FEBRUARY 2014
table of contents
I. VACANCY
II. VISITING
III. VICTUALS
IV. VISUAL
V. VIVANT
VI. VIVRE
VII. VIEW
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I. VACANCY
February was a month of vacancies. Leaving old places behind. Emptying a place of its contents and transporting those things to someone else's vacancy. Inhabiting a vacancy. Dissolving the vacancy.
"it was a sentence from a previous existence."
night shadows
strange, ordinary
At the moment I am empty of words, an emptiness which feels like a sleepy leg, needly and numbed. Perhaps I am doing the living which will distill the words I need later. The living is the vacation. The writing is the work.
II. VISITING
Now I'm living around the corner from my friend Risa's letterpress studio, which she shares with another letterpress printer named James. The studio is in the Heath Ceramics building, in an old laundromat. A storefront, gallery, studio, gathering space.
The Aesthetic Union + Papa Llama. 555 Alabama Street.
The Aesthetic Union + Papa Llama. 555 Alabama Street.
III. VICTUALS
Always.
roasted vegetable lunch, old mixtapes
soup, confessions
bread, butter
sushi, stories
shea, reveille
IV. VISUAL
taxonomies, textures, patterns from this book.
inspiration for living.
V. VIVANT
rooftops
bookshelves
"Everything that I dreamed of is gone. [...] The places I've loved no longer exist. [...] You have to understand: I didn't visit places; I lived places. It makes all the difference in the world."
-Jack Gilbert
(the greatest vivant of them all)
VI. VIVRE
Remember the ordinary. Meditate on sentience.
"a sense of the possibilities"
"Carol is around still, but less reliably. For almost a year, I would wake up from another later afternoon mini-nap in the same living-room chair, and in the instants before clarity, would sense her sitting in her own chair, just opposite. Not a ghost but a presence, alive as before, and in the same instant gone again. This happened often, and I almost came to count on it, knowing that it wouldn't last. Then it stopped."
-Roger Angell, "This Old Man"
-Roger Angell, "This Old Man"
(if you need a good cry...)
VII. VIEW
Driving alone at night, the world's pitch, black velvet
stapled occasionally by red tail lights
on the opposite highway but otherwise mild
panic when the eyes habitual check
produces nothing at all in the rearview mirror
Trying not to let imagination win over reality
Hurtling through the night
passions so spent become facts one observes
Not tempered, just momentarily out of the view
by the body that perceives them
Turning that into my prayer to be deprived
-"The Whole World is Gone" by Jennifer Grotz
"Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry is a corpse colder than the Ice Man; they've all been dying for thousands of year, yet people still write, people still read, and everyone knows that nothing is really real until it is written. Until it is written! Even those who cannot read know that."
-Thomas Lux
"For writers have only one duty, as I see it, the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. [...] once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogmas, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, [...] once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in -- what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception..."
-Zadie Smith, "Fail Better"
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