As I love: my poetics

(Zukofsky.)

This weekend was pretty amazing for me. First off, it’s the first time I’ve ever been invited to a conference as a speaker, with all the glam benefits that entails (billing, funding, and organizational/financial support). That was enough in itself. But on top of that, it was a conference many of my friends and idols would attend–my friends often being the same people as my idols. If that weren’t enough, one of my favorite poets, Robert Grenier, was on my panel. All of this was a fine set-up for a great weekend, with the slight pressure of having to not make a complete ass of myself.

But the conference was very generous. Surrounded by people who understood and appreciated my work, most of whom knew my work– and surrounded by old/kind acquaintances and new ones– the L.A. poets/artists engaged, attentive, questioning and commenting and totally genuine and there– thinkers I already knew and admire like Kenneth Goldsmith, Brian Kim Stefans, Steve McCaffery and Johanna Drucker, and then people I didn’t know (personally) but whose work I admired, and people I didn’t know whose work I didn’t know that I got to discover–!

And the opportunity to engage with Grenier, to thank him and express (probably to the point of gushing senselessly) my admiration for his work (and by extension, and of course in his own right, Larry Eigner’s)– a lineage I trace but which is a false lineage, for nothing was literally “handed down,” and here I am at the end of this lineage I draw for myself (one of many lineages I draw), full of love, and my love in its way acknowledged and accepted–

And seeing Lorraine and Michelle, two of my closest friends and two of the poets I feel that I’m working with in a community (we talk about communities, and I feel that I am in many of them, but only half-heartedly– my community is a small group of peers, women who “create” poetry among other things)– being with them both in the same time/space, physically rather than on the internet, seeing them both there side by side, strengthened by their wisdom and support and exciting explosive wonderful minds–

It was just. really. wonderful.

 

Yes.

Like a dog

In rain
Lulling
Want and onyx
Lulling
Lulled

Somebody give me an MFA.

 

A productive weekend

*

This weekend I was able to get new work together for Area Sneaks (I have trouble keeping up with magazines that want work, and I owe work to many magazines that asked me before Area Sneaks did, but this is a special issue on Vispo that coordinates with the conference I’m going to in L.A. later this month) and format Foursquare 2.12, the last issue of Volume 2.  Foursquare 2.12 was guest edited by Hanna Andrews of Switchback Books, and it features four women associated with Switchback: Hanna, Melissa Severin, Becca Klaver, and Brandi Homan.  Cover art is by Ozlem Haluk.

There are four extra copies of this issue if you want one–they’re at Etsy, as usual.  The first three issues of Foursquare Vol. 3 are planned out and should be more timely than they’ve been over the past, er, while.  (To be precise, there is still one Foursquare Special Edition coming to full subscribers from Vol. 2, but it will not be out till Thanksgiving when I can work on the sleeves with my folks– there will be normal issues of 4SQ Vol. 3 before then.)  Be sure to pick up a subscription at Etsy if you don’t want to miss any!

 

Etsy + Foursquare Orders

Yesterday I finally put together the time and the money to go to the P.O. and mail a bunch of old Etsy orders and Foursquares.  I also bought stamps, so Etsy orders should not be delayed if you place an order soon… all the more reason to catch up on your Foursquare issues if you’re not a subscriber.  There are a number of copies available right now: check ‘em out here.  There are about four copies of Samar’s SE left (subscribers will receive it as part of their subscription).

 

Arrr

In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

 

NYC Return

I will be in NYC Thurs-Sun for the Boog City Small Small Press Book Fair and related happenings.  See the schedule here (.pdf).

 

Quick list

Good things about this week:

 

Then what?

