sparrowmuffin: =cent*i*pede*2=

cent*i*pede * 2

a journal in pieces

All my life I have never known what to do with my hands.
Except for shit like this
—Gordon Lish

1. I usually drive the Airbus because Phil is a distracted driver. This would be enough of a reason but it's made worse by the fact that Phil doesn't have a license. We can't afford even a routine traffic stop. He doesn't have a license to operate a motor vehicle or he has a license but it's expired or it's suspended or it's so badly forged it won't hold up to any but the most cursory scrutiny. It's hard to pin Phil down on matters of documentation.

Remain undocumented, he says.

This is growing more and more difficult to do the way things are trending.

That's precisely the point, Phil says.

Phil says, Escaping documentation is the only way to remain free.

Except you can't drive, buy liquor, smoke, get into a strip club, I point out.

There are ways to get around this, Phil replies. By which he means, finding someone like me.

Utilize the documented, he says. That's the role the obedient play in a revolution. That's their purpose. They are to be used as weapons, as moles within the system. Whether they realize it or not.

So you're using me?

We're using each other.

Remind me why I need you again?

Phil doesn't answer. He never answers questions like these. It's his way of saying that I'm just being difficult, that I know better. Or I should know better.

It's his way of saying, Think about it. The answer is obvious.

2.

(book recently read)

3. Does nothing ever occur to you?
Can't you see with your own two eyes?
You are your own worst enemy.
What's the sense of talking to you? I might as well talk to myself. Say something. Try to look like you've got a brain in your head. You think this is a picnic? Don't stand on ceremony with me. The whole world is not going to step to your tune. I warn you, I'm warning you, don't say nobody didn't warn you—wake up before it's too late.
You know what?
A little birdie told me.
You know what?
You have got a lot to learn.

—Gordon Lish, from Mourner at the Door, a collection of short fiction.

Maybe the most brilliant and amusing story in this book is The Merry Chase—a half-scolding, half-despairing monologue of cliches, alternately advice and insults, spoken to an unknown subject who, apparently, isn't heeding a word the speaker says.

4.

(notebook pages)

5.
—It would have been easier, I'm telling you. I'd have preferred it. I would have been more comfortable if they'd ignored me entirely, ignored me even to the point of outright rudeness.
—Oh come on. That's absurd. You can't possibly mean that.
—But I do. It would have been an environment I was used to. Being an outsider, feeling disliked, I know how to survive it. I thrive in these inhospitable conditions. I'm like those deep-sea fish that exist at the hadal depths where nothing else can live. It's only when they are pulled toward the surface that they feel the pressure, that they implode into smithereens. It's warmth and light that does me in. It's hospitality, it's acceptance.
—That's about the saddest, most fucked-up thing I've ever heard.
—Yes, I suppose it is.
She was smiling. He noticed that her fingers were drained of blood, whiter than the paper of the straw she was twisting, whiter than anything he could imagine had warm-blood flowing in its veins.
  —Zero at the bone.
  —Excuse me?
  —Zero at the bone. It's a line from a Dickinson poem.
She nodded.
—Yes. I know that one.
I never met this fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And zero at the bone

6.

(view from hotel room window-ashland, va)

7. Gordon Lish was born on February 11, 1934. As of this writing, he's eighty years old.

He's been a mentor, editor, teacher, and champion of some of the major short-story writers and novelists in the last fifty years, including Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Don DeLillo, Diane Williams, Gary Lutz, and Cynthia Ozick.

Earlier on, he was involved with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac.

He's a good-looking guy, even as an octogenarian. He looks a lot like his friend, Don DeLillo

(notebook pages)

9. In his story Shit, Lish writes:

I like talking about sitting on toilets. It shows up in the roughage of my speech. Wherever at all in keeping with things, I try to work it in. You just have to look back at the stories I have had printed for you to see I am telling you the truth. Sitting on toilets is certain to show up with more than passing incidence. I will even go so far as to say that where you find a story with a person sitting on a toilet on it, forget the name that's signed as author—no one but I could have written the thing. Indeed, it would be inconceivable to me I didn't.

10.

(notebook pages)

11. Centipedes routinely live up to three years. Some even live five years or more.

Centipedes have a pair of poison claws, not legs, on their first body segment. They are used to inject a venom that paralyzes their victim.

Tropical species of centipedes can eat frogs and even small birds. The centipede wraps itself around its poisoned prey and waits for it to die before eating it.

Centipedes will often sacrifice a few legs to escape predators. They can usually regenerate these lost legs.

Centipedes often make good mothers.

12.

(Richard Canard, mail art)

13. God, you get so fed up with speech.

Just the idea of telling anybody anything is enough to make you sick, every word weighing tons more than it did the last time you said it—or saw it—or heard it—or wrote it—or thought it. Who's got the energy? Who's got the strength? Isn't this why the apples fall off the tree—from such a heaviness from life, from what's holding it getting weak?

—Gordon Lish

14.

(notebook pages)

15. I'm being pursued, Phil says.

Well that doesn't surprise me I can't be the first woman you've kidnapped.

Not as a kidnapper. Phil frowns, not so much because I'm accusing him of being a kidnapper, which is an old and ongoing point of contention between us. But because I'm making light of his paranoia.

Phil says, There are people who want what I know and they'll go to any lengths to get it from me.

I can't help but laugh. Who?!

I've seen him run out of more than one mall, street corner, doorway trying to distribute his broadsides, his poems, his free novels.

Who wants what you know?

This is when Phil always gets cryptic. All he will say is, Just hope to god you never find out.

16.

This is how they wake up. They wake up vomiting. Actually it is a little after they wake up that Mr. and Mrs. North commence to vomit. —Gordon Lish

17.

(notebook pages)

18.

(notebook pages)

19. Phil asks, Will you run if I don't tie you up tonight? Because I'm nearly out of duct tape and would rather not buy a whole new roll if I don't have to, if you're nothing thinking of running, or figure that in the next week or so you'll change your mind about running.

I won't run.

You're not just saying that so I don't tie you up and then planning on running anyway, are you?

No.

Promise?

I promise.

Because it's damn inconvenient for me, Phil says, having to tie you up every time you're out of my sight. And I'm sure it's uncomfortable for you. So I'd really rather not do it. He says, I really hope we've come to some level of trust at this point in our relationship.

Relationship?

Well, yes. What would you call it?

A hostage situation.

I'd rather call it a relationship. The point is, I don't get any pleasure in tying you up, in holding your prisoner, if that's what you're thinking. I'd prefer it not be like that.

I snort.

Phil says, Okay, maybe I get a little pleasure. But not as much as you think. What man, after all, doesn't like the idea of a helpless woman. A woman at his mercy. But I'd like to think I was above that. Well, a little above it, anyhow. Theoretically above it. I hold out the possibility of being above it. Anyway, I'd rather not tape your ankles and wrists together unless it was a mutual thing. Force goes against my principles.

Your principles.

He says, I'd really prefer it if you wouldn't alway be so sarcastic.

Would you buy me a Krispy Kreme donut and a can of Diet Coke instead of the duct tape?

And you won't run?

I won't run.

It's a deal, Phil says. He looks pleased.

He puts on his coat. He says, Look, I'm trusting you. I'm taking you at my word.

I see.

The minute he's out of the Airbus door and across the road to the convenience store I think of running. It would be easy. He couldn't stop me. But I don't run. I stay where I am. I wait for him to return with the soda and donut. I don't run for my freedom.

I guess you could say this was a turning point. A turning point in our so-called relationship.

Everyone felt safe telling their innermost secrets to Mystery Cat.

21.

There are not people in my hearts of hearts.

There are just sentences in my heart of hearts

—Gordon Lish

Where you are is on a city bus heading up King's Highway.

Or heading down it.

Or maybe you're not on it at all.

Maybe you're sitting on the couch watching on television them dredge the ocean floor for the remains of a Malaysian airliner that no one knows why it fell from the sky and you've sent your imagination riding on the bus instead just to get out of the house without leaving it.

Somewhere the book you were reading is.

Or the book you were writing, yes, that's it. The book you were writing.

Or not writing.

The narrator, which is to say, you, or rather I, is dodgy, venal, downright unreliable.

Deranged, sometimes.

The narration of the story, the conventions of narration themselves become part of the speaker's disordered attempt to relay the event in question.

If there is an event.

Sometimes?

There is always a question.

This is your stop but you don't leave your seat. You recognize the corner of your usual stop by the mailbox on that corner. The graffiti on the mailbox on that particular corner. You need to collect your things, to stand up. You can't seem to stand up. Forget about collecting your things. Just stand up. You can't. Oh you're legs will work alright. But something inside you has lost the capacity, not the physical capacity to stand, mind you, that persists, somewhere, but something inside you has lost the capacity to make the decision to stand.

Is it fiction? Is it a fiction based on truth that we're trying to describe? A truth based on fiction?

That I'm trying to describe.

The doors close. The bus pulls away from the curb.

It never occurs to you that they moved the mailbox from one corner to another.

Until now.

Surely they must do that sometimes?

No?

Is the narrative confessing to a hate crime?

To murder?

Do you understand? No?

Neither do I?

That man across the aisle is staring at you.

At me.

At I.

There is so much that doesn't occur to us, that if it occurs to us we don't know.

The ever futile attempt to get the facts straight

Reiteration.

Dirty jokes.

Look, let me begin again.

Collect my things. Can't do it.

I lower myself down on the toilet to think.

Alcohol.

Memory…

You can't trust even what you remember because what the hell do you really remember?

Is anything burning?

The reliance on others to help you remember. But they seem to have the pieces to a completely different puzzle.

That's no help.

There are blackouts, after all.

Holes in consciousness.

Gaps in the continuum.

Significant frames of the film are missing.

In the kitchen, the buzzer goes off.

Your heart skips in that moment when you ask yourself…no, only in retrospect do you think of it as asking yourself. The buzzer goes off. You heart skips. There is no actual asking of yourself until after the fact. That's more the way it went. As if the buzzer were attached to your heart.

Or is the other way around?

What fact?

These are the questions you. I was going to say "must answer." But, no, that isn't right.

Nothing is right. That's precisely the expectation that you must let go.

To go on.

Here's a better question.

What were you timing?

22.

(1st breakfast of 2015)

23. When you consider transsexuality, cross dressing, cosmetic surgery, piercing, and tattooing, they are all calculated impulses—a symptomatic groping towards a next phase.
IT IS THE OTHER THAT WE ARE DESTINED TO BECOME.

—————————————————————

There is no reason
on earth why
you should run out
of people to be.

Stop being possessed by characters
written by others.
Rebuild your self
from the found up!

—Genesis & Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge

24.

(envelope art)

25. the trouble is
every man
keeps a prisoner
groaning
in his heart
—Takuboku Ishikawa

26.

(notebook pages)

27. "I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir," said Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see." —Lewis Carroll

28.

(notebook pages)

29. In this episode, I own a motor-scooter but I don't know what it looks like. This is the cause for a great many hilarious moments and absurd escapades. I have to keep asking people where I parked it. Sometimes they know; more often than not, they don't. As a consequence, I'm always late for work or when I'm supposed to meet someone. One day, I'm having lunch at a tiny cafe. I'm eating a plate of matzah brei. A man comes up to me and flashes identification; he claims that he's an agent of the Transportation Authority. He and his partner are authorized to hold my bike pending an inspection. They are suspicious of a rasping sound that it's making. The scooter checks out okay, though. It's just embarrassing having to interrupt the agent's lunch to ask him which one of several bikes chained to street signs along the sidewalk is mine. Will this arouse his suspicions all over again? If it does, he betrays no sign of it. Not even when I ask him for the combination of the lock. Not even when my false beard slips down. Maybe he's just a better actor than I am, I think, as I ask him directions to wherever it is I'm supposed to be going next. Of course, I'm already tragicomically late.

30.

(notebook pages)

31. So tell me if you don't do this, too.

You're out driving somewhere and you pass a building that has all these great balconies on it. And you think to yourself how cozy it would be if you lived there because you could take your coffee out on the balcony in the early morning as the sun rose or your glass of wine late in the evening as the sun sets and the stars come out. You imagine that you would do some deep, really good thinking on a balcony like that. How you would treasure that half-hour or so of contemplative, solitary quiet suspended over the city as if on a flying magic carpet. As you're thinking these thoughts, you can't help but notice that there isn't a soul on a single one of those balconies, and there must be a good thirty or forty of them! How can it be that no one who lives there appreciates the possibilities of such a balcony?

Later, when you arrive home, you can't help but take note of your porch; of, if you live in an apartment, maybe your own balcony. You picture strangers driving by and thinking how cozy your porch or balcony look. You imagine them imagining taking coffee out there in the morning or a glass of wine in the evening, having deep thoughts, etc. And you imagine them remarking to themselves how odd it is that they never see anyone sitting out there, even though there are chairs, a small plastic table, and a mud-spattered pot with a withered stalk in it. And it's true. You can't remember the last time you sat out on your own porch to sip coffee, or wine, or think, or read, or talk on the telephone, or even just watch traffic go passed.

Is that what life is, you wonder? A lot of unused balconies, unappreciated porches? Is that why everyone seems so unhappy? Why if you don't get your foot off the brake the moment the light changes green you've got ten drivers behind you punching their horns, gesturing violently, and making demonic faces at you?

32.

(notebook pages)

33.

Poet Miller Williams died on January 2, 2015 of Alzheimer's disease. He was 84.

When I was in graduate school, he came to read at the university I was attending as a visiting poet. He sat in on a creative writing workshop and critiqued the poems of two students whose work was under discussion that day. He said of my poem: "When Ms. Williams decides she wants to make the effort to make herself understood, that's when we'll be able to talk about her work."

At the time I thought: "You miserable ugly old goat."

Now, years later, I think: "Well, he was right at least by the measure of his aesthetic." I found his poetry sentimental, plodding, predictable, prosaic, ultra conservative, conventional, reactionary. It charted no new ground, opened no fresh vistas. I didn't like it then and I don't like it much now, although I can respect it for what it is. If nothing else, it is a well-crafted reformulation of what's been written thousands of times before.

But he had me right in at least one respect. I really didn't want to be understood, nor do I particularly want to be understood now. Or I do, but only sometimes. Or I do, but only on my terms, because otherwise, if I use a conventional language common to all, am I really being understood?

Is it possible, given the compromises we must make to be understood, to be understood? Or is the best we can reasonably hope for to be partially understood? If so, that would go a long way to explaining why there is so much misunderstanding, why there are so many arguments between people who insist that they are the ones who understand.

Is it even right to call partial understanding understanding?

I guess, in the end, I don't believe in the possibility of being understood. I think the idea that we are ever understood is largely an illusion.

It's ironic that Miller Williams died of Alzheimer's—a disease that, among other things, robs one of the ability to understand and be understood. I've often thought that I would be far better able to cope with such a disease than most people, people like Miller Williams, for instance, who so fervently believed in communication, the possibility of it, anyway.

I am sorry to hear that he died. He was a small but significant splinter in my past. That short but painful encounter—hardly even an "encounter" as by the rules of the workshop I was forced to remain silent during the critique of my work—has stayed with me a long time. He rightly focussed on the crux of the paradox of my endeavors as a writer back then and ever since.

"Do I want to make myself understood?"

It's a question I've never been able to definitively answer.

34.

(Moan Lisa)

35. We carry within us the wonder we seek without us. —Sir Thomas Browne

Reality is always refracted through the imagination and it is through our imagination that we live our lives. —Steven Duncombe

The act of creating a world is an act of revolution.—Keri Smith

The problem with reality is it's so easy to see. Look around. There it is. Go outside. There's some more. —Steve Lambert

36. Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

—Franz Kafka

37.

(David Stafford)

38. MOOREEFFOC

Meaning: The queerness that overly familiar things suddenly acquire when unexpectedly encountered from a different point of view. Coined by Charles Dickens upon seeing the words "Coffee Room" reversed on the window of a glass door.

39. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen

40.

(red cat)

41.

Anastasia

My boyfriend is a Cossack. He spends most of his time mounted on high; sometimes, on long marches, he even sleeps for days in the saddle. I hear he is looking for me in all the bookstores in St. Petersburg. It's snowing like the plague out there.

Like many Cossacks, he has a terrible temper. He's forever swinging his saber overhead, shouting the fiercest oaths, and that's not even the worst of it. Women and children are always falling beneath the hooves of his white-eyed charger. Heads roll like frothing cabbages in the snow wherever he passes.

Everyone says I'm a fool for getting involved with someone so clearly problematic. They wonder what I can possibly see in him. Sometimes, like now, when I'm running from him for my very life, I ask myself the same question.

Is there any future with a Cossack lover? History says no. The Revolution itself is against us. But if I'm a fool, I'm an intentional fool. I'm prat-falling toward the precipice with my eyes wide open.

Sssh! Don't tell a soul. But I'm hiding in the back of a used bookstore located below street level. I've picked up a dog-eared Dostoyevsky novel. I open it as carefully as I would the jaws of a lion. I sit on the floor with my chin on my knees and make myself as small as humanly possible. Still, the front door always bangs open and the white storm howls. The wooden floor trembles beneath his heavy riding boots. His bellowing voice fills every cobwebbed corner. Thunk! Oh, I hope that's not the head of the wizened little proprietor who let me hide here. He was such a kind old man with his elfish eyebrows and flashing spectacles. Enough innocent people have perished already on account of my Cossack love.

I don't even have to look up to know how he towers over me, wrapped in animal furs, smoking with disdain. His heavy sword is naked and gleaming in a fist the color of raw meat. I turn a brittle page and look up lazily, as if reluctant to unhook my eyeballs from the last sentence I read. But the truth is, I'm just faking. I don't understand a word of Russian. I put my hand to my mouth as if to stifle a yawn but it's not boredom at all that I'm hiding. "Well," I drawl, "what took you so long?"

42.

(woman in red hat)

43.

I'm crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble. As I crawl, I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn't the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling, and then suddenly, I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else. —Miranda July

44.

(home invader)

45.

fire

spire

pokey mouse

dire

liar

picky grouse

expect

suspect

laser doom

transit

bedsit

claptrap doom

46.

47. What if it were all just a test? All the bad things that ever happened to you, all the mean things people said and did, all the lovers who left you broken-hearted? What if everyone in your past were were holding a kind of surprise graduation in your honor to let you know that you had passed the test? Now, finally, they could all let you know just how very much they love you, how they only did the painful things they did out of love and for your own good and how sorry they are that they had to pretend they didn't love you all along? That's the premise of one of Miranda July's more provocative short stories. (Only now that I summarize the story do I realize that her story—in fact, many of her stories—are actually more summaries of stories themselves than they are stories as dramatic enactments).

In another story, a home invader bent on bodily harm, possibly even murder, who may or may not be a figment of the narrator's imagination, reveals to the narrator how little she loves the boyfriend in bed beside her—and how little he actually cares for her.

48.

49.

(Diane Keys)

50. Let me tell you what's wrong with people, Phil says.

I've lost track of the number of times he's started a conversation off in this way. He's always telling me what's wrong with people, what wrong with society, what's wrong with literature, what's wrong with me. This time he doesn't even wait for me to ask, What?

He starts right in.

He says, Everyone considers him or herself the center of their own personal universe. Of course, I'm no different. I take self-centeredness as a self-evident fact, a truism. Everyone is the center of their own personal universe. What has always come as a constant surprise to me is that other people assume that they are the center not only of their universe, but of yours as well. That strikes me as completely irrational. That strikes me as the root of all the insanity in the world.

He says, If they aren't at the center, they at least expect to be among inner circle of planets. They'd rather you hate them obsessively than that you don't think about them at all. The one thing they can't tolerate is your indifference. Knowing that they don't matter at all, that they're not even on your radar, that's tantamount to murder as far as they're concerned.

