2 hr conversation with teller, one of moms church friends, spent most of the time telling him my life story, why do i always feel the need to be held after things like this, feel the need for a priesthood blessing after an outlet.

eading both atwood and marcus at the same time, i get to this:

from marcus: not long into the future when the USA has come the republic of Gilead, a theocracy that has replaced the Constituion of the United States with the Bible, a slave sings forbidden music to herself:"i feel so lonely , baby/I feel so lonely babdy/ i feel so lonely I could die. She doesnt know where it comes from.

now elvis isnt reall about music anymore, he is everywhere, a white trash mystic, the colsest america has ever come to theresa d'avila, a sexualised miracuolus thing....and i imagine atwood-i like atwood, ive read a huge chunk of her work, but she strikes me as brittle, as opposed to popular culture, as against the idea of raptoous intervention.

thinking about the passage, about moving b/w divine and secualr pleasure; between race, class, pleasure, in a reflection that is so small and so tiny, she restores him---and restores the idea of popular culture as subversive...this seems so against her veign...her books tend to be white, middle class, self contained, unrelenting in how men and women examine power, hemegenious in a way that elvis wasnt--then why such a brilliant, if so slight (thats why its brilliant) few words that contain all of the mixed up buisess that peter gurlanisick manages to fail at over 1500

can you imagine atwood fucking, can you imagine her even listening to elvis, looking at her work, does it seem that she interacts wtih popular culture with anything but derision...

book work will end tonite

"I'm uncomfortable becoming the focus of this event, which left so many families in tragedy," she said in a news release. "But after prayerful consideration, I believe that God is calling me to use this opportunity to not only turn my own life around but also to inspire others to do that, too."

she was the one who saved her life by reading rick warren

What would render such return irrational?
An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.
Joyce--Ithaca IIIc

its that day again,

connecting emily to merton, the hermit idea in america always includes reams of correspondance, a hermit cannot be well known and well written about w/o the paper peeking thru.

thinking of collins poem about undressing her, isnt ed naked, isnt her rawness, her devotion to imagery of flesh, sexual or at least sensusal, then the poem is a metaphor, not high class slash fiction, but what we need to do to ed (why do we need to do it to ed, she has done it for us.) thantoseros

in the authour note on emily, in burn break and blow, paglias book on poetry, she mentions the locked cabneint, but which poet is not secure about first drafts, why would they be in books, why the constant and never ending edits, her work is constantly worked over. (cannot find my copy of sexual personae)

is the idea of a writer w/o wanting a publisher real?

qoutes of what paglia says in break blow burn:

Because I Could Not Stop For Death:
deeply inspired by metaphyiscal poetry
"human beings waiting for the grim reaper or christ himself, who weilds a strike on doomsday" (98)

Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers
"Dickonsons usual four line stanza format, based on sturdy protestant hymn structures" (102)
{i am not sure i agree w. this) "They are meek b/c they were led like sheep in life and have now lost the ability to rebel. "Resuerction was their lure and grail." (103)

The Soul Selects Her Chamber
does not seem to notice the contradictions in the reading, b/w a call to hermeticism, and noticing the correspondance.
mentioning herbert. (worth approaching?)

about emily dickinson

im arguing that she was actually she was less of a recluse (ie her letters, her talking to family, her making the books into hand sewn books, her constant listening---cf jimmy stewart in rear window--then who is grace kelly), that he poetry connects to v. specfic religous tradtions (her families calvanist bent, her coming from hte same stock in the same place as edwards, her early family being in the same congregations, her readings), that her poetry has a theologians sevirtiy (the violence mentioned by pagilia among others is an update of the violence expected of christians, ie life is but a loaded gun is exactly like no one knows the hour of ones death), that she connectes to people like wigwood and edwards (did she read wigwood, has anyone made any studies of her readings, can i find a collection of works in her library) , and also that she was a regular reader of standard christian texts. (kempis of course, she worte about it in the letters, anything else) ..and also, perhaps she was percriptive.

more concentration in her poems on old testemant thot then new--is this fair?

books (54)

city of quartz--i feel like i want my writing to be like mike davis, wry, bitter, funny, eridute, and passionite, with a taste for obscure sources and syncretic thinking, his trilogy on LA is as good as was promised, endlessly qoutabel (well, this is the first and im 60 percent finished the second) the section on god cements and expands my thinking of it as a religous hub,

dead elvis--griel marcus necrologic study of the bones and ghosts of elvis, an athropolgic gris gris, worth reading, but he needs to qoute where he paraphrases and vice versa--his eviscaration of goldman sort of misses th epoint--elvis as a rotwesque, as a lurid, wild demon of excess, is a better and more interesting story then the good ol boy who loved his mother and grew up to piety--the forgotting of the corperal grotesquires of sainthood is something that needs to be noted.

hellfire--by nick tosches, if johnathon edwards was born in the 60s, and belived in accuracy of fact as much as accuracy of spirit--talked much about lewis's rejection of god, his viewing as a demonic force, and got me into his (amazing, and exhausting) country records of the 70s

reprinted mid80s contempary american poetry, didnt tell me anything i didnt know already.