So, at work today I picked up the new issue of Artvoice and read my horoscope:

“The reality of love is mutilated when it is removed from all its unreality.” So said the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Reverie. He meant that realism alone is not enough for human beings to live on, especially in our most intimate relationships. We need fantasy to augment the merely factual perspective. We require poetic truths to keep the rational approach honest. Without the play of the imagination, in fact, our understanding of the world is impoverished and distorted. In this spirit, Scorpio, I invite you to be extra daydreamy and imaginative about love in the coming days. Feed your soul and the souls of those you love with experiences that arouse mystery and wonder. (P.S. Nietzsche said: “We have art in order not to perish of truth.”)

 

Buffalo vs. NYC in New York Magazine

Here. This article made me teary.

Meanwhile I’ve moved into my own Buffalo apartment. It’s medium-sized for a Buffalo apartment… the LR is about 11×12′, the bathroom and kitchen are both good sizes but not “large” by any means, and the bedroom is maybe 10×11′. For $550 (which does not include utilities) it’s pricey for a Buffalo apartment, like the apartment in the article is, but in the last weeks of August when students are moving back, it’s relatively difficult to find an apartment. Anyway, the apartment is beautiful, there’s storage and laundry in the basement, there are beautiful built-in pantries in the kitchen and big windows looking out on the backyard.

 

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Dixie Chicks remake

Hilda really likes this song.  She snuggles up to the computer.

There are no good videos of this song on YouTube.  Both the Dixie Chicks and Elvis versions are really low-tech.  Elvis is great, but I like the gender turn that the Dixie Chicks performance gives it.

This week: adjunct orientation (not that I didn’t go to school here for 7 years), finding an apartment, mailing super-old Foursquares.  Next week: first week of school and hopefully I’ll have a new apartment!  I’m looking for a space big enough for the cats to run around and for me to set up some serious bookmaking stations!

 

Buffalo vs. NYC

Buffalo is better than NYC because you can work PT and make like $12k and live frugally and it’s totally ok. You won’t die, or starve, or be evicted. You can live, if uncomfortably, on much less money. Because you have to work less, you have more time to play.

Buffalo takes less time to cross, so a “long commute” means 20 minutes by car, not 1 hr by subway. Because you work less and commute less, you have more time to play with friends. And you’re not too exhausted to do it. And it takes less time to meet up. You can say to your friend, “I’ll meet you at the bar in 10 minutes,” and that’s totally feasible. You don’t have to plan hours in advance if you want to meet someone who lives in a different borough.

NYC is better than Buffalo because of MOMA. The Albright-Knox is great but who’re we kidding? Similarly, the Buffalo Philharmonic ain’t exactly the New York Philharmonic.

Getting out of Buffalo isn’t an event in itself like getting out of NYC. Wanna go hiking or go on a wine tour? It doesn’t require “getting away for the weekend” or “going to the Poconos.” It doesn’t require hotel reservations or battling traffic. You just go. You go hiking. You come back. It’s not a Big Deal.

Conclusion: nothing in Buffalo is a Big Deal. Everything in NYC is a Big Deal. For my time and money it’s much nicer to swim in a smaller pond.

 

While I’m not blogging

There’s Lorraine’s Blog.

Like Maureen, I feel too preoccupied with “living” these days to blog regularly.

 

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In the same thread…

Another post-Academic blog to check out, this time from my UVA friend Kristen Taylor. Food, photography, travel and new media excellence….

 

Divers(ion)

While I’m spacing out to play with my new boyfriend, you all can go read Chris’s blog.

 

Two things

CA Conrad/PhillySound feature at FANZINE

New blog by my friend Chris Fritton

Two more things:

This weekend I read Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.  Got some new books: The Mysteries of Udolpho (keep getting this mixed up with the amazing “The Castle of Otronto”) and War and Peace (both from my boss), and The Sea-Wall (used Duras).  So nice to read “for pleasure” again.

 

FOURSQUARE 2.10 and Vol. 3

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Unseasonably trailing 2.11, verdant FOURSQUARE 2.10 gathers together poems by Lee Ann Brown & Miranda Lee Torn, Kristen Orser, Mischa Erikson, and Jessica Bozek. Cover photo by Maggie Stein. Contributors and subscribers will receive copies, but if you’re not in those two groups of people and you want your own, you can buy a copy at Etsy.

