the story of the magic show

last night, my very dream came true and pontiac and i went to the magic show.

a lot of beautiful things happened there. the man above was the host. he was pretending to be david copperfield in this picture.

this woman was so pretty and flexible.

 

this is *sabastian. his patter included rubber bands and information about houdini.

and then this magician came along and changed my life. here he is telling us how he feels connected to someone in the audience. but who?

it turns out it was me! i couldn't believe it.

we were so connected he knew everything happening inside my head!

he said if i concentrated really hard, i would be able to move this marker. i had already investigated it to assure the audience that it had no hidden problems. i even drew and x on my hand with it. everything about the marker was regular. and then i moved it with my thoughts and the energy in my hand! he also took my arm and showed it to the audience and then i had to close my eyes and count how many times he touched my arm. so i did. and then he asked me and i said three and the audience lost their breath together. pontiac says he didn't touch my arm at all.

the last thing he made me do was inspect a ring he handed to me. when he did this, i could see a string coming from his mouth, so i knew a trick would happen. and then he spun the ring in the air and even though i knew a string was around it, he still did all of this stuff that would be impossible even with the string! and then he made it land on my finger! i was amazed.

*story about the lemon and the magic show

in the beginning of the magic show, before it started, sabastian was walking around telling us cool things and showing us his rubber bands and i told him about the lemon. i said, do you think any lemons will disappear tonight, and he said no, why, and i said, i brought a lemon along in case one disappears and then i can find it in my pocket and everyone will be amazed that it got to me because no magician was ever even near me--it will be astounding. i think this lemon is the reason i got to have a part in the magic show because sabastian knew how terribly i wanted to be a magician. the only trick i know is about the police and some farm animals but i couldn't remember it and so i couldn't show him and then i felt like a horrible magician.

the end.

summer was warmer

 

 

 

the molebone tree

green mountain falls

we helped rob move his things into a mountain apartment. it was so cold my digits began to hurt whenever i was outside. this is where he is living.

a little place called green mountain falls, 10 miles or so outside of colorado springs, population 773 in 2000.

above is the lake. it has a gazebo. you can ice skate here! and below is a tiny restaurant area.

this is the restaurant rob lives above.

it has a big fireplace. a woman said it was the second biggest in colorado . . .

 

it also has a bar that isn't in use and a lot of animals by the ceiling

 

i don't know what happened to its eye

here is one of rob's bicycles. and here is a picture of the stairs we had to climb to bring his things inside

here is a picture of when matthew went on the roof. it was snowing.

and then i started taking pictures of a broken television we found inside

 

 

 

laura jensen

i found out recently that laura jensen has a blog (thank you, ts!).

she counted birds on thanksgiving.

here is a poem that i love by her:

the poorsoul

the poorsoul steps from its habitat of leaves,
and it must be singing a song. without the song
you would only walk away, chanting onlies
to only the wind, only little sighs by the water,
only your neighbor.
soon you will be leading every traveler
to the right saloon.
the poorsoul steps ffrom its habitat of leaves,
and there must be snow. without the snow
you would say, "there, i thought it was
something living, and it has no shoes."
there must be summer, when the nights in gloves
wrap days around the feet of the poorsoul.
there must be a song, and snow in summer.
we would never stand there long in the cold.

my week with d

i've been hanging out with d'count all week

in the whole universe of dogs, he is the best dog that ever existed. we visited with friends:

and had an america's next top model finale party:

his favorite girl is on the left. this is what he looks like at the party:

his is watching so intensely, but his favorite girl loses. he was totally devastated. and so was she.

and then we visited the dog park so he could be happy again.

we finished up the week by eating a big dinner with friends and at the end of the night, he joined the food finder's network:

 

here are the first notes i was making about his life when i thought he would have his own blog, but i guess he wasn't that into it:

here is some information about d'count's (aka count chocula) first day:

he woke up.

we played a game called mole getter blues. basically, i throw an animal (maybe a hedge hog, but i call it a mole) and he retrieves it. then he gets the mole getter blues.

he ate some.

he had some sex in him that needed to get out, so he tried having it with the air. but it didn't work. and then we went for a walk. and then he went to his house for some alone time.
  

