Friday, August 31, 2012

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Perhaps in ten years I'll be able to look back and see why it was better to be just one of the gang. Still, it's no fun playing the piccolo in the band. It's no great shakes being the dancer over at the side of the stage, when all the best performers stand in the middle of the stage, microphone in hand. It doesn't make me beloved to have had sex with a few hot guys. It has never pleased me how slowly I read. In fact, when I think about it, nothing in my life signaled out that I'd be the one. I don't know why I thought it.

Soon we are going. Soon we'll ship off. And I won't whisper to anyone, I thought it was going to be me!
-Fron Shelia Heti's How Should a Person Be?, p 239

Sunday, August 26, 2012


Black socks/shoes for hiking and swimming

  • Edit audio bytes from rehabilitation interviews
  • Finish syllabus; xerox for first class, tomorrow
  • Write Oral History conference paper
  • Grant app
  • Back up archive
  • go to the movies


Marina Abromavic explaining her new performance art center in Hudson, NY


Badminton Gang: Thursday, 6:30 PM

Saturday, August 11, 2012


Murder Mystery

We were sharing identical eruptions of hives and acne, sharing even the same muscular ache in our lower back, like we’d become one body. I thought we’d become very close. Intimate. Then I realized we’d both been poisoned.

People were really losing their minds. I couldn't help but notice that the writers were making art and composers were staying up late at night in their rooms without sound, and artists were not making anything at all.  Instead, they were taking long walks for “inspiration,” stopping at the creek outside my window where they all seemed to be surprised, day after day, that the creek was too wide to cross. One woman spent dinnertime discussing possible strategies—barges, log-bridges, and flotillas. I suggested simple gators. But people were not in their places. They had strayed from their disciplines. I continued to write.

A writer took to hanging all the red and green apples we had on a winter-naked tree near his window. They hung from paperclips and string, like dumb mobiles and I had to trek to this area whenever I wanted a piece of fruit, dismantling the apple from its hook. I also caught this same gentleman on top of many roofs leaving large deposits of congealed food coloring that he hoped, he said, would leave the buildings with large colored icicles.

The strangest resident drove a white BMW and kept his dry cleaning in the car the entire length of our stay. This was Wyoming.