I feel like I have to blog each morning about how I didn't get anything done the day before. At least I'm writing something...

Yesterday was for making money: went into the office and edited/wrote for most of the day, then brought a project home with me and proofread that last night. I'm a contract worker, so I feel a lot of pressure to be actually working for the hours I bill (so different from being an employee, where I only felt pressure to be in the office for 8 hours, nevermind what I did with them). I think part of it is that I want to take the least amount of time away from writing (or thinking about writing, or preparing to think about writing). And I'm make more per hour than I've ever done before, which allows me to work 15-20 hours per week and continue to live comfortably at the grad-student subsistence-level to which I've grown accustomed. Still, I know I'm sending in my invoice tomorrow, so I'm trying to get as much done as possible for that billing cycle.

Maybe tonight will be for making art. Isn't there a house reading this evening?

I think the only worthwhile thing I've created lately is this blog, but that's kind of hard to take credit for. ome really smart enginers built the platform, and some smart group of marketers conspires to keep it free, and some really smart group of artists now fills it up with stuff.

Really bummed I missed the Mills reading- couldn't get away from students who were asking for make up office hours in time to get there. Here's virtual 'what up' to my people. Will make better efforts come January to reconnect with M-folks. Anyways, finished stone patio, which was kind of satisfying like writing something, except the client had all these nit-picky complaints that weren't interesting in the way my own or other artist's nit-picky complaints are interesting- they were just fucking stupid. Good to be remindd of why I hate slaving on a building project only to be rewarded with ingratitude and a sore back at the end of it (the money is always trivial and never at all worth it).

The one thing I did produce today was the product of getting my laptop, and a whole shit ton of not-back-up-work, stolen two months ago. The one place I did have some things backed up has only old and abandoned versions of things which I later reworked or discarded. Now I get to look at all this stuff as some kind of strage artifact. Here's the start of a cut piece made up of a few strands from two (and probably eventually five or six) documents:

suppose we (I) were (just) mistaken about just (want) what this (that) meant(same) your sureness(momentum!) then (could) no guarantee we(I) could (talk) head (backwards) north forever(from) and pass (this) ourselves searching(feeling) if what we really needed was to(to) go out. (its inception and show you that.) I to feeling this form backwards talk I could momentarily same. that just want I.

Didn't make a lot of art yesterday, unless you count calling up Large Firm and impersonating an executive assistant so I could get the contact information of the Important Person my boyfriend wants to talk to.

I did see a lot of art, at the Works in Progress reading: Lara Durback, Erika Staiti, Jen Nellis, and Stephanie Young. Stephanie read an essay she's working on about Suzanne Stein that is really an essay about Lake Merritt (or was it the other way around?). Lara did a thing with string that was very Cecilia Vicuna-y (apparently inspired by some stray comment of Dillon's).

Keep it short- not much to report, except that I am beginning to think that academic jobs may be worse for my creative life than construction, simply because the former is to engrossing. I had students in my office hours until 11pm last night, and teaching two classes 2-hour today wiped me out. Bithc, bitch, bitch, moan, moan, moan.

I started a new file this morning for "Philosophical Notes", which is something I thought I had put down for good. Here's the new addition:

'One thing you might want to say is that the rule of universal generalization, where you go from any random instance to all instances, can’t be justified in all cases, or that it in fact establishes something different than either “for at least one case” or “for all cases”. This is why, for instance, "The American Dream" is paradoxical.'

I have to keep tinkering it, but that's all for today.

Here's a little something from Don't Panic:

Talk about a glacial pace, a forward momentum that is invisible to human perception in the here now what now, but what if that pace was speeding up, how we might see the ice caps melting over the Antarctic sea, how we might see the blocks of ice cracking and heaving, and a hot dry wind beginning to blow. And as we talk about the glacial pace of progress, the diplomats and NGOs just standing around the lobby exchanging cards, the politicians with their eyes on the next campaign, the next quarter’s earnings, the next port of call, another pace is quickening.

I find myself starting poems in the car and not being able to write them down until later, when I've forgotten the poem I wrote in the car and have to approximate it with something else. Such are the hazards and the rewards of a 30-45 minute commute to San Ramon.

I am drowning in theory, but here. Does this count as a break? Do a reading response journal and a theoretical paper on Sontag's erotics of art count as creativity for the day? Yes, I suppose, but I'm not talking about them because well yes. I have to email them within the hour.

The 'academic' portion of my semester will close this week and I will be, like Loretta, in chapbook land (and also distributing soon--L, we should trade). I adore printing, deplore typesetting. I will live at the studio tomorrow. Not a bad place to be. But the chapbook is an excerpt from what seems to be becoming my thesis, a series of untitled prose poems that are quite dependant on one another.

