How do they manage to get along? 

How long is this going to take? 

Is this a pattern or did I imagine this? 

Achy Desire, 2008

I was poking around the files for shows coming up in the next year at work and found Dahlia Elsayed. Which I was happy about. She says on her website: 

Writing and painting have always been close processes for me… The work has developed from book art to work on paper to large-scale installation paintings, that use image and text to create detailed, visual narratives of locations and experience.  

The work draws on my surroundings, informed by autobiography and environment, creating contemporary cartographies of memory, place and dislocation. Part data-tracking, part topography, these conceptual maps examine the aesthetic surfaces and ephemeral cultural markers of recent immigrant populations, of which I am a product. 

You can see more here: http://www.dahliaelsayed.com.

I really like organizations/people/books/work/ activity that are many things at once. That’s why I like artists books, that they simultaneously touch on visual art/writing/language/performance/sculpture/illustration/sound/time/etc…. Being able to enjoy something in different ways depending on your interest, appealing to different kinds of audiences at once-I like the tendency (or at least the desire) to bring different kinds of groups of people together in that way. (The study of artists books, well, that’s something else entirely, which seems to have a talent for breaking things into tidy groups and cliques and well-defined activities. But that’s besides the point.) 

There’s a show on where I work right now about historical and contemporary artist collectives who publish books, in various ways and in various places, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how these organizations have made a way in the world. These groups publish as part of so many different activities (educational, activist, literary), some of them as part of artist co-op workshops, some not, that it makes you focus of the book as a set of possibilities, as a starting point to work out from. I’m really interested in the ways these organizations have found so many different ways to provide a real support structure for artists, that intersects with real-world economics of, how do operate a business and produce work that you’re proud of? 

Which brings me to the Regional Assembly of Text, which is a small business, and a store, and a publishing concern, and an art project all rolled into one. On their site they define themselves as a little stationary and gift store, which seems a little on the modest side to me. 

I like the populist approach to the artist book, that it’s about things that people like to read. I like the well-designed storefront and retro office supply aesthetic. I like they have a storefront and a gallery, because in the end both are storefronts anyway. Most of all I like that it’s an activity first and foremost, which manifests itself in a variety of ways, in an accessible form of language.  

I love this, which you can purchase here for a mere $6. I’m always looking for ways to increase my level of accomplishment. It’s the overachiever in me.

The exhibition Artist’s Books as (Sub)Culture is up until March 28th in New York, you can see some photos from the show here.

I’m within twenty pages of finishing Infinite Jest, and I’m dragging it out as long as possible. It’s like trying to avoid being dumped. I’ve spent months with this book, I’m invested. It doesn’t help that he’s saved the really sad, gross addiction stories for last. I’m sort of at a loss as far as what to do next.

It’s the kind of book smarty-pants like for its creation of new forms of reading; and it does that, it’s true. I like the footnotes, I like the back and forth, the fact that you need two bookmarks, the pyrotechnics involved in writing a thousand plus page novel with no ending and hundreds of digressions. But that isn’t why people like it, or why they bother with it, it’s because it’s an enormously compassionate, funny, enjoyable book, with characters that feel like family. And the pyrotechnics make sense if you think that only an addictive, obsessive personality would write a thousand page novel about addictions and obsessions with hundreds of footnotes. It’s not driven by theory, it embodies them in the midst of telling a story. Which I like.

I saw Silent Light this week, where I learned that some people move too slow even for me. Adulterous Mennonites have huge pores, as I know having spent long, agonizing moments contemplating them. It’s possible to linger over everything for longer than you thought possible, which is an idea I like better in retrospect than I did in the theater. It’s a beautiful movie, but uncomfortable, because everything becomes super amplified. 

I finally faced facts today and bought snow boots for the first time in my life. Snow is wet, I’ve determined, and ice is slippery, and because this is true I now have footwear adequate for coping with this reality. Why does it take me so very long to come to grips with very basic ideas? I do not know. 

In a burst of New Year idealism, I have decided to organize my collection of index cards. Jasper helped. 

