before she'd finished lunch. Is there anyone I like to be with, still? When did Shirley start to bore me, she talks too much about her rasta baby, I disapprove of becoming a Catholic at 40 and writing a dissertation on medieval ethics, and giving Jomo money and a blow job in an alley while she was on the job - too much about men, and yet she lives lively and was sturdy at the bus stop with long blond hair turned white with little change of color, bosom to her waist, hands in her jacket pockets, big creased rectangle of a face. Many declarations. A Grendel. Grendel's mother. Barbara the opposite, tiny thin thing, pressured talk. [Opposite page notes getting ready for my film night]   part 3 in america volume 20: 2009 june - october work & days: a lifetime journal project