on skies + colours

Journal:

"Reading Daybook: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt & thinking about all the skies I have seen, all the different types of air. 

Thinking about how the air looked in different places & how you might lay that out. 

The warm wet yellows of New Orleans.
The steeliness of Paris, grey almost like iron.
The cold blue/grey of London
The brownishness of Brooklyn. 

& Los Angeles is bright--like primary colours, with a kind of occasional yellowish twinge. 

Why I think I never went much into visual art is because I could never get the translation right between my head & the execution of it by my hand. I can think of the yellows, but I cannot make them."

LAABF

 

Went to the LA Art Book Fair at MOCA yesterday. 

Perused the endless tables of bookish creations. 

Got inspired for my own small press explorations.

A few more photos on tumblr. 

TBR book list

I was tagged by the lovely Rebecca Ann Jordan.

My TBR list, super pared down & all I can remember from my notebook scribbles on the subject.

Bough Down - Karen Green
The Last 4 Things - Kate Greenstreet
The Gorgeous Nothings - Emily Dickinson/Jen Bervin
A Little White Shadow - Mary Ruefle
Ecodeviance - CA Conrad
Red Juice - Hoa Nguyen
Vicious Red Relic, Love - Anna Joy Springer

Read my TBR list answers under the cut.

"only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."

-Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You.

on photographs

"One moment, in all of history, was captured, but the moments before and after it disappeared into the onrush of time; only that selected moment itself was privileged, saved, for no other reason that its having been picked out by the camera's eye."

-teju cole, open city

driving out the desire to question: excerpt of my thoughts on Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty

Pg. 29:

“the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity.”

I posted this on facebook. All my liberal friends liked it. 

I consider myself educated & intelligent (most of the time) & my reflex was to underline this & say “yeah!” & bemoan the influence of ignorance. But I think it might actually be more complicated than just that. Something about consumerism which drives out the desire to question… which Nelson elaborates on on the following page: “Instead it promotes something more like an idiocracy, in which low-grade pleasures (such as the capacity to buy cheap goods, pay low or no taxes, carry guns into Starbucks, and maintain the right not to help one another) displace all other forms of freedom, even those of the most transformative and profound variety.” (pg. 30)

In some ways it’s kind of funny, that sentence about the freedom to “carry guns into Starbucks”. At the same time it’s a pretty terrifying idea, that this is where we’ve come. I wouldn’t say it’s ignorance or stupidity really, I think it’s rather that a society which puts so much value on physical wealth is also a society which becomes increasingly detached from compassion & human connection. This is, I think, what Nelson is getting at. It’s also the role of art, & perhaps why we don’t value art or artists… they don’t have the same capacity for physical wealth. I’m asked all the time what I’m going to do to make money with my poetry degree… people are baffled & terrified when I tell them I don’t care. That I’m not getting it to make money off of (I’d be pretty dumb if I thought a poetry degree would make me rich). It’s interesting. It’s not enough that I want to learn & think or whatever… How will I make money doing that? Thinking is not enough, it has to come with wealth otherwise it’s not worth it. 

excerpt from my ruminations on The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

"Unable to pinpoint her discomfort with her surroundings & their expectations, Christa T. is half assimilated into happy housewife motherhood. Though she clearly loves her children, the role of doting wife & mother is a shoe just a half size too small—she never quite settles into it. These are the subversive undertones of the book. The idea that an individual in an oppressive society could want anything other than what that society has deemed appropriate, & that this individual could pursue said alternate desires. The rebelliousness of Christa T. is found in her desire for something else, & her lifelong inquisitive search for that alternative. Though as she ages she becomes resigned to the fact that her struggle isolated her from her larger culture, she still feels that there is something not quite right. This uneasiness is her rebellion."

"He had these big sharp claws on his hooves, and sometimes he'd put one up on me. I understood it as the part of our mind where art comes from. And I hoped he wouldn't scratch me with them, because that would really hurt."

-kate greenstreet, young tambling. 

reading kenneth goldsmith

I've been reading 'Uncreative Writing' for the past day or so. the most fascinating element I've come across is this notion of language permeating. Goldsmith talks about how everything we encounter digitally is language on a sub level... that code which makes your graphics run is language. there has been a terror in literature of the internet & what it means for language & the written word. Goldsmith posits that we must merely reevaluate our understanding of literature to fit in this new (digital) world.