There’ve been inquiries about subscribing for another year of Foursquare, and this morning I received a payment. So if you’re eager to resubscribe, I’ve put the subscriptions up on Etsy. You can get 1 year for $60 or 6 mos. for $30. Single issues and Special Editions will go up to $6.  There will be no subscription trades this year– I am too desperate for money.

Click here for 1 year (12 issues)

Click here for 6 mos (6 issues)

We still have two issues to go for Foursquare Vol. 2– March and May. March (above) will be out later this week, and I’ll try to get May out shortly after but in order to do that, I need more poems. Would those of you who’ve never submitted send me work, please? And if you know someone who wants to submit, please encourage them to do so.

 

Income.

I can’t wait to get paid this week so I can pay the minimum on one of my credit cards, my car insurance, another bill, another bill, and do laundry.  If I have money left over I might get a much-needed haircut.

Credit cards are evil. I know everyone already knows this.  But if you didn’t know, please heed this warning and don’t rely on them.

Yesterday I looked at a house, but I think I’m going to wait a year or so to actually buy one because there are all sorts of grants I can get for buying a home in downtown Buffalo.  I could potentially make about $12k in grant money… just for being under a certain income level and getting a mortgage on a house in Buffalo.

 

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What would your mother think?

Someone broke into my car! Which makes twice in six months … They did a much sloppier job than the people in Brooklyn too. In Brooklyn, everything in my car had been gone through, but nothing was broken. Today, the window was broken and it was raining and windy so everything inside is a big mess. Luckily I learned from the previous experience and there was nothing in the car worth stealing, but it’s still incredibly annoying, and repairing the window will cost money that I don’t have (because I don’t have a slush fund because I have only recently started making enough money to even pretend to begin to get on top of my bills). ARGH.

 

Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, Alt. Take

It’s like Mrs. Dalloway but with an alternate ending (since Clarissa was lucky enough to have all her guests and Septimus was only an almost anonymous shadow of death.)

Buffalo architectural history is really interesting but whenever Buffalo history intersects with the 1901 Pan-Am Expo, which is so often does, it becomes even more interesting.

 

A Viennese woodpecker

I took advantage of my comp tickets and went to the BPO concert tonight. The program included Beethoven’s 5th, which is pretty great. When I sat down and heard the instruments tune, I almost cried. The tuning-up period is really my favorite part of a concert, unless the music is just really phenomenal and well-played. It reminds me of Ulysses and my past. I thought of how although I’ve been to many operas since 2002, I haven’t been to many orchestral concerts (if any?)… i.e. I haven’t been to a concert like that since I was dating Aaron. Aaron and I didn’t go to the BPO– cheaper to go to concerts at Slee Hall at UB– plus Aaron didn’t like the conductor of the BPO’s style or the traditionalist programming. But anyway, we used to go to concerts a lot, and I haven’t been much since then. Hearing live music is really so much more interesting than hearing a recording. The performance value– I mean, the athleticism required of the players– is so fun to watch, and in a good hall the acoustics can be amazing, can add a whole new dimension to the work. Of course, you have to deal with the conductor’s interpretation of a piece which can sometimes be really annoying (generally, if they take it too slow it’s annoying) and with the audience’s coughs and other disturbances. But still.

I didn’t think the conductor was bad at all– Aaron thought she was too much of a performer (for the audience), too inexact (for the players) but I didn’t find that to be the case– I actually thought she was pretty good. Not Leonard Bernstein or something, but good, a lot better than the conductor that used to work at Slee, who was basically a human metronome. The BPO conductor tried to rouse the players, but the whole bass section seemed dead for most of the piece, with the exception of a moment in the third movement. I thought her energy was good. The players themselves seemed bored. The piece is so good that it’s hard for me to understand how they could be bored. Isn’t playing a piece again and again like rereading a book, to some extent? How many times have I reread passages of Mrs. Dalloway, and I still get excited by it when I reread the thing again? If I were to read it to people who’d never heard it before I would certainly feel even more excited.

