Thanks for reading!

I can now be found at my new blog, Jenny’s Conjecture.

New, New, New!

I’ve posted new writing samples in the Poetry and Prose sections.

Also, don’t forget to come hear me read on Monday at 7PM in Steuben Hall South Gallery at Pratt Institute for the Ubiquitous Literary and Arts Magazine release party. There will be great art on the walls and great art in the air. Plus, FREE BOOKS!

Be there or be square.

Winterizing

The first snowflakes came and went. I let one fall to my tongue while I walked to work on Monday morning. There is an elaborate beauty to them that I have been attempting to mirror with paper. Origami is my latest interest. I find it soothing. Somehow, between books and jobs, the satisfaction I feel creasing a leaf of paper is helping me to find my center.

In “Personal and Impersonal,” William Matthews writes, “An apprentice not only learns the tools and materials of a craft, but commits to memory and muscle memory the characteristic motion of an activity. Such repetition is not only a sort of calisthenics. We know that in human evolution greater brain capacity is linked to greater hand-to-eye coordination. Presumably, the increasing complexity of physical chores stimulated more complex brain activity. Perhaps lifelong immersion in intricate processes such as writing poetry or playing the piano works similarly. In any case, an apprentics begins by confronting those parts of a craft that are easiest to describe with words like anonymous, collective, and traditional. But a skillful apprentice moves toward a condition of mastery by which quite opposite words are invoked: hallmark, signature, style. ‘You only have so many notes,’ said Dizzie Gillespie, “and what makes a style is how you get from one note to another.’”

I try to keep this in mind as I near graduation. I am not thinking of the completion of my BFA as even remotely resembling the completion of my education. Rather, it represents a shift in the model by which I will learn. Rather than continuing to apprentice books, I am transforming into an apprentice of business practices. I am thrilled to complicate my rehearsals, combining the exercise of my skills in many areas–words, web, zest–all those things I do best but can do so much better. The possibilities are keeping me on my toes.

Fold origami to leave between the pages of library books.

Half-Remembered Love

Colleen Caporal’s a half-remembered life is an act of pasteurization. On display at the Pratt Institute Digital Arts Gallery until November 12, 2010, her images celebrate that which is left behind when a family photo album is boiled free from the grief bacterium. The obsessive process of re-photographing by which each piece was constructed mirrors the conscience of the bereft human being, who both craves to remember her mother’s loving embrace and desires to be free of the complementary memory of its loss.

The work’s palette is warm with the radiance of human bodies: the glow of a father’s arm reaching for a daughter or the robust light that falls upon a mother’s chin when filtered through her baby’s blond hair. Every piece floats off the wall, pinned down at only two corners. “You can touch them,” Caporal says, and you do—it makes sense to press your fingers to the paper, acting out the intimacy that is rehearsed in each image.

Anchored at the gallery’s center by the presentation of two letters (one from living mother to artist and the other from artist to the ghost of mother inside her head) and a collection of photographs from Caporal’s early childhood, the series of eight images takes on a narrative. The visual gesture toward the smallest physical connections reminds us that we can use up our whole lives yearning for a sensation so ingrained in our humanity that we barely even remember it existing at all.

Colleen Caporal

a half-remembered life

November 8-12, 2010

MFA Digital Arts Thesis Exhibition

Pratt Institute, Dept. of Digital Arts

536 Myrtle Avenue, 4^th Floor Gallery

Heart Attacks Rising in American Women

Recently, the media has devoted an uncanny amount of time to reports about “Generation Me” (people currently in their 20′s and 30′s…a.k.a. talkin’ ’bout my generation) and it’s proposed narcissism. The New York Times recently followed up with an article briefly discussing the existence of opposition to the view that Gen Y lacks empathy and suffers from swollen ego.

At the very end of this article, there is this tidbit:

“[The Narcissistic Personality Inventory] is not a diagnostic tool for narcissistic personality disorder, a serious psychiatric condition; it is simply a rough gauge of self-confidence, vanity, and self-importance, traits everyone has to some degree. And scores have gone up significantly, at least in some college samples. ‘This is particularly true in women,’ Dr. Twenge. ‘That is where we see the most dramatic increases.’”