This I have been thinking about a lot. I have been operating in my "creative life" (as pretentious as that sounds) under the etymological definition of the word 'poetry'... i.e. 'something fashioned or made'. that definition has no mention of language, or words, or line breaks, or form, or whatever else we have arbitrarily decided makes something a poem. & though I'm not particularly far along in Goldsmith's book I think it might be at the root of the idea I've been trying to hash out.

Take this for example:

I made this image using a process Goldsmith describes. I first opened a .jpg file in text edit. of course the file opened as a indecipherable series of symbols (language). I inserted randomly the text of a poem I had written. when I oped the file again in a picture viewer it had been completely changed. Goldsmith writes: "What we're experiencing for the first time is the ability of language to alter all media [...] Words are active & affective in concrete ways." 

I think that's beautiful. 

 

flesh

"Cooked, the meat will blacken, grow dark in the night like a bruise."

-claire donato, burial

near to the wild heart

In putting together my final MFA packet of this semester I was tasked with writing an annotation of Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart. The novel is influenced by James Joyce & is written almost entirely in an introspective dialogue. There is very little, if any, physical action. Reading the book felt like being lost in a blue waterworld, with no direction & no footholds to grasp at. Needless to say, I wasn't sure how to write about it.

So I put together this audio/visual piece called lispector blue as a kind of response/exploration of the process of reading the book.

lispector blue from Natalie Raymond on Vimeo.

notes on autoportrait by edouard leve

"

the small combined to make the big.
what binds us to this earth?
(gravity recurring)

inventory before disposal.

"

on words in two translations of sappho

The Poetry of Sappho, translated by Willis Barnstone and Anne Carson

These two volumes actually cover the same expanse of work by Sappho (namely all of it that is left), but they have very different approaches. Whereas Carson emphasizes the fragmentary nature of the surviving texts by structuring them on the page with their missing lines displayed as blank space, Barnestone writes out each piece as if it had been completed, as if Sappho had structured them the way that we have them now. Both are important for my poetics. I cannot think of a poet who has inspired me more than Sappho. Fragments have a power that so called “complete” poems do not. Their words hang in the air, and you are forced to think about their language from every conceivable direction and angle. Take Sappho fragment six, as translated by Anne Carson for example:

“Go

so we may see

lady

of gold arms

doom” 

Each word lives within itself as well as within the poem. Each word must be digested by the reader on its own. What does “doom” mean here? Is the lady of gold arms doom incarnate? Does she foretell some kind of impending doom? There are possibilities in each word and line, which is something I actively try to bring over to my own work.  When a word is by itself, but still in a larger context endless possibilities spring up. 

a fragment of Sophokles

[...]
Ice-crystal in the hands is
at first a pleasure quite novel.
But there comes a point--
you can't put the melting mass down,
you can't keep holding it.
Desire is like that.
Pulling the lover to act and not to act,
again and again, pulling.


reading Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson.

page 78

"[...] But she was young and she had never felt the power of the dance so strongly before, and she wanted to keep it; she wanted it with a great ferocity which she mistook for passion for this man. She was certain about him; he could not get enough of her.

[...] She could have accepted it if he had told her that her light brown belly no longer excited him. She would have sensed it herself and told him to go. But he was quitting her because his desire for her has uncovered something which had been hiding inside him, something with wings that could fly, escape the gravity of the Church, the town, his mother, his wife. So he wanted to kill it: to crush the skill into the feathers and snap the bones of the wings."

-Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

dear sugar

"withholding distorts reality. it makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. it makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel."

I got my hands on the book of the Dear Sugar column from The Rumpus by Cheryl Strayed. I'm only a few letters in, but I love it. It's exactly the kind of thing humans need. The process of waking up can be slow, but it seems to me that this will help.

reading list

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• The Complete Poems of Muriel Rukeyser - Muriel Rukeyser.
• This Connection of Everyone with Lungs - Juliana Spahr.
• The Narrow Road to the Interior - Matsuo Basho (Sam Hammel translation).
• Humanimal - Banu Kapal.
• In the Western Night - Frank Bidart.
• What is Found There - Adrienne Rich.
• One with Others - C.D. Wright.
• The Collected Poems of George Oppen - George Oppen.
• Ceremony - Leslie Silko.
• The Pillow Book - Sei Shonagon (translation?).
• Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes (Edith Grossman translation).
• Ship Fever - Andrea Barette.
• Frame Structures - Susan Howe.

terribly sorry for all the posts... but my brain is stewing.

n