The concert hall is well-designed and the acoustics are very good, better than at Slee (for various reasons, some of which could be corrected). (The history of the concert hall as told by Wikipedia is really interesting.)

The other disturbing part of the concert, besides that some of the players seemed bored, was that much of the audience was old. The vast majority of the heads in front of me were hoary. I saw a few teenagers and a couple of couples in their 30s, but otherwise the young folks were in their 50s and most people were probably over 65. I found this really weird, since most of the concert goers at Slee Hall (which is about 20 min. away) are under 50 and in Vienna there were people from every demographic you could think of. I think this results from many things– the decline of arts education in the U.S., the downtown location of the BPO’s hall (i.e. it’s not up by UB’s campus), the culture at the BPO which seems very Lawrence Welk-ish– but the main thing, I think, is the price of tickets. For students, a ticket at Slee is $5 (a non-student ticket is $9). At the Vienna Opera, a stehplatz is 2 Euros. If you’re a child or senior you can get reduced tickets to the BPO, but there’s nothing like the student rush tickets at Lincoln Center or stehplatz, where you can get in at the last minute for a drastically reduced price. The concert wasn’t sold out– I think as long as your concerts aren’t selling out you can certainly take the gamble and sell student tickets at a huge discount, especially if you’re located within a mile of two universities! It’s not much a gamble, either, of course– since students grow up, get jobs, and become patrons if they’re groomed properly.

… Something the program notes pointed out (but which is not included in the Wikipedia description of the 5th Symphony) is Beethoven derived the well-known first four note (da-da-da-dum) from the peck pattern of a yellow-hammer he heard in a park in Vienna. The piece struck me as very Viennese– it felt like Vienna, somehow– but this tidbit endeared the piece to me even more, because at the time of writing Beethoven was beginning to go deaf. The sound of the four notes has been described as “fate knocking at the door,” which is interesting because of the social conditions at the time of writing and Beethoven’s increasing deafness, but the fact that the rhythm was actually determined by a woodpecker makes that analogy (to Fate) even more emotive. Imagine how special it is for you to walk through a park and hear birdsong, and then imagine how much more important that is for a composer (especially a German Romantic composer) who is inspired by the songs of Nature. Perhaps a woodpecker’s knock, with its heavier pitch and vibration, would have been one of the final bird-calls Beethoven could distinguish.

 

Cat food

I have been researching cat food so I can change my cats’ diet to a more natural, protein-rich one. They’re predators, after all, and feeding them “diet” or “indoor” foods that are mostly carbs (as most pet foods are) seems silly when I could feed them less food (=less cost, fewer calories) but food that is richer in protein and vitamins. Djuna often gets a tummy ache and hair balls and Hilda has allergies to something that I’ve been trying to isolate for two years now– I’ve changed litter, food, toys, cleaners, laundry detergent, water filters, geographical region– so I want something that will make their coats glossier so that Djuna doesn’t have to groom so much, and without corn/wheat in case that might be what Hilda’s allergic to. I currently feed the cats Dr. Hill’s Science Diet Light with Hairball Control, which is expensive and not that effective (in that there are still hairballs). Plus, there have been recalls on it, it’s mostly grain, and the meat it does contain is by-product. So I did a lot of research and narrowed it down to Evolve, Timberwolf Serengeti (sounds cat-like doesn’t it?), and Castor & Pollux. I decided on Castor & Pollux because my local grocery store was on their list of retailers, but when I went to the grocery store, they didn’t have it. So I went to the local pet store which is about 3 blocks from my house. They were impressed with my knowledge about cat food and said they would hire me, but when I said “actually I’m looking for a job” it turned out that they were just being flattering salespeople and weren’t hiring. Oh well. Anyway, they gave me free samples of two foods: Evo and California Natural (herring and sweet potato… in case Hilda’s allergic to chicken). I don’t like to change the cats’ food a lot, so I laid out three bowls: their normal food and these two other options. I will see which one they eat…so far Evo seems to be a hit.  The cats eat better than I do. I wish I got herring and sweet potatoes every day!  My diet is more like a low-grade cat food– mostly rice!