skimed and scanned the two volume dictionary of nixon, but really thats all i needed (thouhg cause of my lack of reading of whole sections, doesnt count on the list. )

reading sinker on family vs nationalist concerns i rethink the peice in the inbox of robin at xwest--and how it rides the line against families, nuclear families, and marriage and all of that.

its like wanting to be married and have children is a borgie intervention, to use the most cliched terms on record, it is counter revoltuinary, those prone to up against the wall motherfuckerism of radical politics have to be careful, because the look is large, its about big politics, its guns or butter, as opposed to the lives we lead.

guilt comes in, i am not doing enough to solve the problems of the world, i am only doing the small and domestic--what comes in then, is to become revolting in day to day actions, and to remember, deciding how to decide about yr mother driving is as impt as finding out where your oranges are grown.

(is this a delusion?)

bad day and good day

got a peice in xtra west--an anti pride screed in the old body politic sense, i compared the entire fag population of WeHo to Paris Hilton.

mom was banged up in a fender bender, 4500 dollars in damages, and the guy was a total asshole--his fault, which means she is out of a job.

the world goes on.

there was a boy named matthew i met in victoria, last time i was there, a sailor and he drew, watercolours and pencil--mostly not bad, hes in lunenberg right now, and back to victoria a week ago.

and he sang billy bragg, in such a clear way, so close that it sent shivers up my spine, and i was talking about how much i found myself obsessed wtih california lately--and he saing help save the youth of america--and its s deeply silly song, and i know its silly, and i love the beach boys too much to take it seriously

but hearing him singing it--and then hearing a bootleg billy sing the internationale at some concert in belgium--w/o irony, with a suriety adn an earnestness and a devotion, and an openess, it was like all those atheists who love gospel, and the boy had the dying words of christ tattooed up and down his arms, and he believed in the social gospel of jesus christ--he believed in the father, and in socialism...

now im sure that bragg doesnt belive in god, but matthew did--and there is something in this shedding the snake skin of irony and post modernism and bricoloauge and pastiche and all the genre fucking, and singing as loud as you can something you believe in--and you know what--the internationale is actually not a bad coda (and neither are the more hippy sections of jesustalk)

its funny the dying words he chose werent eli eli lama sabach--they were into my hands i commend my spirit--which i never really found impt. the difference between the two of us then, was forsaking vs commendng, and there is something to be said about braggs accepting
anwering chuck on ilm

the best thing about the missouri/kansas peices, are that each county was asked to paint or decorate the model in a way that reflects the populaces aesthetics related to its geography

just look at his fucking website: http://home.att.net/~AllanMcNYC/projects.html

the colourful molds of the statues, the work on the dinsaour trails on utah, the geographical centering, hes from LA--i should never dismiss an artist until i do the theory.

the black and black images are sillehuted models of each county in the two states he used to make the models---what about t he rest of them, maybe theey are more interesting then i thot.

missouri not nebraska--all of the records are here:
http://home.att.net/~amcnet3/topos/momapmapslist.html

still dont get the large black and black stuff.

all of the work below is by allan mccollum--and he also has this great project where he makes topographical models of nebraska and kansas and offers them to musuems (small, local) in home towns across the state.

alright--here are the peices i find interesting
a seires of dice, each with a seperate inconograph--connected to the i ching but modernized, ambigous, beautiful, simple and functional
http://home.att.net/~artarchives/yourfate/face.html (look swiss)

http://www.usfcam.usf.edu/pix/AlMc3.jpg
10 000 hand crafted, pseduo industrially based, multiples (strange)

http://www.artline.com/associations/ifpda/ifpdafair/ifpdafair2002/nonexhibiting/I_C_Editions/a_McCollum.jpg
a small edition of plastic thoctckes, combining warhol and whiteread...plays w. banality, anti function. (these ones are fotoes in a way that makes them bigger...they are about four inches on the diagonal)

http://www.leconsortium.com/mccollumcoll.html
i have seen these works advertised in the big magazines, urns, called (x) plastic vehichles...i havent thot about these v. much, the only difference seems to be size and colour--the shape is the same, and they look almost neo classical--like stark remaking 17th century chairs.

none of these are related to the the black on black, ink, framed, large collectiosn of prints that were sold so well in phillips this year (multiple auctions, 84k on a hi estimate of 4, biggest show in a show full of names, hirst, barney, levine, wool, etc)--and i dont know much about them, though the inforamtion on the web seems to be in languages other then english

i dont like this

http://home.att.net/~artarchives/yourfate/face.html
also did this fun, keyboard based electronic divination system

still, dont know why he made so much

two stories pitched to bitch magazine--about the misogyny of the new country kings and about agriculture queens

* The U.S. Pavilion features a new cycle of paintings by Ed Ruscha done specifically for the Biennale, in a show organized by Harvard University Art Museums associate curator Linda Norden in consultation with Whitney Museum curator Donna De Salvo. The paintings "make progress, or the course of progress, their subject," and are described as "documentary" of "an urban landscape." Joan Didion has written a foreword to the accompanying catalogue.
artnet.com

fucking excited about this!