Could it be that the overall increase in “narcissism” shown by the data is actually a result of the advancement of feminism in American society? The Inventory doesn’t just measure narcissism–it measures confidence, and the two are lumped together. With half the population transforming into a more empowered social group, how could the composite score for a generation not increase?

Man, feel like a woman.

After Opthamologist, Drive-In for a Strawberry Malted

The urge to write curdles in me sometimes. I stare at the screen or my hands or I am biting my lip so hard my eyes water but the only movement I experience is the quiver of static. As many times as I push on my nerves, they just push back, like a self-healing polymer.

All changes are difficult: bearning into existence (words or children, I imagine, are similar to spring), reaching the limits of being (and therefore ceasing all forward motion), conversion of the foreign to the intimate (lovers not excepted), relocation of the internal organs (as from surgery or growing taller), the energy of activation (and, usually, the procurement of a catalyst).

Today’s attraction to the parenthetical comes from reading a wonderful book called Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I took it from my sister’s bookshelf on my last visit to her slope-ceilinged attic apartment. She said, “Yeah, it’s good. The narrator is very self-aware, too self-aware, like annoyingly self-aware, so a lot of people are like, ‘I don’t like it; she’s too young to be like that,’ but I’m like, ‘Yeah, she’s just like my sister.’” It made me read the book, anyway. And I love the book. But beyond its being a novel, I must now read it as a review of my sister’s critical analysis of me. Or maybe that would only lead to what I already know, which is that in family, there is much blindness and many treacherous slopes.

Enjoy the typing sounds.

Grandfathers and Golf Carts

A pair of cardinals lives near this house. Sometimes they drop onto the feeder. Sometimes they clutch the telephone wires. Their red feathers are such a bright spot in all the brown and green of the Possum Creek environs.

A place named Soddy-Daisy should be from a Faulkner novel, maybe. But I’ve had a pedicure here, and every day I go swimming in the lake. Sometimes, a lightning bug flashes past my window at night, and I make a wish. Other times, our mostly blind neighbor waters his grass just before nightfall and all the lightning bugs go into a tizzy, flashing and flashing like a Pretty Lights concert.

If I had grown up here, I think I would have believed in fairies.

There is a red spider on my screen. The other day, my aunt and I saw a baby beaver trying to cross the highway. The value of a truck on a country road is that it is bigger than the car with which it will inevitably collide, head-on.

The loneliness of old age is primarily self-imposed. Or maybe it isn’t loneliness at all. Maybe we just get tired of making conversation because, after many years, we realize that no matter how great our passions have been, the world really doesn’t change. Or no matter how much the world changes, there is still only one way to go about being, so what’s the use in chatter.

Our needs are finite. Meeting them is inherently dissatisfying. To be human is to suffer, and wouldn’t we just be so bored if it were any other way?

Run with the dogs awhile.

Hooves

Patti Smith has been in the media a lot these days, which makes the pleasure of my meeting her last fall even greater. She’s going to be a speaker at Pratt’s graduation this year, along with Johnathan Letham, so it’s writers for the win.

The other day, a friend of a friend of mine tossed out this Flaubert quote over pints (for the boys, that is… a Bordeaux for me) at the extraordinarily warm-lit Brooklyn Public House: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

[Side bar: Relating to today's earlier post on math, Flaubert also said, "All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry."]

But getting on back to Patti Smith, she told this to Interview Magazine:

If you attach anything harmful to the creative process, you have to do that. If you learn nothing else from me, this is a really important lesson. I’ve seen a lot of people go down because they attach a substance to their creative process. A lot of it is purely habitual. They don’t need it, but they think they do, so it becomes entrenched. Like, I can’t go without my coffee. I can go without drinking it, but I can’t go without it nearby. It’s the feeling of how cool I feel with my coffee. Because I don’t feel cool with this tea. [Bollen laughs] You know, there are pictures of me with cigarettes in the ’70s, and everybody thought I smoked. I can’t smoke because I had TB when I was a kid. But I loved the look of smoking—like Bette Davis and Jeanne Moreau. So I would have cigarettes and just light ’em and take a couple puffs, but mostly hold them. Some people said that was hypocritical. But in my world, it wasn’t hypocritical at all. I wasn’t interested in actually smoking them. I just liked holding them to look cool. All right, was it a bad image to show people? I’m happy to let people know I wasn’t really smoking.