I’ve spent the week thinking about what I can control and what I can’t, and what a great relief it is to not to have to control absolutely everything. 

I remembered on the train today that once upon a time I had an enormous list of rules for every contingency. A literal list! 

I mean, I was kidding, sort of, but really! 

I think it was the nice catholic girl in me. 

I sent a copy of the list to the person who said the above to me. I don’t think she got it. 

We had a very awkward dinner a few years ago. 

I think she was under the impression that because I wasn’t married and hadn’t given birth that I was leading a much more exciting life than I actually have. 

Or that I was crazy, one or the other. Perhaps both. 

It’s uncomfortable to be in the middle of a conversation with someone and realize they’re not speaking to you, they’re speaking to a projection of the character they’ve made of you in their head. 

I’ve got most of a dummy for a book done.

This past year has been particularly good to me; I’m hoping that my luck holds for awhile. 

I dislike New Year’s as an Enforced Fun kind of holiday, but I love how people all of a sudden reevaluate their lives. People dump their partners, start regimens, people leave town, quit their jobs, resolve that the future will be different. We’re boldly moving forward, right now. I like the dramatic rise in expectations. I think it’s funny how people expect change to happen all at once, all of a sudden, in one fell swoop. How you can declare that change has already happened, without taking the time to make things different, which of course takes a lot longer than it does to make a statement or adopt some rhetoric. What does it take to live the life you want? A flood of action which leaves purposes way behind it! If you use the right language, it’s real. I used to work with someone who deliberately embraced this idea, and was convinced that if you spoke as if something were true, then it would really happen. This is either brilliant or psychotic, and I’m still not entirely sure which. 

I think it’s fascinating how talking about and around change is more seductive than making it happen. Because most things change at a glacier pace; you can work towards things, but only at the speed of dripping cold molasses. And you usually can only sort of approach change, not actually get there, like a horizon line or a mathematical limit. And we’re not used to things operating at that kind of pace.

It’s why I like learning how to do things the slow way, learning how to dig in. It’s good to learn more about how to have patience, in case you might need it.

Well, actually, not. Pretty much the opposite, really. But right now I’m interested in the elephant in the room, the story these people over here know, and those people over there do not, and how the  telling and not telling, and the planning out of who to tell and when, charges things and gives them a power.

I think that’s why when there’s something you’re not telling someone that that’s exactly the subject they will want to bring up and ask questions about. There are things that have happened right in front of me that I have not seen and registered, that I didn’t know about at the time, but once I was told specifically that there were there, then I could see them. There are things I’m really conscious of trying to describe as factually accurately as possible.

 It’s really luxurious to have two weeks stretching out in front of me, but I feel at loose ends in the presence of luxury.  The snow’s pretty, but I can’t run in the snow, and when I can’t run I get crazy. I don’t actually enjoy slumping around the house in dirty sweat socks. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the gap between what people say they are like and what they actually do. Some people like to lead with their worst foot forward, and tell you all about the worst possible impression you can take from them, while actually doing something much better than what they tell you. It’s like they’re trying to prevent you from being disappointed. It’s an odd thing to grapple with, because you’re being asked to pretend that what’s in front of you, what you can plainly see, is something other than what it is. It’s like they’re blinded to what they look like by the chatter in their head. 

Personalities are performances, it seems.

I made hazelnut truffles last night and now have a large bottle of hazelnut liqueur to grapple with. Girly drinks and dirty sweat socks seem to be in my future. Rolling chocolate balls seemed dirty and wrong. But in the best of possible ways.

I remember a time when I was always waiting for something exciting to happen. 

And then many exciting things did happen, and most of them were unpleasant, and then I wanted nothing exciting to happen. 

I sorted out the text for my book in tidy piles last night. 

And I looked up a recipe for turnips and leeks. 

I did not do this. Which may reflect poorly on me.

I’m having trouble concentrating lately. I’m looking forward to taking time off and having time to focus.

I plan on baking a whole mess of food tomorrow. Hopefully it will relax me.