I will likely spend much time over coffee binding books during the break. But I have an extensive pile of books waiting for me, which you will hear all about over the next 6 weeks or so. And I am dying to make some art--I'm not exactly a visual artist, but I play one frequently. I have some empty canvases or canvases that need to be covered over and wires that need to be bend and ribbon that needs something. My walls are irritating me and I want to make pretty things.

So, since I have been painstakingly staring at this poetry while making the chapbook, here is the last spread--not of the collection (at least as it stands now) but of the chapbook, yes.

Envelopes into a wooden box under the desk, having given up on letters they do not bother to read. A child removes his right shoe, throws it at the wall and it becomes clear. She leaves the room to lie in her bed.

Oneday I do not believe in instead. There are things we have done and will not talk about and things we talk about that we have not done. I put them in the same pile.

Students are hijacking my office hours, which were supposed to be stolen poetry hours, so before I lose my mind, I'm going to make a list of every project I want to be doing, and then maybe say a bit about oneof them. Really though, this is another unproductive art day (except it produced more blog community- yeah Loretta!).

-Song settings of Elizabeth Willis poems for art rock trio
-Study 2013- collaboration with choreographers Cara DeFabio and Abby Niechtlich about eschatology
-Oakland Topoetics (the never-ending project)
-An unnamed multi-media concept: music is scored to a text which is sequenced in time to appear on a projection screen (like operatic supertitles with the voice track turned off)
-Complete flash version of my thesis: summa_poetica (like that will ever happen)
-A large improvising music ensemble, a la Sun Ra, but hopefully not derivative of his groups
-A 4'x4' wood cube (box), made up of 2'x2' squares, each of which can be rearranged to sit anywhere (like a rubics cube) and each of which has a text on every axis (top left to top right, top right to bottom right, etc) such that: a.) the corners all start with a letter from the code of dna (actg), b.) the resulting lines of text, stretching around every face of the cube, can reasonably be read as one line of a poem.
-A series of brick poems, poems whose text is painted on to standard 2"x4"x8" red bricks stacked in various precarious ways, thrown up all across Oakland
-A PSA chapbook, although Loretta is probably going to win, containing elegies for jazz drummers
-textmusic: a piece meditating on the analogies and disanalogies of writing in general, and especially, poetry and music.


Tonight, I was supposed to do research for Study 2013 about a doomsday prediction that didn't come true. I wanted to do Busta Rhymes 2 (or 3) albums that came out around 2000 predicting the end of the world, and then the kind of tragic fact that, after 2000, he had to keep making public appearances and be a performer, because I think he was dead serious, at least from what I heard. Looking for interviews around that time where he might say something, and to go analyze lyrics from those albums. I still have until Thursday to get this together, so I'm not in trouble yet.

All right, back to grading.

Hi. My name is Loretta. And I write poetry. Dillon says I should plug my online journal, There. Consider this a call for submissiveness.

Current projects:

- mapoetry: using online maps to locate poetry in place, working with a friend of mine's web project; see this haynaku series that follows my commute; or go here to make your own; I think there are some interesting possibilities for collaborative projects

- Don't Panic: something to do with climate change; I don't want to talk too much about it yet (which means you're going to hear a lot about it); I promised a friend that I'd enter the PSA chapbook contest and this might be my entry

- binding some chapbooks I printed last spring; I'm selling/giving away copies to anyone who asks nicely

- writing up natal horoscopes for some babies born in the last year

- painting my apartment red and orange and green

I've pasted a draft of an attempt to synthesize the last two days discussion into a blog. I'm going to keep working on the draft, but time constraints of grading student papers and packing/moving furniture cut short my draft. The words "air bone" are the start of a longer list, involving dictionary research into the word "harmony" as well as associations of sound. Not sure what the blogger machine is gong to do to my formatting, but the idea is that words "congruity, anthology, chord, song" extend "vertically" from the word harmony.

Thanks for jumping on board, Zac.


congruity
anthology
chord
song
joint
sit trending upwards- a line of harmony

in line, in front of me
trailing outwards: air bone

The date of this post will read the 26th, but I am actually trying to get day two's thoughts down. Spent nine hours installing a granite patio, followed by a few hours socializing with different groups of friends. Friend Jeffrey Schrader threw a fun party which unfortunately was only turning into a house reading as I was having to leave to go to social function number two. My apologies to all poets present for snaking out (a friend was in town from New York for one night and waiting for me in San Francisco).

The only thing I have to say art-wise, other than "working and trying to do 'my work' is a bitch", is a reflection on the granite patio which bears strange relation to yesterday's piece. The patio was built by random coursing, whcih is a general schema, or really the lack of a schema, for determing what pattern the joints between different-sized stones go in a patio (or a wall, for that matter). The two joint patterns we are probably all familiar with, square corners as in most tile or linoleum, or staggered joints as in brick, where the bottom brick ends in the middle of the one above it (i.e. the joints are displaced one-half a brick length apart from course to course) are both regular. Random coursing is a way to use up stone of a differnt size by fitting them all together in a puzzle whose whole assemblage was never determined beforehand.

