| time remaining 3 part 3 - 2015-2016 november-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
10 November 2015 [presentation prep: The new films Toronto has always been good to me, better than anywhere else. Mike Hoolboom and Chris Kennedy. Franci Duran told Chris who told CFMDC who sent an email. CFMDC. Jacob Korczynski who set up a show in Karlsruhe this summer. I find it hard to push my own work. Beginning again. There's something more I want to do but here it's beginning where I left off. California films - place, enchanted by places there, By the lotus, o sea, OB pier 5, 3 movements in San Diego, here San Diego county ranch country oak savannah, last light in the Anza Borrego desert - knew I'd have to leave when I quit teaching and my work visa ran out - Digital - being able to use a single lens reflex - a Nikon - being able to edit at home - the cumbersomeness and expense of analog filmmaking - I'm kind of a loner and it's possible to make films without having to ask for things - Teaching, having a salary, buying a Mac Pro tower, 30" monitor, final cut pro, an audio field recorder, Here - hundred year old ranch house in the most exquisitely beautiful oak savannah country - pocket remnant of - survives by being agricultural reserve, nature preserve and reservation land - two years there - windows overlooked a wide valley - turkeys had a route down to a pond and up again into the trees - I'd see them from a long way off coming single file up a path - they had such presence, they were so alert - they seemed like people to me - tribal people - they'd gather sometimes under my window - mating - someone in the history of the house had built a little walled patio next to the living room's door, and in it had plumbed a little fountain - and had planted above it a toyon, which is a native plant - it was dry country - I learned that if I turned on a trickle of water the sound would bring birds of many kinds to drink. I could watch and listen from behind a screen door. To film the turkeys I'd set up the camera focused on the stone basin and when I saw them coming up the path from below would rush out and turn it on and then rush back to hide behind the screen door. Here is the turkeys and their tremendous alertness and realness - they are so conscious - but it's also the little stone terrace so beautifully formed by someone in the past. By the lotus - Balboa Park - what was he reading from - in a way the whole film is a simply a set-up for the white fish - to be there ready to see how beautifully it swims through the frame - but has other associations The ways it continues trapline in another medium - things swim through the frame and off-screen sound gives the context - but I was aware too of the Buddhist associations of the lotus - and of reflection - so there's the child's eager presence and the man's voice droning from a holy book in the background - little frame full of beauty and presence and around it the reverberations of cultural appropriation of that little frame - consciousness - the moment of presence and the internal voice droning and the child's eagerness at seeing - O sea - why is it pink? Is it worth having at all - Last light - feeling how coming into old age is a desertification - living in Borrego Springs which is a small town in the low desert in eastern San Diego County - the mountains are treeless and seem to rise very abruptly because their actual bases are covered a mile deep in sand eroded off them - these are the west faces of the Santa Rosa range - the fading-out of it - Sound is one track doubled and offset a bit, high frequencies filtered out so it would be more of a sound of the mountain. How the new films continue from the old - oh no it's trapline all over again - it isn't quite - notes in origin - place - ] Frightened? Keyed up. Went through here2012 looking for toyon and turkeys. Liked it. Yes I shd make a photo book. Liked the writing, best bits. It's not nothing, as work. It's a collaboration. Land and mind. - Kamloops airport. This morning thinking one of the things about this age is being afraid of stress. The centre of my chest felt tight and I was scared of being scared, I mean talking self was in a flurry trying to know how to calm 'the body', whose anxiety didn't seem to have a good reason. Rider and skittering horse. I sat still for slow breathing and gradually slowed down and shut up. Felt my heartbeat. What is there to say about the drive. Vapor. Not cloud or mist, I was thinking, more patchy and visibly breathed off ponds and lakes and some fields. Winter color an almost even dun in that reticent light, even the rocky ledges. Uncle George eager to show me grassland, not Lac du Bois but south toward Merritt, his country, where he came as a new-married young man to his first school, a one-roomed school on a ranch. Rose Hill. The old Kamloops-Merritt road as must've been, a winding dirt track following the crest. Bunchgrass, cowpats, rocks piled to the side, great open vistas of velvet-seeming slope. Nearer Kamloops - Knutsford - country like eastern Washington that used to have dry farming - wheat, oats, barley - and little homesteads every half section he said. Dry brown wood: cabins and corrals. Dark spruce streaks and bare aspens in the draws. I was being agreeable. There was nothing else I could be, he doesn't attend. She does, although she launched into a story about her sore feat that went on too long. Over lunch he told me a health story too. I must never do that. 11 Toronto
14 TIFF Lightbox. Thursday morning. Walking is hard. Walking carrying anything is an ordeal. I labour along limping heavily. This morning out the door too fast worried by the weakness of my heart, or so it felt. Standing packed in the back of the Dundas trolley wondering whether I'd keel over. [page of notes on the films to get ready for the evening] "I could see Trapline every day of my life" said Scott. 13
There are often a couple of quiet women who say they liked it. I believe them and can think it's for them. Meanwhile the thin young men with impassive faces who deal in 'art'. I was more scared after than before, last night in bed feeling I didn't know anything about how it went. Chris had a shiny face in the far row. Mafalda and her man in the front row, and Tia grinning when I said desertification. Cheryl and Barbara a long way back. At the drinks gathering after no one with anything to say about the work. It's always like that, though, isn't it. Technically: beautiful projection. Beautiful sound. One-shot films. Jesse and Lux print, Sam and Paris, Mary Daniel and Marcia of the farmhouse. One-way conversation - audience of 56 scattered through a big space - some I could hardly see or hear - I talked and had no idea how it seemed. Out of touch with the moment in the sense that I was presenting not feeling. Toronto - grubby storefronts and house fronts, rotting remnant feeling, what is it, immigration? Why am I thinking science fiction, The dispossessed underclass warrens on Uras, Cabbagetown. Lot of young persons who look poor and arty. (Am I too candid?) Colleges have curator programs now, Franci said, a professionalization. I don't understand Jacob's formality. It's dark and chilly. D and F and their generous informed household. We sit and talk on and on. 15th, Sunday morning That was bad, last night. Why wd she invite those two, why does she tolerate them, why wd she think they'd be good dinner companions with me. Or what. Smaro a gross egotistical bulk, Barbara a tight egotistical scrawn, neither giving any attention to where they were or with whom. C's companion watching and noticing but unseen, C with all her wit giving the floor to their alternating harangues. And what is it about her hair, she had silky fine hair and has made it coarse and stiff as dyed straw. What costume is that meant to be. It says arty. But why. Art doesn't need a costume. I realized I was not going to sit through more of it and was going to have to get myself away. Wasn't imagining that everyone would get up and follow me toward the door. The way that went surprised me because I spoke exactly without knowing I was going to. Smaro saying "I was glad to meet you. I've heard so much about you." I said "I hope you'll hear more." Barbara saying "I won't see you again," I saying "You're seeing me now." I cringe to be telling these sentences because they can feel like those women's blind egotism but at the same time I want to record the dry steady objectivity of that moment. It came because I was doing the right thing. Mafalda this morning wrote "You were really in your own space." She meant talking to the audience after the movies. Yes that's how it has felt. The phone photo she sent, though, looks so grieved. As I was walking away up Havelock toward College I was thinking no, the way it's supposed to be is the way it is at David and Franci's, warm listening and warm talking, all lively and kindly. Were those women competing? I don't think it was that. I think Barbara lives very compressed and when she lets herself out into talking it comes out like the shriek of a teakettle on the boil. With the other one it's professional hardening, it's ambition, being an expert, giving talks, succeeding, needing the safety of her own voice sounding successful in ways she understands as success. And the work. Trapline really is great, Mafalda said. But no, so chopped in its cuts and crude in its sound, so much of that loud male voice, so harsh in its sound and ill-judged in its length of shot. The new ones didn't impress. Amy of CFMDC saying curators have been phoning wanting to look at the new Ellie Epps. Nothing has come of it. C said by the lotus is best because it's more layered. M liked last light. I liked its sound - the sound was right. In o sea I liked the sharp cut of the words floating some exact distance in front of moving sea surface. OB pier didn't work, C thought because the image was too large. I was the wrong speed for all of them, didn't feel them, didn't feel why anyone would feel them. Then talking as if they were something or other just becomes unsupported lying out over open space. My own space of other times. What else. The city. The trolleys' way of coasting silently, their gentle efficiency, the courteous way cars in the near lane stop until it moves forward again, the usually brown young drivers, the quietly neutral female voice saying the names of stops. Joseph Boyden Through black spruce, Three day road. Long visit with C in the Café Novo. The way it goes, she so generous in attention, I liking to be