The Game (3)
April 26, 2013, 11:22 pm
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writing3. What is the wish of the dream?
I open my hand and a small cluster of people peer up at me out of it silent and bug-eyed. I draw them out of my palm like taffy, but there is no snapping sound and no lost teeth. In a minute the crowded room buzzes harshly, wondering why it had bothered one more time to show up for nothing but an exhausted optimism. I was lucky to be the dreamer because the dreamer never stops being interested. People know when they haven’t said enough, that’s why they dream. Or that’s not why they dream, but why they continue loving.
When I met him he was raking leaves, in his tiny yard; usually they’re across some table in a room. And what of the very bald one who practices his Foucault Face™ in the mirror each day? If I try to write the story of someone who worked hard in case he showed up to work, what is the plot? She played touch tag by saying a thing then running into a field of noise. The delay architecture is so deliberate I can feel the shot-reverse-shot, the voiceover, and the signs of truth tattooed on my often-entered vagina. Continue reading →
The Game (2)
April 19, 2013, 4:10 pm
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slow_reading2. This game is called “Watch Your Step.” I am not sure that it’s a game or that any of the games I’ve described is a game. It’s more like a scene that stimulates games of encounter, which is to say, scenarios of risk. My thinking about this was world-shaken by Diana Taylor’s article on double-blind scenarios, which came out after her book, which I also loved, but as I was the editor for the smaller, later piece, my bones know it as deeply as a body would that has many times leaned toward its object. This is not objective knowledge.
The best a thought can do, after all, is to make itself available to be found, by documenting its encounter with something so well that it shifts things into a new proximity, as though words in a dictionary had suddenly slid down into each other’s definitions. That’s not too eloquent, but the event of eloquence has only a little to do with meaning emerging. I was researching what a “scene” is while editing Diana’s piece for a “special issue on the case,” which the University of Chicago Press refused to make into a book because they thought it wasn’t “sexy.” Continue reading →
The Game
April 10, 2013, 2:56 pm
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writing1. The Test
There’s a can of blueberries at the back of the shelf amid dust and flour mites or whatever it is that gets into the rice, like an old writing file where you made a deposit in the darkness of a late style. As though berries too syrupy even for ice cream and the cheesecakes your mother never got to make were just waiting around for you to be found, like that child in the game. Continue reading →
A Consultation
April 10, 2013, 2:19 pm
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PoliticsHi! I’ve been writing books, and so this blog, which is a research blog, after all, has been languishing. I imagine that, starting in June. I’ll post more often to retain and retrain focus, as I will be on an extended writing-for-deadline hiatus, researching a new book, letting things in. It’s exciting to be on the verge of a porousness that’s both deliberate and can’t be intended. In the meantime I’ve been using my blabbing time doing some interviews (listed below) and, in concert with Katie Stewart, doing some writing exercises that I’ll also post some of here. We’ll see where that work on the ordinary goes—maybe another little co-authored book. In January a book I’ve written with/against Lee Edelman will appear from Duke: Sex, or the Unbearable. I like collaboration, it’s taxing and revealing, like villanelle-writing, which is also influencing the current work. Continue reading →
. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought 