=poem=

=Ben Lerner=

The last vestige of my personality was my terror at my personality's dissolution, so I clung to it desperately, climbed it like a rope ladder back into my body.


(And that was the problem. I always grabbed for that rope in the penultimate moment. I couldn't overcome the panic that it would be pulled once and for all out of my reach. In the end, I always saved my self).

=Book recently read: 10:04 by Ben Lerner=

(in 100 words or less):

A writer has an enlarged coronary artery that might burst at any time. His friend wants him to artificially inseminate her. Meanwhile, he’s writing the book that you’re reading.  But to say that’s what 10:04 is about would be like saying The Odyssey is a cautionary tale about traveling without a GPS. 10:04 is more a meditation than a novel.  What it’s “about” is how we all fictionalize our lives. Lerner delivers a familiar world made slightly but indisputably different though the experiencing of it. That’s the “meaning” of the novel—and our lives. Beautifully, earnestly, urgently written.  

=envelope art=

  

=suddenly i couldn't decide: sharp stick in the right eye, or sharp stick in the left?=

=the pataphysical inquirer: July 30th 2015=

=calligraphic abstract 3=

=escapism=

=offhand comix=

=The Pataphysical Inquirer: July 29th 2015=

=the carbonist manifesto=

=calligraphic abstract=

=The Pataphysical Inquirer: July 28th 2015=

(notes & supplementary materials):

=polaroid dreams=

=The Pataphysical Inquirer: July 27th 2015=

=envelope art=

--heading to one of my most loyal correspondents…the fine folks at Public Storage!--

=Book recently read: Carpenter's Gothic by William Gaddis=

(in 100 words or less):

A story of conspiracy and corruption in places high and low, of religious fanaticism and political opportunism, pitting skeptics and true believers of the worst sort, the well-to-do and those struggling for a piece of the pie. Pynchonesque, though its more proper to say that Pynchon is Gaddisesque. The prose is breathtaking: the dialogue unlike anything I've   ever read, and the message—war for profit—creepily prophetic. Funny and grim in equal measure. At its center: a marriage collapsing under the weight of madness, malaise, and eventually murder. Gaddis deserves the reverence and awe he elicits even from fellow writers.

=Doodleism: A Doodlefesto

{from notes scratched on the back of a water/sewer bill}:The most provocative ideas are incomplete.

A spontaneous drawing is always the most electric, the most alive, the most biologically viable. The Zen artist operates by this principle.

• The more reworked a drawing the more the life has been drained away, the more inert, the deader it becomes.
• 
  
• [insert doodle]

• An idea, to be fully developed, must die the death of a thousand cuts. Reason demands a steep ransom. The more one writes (or speaks) citing arguments & explanations the less convincing one becomes. The more obvious it becomes that one is lying, leaving out fully half the truth, the shadow-side of any argument.

Behold the aphorism, the literary equivalent of the doodle, which refuses to be reduced by expansion.

THE DOODLE IS A PICTURE OF THOUGHT IN MOTION
THE ONLY KIND OF THOUGHT WORTHY OF THE NAME.

AS SUCH>>>THE DOODLE IS ANALOGOUS TO THE "SPIRIT OF THE LORD MOVING OVER THE WATERS."


The half-finished thing, the thing never complete, leaves the door open for wonder and imagination to enter;
———————————————> the hope that “this” 

is finally the thing we’ve all been waiting for 

is not dashed for the umpteenth time. 

Incompleteness  & imperfection are
themselves the two doors through which inspiration & fantasy 
slip inside.

The unread book is always the best. The half-read book is always half as good.

The doodle, like life, 

is always a mess; 

it’s comprised of lines that go nowhere, 

cross-outs, 

write-overs, 

repetitions, and embarrassments. 

The doodle, like life, 

is never finished, 

it’s only abandoned.

David Antin who doesn’t so much recite a poem as “think standing up” can be said to be practicing a form of spoken-word doodling.

First thought, best thought, said Allen Ginsberg.

                                     We would replace the masterpiece with the doodle, 

the canvas with the diner placemat, 

the book with the damp 

cocktail napkin.

• The best, most beautiful pictures and ideas have been lost between the scrap paper by the telephone and the artist's studio.

To be is to doodle.

Existence precedes 
doodling   

but doodling reveals essence.

The doodle is the secret 

signature of the self.

I see myself in the mirror of my doodling.

Up to now I’ve looked to the doodle as a source, as raw material, 

as notes to a complete work, as raw material, 

as inspiration, 

as direction leading to something else. 

What that something else is never materializes. Now I realize that the doodle was the thing I’d been seeking all along—the doodle is the Thing-Itself.

The doodle is not a cryptic key to the mystery. 

The doodle is the answer, 

the mystery, the magic exposed plain as day.

To be is to doodle.

=Book recently read: "…isms: understanding modern art by Sam Phillips=

(in 100 words or less)
This book is aimed for a YA audience but I found it quite informative, like watching a PBS special. From late 19th century Impressionism and Symbolism to 21st century Conceptualism and Internationalism, this guide gives you a very brief but nonetheless helpful overview of all the major art movements of the last 135 years. Cross-referenced in a clever way, it shows which movements have common agendas and which are at cross-purposes. Major artists of each movement are listed as well as a photo or two of representative works. Especially good for someone like me without a formal art school education

=A doodlefesto=

=calligraphic abstract=

=pataphysical inquiry: July 26th 1015=

(notes & supplementary materials):

=Odilon Redon=

My drawings inspire and are not meant to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

(A couple of lines I wish I'd had at my disposal back in graduate school whenever called upon to defend my poetry from the skepticism of those professors and classmates who suspected it wasn't "about" anything. It wasn't. Odilon Redon explains succinctly for what otherwise incomprehensible purpose it might have existed at all.)

=Jules LaForgue=

No more official beauty. The public, unaided, will learn to see for itself and will be attracted naturally to those painters whom they find modern and vital.


(What Jules La Forgue said about the independent art movement at the end of the 19th century can be said even more forcefully at the beginning of the 21st. With the advent of the internet, artists and writers need not submit themselves or their work to the qualifying judgment of the traditional gatekeepers monitoring who and what is seen and heard. Like Santa Claus or Jesus, the Establishment exists only if you continue to believe it does, only if you want or need the condescending pat on the head it bestows and, of course, how desperately you value the coin of the realm by which it rewards the complicit and the co-opted, and with which it buys what's really on the market: your obedience.)

=polaroid dreams=

=impromptu comix=

=impromptu comix=

=pataphysical visual inquiry into July 25th 2015=

(supplementary notes & materials):

=crustless sausage/broccoli rabe quiche=

—so good my husband had me make it again. See recipe from July 21.

=Kasimir Malevich=

I have transformed myself into the nullity of forms and pulled myself out of the circle of things.

(I wish! Is this like pulling a rabbit out of your hat? Or pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps? Some trick, however it's done!)

=the crave=

=the new ugly (3)=

=pataphysical visual inquiry into July 24th 2015=

(notes & supplementary materials):

=The new ugly (2)=

=The new ugly (1)=

=polaroid dreams=

=pataphysical visual inquiry into July 23rd 2015=

(notes & supplementary materials)

=doodle therapy=

=15th sighting=