 

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Things I dislike about New York

1. The subway. Public transit is great in theory but in practice, in a city this big it’s disgusting. In the winter it’s a disease factory, where sick people spread germs to healthy people and the stress of everyday life in New York makes everyone vulnerable to contagious diseases. I’ve heard about how gross it is in the summer, with the smell of bodies and sewage, but I plan to be in Buffalo before it gets too hot. Along with the people who are actually on the subway, there are the people who use the subway as a bathroom and all the other shit that drips down into the subway from above. Then, there is the slowness of the thing. It is not always slow. Sometimes it’s great. But to make up for the times it’s great, there are the times you get to the subway station and instead of having to wait the usual 5-7 minutes you have to wait 15-20 for no apparent reason. And the constant repairs that reroute and delay.

 

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Poetry Reading

I’m reading Friday night at Stain Bar in Brooklyn.  Details here.

 

Free food

This week I’ve been working a temp job at a market research facility.

 

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Consortium

1. If you will be my sweetheart dear,
Then I will give you water clear.
2. With a Valentine
3. I Corinthians 13
4. My essay on Zuk’s poetics of love

Juxtapositions for the hell of it; I’m not exactly saying anything. Just tumbling thoughts, like rocks, in my head.

 

Tiny books about very large things

Today, thank god, we had books to scan. I wasn’t able to scan many pages. For god knows what reason (well, I know the reason…) I kept picking books with illustrations and tissue, which require a different, slower scanning process. There are two reasons for this. First, I like pictures. Second, we’re scanning a lot of History of NY books and I dug out all the ones about Buffalo and Niagara Falls and as you can imagine, the books about Niagara Falls have a lot of pictures. Another thing that makes the Niagara Falls books difficult to scan is that they’re often very small. I’m not sure how such a large waterfall engenders such tiny books. Tiny books are hard to scan and hard to process after scanning.

An example.

 

Sunday

Spent the afternoon at MOMA with Charlie (my brother) and Nykki (his girlfriend)… there are pictures. Afterwards, a fine dinner (on Charlie) at La Bonne Soupe.

I came home to find that Damian had finished cleaning his stuff out of the apartment (Damian is another House Press folk and the one renting my room before I did) and Eric happy with the news that his work will be the 50th Big Game tinyside (and the last tinyside for awhile while Maureen takes a break).

 

Scribes

Today we finally had a batch of books to scan at work, and I scanned over 3k pages (I scanned 1k the first day, 2k the second day, and 4k is the quota, so I am coming ever nearer to my goal). One book I scanned was this one, which may not be very interesting in itself, but was interesting because it was prepared in the 1800s to preserve 17th century documents. So I sit at a state-of-the-art “scribe” taking photographs of bookpages every few seconds and making them into these beautiful web documents… and the content of these pages, in this case, is how records were being preserved 200 years ago. Isn’t that cool?

We also got a slew of books on the Adirondacks, which made me happy. I’m getting a lot of ideas and source material from these books. Unhappily, one of the most inspiring books I had today ended up being rejected for the online archive. The standards of what makes it onto the archive are very high and mostly have to do with reproducibility. In this case there were fold-out maps. We don’t yet have the proper machine to simulate fold-outs online (though we’re getting one soon) so any book with fold-outs ends up back on the book cart for now.