There it is, kiddos, badassery is in the eye of the beholder. We don’t have to self-mutilate, cutting the beauty out of ourselves to insert into our art. You can be healthy and creative all at the same time–and probably have a better career for it.

Don’t die the poet’s death.

Now is When I Get to Wear My Pretty Summer Dresses Again

I have been thinking about math a lot lately. I told my acaemic advisor that I should probably take another math class before I am dumped into the real world, just to brush up on my skills. Since I don’t need any more math credits to graduate, he recommended an ambiguous artist-friendly elective called Math and the Imagination, which sounds titillating but came with an incredibly sophomoric course description. I declined his advisement and signed up for Alchemy instead. But today, I stumbled across this delightful post on a Times opinion blog that made me remember why I wanted to take another math class: I like math; I think it’s neat-o. The end of the article really taps into my poet-girl obsession with quantification:

Snell’s law describes how light rays bend when they pass from air into water, as they do when shining into a swimming pool.   Light moves more slowly in water, much like the hiker in the snow, and it bends accordingly to minimize its travel time.  Similarly, light also bends when it travels from air into glass or plastic as it refracts through your eyeglass lenses.

The eerie point is that light behaves as if it were considering all possible paths and automatically taking the best one.   Nature — cue the theme from “The Twilight Zone” — somehow knows calculus.

This is the kind of OpEd I can get behind. Rather than try to enroll in an architecture class about the mathematics of concrete, I am going to dig out my old calc books and get the ball rolling again on the physics portion of my MCAD studies. Whether I want to go to grad school or not, I have to say that I just enjoy learning. The great thing about practicing math is that it is soothingly rhythmic. Like making lists of words with similar sounds or collecting geodes, it appeals the obsessive inwardness of excercising one’s own brain.

I hope everyone has been watching Life on the Discovery Channel. It’s a great throwback to the days when Discovery actually showed really fascinating animal documentaries and elevated ecology and biology to everyday cool. Shark week, anyone? These days, it’s all Ice Road Truckers or whatever, and the up-close shots of flies’ eyes have been forgotten. I miss the microcosmic focus of the good old Discovery. We used to be able to put on the poisonous snake shows to scare my dad, but not anymore. It’s only cool to watch king crab boats at work once or twice, but snake bites just never get old. If only Steve Irwin hadn’t had to go and get himself killed like that (poor guy), I would watch a lot more educational TV

Eat ice cream cones with friends. Add sprinkles if you want.

Swiffer Sweeper

I just smushed a giant maroon roach on the wall of my floor lounge with my Swiffer Wet. It is really the perfect roach-killing tool. You can squash, disinfect, and contain the carcass all with one easy motion.

In other news, my political-science loving friend tells me he believes that World War III is about to begin. Apparently today’s bombing was the final sign in a series of undeniable forewarnings. I don’t know whether I can hook onto that logic-caboose or not, but I certainly do see some signs of impending doom. For example: a 2,400 page long health care bill, the benefits of which not even hospital administrators understand; Republicans going to nightclubs(oh, yeah, and expensing the trips); and these various other problem areas of great hilarity.

What else is new? It seems like everyone has forgotten about Haiti except not-for-profit advertisers on Hulu. Chile never even made it into the news. Netflix, with its vast queer library, is definitely the number one advocate for queer culture space. Date rape is beyond college students’ comprehension. Esquire actually published some interesting sex-survey results that don’t seem to slut-shame or hyper-virginize women. Google is duking it out with China, which means that soon, everyone in the world will either be Chinese (Go, population growth!) or Googlese (Go, total disregard for privacy!). [Editor's note: It seems to me that cultural revolution will always beat the Cultural Revolution, if you know what I mean.]

Okay, that’s enough for my late-night style news review. I am now listening to Bobbie Gentry and wondering when I’ll get to wear my pretty summer dresses again.

Imagine an infinite summer.