birdwoman, bee-town, mountain, rain

The adventure continues / the adventures continue.

I am happy.

toward the studio

A good feeling is waking up to a very bright blue sky out my skylight (my view from bed). And having breakfast while reading (I'm rereading one of my favorite books of all time, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of their Popularity, by Whitney Otto), a nice warm shower, and then time to work.

I'm right at the stage where I have ideas and shapes but not a total form and so I can't/won't/don't want to talk about the work, but I want to show it and say OH LOOK I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS!! I have three paintings in progress and then the prints I mentioned in the last post, and I have some ideas about how they go together. And I know what the last three paintings will be.

Today I need to get the website for the poetry series up (I'll post about that when it's ready) and then tomorrow I'm going to be in Leicester working in the printshop all day. Ahhhh.

I feel like this: about to run off the mountain and start flying.

how much space

Beginning to make prints again. Beginning everything again. I didn't realise how much I'd allowed to go dormant. And when I begin I realise how much energy I really do have and how wide open I can become. As though everything makes more and more space for everything, everything. How this body is a galaxy to what's inside it.

I still want to make trades with people who've replied here. I'm just slow because I want to do it right and not fall behind. My datebook right now looks like this: meeting, meeting, meeting, do a little thesis work, email a million people, have some cake, go to Leicester to make prints, go to poetry events to drum up support for the event I'm doing in May, Sainsburys, dinner, more emails, work on the website for the poetry event, more meetings, repeat, repeat. Sprinkle in a little intrigue and a whole lot of happy-to-be-among-the-things-of-this-earth. And a few days of England-in-the-sun.

Not that everything is easy. But there's room for a lot and every thing I do reminds me I can.

oatmeal muffins

I really loved it when I was a kid and my mom would make oatmeal-raisin muffins. These aren't very sweet but they have lots of raisins. I love them with butter. Back then, my mom would pack them for my lunch, which was a real treat (for a while, I thought bread was disgusting). I froze some, when I made several dozen about two weeks ago, and they defrost perfectly--just taken them out of the freezer and let them be for a few hours. A nice afternoon snack as I watch the builder put up new shelves in our office and peek out the window to see the blue sky while I work.

love/research

James Baldwin: "Art could only result from love".

Beth Orton: "Open my heart, open my heart/ there's something telling me to open my heart".

birdwoman

Who is she? Where did she come from? Why did she appear, and when? Who knows her, how does she speak, what does she want? It's something like the light on a wooden church coated in tar, fickle, freckled (who knows how?). Snow as deep as a body (however small) in mid-April. The mystery the world is, which is to say how it keeps opening and refuses to give itself up. She is a miraculous crystallization of presence, in Barthes' words. She very nearly does not exist. Or will not. May.

*

Getting on time for something simple. I need my own space. I need more than one room. I need there to be places where my walls are blank. Sometimes I imagine giving everything away or just leaving it and not telling anyone where I'm going. At the same time I want to settle down, be somewhere that feels like home, where I can plan to stay for more than a year. More than two years. I like being with the friends I'm making in Nottingham, outside of the university as well as within it, because it helps me feel placed. Rooted, so I can go and come back. I'm learning to be lighter and more free. The story is still being written.

a yellow umbrella, a bus ticket

I am not a vicar but I would like to have tea with you.

New projects, new work, and old work and old projects.

When I am tired and worn down, and especially when I am homesick I feel like everything is old and dull and I lose the spark of my projects for a moment and wonder why I am doing all this. Then all it takes is one thing to tip the balance either way. Ah, the healing powers of a really long, really hot shower. And a dose of perspective. I really do enjoy the things I do and the place I am. And I have lots of new books, and I'm going travelling.

I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog over the last two days and really couldn't put it down. I'm also reading a book called Pictures and Tears, which I'm using for my dissertation. I found myself moved to tears, to laughter, and to something in between many times while reading the former, and I think Elkins (who does, at several points, intimate that people don't cry with literature [or theory] the way they sometimes do with paintings--but I cry often when I'm reading, and especially theory. But that's maybe something for another time) might be interested in the way that aesthetic and affect intertwine in this book. The only bad thing is (and this is a state I find myself in frequently) that, having so enjoyed this novel, I'm reluctant to start another, for fear it won't be as good.

More soon, I'm sure. I'll be peeping all 'round a new place and I'll show you when I'm back in the Town of the Bee.

new narrative strategies

'An ending which is surprisingly sudden'. From this, which I've really been enjoying (having spent a good piece of the day reading the archives, and only getting to about October of last year). I like finding websites where I wish I knew the writer and can imagine having a cup of tea or a (half) pint with them.

I can't believe I just wrote 'have a pint'. Turning English? I'll need a textbook. All right, and more evidence--I've now watched the Grand National (and the horse I wanted won--though we bet on another), witnessed the arrival of three springs' worth of daffodils (I was here in March of 2007 as well, visiting for almost all of a luxurious month), and begun to use apology as a primary mode of communication (oh, dear).

Other pleasures: Ben Terrett (cf Really Interesting Group). Kris's Color Stripes.

(Crewe, June 2008)

let's trade.

I'm looking for pieces of quilter's cotton in pretty patterns (like this, this, or this); wool felt; prints; drawings; paintings; small works of art; bits of found paper; trinkets; stories; wonderful things.

I have etchings, drawings, small sewn objects, papercuts, kimono cloth, and etc., etc., etc.

If you'd like to trade, leave a comment with what you have to offer (include your email or another way for me to contact you!!) and what you'd like in return, and I'll reply if it sounds like it would work.

1/2

Judith Butler on Derrida:

"At the end of [his final interview with Le Monde, published 18 August 2004, Derrida] remarks that everything that he has said since 1986 about survival 'proceeds from an unconditional affirmation of life. Survival, la survie, is,' he explains, the 'affirmation of a living being who prefers living, and, hence, surviving, to death, because survival does not refer to what is left, what remains; it is the most intense life possible.' If, then [Derrida] is uneducable on the matter of learning how to live and die, it is because his relation to living and dying is not one that can be instructed or learned; it is a matter of affirmation, and this affirmation is not learned or acquired, and it is most certainly not based on evidence that supports the case that, yes, affirmation is warranted. The yes-saying of affirmation is not based on evidence; it proceeds with indifference to evidence, and it takes the form of the 'yes', though I take it that this 'yes' can happen in various ways."

From the essay "On Never Having Learned to Live", in Radical Philosophy 129 (Jan/Feb 2005), pp 27-34.

Tomorrow is my half-birthday; I am 28 years and 6 months old, and I am learning how to live.

perfect last lines

ELSA

(Cambridge, 1967)

Nights of long sleeplessness and pain
yearning for dawn and fearing it,
days of that past like the echo
of a still more useless past--now
I bless them. How could I foresee
in those loveless years that the dread
inventions of fever and fierce
daybreaks were no more than clumsy
stairs and wandering corridors
leading me to the pure summit
of blue which persists in the blue
on the eve of this day and my days?
Elsa, your hand's in mine. We see
snow in the air and we love it.

Borges, from In Praise of Darkness (1974; trans. N.T. di Giovanni)