Bookish

I'm still slowly coming out of a very intense space where i'm obsessed with words but barely able to string a verbal sentence together.

after hibernating at Debbie's for 3 days - i've spent a frantic 3 hours catching up on email. Barely moving, typing frantically in front of a computer screen - very like the way I've been since saturday.

I've realised that it takes me at least a day to arrive into the zone where I can write - and let the words flow. I'm realising that i can't be fordist about my writing - that I spend stupid amounts of time sitting and staring and then stupid amounts of time at stupid times just typing tapping frantically.

Over the last few days I've remembered to eat a coherent breakfast of porridge and fruit - but after that I get a bit vague - tending to wnader into the kithcen at odd hours wolfing down whatever I coud find - or munching vaguely on chocolate coated coffee beans.

It's an insane way to work - but it gets the job done - strange strange space of creativity.

Sometimes - actually most of the time, the tome feels like the hardest thing i've ever done. I feel my brain and body at their absolute limits - pushing, pushing pushing shit uphill. trying to synthesize so much infomration, anecdotes whatever.

I've found with the interviews - that I have to listen and relisten and let them enter into my own thoughts before I cna include them in my writing. It's a painfully slow process. I'm still working on some of the stuff i transcribed 12 months ago.

i'm still working on a lot of the stuff I read 12 months ago. Last year was a fucking cataclysm.

i'm been moderately gloomy - coming up to the aniversary of the end of my marriage. I spent Valentines day with diarrhooeah (charming detail!) and feeling sad.

the surprise present from the consort added more confusion to the layers - especially as he admitted that he'd started seeing someone -a euphemism for sleeping with them I guess.

Part of me is desperately miserable. I sobbed myself to sleep and spent a day sobbing silently striding through snow and sunlight in central park. I found it strangely life affirming - and remembered my siilar snow bound stides across white streets of Tampere last year....

as I felt
her love
slipping
away

sometimes the present is so ghastly all I can do is try to keep moving - like a mad mouse on a treadmill - hoping that the force of my momentum will move time forwards and move me away from the present.

but this is not how writing gets done.

writing involves slow, unbearable stillness. Solid stoic fixity. an immersion in my body and a very strange detachment from it. I sense my body so much, I can smell my sebum, feel the grease ooze from ever pore. every fart, every muscle, every splash of piss - it's an intensely visceral experience.

Lautreamant obviously did a lot of writing. His crazy bit in the chant du maldoror (regular readers of my bodies art and stuff blog - will know the reference) evokes so much the intese abjection of the writing body.
still
surpassing
time

but hell! this blog is meant to be about my fun filled whirl of an exciting life in the big apple eh!

so what bits from the big apple can I offer you this week?

the bum destroying Davis's version of Caravan on a battered trumpet in the subway?

the simulated autumnal perfection of the R train at 49th Street? the R-train carriage is pure '70's uber brown - formica wood-swirled panels, orange and yellow seats, and 49th street is all red tiles.....

Or last weeks madness - an 8 hour 'theatrical' drawing marathon in some theatre in NOHO. It was the only place in New york without central heating and there were naked models, standing around for half an hour at a time. I lent my puffy parka to one to use as a robe.
that was the bad bit. the good bits included lots of fake blood, gorilla outfits and furry caveman outfits, homocidal housewives and lots of silliness. I was glad i borught my colours.

I aquired a crumpler bag for my laptop (it just fits) by agreeing to join the cave-people for a 15 minute pose. All i had to do was weild a baseball bat - pretending to belt one of them in the arse.

It was stange how my body autmatically wnet into a contraposto rotating pose: feet in one direction, legs twisting so my torso headed to another direction and me head turned in another. Strange how In a freezing basement theatre in new york, i counted the same breathes as for a 15 minute pose as a freezing classroom in sydney. Even after 3 years. two hundred and ten breaths.

I took it as an opportunity to d some research - find out about the posers and the organisers - i guess it could be participant observation - but I'm not sure if any uni ethics committee would accept it.

speaking of uni'ss I was mired in my slavish insecurity on saturday, which was no day to be swanning around in the Hilton Hotel. I didn't have any scerrick of pastel pink and thought of Paris and felt regretful.

I went to the Feminist Art Project seminar for the College Art Association conference. Initially I'd had vague dreams of swanning around with little business cards, networking and sussing out a post-doc. But - I have days where everything is too much. i can barely meet people in the eye - let alone run my own marketting campaign. sometimes I wish I was doing a PhD in mathematics so I'd have an excuse to act like I had aspergers......

some of the talks were OK, some were good, some were tedious, a couple were brilliant. surrounded by affluent successful earnest bookish women - I felt not unlike Jean Louise Barrault in Les Enfants Du Paradise - the bit at the end when he's running around a sea of clowns - and it was a bit scary... is this what I am? what I want to be?

Of course I wear less black and less designer clothing that feminist art historians. I wear bright colours and take my clothes off with people dressed in gorilla suits. I felt extremely uncomfortable in the Hilton hotel and tend to feel awkward and yuckky wherever I see the dead animal brigade (those freaky perfumed women clad in carcase skins - I'm not an animal libber - but I find fur coats... ABJECT). I feel more in common wiht the strethced out stithced up pelts than the freaky beings wihtin them.

maybe i've been working too hard