In the middle of the night, while asleep, he fell off the bed and I woke up and helped him back up.

And the second day:

Today has been less adventurous. He got invited for a date to see wolf 3 at arda’s, but we were making chili and he said he would have to have this date on a different night.

He slept at his house for a while and I finished up with Nietzsche.

And then we walked and he smelled a lot of things.

Now he has been eating a long bone.


all in all it was the best week ever. d'count makes me so happy. and my heart feels in a million pieces because he's going home today.

and here is the best song for the week. oh, it's the one called animals. i have loved this song all along and i just found out roger plays guitar on it!

snow

it's snowing here. i guess that means i should waste the entire night on the computer watching mannequin and bangles videos on youtube.


i love the song so much, but some of the scenes make me uncomfortable.

last night i saw tomaz salamun read.

my instructions would be for you, if you have 37 minutes, to go into a dark room, or a room with only a little light and play this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQkh0VQaUKo

mind vs. mind

there is only a week of school left. i have to make a chapbook and finish a story and then i will be done. for break we were going to go to florida to visit rob, m's bf, but now rob got a job in the mountains around ft. collins, so he's coming here instead. this is good for m, but sad for me. i think pontiac and i will have to devise a different plan. last night she said we could go to russia. i hope we go somehwere by the ocean.

i just listened to this (dr. warren brown on the brain science podcast) the other night.

it talks about how we get stuck in the idea that the mind is a noun, and how really we don't have A mind, and how we lapse back into a mind/body dualism that is problematic. my favorite part is when he says, first we act and then we get feedback, and that the only way we know anything is by actively interacting with the world. if the brain is separated from the world, there can be no intelligence. information is dependent upon our interaction with the world.

it seems like what he was saying is that our world view, which was specialized and reduced to the smallest parts (all causes can be understood by something smaller: physics), is now becoming more holistic and we are considering the entire oranization of the parts to help us emerge. emergence became the focus of the talk--emergence as a natural process.

on to the imagination! a few days ago i read downstream from trout fishing in america, keith abbot's memoir of richard brautigan. i had read some of the chapters before in magazines and online, but put together as it now is! it's incredibly informative. he knew rb for almost 20 years and this books takes a chronological approach to that friendship. there are certain times when i don't feel like trusting abbot just because what he says is sad, and the book does have a tendency, at times, to present the material in a way that makes me feel like he has an agenda. but overall, it's an amazing portrait of rb. and instead of ending the book with the end of brautigan's life, abbot devotes the last part to a thorough criticism of rb's work.

he ends the book like this:

"the curse and the blessing of the imagination is that the mind (noun) wants to create an autonomous object, yet it can't prevent itself from imagining that object's eventual disintegration  and it can't fail to understand that by giving birth to something, that something's death is assured. brautigan's tragedy, which he enacted in book after book and eventually in his own life, was that he defined everything, including himself, in terms of an ahistorical imagination. brutigan wanted to round up life in one mercurial, moving, magic vision, but he recognized that he could produce only books--and he called those 'paper phantoms.' 

saying goodbye to blanchot

for the last blanchot tutorial i'm going to present on this:

"the water in which narcissus sees what he shouldn't is not a mirror, capable of producing a distinct and definite image. what he sees is the invisible in the visible--in the picture the undepicted, the unstable unknown of a representation without presence, which reflects no model.

i decided to do a photo shoot and make a movie for my presentation, so i got out the animals.

 

shoot

i forgot about this:

my new house will have a tree growing through it. kind of. this is more the house attached to my new house.

and i went to a place today where i bought christmas presents: ugandan jewelry made of paper! and a nice bag.

dikeou

last night jen, eric, and arda read at the dikeou. the reading was the best. everyone should buy all of their books. right now. i'm really so serious. they are all the best books that you should read if you haven't. here are some pictures from it. i made a few movies of poems being read as the rabbits deflated but i don't know how to add movies to this.

the last picture is from tamara on halloween. she is a woman in a window!