I can feel poetry brewing… I have at least three large projects on my mental stove at this point, and scanning these histories of New York State is like pouring molten metal into the molds I’ve been preparing for these long years that I haven’t written anything.

 

I forgot to tell you about the man with sakura blossoms. At night, in the subway, at almost midnight, an old man waiting for the train with a few small branches on which a scattering of sakura blossoms budded.

IN A STATION OF THE METROThe apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

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AWP Day 3: Roll Call

Amy King* – Deborah Poe* – Catherine Daly – Damian Weber – Will Hubbard* – Ellen Baxt* – Jill Magi* – Doug Manson – Mike Kelleher – Ana Bozicevic-Bowling* – Jaye Bartell – j.s. makkos* – Jacqueline Lyons* – Dorothea Lasky* – Eric Baus* – Suzanne Frischkorn* – Brenda Iijima – (who am I forgetting?)

I got a little overwhelmed at meeting/seeing people so there were plenty of people I didn’t introduce myself to. I acquired a little crush on the guy manning the Archipelago Books table (from which I acquired many a free book– great, since I’ve already bought so many of their lovely books). I then tried to go to the Cannibal launch but it was packed and I ended up hanging out with Eric and his friends instead… till I called it an early night. After all, I have to work another trade show tomorrow.

 

AWP Day 2: Roll Call

Shanna Compton* – Reb Livingston – Bruce Covey* – Maureen Thorson (and her new man) – Jill Alexander Essbaum* – Marie Buck* – Jennifer L. Knox* – Shafer Hall

Plus some of the people from yesterday. Soon… tomorrow!

 

from another

Brent Cunningham’s fun live AWP feed

 

Poetry is what happens (a poetics of reading blogs, landscapes, people, textures, or anything else that requires sense-making from signs)

There is some confusion, or ambiguity, about my blog’s subtitle (which I have reinstated). If you click on the subtitle, the meaning should become clearer. To clarify further, I propose that disregarding the examples McQuillian provides of specific acts of deconstruction on specific texts, one replaces the word “deconstruction” with the word “poetry” when reading this passage, retaining, however, the word “deconstruction” as a ghost/source text (deconstruction).

The original text, “Deconstruction is what happens,” is Derrida’s, and regards living in the world in general, a meaning which I want to retain for poetry– survival is poetic. This is not to say that poetry (or deconstruction) is positive or negative, just that it is, it happens; moreover, it is descriptive, not prescriptive (it is better if you have a grasp of Derrida’s theories of “deconstruction” and “survival” and can superimpose “poetry,” as if it were on a transparency one could overlay for a secondary meaning but just as easily remove).

 