heard, dilating, and always a bit guilty feeling I'm not giving her what she's giving me and not having, being, what it would take to do that. We laugh though, it's personal, it's familiar on both sides, it's interested and easy. Twelve or thirteen year old with thin boy legs and fluorescent pink hair, a lovely creature, so at home with his parents, so safe and natural, safe and natural and likely having little sense how rare his kind of life has been for children. Homework, hockey game, private school, guitar practice, best friend, overnight with his bright professor nana, running and gym, bike, Spanish lessons online, house in the most mixed interesting unsuburban part of the city, a professional father and an artist mother, a trip to London Berlin and Istanbul, a Christmas trip to a beach house in Chile, a lifetime of loving attention, an older brother enough years older to be out of competition, a pretty mother, no one dead or dying. 18 What more to tell. Yesterday over the Rockies flying blind through dense whiteness, pitching about, feeling the small Air Canada jet-prop thrusting blindly forward, feeling the unseen sharp teeth of the Rockies below. Then landing in a rain storm in Kamloops. It was only 2:30 but dark as 5:30 in winter, snow higher up on the hills. Driving home through slashing rain, having to constantly change wiper speed, being careful with braking, arriving at Cache Creek in actual night, buying gas and milk, getting home to my ugly stairs and hot bath and deep tea and a note from David. At 7:30 in the morning the car TIFF sent, Franci bringing coffee in a jar, the two of them turning and walking up the stairs. Toronto's wonderful bright, tinted morning from the expressway, my driver telling his plan to save the world. Monday night meeting Jacob in the Empress, both of us with our cheap drinks, he unfolded in a way I'd been thinking he mightn't, a warm light person after all, young, poor, with a daughter, his bicycle helmet on the ledge next to us. I asked him about the films. He liked o sea because of the text, and last light. OB pier least. Chris said OB pier prepared them for last light. Chris's party. Robert Lee taking my hand between both his wanting to tell me my work encourages him. Then Chris said the Gladstone screening made the conference. I said the conference made the screening. Who was there: Chris and Sarah and their lovely Sasha, Robert, Jacob, Lauren from CFMDC, Andrea from Wavelength, Chris from LIFT, Franci for a while, Aimee from CFMDC, Roberta from LIFT. Chris's bright small face atop a long neck. Jacob saying people in Karlsruhe liked the text and stood reading it. He liked the way it patches together different times, not making clear their relation. Robert said he's reading the journals. Chris said he'd got as far as the 17 year old. Robert said elegant. After the screening a quiet woman who thanked me, a young woman who said last light reminded her of North China where she's from. Jacob interested to hear about the sketchups. 19 I was awkwardly carrying a box of matches, riding a bike. Dim sense that I was to take them to the building where I used to live, matches in danger of falling out of the box. Route through a manufacturing shop - don't remember this well. They seem to have given me a plastic bag for the matches. Come to the renovated building I'm thinking of as 824 E Pender. At the exit Trudy coming out the door, not surprising. I say hi. Friendly tone. She says hi. Rhoda follows silently with someone else. Go upstairs. New owners on the second floor won't let me pass, Middle Eastern men maybe. Imcomprehensibly thick accents. I try to explain that I just need to leave the matches. Not actually sure where, maybe the back - south - flat I've seen in dreams before. They won't allow. My matches are on a high ledge above a door. I have to get up on a chair to reach them. As I'm leaving I'm trying to see what's been made of my old apartment. High-end retail space at the front of the building, ceiling at least three storeys high, windows all that height. Was my place subsumed in that commercial space or is it still behind this part? Something earlier about tending a fire, making it burn hotter by opening drafts on both ends of the firebox. Saturday lunch with Anne and Harvey. She'd made Oma's chicken noodle soup. There was a real baguette with a hard crust. She was plumper than five years ago. Harvey didn't look like himself - it was as though his face had been smoothed and slightly bleached. At the same time sweeter and realer, quietly confiding his losses. We ate at a small round table by the window looking over Sherwood Park in wonderful fall color. An odd thing is that as we were going down toward the car in the basement we came upon a pool of oil that seemed to have seeped up through a corner of the floor's parquet tiles like a stigmatic apparition. Uncle George while I was away checked my fluids and phoned a Jeep dealer to ask about causes for the check engine light. I'm recognizing my own elderly increasing loneliness in these kindnesses of Mary's family. "You're catching up" Harvey said. Lynne Segal Out of time. Winnicott multiplicity of ages. If this silence is to last, how long it seems, my short future. De Beauvoir. "'We must stop cheating: the whole meaning of our life is in question.' On the other, she loathed the aging body... ." First national march of the Women's Liberation Movement in Britain on International Women's Day in 1971. unless they had a very particular fiery clout, charisma or charm In people aging the stronger reasons to say they are not the bodies they are. That's cheating for sure. I don't like political efforts toward valorizing aging either. Aging isn't a good thing: it's a hard thing. It happens. It's a cost of having lived. There are better and worse, more and less fortunate ways of rotting before we die. There's complexity and sometimes beauty in the rotting but still what the young will most want, will most have to want from the older is hope that it isn't really what it is. narcissistic injuries of aging To be their own ideal once more - is Freud. Secondary narcissism, loving what one once was. "Another person's narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own." Pleasure in one's self. "Happily married to a man of significant eminence." 20
- Emilee quoted that. She's reading Being about for her program at the European Grad School. I forget what I was able to do when everyone else forgets it or never notices. I dreamed a man - a slight small man - leaning his face against mine lovingly, grazing the corner of my mouth with his. Was liking it, thinking this sort of man hadn't been my type but I was going to go for it, I liked him. Was looking around at where we were, which seemed to be where he lived. It was out in the country but there was a parking lot next to it. Awake I realize he was or was like Robert Lee. Of my own videos the ones I like are by the lotus and here. No one said anything about here. I said to the dinner table, the consensus about the films is that they're no big deal. The consensus is that the talking was better than the films. David asked, did someone say that. I said I'd gathered it from what people didn't say. More people said the talking was good. Nobody talked about the films. You put people at ease David said. It's from teaching I said. If you don't put people at ease you don't get anything interesting from them. Be careful of this: because of what Jacob said about winter interference I'm looking at my old writing with an eye to what I actually can't know, ie what young persons of that kind might like. Noticing that because memory is weaker my present moment has a vaguer penumbra. I can still talk - for instance in the naturalness with David and Franci or Cheryl I could pour forth lively invention I didn't foresee. But. - The Saturna volume - Edged out 8 - working with it, which is working with myself at 38-39 - partly as if working with someone I don't know - I do often like what she likes in language but sometimes re-punctuate or re-space - my purpose is different sometimes - she sometimes has to notice things I no longer do - I sometimes don't follow her additions later in a notation - don't know whether they mean something I'm missing - I sometimes smooth out her exactitudes - I'm less anguished and more sure of myself - I loathe Jam when I see her crooked machinations - I rise in defense of myself. More important, in the blinder reaches of the text, the better blinder reaches where I don't know, where I still don't know, I'm wondering whether I could just go on in trust of blind recognition whatever it is. I know I like many things in the suite - what should I call it - 1983-84 September-April - I know I want to work with what she was more than I am, and can, am able to help her finish what she was wanting to do. Edged out means more than one thing: excluded but also living valiantly on my edge, on an island edge. A lot of it realistically is just shapes of language maybe useable, recognizable, by someone - it's a collection of abstract recognitions not primarily about me and not necessarily recognized by me except in being maybe recognizable by someone - and then sometimes bursts of personal love that sing out with characteristic lightness. Working with it I look for thematic lines - not thematic and not lines - concerns? - followed trackings - not resolvable in the text - clumps - clumpings.
There's forming to find - The glass essay closest but not close - it's another isolated winter, more islanded by far - a collaboration - is it a book? Yes it says.
22 Yesterday afternoon I read through my email letters to and from Tom - I saw that we loved each other. Equally. Whenever I could write him letters and he could reply he was the man for me. 23 August-November 1983 before Saturna separated from Jam and sorting energetically - looking at the gathered bits seeing that I was forming the sorted steady platform I taught from and the sorted steady confidence that led me through the doc. I used the energy of pain to work. Sorting now with more than one focus - what grabs as language - what describes the time - what's vacated or wrong - what I might need now - what it was with Jam. 24 Yesterday I woke to snow on the ground. Swept it off the stairs, swept it off the jeep's windows. Bit alarmed realizing I'll have to walk afraid of falling while it lasts, which might be months. Snow-light in the room, aura of the lake house. Aug-Nov before Saturna - lot of abstract sorting. Dec-April Saturna - sorting and place.