You see this me-centric attitude everywhere, Phil continues, as I knew he would. You see it in airports, in grocery stores, in traffic. It's why people are so oblivious of others, why they act genuinely startled when someone else speaks up on their own behalf. Their expression says it all. It says, Hey where the hell did you come from?

We all see ourselves as the only real person in the world. Don't tell me you don't, because I know you do.

I shrug. I wasn't about to say anything.

He eyes me suspiciously, as if he suspects I'm harboring secret dissent, but he can't resist continuing to the end. It's why they cry foul when they step on your toes. It's why they always see themselves as the victim of some slight, insult, or injustice. You see the same thing in the collective character of nations. In this nation above all with it's destructive globetrotting, it's malign machinations. And all the while carrying on self-pityingly about how ungrateful the rest of the world is for their interference.

Phil says, It's this universal but unacknowledged solipsism that is at the root of all our most troublesome problems. Ironically, no genuine ethics is possible until a person acknowledges, as I have, that 1. he or she is the absolute dead center of their universe and every else is a satellite of relative importance and 2. everyone else feels the exact same way vis-a-vis everyone else and they each have every right to do so. Only when everyone acknowledges these points will we stop expecting, demanding coercing more than is our due from others.

Well, what is our due from others? I can't help but ask at this point. What can we expect?

Expect? Nothing, Phil says. We can't expect anything from anyone. That's what I call enlightened solipsism.

51.

(notebook pages)

52. There are some great reasons for resisting language and one of them is love.

—Miranda July

53. What can you say? She's a popular girl. Some people can make connections by the simple fact of their existence, like a radio antennae, even if they're very fucked up people. Others can't no matter how hard they pretend to be normal. How do those lucky people do it? You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out. There's no how to it. There's no way to have "it." If you don't have it, you'll never have it. No one wants to believe that's true, but it is. It just is. Sorry. When you ask, "Do you love me?" You've already answered your own question and it's not the answer you're hoping to hear. Go ahead. Cry your pretty eyes out. Laugh your fool head off. There's no cure for it. Except not to give a damn. Give that a try, too, while you're at it. Let me know how that works out for you.

54. Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees. —Miranda July

55.

(from the Book of Impossible Birds)

that bird

you reminded me of...

i knew

it was impossible still

how remarkable it was!

56.

sickly sibyl

feather bone

shaggy

shoehorn

topsoil

phone

soapstone city

martian moan

marvel

marble

nail file

prone

57.

Recipe: Pumpkin Goat Cheese Walnut Pie

A less sweet, easy-to-make post-holiday alternative to an old favorite.

First make a pie crust!

2 cups flour

2/3 cups butter or margarine

pinch of salt

1 tablespoon sugar

Mix together with your fingers.

Add cold vodka slowly until a bowl forms, wrap, and put in fridge for at least 20 minutes.

Pre-heat oven to 425.

Then, in a large bowl:

1 30oz can of pumpkin pie mix

1/3 cup of goat cheese

1 beaten egg

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup of all purpose flour

1/2 cup of milk

1/4 cup of chopped walnuts

Blend together until creamy.

Pour into prepared pie crust.

Put into oven at 425 for 15 minutes

then reduce temperature to 325 for

another 25 minutes, turn off oven,

crack open door, and let pie cool down

until it sets.

Take pie out of oven to finish cooling.

About two hours of cooling total.

It won't be fully set until you put it

in the fridge but it should be set enough

to cut out a couple of big wedges to

share with your husband during half-time

of the Knicks game when he comes out needing

sustenance and consolation because the Knicks

are well on their way to losing yet again!

58.

(book recently read)

A Christmas gift from my wonderful husband (thank you again! xoxo) who is himself the best gift I've ever gotten, Lynda Barry's new book is an absolute must for anyone interested in creativity (and if you aren't interested in creativity it's only because you don't know that you are). Barry is the best sort of instructor: she doesn't teach so much as inspire.