AWP Day 1: Highlights

1. Meeting Joan Retallack and giving her a copy of OFC. I’ve always admired her, and I’ve seen her many times at readings and functions but never had the proverbial balls to talk to her (which is weird because I never get shy around poets!)
2. Running into Austin Segrest, who I grew up with, went to school with, was in classes with all K-12, but rarely see nowadays and wasn’t expecting to see. He’s in a creative writing program somewhere in Georgia so he was there (like all the other MFA students).
3. Meeting Joyelle McSweeney, who is a lovely person in person (in spite of our aesthetic differences) and who did a great job reading noir fiction tonight at the “Steal this Reading” reading in Greenpoint (which was super-well attended!) Since her review of OFC, though not a bad review per se, was the most negative the book received, I’d had some anxiety about meeting her in real life, but she was lovely.
4. One of the most beautiful books I have ever seen… possibly the most beautiful example of letterpress small-batch printing I’ve ever seen: The Jungle from Rope-a-Dope Press. This is a series of letterpress broadsides, all by young poets you probably know, bound together in an edition of 12 (of which 11 remain for sale at $240 each). Each broadside is a work of art in itself. The broadsides are then coptic bound into an oversized hardback book with letterpress leaves with jungle motifs between each broadside. If you have $240 to invest I don’t see how it could be better spent. If you don’t have that kind of money, the AWP deal on the individual broadsides is 3/$24.
5. If you don’t have $240 but want to invest in an artist’s book, the most bang for your buck is Andrea Baker’s $15 “True poems about the river go like this.” “True poems” is an accordion book printed on scraps of canvas glued onto folded stiff canvas with black thread embroidery and slathered red oil paint. I don’t know how many copies of these there are, but at $15 they won’t last long– the effort put into this and the quality of the poem within make it the best deal I’ve seen so far at AWP. I sold two copies of OFC today and I immediately went and bought this and the Ugly Duckling volume of Aram Saroyan’s minimal poems.
6. Christian Bok’s talk on viral poetry. I mean, that man makes me want to scream like a Beatles fan. (Yet, I have no trouble talking to him… because I’ve known him since Crystallography was his only book. Harder to approach Retallack.)
7. Seeing A Sing Economy in real life– it’s beautiful, and I’m happy with the way my poems in it turned out.
8. There were a few highlights of the off-site “Steal this Reading” AWP-related reading, such as: seeing Justin Marks in real life, hearing Joyelle’s new genre fiction, seeing/hearing Adam Clay for the first time (thank god– a charming, funny poet! After a string of Poet Voices it was a relief), meeting Andrea Baker… but what made me feel special was that Matt publicly thanked me and the handful of others who helped sew Cannibal. It felt nice.

 

AWP Day 1: Roll Call (with many parenthetical remarks)

Adam Golaski – Scott Pound* (navigated me through the tempest) – Matthew Klane – Matthew Timmons – Christian Bok (as ever) – Evie Shockley – Jena Osman (super presentation on her periodic table project) – Brent Cunningham – Steve Schroeder* – Matt Henriksen (a busy bee this week) – Joyelle McSweeney* – Johannes Goransson – Tim Peterson* – Ivy Alvarez* (shorter than I expected) – Joan Retallack* – Susan Schultz (my support system while at UVA) – Craig Perez* – Stan Apps* – Clay Banes* (less aggressive than expected) – Elisa Gabbert – John Cotter – Lori Anderson Moseman – Cristiana Baik – Justin Katko (awesome as ever) – Bill Howe – Lisa Howe – Sina Queyras* (taller than I expected) – Alana Wilcox – Erica Kaufman – Jonathan Skinner – Austin Segrest (no superman underoos) – Kaya Oakes* – Lee Ann Brown – Mathias Svalina – Matvei Yankelevich – Jenny Boully* – Bronwen Tate* (so cute) – Dan Hoy* (taller than expected) – Andrea Baker* (so cool) – Graham Foust (who’s apparently a superstar now, which is weird) – Wade Fletcher (who did a great job with Phoebe)

* people I met for the first time today (that I’d known before but not in “real life”) or hadn’t remembered meeting before so I thought it was the first time.

(Sorry, I’m on a Dell laptop so umlauts are lost in translation.)

I got recognized a lot, which is always nice. Go Facebook!

 

Stealing yr good ideas

A Sing Economy looks so incredible that I have asked Scott Puccio to do the cover for The Anthology. I wanted something minimal and avant-garde– so much so that I was planning to have an all-white cover. But this will be prettier.

 

Eric left me at home alone with the boxcutter

And after applying to another handful of salaried positions, I got madly frustrated with not being able to walk through my room without tripping over boxes of books, and I took that box cutter to my boxes and in the next three hours came up with a precarious but functional system of cardboard “shelves” which will suffice until:
a. the cats try to climb them
b. they collapse under their own weight
c. I can afford real bookshelves
d. I find the energy to scout for milk crates

In building this monstrosity, I discovered once again that I have too many books. Since this is only about 1/3 of my books, it may be possible to sell some of those in storage, after all.

 

The woven thing

weaving–>computer mnemotechnics

 

Chris Fritton @ Etsy

finally.