25 Georg Patzer says impressive photos and exciting little texts. A photographer's precise take on the threshold between inner and outer. Quiet, simple work with thoughtful depth. Brighter bulbs. Heinz Esau turned off the check engine light, said it's running lean, he doesn't know why. It still jerks. It's true it's quiet work with thoughtful depth and I'm glad he said nice things about it in the Badisches Tagblatt though he mythologized my escape from the Mennonites, said I was near to quoting Wm Carlos Wms and called the red light of the virga a BROWN frightening fierce wind. Mainly what I'm taking from the German reviews is that they kind of like the writing, which encourages me at last, whatever their misunderstandings. They like stone book too. -
all their prosthetic dogs 26 It was a brilliant spring day, and in the distance one could hear the scampering of the sea. [Durrell] A few flakes, sparse flakes, drifting. Even pewter sky. Scent of carnations next to me. They cost $8. 28 I try to be scrupulous in sorting, want to be sure of what I say, at the same time realizing it's alright to keep lines I don't understand because they don't actually have a status different than the lines I do understand. I mean in the reader who in any case is making something unknown of them. Small small drift of the scent of carnation so pleases me. What's different now is I'm less anxious about being mistaken in keeping and erasing. I am always aware it's a sea of possibly related significances, many of which I don't see, don't handle. I mean I am aware and more easy being aware that it's beyond me, I can't know it. I'm not afraid as I was that I am passing on something that will harm. 29
30 What winter's like in this place, close-lidded grey, dry bitter cold, mountains when I'm on the road to see them quite wonderfully articulated by light snow sifted into their creases and bringing forward their signifying simple shades of grey and tan. Watched American sniper last night and then this morning dreamed Tom had died. I was on a wide lawn shaking out a sleeping bag, at a little distance a man, a soldier or vet, also getting ready to camp for the night. I knew Tom was dead and as I was beginning to wake was realizing I should arrange his wake, call his friends. Skill, loyalty, bravery, strength, confidence, luck, camaraderie, round muscle, eyes with intent: beautiful masculinity: maleness let loose into its primal function, sexy and tragically wrong. His funeral procession 200 miles long, every highway overpass on the route hung with American flags, the whole route lined with patriots wanting to love a hero. The movie wanted to love a hero too, showed him tender with wife and children, showed him invincible though actually he'd been injured often, didn't show him drunk, and didn't show him taken down by his shadow self, a weedy psychotic young vet. What I feel in relation to the story is the kind of pity I felt for Tom in his warrior pride, that something beautiful in him, that something in him wanting to be beautiful, had no - had found no - right function and was betrayed in the venal false consciousness of his nation, that had been glorious in a just war and so much wanted to be glorious again that in its succeeding generations it plunged into two entirely unjust wars. Invading Americans equipped with body armour, armoured vehicles, exhaustive training, radio contact, overhead cameras, fighting unarmoured men in old cars who by any objective measure were better founded as heroes because they were defending their own soil. I took to America also because there I was in the thick of glamour and contradiction. I'm proud of having loved an American soldier also because it was complicated. December 1 Have been once through the Saturna piece. Furiously dislike Jam in the record, was struggling to learn to distrust her accurately. What to do with that part of the time. Was being edged out in an ambiguous way, unconscious in all but me.
What was I edged out of, that, something I was onto. - If I read lying down at noon I fall asleep seamlessly. Reading becomes dreaming without me noticing. Usually then I'll wake for a moment. It looks as if my housetruck was reposted a year later - new batch of raves. "Amazing. Perfect. Love it." "I could really be happy living in this." "Way excellent." "Favorite design so far!" "Ellie I love your design." "Definitely a great design." 8 Soto like me. Last dream. Thought for a film, small monkey girl drawn walking in profile, series of little scenes. That was the title. On Ilkley Moor bah't aht - have it in my head since hearing it in Nicholas Nickleby. Remember working it out from a library book on the piano in the basement bedroom in 52 Burghley Road. Young. 1984 May-Oct. The different sort of writing through the summer with Michael, hardly needs editing, deft and light, mobile, not fine-cut, not what I want now though I can see the good health in it. Fiercely indignant whenever Jam shows up. Feel sorry for the young person still confused by her mentat jumble. But I'll check.
4 One day it took up the brush and lo! pictures of truly troubling originality and authority were born. I stare at them with reverent wonder. It is the Hand alone which has contrived to step me through the barriers into the company of the Real Ones .... All the roads have opened before me. [Durrell Clea] 1983 June-August Ellen telling me to dump Jam. -
- Today someone in Tunbridge Wells roaming the site. - It's a larger scope I'm seeing, it's not just the Saturna journal it's the whole time with Jam, the way I was working and what I was working on. It's unfinished. It founded what I later could know but there's more - There's an impulse toward a more social charm, I mean in the lines I pick, Anne Carson's sort, but there's something drier and deeper. The many ways it can be searched. What I was looking for. In 1983 there's still the prenatal, and then I'm done with it. Jam is a vile person. Such anguish about writing and gender, attachment. 6 I skip over the Lacan-Kristeva notes without hesitating now.
9 Why are there so many ads hateful to men - was looking at misandry sites this aft - they blame feminists or 'women' but it isn't women who make, buy or present them. There are dumb men in a lot of shows guys like, dumb men and pretty women, what is that?