59. Sometimes we say a certain kind of picture looks like a kid drew it. And people are dismayed by this and even ashamed enough to destroy the picture—get rid of it immediately. But what if the way kids draw—that kind of line that we call 'childish'—what if that is what a lie looks like when someone is having an experience by hand? There is an aliveness in these drawings that can't be faked and when I look at them that aliveness seems to come into me. Real aliveness of line is hard to come by.

—Lynda Barry

60.

(notebook pages)

61. When someone learns to draw—to render—it's the first thing that goes—the aliveness. And it's what some artists spend their whole lives trying to get back; the Spookhouse and the Merry-Go-Round are two different rides. When we say a kind of drawing is good we may be talking about a certain kind of ride everyone can stand and understand—through the thrill is gone, it's nice: a write on the merry-go-round. And then there is that other ride. The Spookhouse: the one with all the not-knowing that both scares and delights us and leaves us screaming and laughing because we have no way to control the outcome—we are in motion, creating some ind of energy that still runs through the drawing even after we've lifted our hand away. —Lynda Barry

62.

(notebook pages)

63.

Devils come to earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists. And they have a magic question. The magic question is: WHAT FOR? But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal. It saves our souls. —Young-Ha Kim

64.

(envelope art)

65.

(scrapollage)

66. What is it with these ultra-conservative intolerant tight-asses who condemn everything and everyone who live outside their own narrow parameters of right and wrong? When they're on their deathbeds are they really going to be satisfied that they never tried anything new, that they never dared to stray from the so-called norm? Is that really any kind of achievement? Will they die content in the knowledge that they never stepped over the line, never left the center of the road, never took drugs or slept with someone of their own sex, never got a piercing, never got arrested never converted to another religion, never changed their name, never dropped out, never went crazy, never lived on the street or experienced what it was like to be on welfare, never became a communist or protested police brutality, war, corporate greed? Do they think there's a reward waiting for them because they never changed their mind, never looked at the world from the other side, never changed anything of substance in any substantial way, but instead stayed the course, stuck to the company line, always followed authority, always did what was expected, what they were told to do and did it faithfully right to the very end? Do they think that was a life worth living? Do they think that was a life? Don't they understand that what they were in life is hardly any different than what they will now be in death for all eternity—a corpse?

67.

(King's Highway)

68.

(notebook pages)

69.
Liking and not liking can make us blind to what's there. —Lynda Barry

70.

~~What does it mean?~~

(notebook pages)

71.
There is another Loneliness
That many die without—
Not want of friend occasions it
Or circumstance of Lot

But nature sometimes, sometimes thought
And whoso it befall
Is richer than could be revealed
By mortal numeral.

—Emily Dickinson

72.

(notebook pages)

73.

It seemed obvious to Kugelblitz that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day—the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle-age, the dementia of late life…all working up to death, which at last turns out to be sanity. —Thomas Pynchon

74.

(Richard Baudet)

75. I can easily understand why Gary Lutz is not a widely popular writer. He writes in a deliberately awkward style that ordinary readers are likely to take at face-value. Gordon Lish, slightly less widely unpopular writer and an obvious influence on Lish, writes in a similar mode. An appreciation of Lutz, like Lish, depends on the reader being in on the gag. If an unknown writer were to submit a story in this style to the typical editor of a typical literary journal odds are the piece would be rejected out of hand on the grounds that it was penned by someone who simply couldn't write. There are any number of similar examples in art and literature where one's reputation must precede one in order for the work to be taken seriously, let alone appreciated. The work itself, unfortunately, cannot, or will not, speak for itself. It speaks in another language that requires an intermediary, a translator of some authority to speak for it. The sad fact is that most truly original work must necessarily speak in a language so alien to the current vernacular that even an intelligent audience can come to the conclusion that it's speaking in gibberish or that it is the result of an inarticulate, ignorant, or simply inept writer. In this instance the fairytale formula works in reverse: the Emperor needs to assure the crowd that his acolyte isn't naked but indeed wearing new clothes. "See? See?" he says, pointing them out "how wonderfully fashionable they are!" and that's when the assembled literati suddenly open their collective eyeballs and say "Oh, ah, yes, of course!"

76.