kafka talks to joseph k

last night, we went to a play at the bindery called joseph k. the set was sparse: a large metal hamster wheel and a magician's box, which, at the top, sat a chair, desk with a typewriter and kafka with large black circles under his eyes. throughout the play, kafka reassures joseph k that he loves him and admits that some of the things that are happening he didn't intend. joseph k finds himself awake and accused and the build up to the trial is cluttered with interruptions from the landlord, the slutty tenant, court officials, a musical act, and kafka, who at one point trades places with jk:

"The story plays out in necessarily inevitable and murky fashion. Everyone disappoints Joseph, including, ultimately, his own author. Joseph pleads with Kafka to save him, but Kafka wonders if his characters are ever truly in his control — a point viscerally demonstrated when Kafka's fictional lawyer seizes him and, finding him as guilty as Joseph, slices Kafka's tongue out."

the set was industrial and shadowy. the props, which included a full, and later, a fully eaten apple, were proficient. the dialogue was lustful and quick. the play was stunningly imagined, cast, and performed. and it was written by a local playwright: martin mcgovern.

mustaches and strings

i just bought this:

http://shop.marcjohns.com/collections/prints/products/mustaches-on-strings-signed-print

which makes me think of this shadowbox, seen above, i put things in a long time ago.

i don't know why hanging mustaches are so pleasurable. i guess they just are.

to: denver

these are some pictures from in front of my house. this is what it looks like in front of my house when tornado sirens go on and on.

i'm pretty sure the best thing i've read today goes like this:










i called out for you twice & a boy
with your name showed up
with all the animals from the road
at the end of the storybook.

jmw, the book of whispering in the projection booth

or, maybe it was this:

the loud stuffing of people into corners with other people
and then the beautiful special people with skin kissing
each other. why does the morning seem all draggy and alive?

jb, take it

goldie hawn

since mg is visiting, goldie hawn and kate hudson are here as well. they spend most of their time on the couch, however, goldie sleeps underneath mg's pillow in nighttime. with them here, i can't get anything done, what's more, we talk so much about them being here that that's all i think about now. mg will say, who's that? and i will say, it's stinks (what we call goldie because apparently she has a foot odor problem, or so mg tells me). when we leave the house, we have to prepare them for our departure. he sits them up right in the seat i usually sit in. when we're gone, he asks what they're doing, to which the response is varied, but usually, stinking up the house. this morning, we had a photo shoot.

some new things

i just got done putting a picture of birds (a lot of starlings) on a telephone wire into a frame that is silver.

and i finished my first year here.

and i went to see neko case.

and i was going to see leonard cohen, but the rain kept him away.

now, it's summer. z.schomburg's chapbook, the pond, came with a black and white kodak of a small girl with her arms by a window. the picture also has two women with watches in chairs looking out the same window. it's from july, 1958.

yesterday at a mall, some children were being mannequins in a shop window. when i passed, they forgot to be mannequins and smiled at me with their eyes going in a different direction.

now m is playing the new clem snide and i am watching the rain.

sometimes birds break

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qclxx4uO0ac

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http://www.marcjohns.com/blog/

bark

before abandoning hopscotch

"if you were to take a good look you would see very easily that on all sides, where you least suspect, there are images that copy all your movements."

reality = internal

+ to understand something, one must be outside of the thing being understood

= never capable of understanding reality

"we understand less and less what a fish is"

"the relationship between me and what is happening to me escapes me at this moment, but i don't deny that it is happening to me."

hopscotch

1. “Oh, you mean why all this. You’ll find out, I don’t think that either you or I is too much to blame. We’re not grown up yet, lucia. It’s a virtue, but it costs a lot. Children always end up pulling each other’s hair when they’ve finished playing. That’s the way it probably is. Think about it.” (91).
2. “hopscotch is played with a pebble you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. . . . little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares and then one day you learn how to leave earth and make th pebble climb up into heaven, the worst part is that at precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make that pebble climb up into heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you’re into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another heaven that you have to learn to reach too.” (214).
3. “and in this way duty, morals, the immoral and the amoral, justice, charity, the European and the American, day and night, wives, sweethearts, and girlfriends, the army and the bar . . . came to be like teeth and hair, something accepted and inevitably incorporated, something which was not alive or capable of being analyzed because that’s the way it is and it makes us what we are.” (80).
4. “it’s impossible to live with a puppeteer who works with shadows, a moth-tamer. Someone who spends his time making pictures out of the iridescent rings the oil makes on the seine is unacceptable.” (182).
5. “and these crises that most people think of as terrible, as absurd, I personally think they serve to show us the real absurdity, the absurdity of an ordered and calm world . . .” (164)
6. “the absurdity is that it doesn’t look like an absurdity.” (165)
7. “action can give meaning to your life” (166)
8. “the second should be read by beginning with chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter.” Table of instructions
9. “without any words I feel, I know, that I am here, . . . that’s what I call reality. Even if that’s all it is.” (160)
10. “reality is there and we’re inside of it, understanding it each in his own way” (161)
11. “the intercessors, one unreality, showing us another, like painted saints pointing towards heaven. This cannot exist, we can not really be here, I cannot be someone whose name is horacio” (12).
12. “the absurd thing is to believe that we can grasp the totality of what constitutes us in this moment or in any moment, and sense it as something coherent, something acceptable” (163).
13. “life as a commentary of something else we cannot reach, which is there within reach of the leap we will not take.” (458)
14. “and then you start talking about the search for unity, then I start to see a lot of beautiful things, but they’re all dead, pressed flowers and things like that.” (76).
15. “the catch is that nature and reality become enemies for some unknown reason, there is a time when nature sounds horribly false, when the reality of age twenty rubs elbows with that of age forty and on each elbow there is a razor-blade which slashes our jackets. I discover new worlds which are simultaneous and alien, and every time I get the feeling more and more that to agree is the worst of illusions. Why this thirst for universiality, why this struggle against time?” (93)