To do this, you operate with two basic rules: no joint can run longer than x (where x is a number specified by the mason- usually a proportion of the size of the area being covered) and no offset can be less than y. Thus, if two stones have one dimension of the same length, they can only be set side by side if their total length isn't greater than x, and the joint created by the next course of stone up against them must be broken by a stone which does not share that dimension, but crosses that joint and ends at least distance y from it. Sorry if this is hard to visualize, I'll investigate adding pictures tomorow.

Here's the thought. Square corners, where all joints line together indefinitely, are very weak constructions, because all the joints are allowed to fail simultaneously (this is especially important in walls building). In a brick pattern, the vertical joints are taken care of, by being staggerd, but the horizontal is ignored and allowed to run indefinitely. Random coursing is a process of interjecting the vertical axis into the horizontal, and vice-versa. This is also the strongest method of building, as not one joint's failure can undermine the entire structure.

Again, somewhere in the use of vertical and horizontal here, an analogy is wanting.

Here's the latest installment of a series I am doing on music and poetry. The idea is to construct sets of analogies about the practice of music and the practice of poetry, both writing and listening, composing and reading. As of now, my plan for unleahing them on the world is to have one side of the analogy read and recorded as a sound file to be played while the opposite side of the analogy is displayed (either in a flash web animation platform, or as a kind of video piece). Sorry if its a little dense/boring:

In music we speak of horizontal and vertical dimensions. The horizontal is what is sonorant to every listener- it is the succession of sounds in time (notice that the listener is not necessarily compelled to believe that this succession is a complex of many sounds- it could simply be one “music”).

The vertical dimension is slightly trickier, though no less real. Each moment of music is analyzable as a complex of multiple tones, related to each other in the logic of any of several theoretic systems (serialist, Shenkerian, blues cadence, etc.). More elementally, each tone itself contains many other tones, as its overtones, who vibrate by virtue of the physics of standing waves, which in nature are never pure (i.e., never contain fewer than two frequencies). Of course, in music many of these overtones may also occur as actual tones in toned by their own instrument, simultaneously with this tone, which in the orientation in which we are now speaking, is called the “fundamental tone”. This fundamental may, in another orientation, be an overtone of some other fundamental. Thus the vertical dimension of music is a set of tones arranged mathematically around one tone.

In poetry we speak of vertical and horizontal dimensions. The horizontal dimension is what is apparent to every reader- it is the arrangement of words in space (notice that the listener is not necessarily compelled to believe that this arrangement supervenes on some culturally-agreed-upon strategy for ordering words as we read- i.e. left to right- top to bottom; top to bottom- left to right; right to left- top to bottom, etc.). The horizontal dimension encompasses every possible relation of words in a two-dimensional space, or as imagined in possible successions of time(s).

The vertical dimension is more conventional, though no less obscure. Each word is analyzable as a complex of a definition and an etymology. In the definition, there is the word’s extension, or the reality to which it vertically ostends, and its intention, or the internal realities which it seeks to both express and affect. In its etymology, there is the various other words to which it is related, as species of genus are related- where both extend from a common ancestor whose trace may be found severally. Of course, all of these components, both the intention and even the extension, as well as the etymology, must necessarily be expressed in more word. Thus the vertical dimension of a word is a set of other possible words, arranged semantically around the word in question.

An analogy between these two uses of “vertical” and “horizontal”, respectively, is wanting.

This is a blog dedicated to the daily (or thereabouts) journaling of the art endeavors of a growing cast of characters. Everyone posts each day what they've done artistically in the hopes that tomorrow they will do something again.

I would not myself trust this kind of scheme, if I hadn't spent the last hour writing something for my first post- which is exactly one hour more time on creative writing than I've spent in the past two weeks. This blog is an attempt to get a very loose community of creative folks to think about and report what they have done as artists every day, or some workable time index approximating every day. There is, of course, something very arbitrary about "every day" as a measure of artistic involvement. Nevertheless, in that so many of the other demands upon us, like work, are daily, I thought it might be useful to see what place art has in that scheme. The advantage of trying to post every day is that we may each be able to construct, in retrospect, a picture of what countervailing forces have, over the course of some blog time, kept us from doing art at the level of immersion we might have wanted, or, conversely, we may be able to discover what forces prevailed in a given blog period in getting us to creative fruitfully.

The idea of making it both public and a group effort is two-fold: it creates that important sense of duty and accountability that we can never seem to get out of ourselves alone, and it will, I hope, be a very cool way to hear about each other's projects and endeavors as they unfold. Instead of asking cliched questions of each other at parties, "what are you working on these days", we can see each other's work unfold.

This venue is going to obviously favor those of us who work in text, but feel free all and everyone to link us to any outside sample of current work in other web media.

Thanks for stopping by or contributing.