10 Dreamed I was imagining loving. I was in an upstairs room with an older man, I think a doctor. We were looking out the window together. He noticed two trees with a few green leaves on their tips. Were they new leaves? No; leaves they'd held onto after the fall. It was quite a dark room but there was a sense that we were cleaning it up some. I washed a blue and white china bowl to put lemons into it. He showed me a sheet to put into the laundry. I stood there imagining what it would be like if I simply loved this man, loved being with him. He was a gentle soul, a bit reticent maybe. I was imagining being with him without the ambivalence I always had with Tom. When he died I'd miss him. 12 Brody in the New Yorker, best movies 2015: The most inspired directors make images with an innate complexity and independent existence; they have an instinctive taste. As for those who don't - their films used to seem merely adequate and mediocre, now they seem oppressive, reactionary, and destructive. shed the quasi-religious self-containment of his earlier work and made a film that's as outrageously comical and straightforwardly tender as it is riotously surrealistic and probingly documentary, liberated himself from himself. Movies were born to nourish and enrich solitudes in public. 13 Sunday morning. Katrin sent a note. I sent one to Indra and had a reply. FB messaged with Luke on a bus in drizzly fog. Sent Carmichael a link to Indra's Concordia page. Bit after noon. White breath off the cliff because it's around zero, whiteness subliming from rock into air. - Keep looking at the photo of Indra at 16. I photographed her from behind. She's tall and broad-shouldered and bare-legged, edge-on to the sun, caught mid-step, alone on a path balanced in the centre of the narrow frame. She doesn't know she's being photographed. The tilt of her head looks thoughtful, solitary in a way I recognize. I thought her divinely beautiful all up and down, and even now it consoles me to see her then, at the same time as I'm wanting to know what sort of life that divine beauty could buy. I discover: marriage at 30 to a French Canadian expressionist painter 23 years older than her, three children, an address across the street from Parc Lafontaigne in Montreal, books published by MIT. A mainstream life. Widowed in her mid-50s. In Toronto I complained to C resenting how good Martha looks for her age. She said Martha has Parkinson's. 14 When I was excerpting yesterday looked up Karen Chapnick. Died 2008. Paralyzed before she died but still working. Dark sparkle. BBC's Wolf Hall on DVD - Mark Rylance quietly modern as Cromwell. I don't mean modern, what do I mean. Present to himself in a way I don't expect in actors. The measuring way he walks across a courtyard. He takes as much time as he needs to discern what's in front of him. So I look him up. He told actors in a workshop that their key was to say to themselves "I am enough." Streep said something like that. Two other things about him. 1. He's married to a substantial woman, composer, music scholar, playwright. 2. He thinks of Shakespeare plays (not Shakespeare's plays) as having Sufi-like anti-authoritarian instructional intent, advocating developed consciousness and personal integration. In Wolf Hall Cromwell is sympathetic with Tyndall but he also sacrifices Anne, who is in some sense himself. Boleyn beheaded in 1536, Cromwell only four years later. Henry died 7 years after that. Elizabeth reigned from 1559, twelve years later. Mary was 1553-1558. 15 Just before waking reaching to Tom who was sitting on the floor below me, beseeching him, why doesn't he want to be in touch with me more, he doesn't have to be so alone. He looked anguished. The days passed, which seemed the most I could expect of them. [Drabble Birdcage] 16 Lo a clear sky. Blue snow between the tufts of bunchgrass. Luke is on the way to Cape Town. 17 We talked in the last half hour of his birthday, he in a good house in Constantia. When we clicked off I was in such a sharp nostalgic ache for times I've been with him, really sore. Photo yesterday I liked. There was sun briefly. Went out to try for vapor against the cliff and found this one as I was coming back in. Intense blue-green. Won't describe it. Posted 5 of the more ordinary ones and like what FB does with them, 5 small crops set together so they show a common tone, this one an assembly of blue and white with tawny browns. New FB contacts Katrin and Indra. Transcribing this book, want to be caught up for the end of the year. - Here, last light and OB pier at the International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal early March. CAD is 72 cents which means my retirement fund is almost $4000 more than par. 19 theoretical event of 6th century Greece old Mycenaean cities palaces with god hearth, new cities sanctuaries history of urban form if we think of the city in terms of weaving the Piraeus craft specific to Athena was weaving new city-states of the Achaean navigators Athens old Mycenaean citadel port-democracy vertical loom, hearth, goddess, sail loom post and beam hearth and statue in the centre, columns stand around the outside craft and communal association replacing cave and sacred grove kosmos the ordering and the ordered, making and made Odysseus's boat-shell built without frame, mortis-and-tenoned She imagines the imaginative potency of craft. choros or dancing floor Socrates' ancestor: an essay on architectural beginnings 1993 (at 48), thesis Master of Architecture 1991 theory understood as the wondering admiration of the well-made thing Vitruvius: writing the body of architecture 2000 Ordonance for the five kinds of columns after the method of the ancients 1993 with Claude Perrault, translated De architectura most impt text for 1600 years Romans' conceptual construction of their world political and religious context of the period BA 1966, married 1976, architect 1986 a time when skills weren't taken for granted Anaximander of Miletus significance of models of cosmos a spectacle, a theoria absolute darkness of the womb gnomon verticality on a pavement made hours, seasons, equinox, etc, visible, modeled, makes cosmos seen 20 September-December - what have these months been good for - got to know local house market - two new house models, blue house and 1034 - researched house-buying, inspecting and reno - refined the Oliver house and started Clearbrook Road - worked out personal house finance parameters - moved all my stuff to cheaper and local storage - found a bed - cleaned the Mac Pro, new keyboard, new 17" adaptor - Karlsruhe, Paris, Buenos Aires, Toronto, two reviews - added Leslie, Indra, Russell, Anne, Katrin on FB - investigated game engines a bit - investigated Lillooet and Walhachin a bit - finished and sent 5 videos - Karlsruhe print run - transcribed and linked up to here - no reading worth mentioning, or Davies Pound maybe - went through Edged out extracting - cleaned up E1-E6 or -7, couple of photos, Jeep window, soft, hillside, subtle color - good visits with C and Dave and Franci, Anne and Harvey - 21 $500 from Dave L. Through E10 today - months pregnant - better and worse times with J but they all disgust me. There are 4 paragraphs describing the day and night Robert was at my house. In them I feel something so different, not frantic confusion, quiet warmth like a dark warm space in the chest. Actual love. I can feel victimized by J's madness and nastiness but am disgusted by my part in it too, wrong from the beginning. Ashamed. Was ambivalent with Tom but not ashamed of anything I did to him. The way Mary was about Rowen appalls me again. I was in such trouble and she was concerned only for herself. No work worth anything in the nine months - The fact is that I prostituted love woman to J trying to exchange her for cultural capital, which I was in desperate need of on account of patriarchal neglect. That's the whole story of Jam isn't it. The right way to live as and with love woman is what I felt for RM. Neither of us could have handled being together then. I couldn't have handled the real thing with anyone.
22 In 1984 In a canvas tent was luminous - at least the lines I picked out were. Now - what is it - I'm not intoxicable by images? I see his self-absorption more, and what might be his courtship of pain for purposes of poetic allure. I'm more interested in precision, his flips into surrealism seem self-aggrandizing. At the same time I do give his meditation experience some credit: he likely knows things I don't. Reading through Edged out is hard on me, am jangled by it when I try to sleep. - From E10, October 1984 We didn't look after each other. I contempted a lot of her. Was offended when she was in pain. Wouldn't have her except as the marvelous friend. Wouldn't pity her and then had to suffer her superiority because I'd only been willing to have her so. Wouldn't feel with her, too afraid to lose my own view. Eager to hurt her to get even for not being my true heart mate that I'm not either. Both feeling our own spurned devotion and avenging ourselves without pity. 24 Christmas prep laundry in Cache Creek. Vegetable soup fast. David Fray keyboard concertos. Took a while to fall asleep last night. Lay here and remembered how it felt with Tom when times were good: it felt like being at home. Really from the first. 28 Second day of crippling sore neck, pain sometimes up over the top of my head and down my arms. Hardly eating - trying to deal with 5 pounds of belly blubber since the scale broke and all the bread I wolfed in Toronto. - Smell of beef stew from next door. 29 Can I recover what exactly was the new stance - new to me - I was trying on between 1975 and 1985 - where it came from - what it had changed when I moved on from it - something stylistic, trying to write phenomenology - the moment as experience - solipsistic exactitude
31 203 Bancroft. A bright day. cold. I wear the purple Carhart hat. Drive straight down the drooping end of Bancroft. There it is. A shack. Derelict cars. A little trailer, stacks of old boards. The house is sided with old asphalt cladding. A man inside has seen me coming. He's a friend looking after the place. House inspection pickup. She's away for a while. February maybe, musician. 1st January 2016 What sort of life it could be - clean up the yard, get rid of everything - clean up the trees below - turn the whole yard into garden and orchard - set a bed on the river ledge - completely renovate the house. 4th Winter here isn't what I imagined when people said certain places in the interior are the warmest in Canada. There's snow now that has lasted a month and it's been steadily -11 or -12. It's dark. Streets and roads are dirty slush so all the cars are sprayed to the windows. The hillsides are beautiful but stark in maybe three shades of grey to white. It's not the Olson house, which was bright though cold and it isn't Mesa Grande which was always beautiful and didn't hold onto winter. My neck's been hurting for ten days. Food is so monotonous I lose interest. This patch of ground is unwalkable. What shall I do - oh and the hardship without books. And being alone all day so I don't wash my hair and get food dribbles on my sweater from eating lying down. If I lived here I'd need to go somewhere else four months of the year. Text from Eliz saying she's okay, since Kane got beat up she's known he could die any time. 8 Ten hours of Sketchup days in a row. Working on a reno of the river house. What do I think of the river house -
- Women, the New York school, and other true abstractions Maggie Nelson 2007 The aim of a poem was to live forever. 'Abstraction' - no. Her conceptual distinctions aren't useful to me. I've looked for examples, what do I like, what do I want to use, what leads me further into my own work. Paradigm instances not principles. [Page of 203 Bancroft notes] 9 The way my brain suggests with an image. Am thinking the screen's height is wrong, is making me hunch for hours and that's what has made my neck sore. A dim little picture as if from the right: my black dictionary volume under the pedestal. Why is there more of a sense of being given a solution in this way of 'getting an idea' - more than what, the way language comes? As if it comes more from within or under me? 'Me'? It's a neat swift gift, here you are. - Such a texture of inexactitude in the way art-making is thought of. I hold most of it suspended. In it occasional pegs of interest. What art is and is for and the many kinds of things said as if about it. 'Modern man discourse' of the era - I now take for granted that men will want to block me. Stanza a chamber, a place to stand looking - the feeling of a space. In poetry and painting: how does this look next to this. insisting on over-the-top pleasure My question isn't what's the relation of writing and image-making, it's what is it about images I like, what is it about poems I like. Strong rejections of anything else. "Staring you down with beauty" is Schuyler of a large canvas. I need something art either has or hasn't. Easy to tell. It's about recognizing possibility of new skill in making which is a new possibility of beauty. It does have a feel of forward edge about it. It's cognitive skill I mean. There are cognitive skills - kinds of cognitive skill - I can recognize but don't have, Constable or Patrick O'Brian, but they've done their work in the world, it's not work needing to be done. I want to work on something cognitively needed. That's where I want to be of my time. She reads the poems by completing them in a way I don't like. She makes their details pose large generalizations. Those should be penumbral not stated. It's giving me background for Susan and Notley. "One of the savviest voices and most restless intellects in contemporary literature - honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough" - someone on Eileen Myles. - [Sketch with measurements for 203 Bancroft]
10 24x32 studs on 16" centres - don't need to cut down sheathing, insulation or wall covering. How to raise the ceiling w/o raising the roof - architect. 11 Note from David saying Dorothy is dying this week. The river house model is done. [with storm windows] [toward the south end] [toward the desk] [northwest corner] [french doors] [kitchen] [whole kitchen from overhead] [guestroom] [front door] [bathroom] Found ways to fix little things all day yesterday but it comes to an end and then, again, I have nothing to do. CFMDC is taking last light to a Rotterdam trade festival says Aimée, end of this month. 12 There was a new young teacher - high school teacher. I realized I'd be able to work on the teaching letters with her. A few mornings ago a painting in front of me. I walked up to it with a wide brush and in one fast gesture made a green swirl of water. The new lesbian mise-en-scène is a fierce, wildly infectious, and inclusive cultural force ... female outlaw optimists, teeming butch-femme talent, fearlessness, gaudiness, booziness, and flaunting a complex sexuality ... this huge girls' art movement ... claiming girlhood - in all its weirdness, pleasure, danger, agony, ferocity, lasciviousness, and fantasy - as a rich and fundamental site ... workshops ... constructed a loose community of people who were combining experimental writing practices with personal and political convictions ... artists of all kinds ... poetry voice ... . But, ugh, move on. 14 Working on Titania's gash -
I need consistent grammar. Working on that but it takes quite a few passes. What I still have only a dim grasp of:
I like the interweave of personal and impersonal. There's a person trying to figure out how to live. Suffering, being pleased. Sex, landscape, study. She begins but can't finish. I can't generate and feel and register as she can but I can finish. I love her. I can be the help she needed. Am I helped in this by all the teaching.
16
Gina - tutoring job, Cache Creek library, $25/hr, 6 hrs/wk is $600/mo
which isn't a lot but let's say $2000 into the credit union by the end of
the semester.
time remaining volume 3: 2015-2016 november-january |
