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1. Rousseau’s Confessions / The Charterhouse of Parma / Journal of a Plague Year/ Borges’ Ficciones / The Apple in the Dark / Mary Shelley’s The Last Man /  The Education of Henry Adams / The Professional Thief by a Professional Thief /  The sorrows of Young Werther/ Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book / Jacob Van Gunten / Infancy and History.  

2. Answer WHAT IS COURAGE?  or Rousseau, upon the site of the deliriously beautiful aquaduct: “Why was I not born a Roman?” explain this, also how the air is at once cool and warm, how it is to have never felt like your heart broken in the romantic sort of way and what this could mean for developing empathy.  “Life is real life is earnest love or fascination is my middle name” says Bernadette.

3. Various diseases with which I should be diagnosed:  sinusitis, lack of competitive spirit, a lot of lecturing really and waking up in the middle of the night to say something cruel,the interior lives of near strangers, wanting to consume myself via long artistic processes as I once wanted to be consumed by love, speakable gratitude:

thank you,
also a detailed list of refusals:  public, personal, professional, romantic, material, artistic.

3. There is no use of leveling critiques
unless one is enacting her own,

POSITIVE PROJECTS: Anything with instructions.  Silhouettes of hair made via calico appliques. Dolce and Gabbana carved pumpkins. A list of questions:  WHAT IS WRITTEN BY THE DAPPLING OF SUNLIGHT?  WHY DO KITTENS NAMED MOSES ALSO HIDE IN BASKETS?  How is that you have come to reject narrative?  

4.THESE ARE CLOTHES THAT DO NOT CHANGE: the sailor collar, the sailor dress, the sailor jacket, the sailor pants, the sailor stripes.  Crest punk.  The years of affection for the glittery, gold brocade, black velvet, plum silk.  Childhood’s plum velvet knickers and plum velvet vest.  My brother’s little army jacket, me in my brother’s little army jacket, holding up Parallel Lines. Annie Hall ties, fedoras, trench coats, vintage girlscout dresses, doc marten’s from london, a black wool german army jacket, an old man’s black plastic glasses.   Spandex, later, and babydoll dresses, high boots, hot pants, wet-n-wild lipstick, band tees, mustard fifties sweater with suede insets.  Rose scented perfume, velvet bathrobes, silk things a lot, willful brew of luxury androgyny trash and accident.    Undying love of little white socks folded at the ankle and mary janes.  Undying love of fur coats.  Undying love of bobs and of bangs. Undying love of rhinestones.  Red and black flannel, brooches with bent needles.

*

Leevi Lehto:

A poets voice, or office, today, may be seen as one gesturing toward a Utopian communality (beyond understanding) - a new kind of communality grounded on the misunderstandings and actual failures to communicate that, under so much talk about the opposite, go on determining the exchange between peoples, languages and cultures. A voice of dissonance, and of constant surprise, of the actual joy of misunderstanding, but at the same time, in a classical vein, necessarily elegiac.

BLOGPOST

then we did it for love

I hadn’t been invited to speak and don’t know how I got there.  I was like "now imagine that every seven years one tang drinker gets to sip on the orange juice. Imagine being the one who is always being promised the orange juice. Imagine, sometimes, they even let you pour them their juice."

I think I’d been told that certain people were forbidden to speak, maybe, so I cried a little at the exclusion of the 4ever-excluded class, and then said that if they thought for a second that labor wasn’t about this labor they were wrong, wrong, this was a majority's future, and many people's present, so much work and so few jobs not just for drinkers of orange liquids but all of us -- this was a “provocative model” and “highly efficient de-professionalization” -- and I realized even then I couldn’t keep talking about tang but couldn’t stop. It was a graceless dream, and afterwards I woke up and wondered if I had been reading from notes.  


How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (Cultural Front)

Everyone always just said solidarity, and I am pretty sure I didn't even have the right to have that dream.

*

Should be Gauguin, Proust, Woody Guthrie, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley. Everything should be linked to Stendhal.  Also to Paul Klee.  I’m recovering my source texts & some of my memory.  It’s also all the figurative language you have to deny yourself in order to get on in the contemporary / those old fashion affections coming out all at once in the forbidden-to-you-by-you work.

 

There are these conversations about how only the lyric is acceptable but also how the lyric is unacceptable, how only trauma is acceptable but how trauma is also unacceptable.  I have never even thought of anything as trauma, perhaps because that word seems to be used by a kind of despised class to indicate the disappointment they feel that they are not able to have exactly everything that they want.  I don’t even want what I want.  What delicious possibility is inherent in the world of those who do not have the everything of the few?  Who do not have to make one false choice, then the next, traumatized always by the stakes of mere taste, by the terror of an incorrect move among the serious, spectacular minutiae?

loyal wroughtness

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ANNOUNCEMENT

I once read Stephanie Young's Picture Palace & immediately made a small book about militant dysphoria, flarf, an idea of dj/rupture 's, chocolate cake, geese, objects, money, midwestern apartment buildings, self-indulgent (or political) despair, motherhood, work, the poets (probably you), the perpetual sickness that comes from rubbing up against things, Charlemagne and the German girl, etc. It kept me busy for several days.  I thought it was a memoir until I thought memoirs were only written by property owners.  At first it wasn't anything, ever, but now it is this.

*

The way to imagine it is like a diary also like those little stories Lydia Davis writes also like a record of the way time passes also like something to do until I settle down.

/

I wonder what a difference it is when things are not collected up into books?

*

One of the inventors of the sewing machine didn’t patent it because of the human cost.  Always I think of Emma Goldman with her sewing machine, or Emma Goldman her first night in jail “at least bring me some sewing.”  Wikipedia says the sewing machine reduced average garment construction time from 14 hours to two hours.  Somewhere on a sewing blog someone said “use every part of the garment” and “each garment holds in it hours of a garment worker’s life.” Whenever I sew I feel that connection to the garment worker who is also right now sewing just as when I used to write poetry each time I wrote felt also that thing -- culture -- tendrilling out in me, but I would argue it is more meaningful to sew a dress than to write a poem.  I am not to be heard shouting out in frustration, however, when writing.  It’s just not as hard. So I make anywhere from 10 to 15 dollars an hour at any of my three jobs.  A garment from Target or 4ever 21 costs 10 to 30 dollars.  A garment from a thrift store costs somewhere between four and 10 dollars.  A garment at a garage sale costs one  to five dollars.  A garment from a department store costs 30 to 500 dollars.  All of these have been made, for the most part, from hours of women’s lives.  Now I give my hours up to the garments.  My costs are ridiculously low:  $2 fabric (sometimes sheets and blankets) from Goodwill, patterns bought for 99 cents or less, notions found at estate sales for almost nothing, one or three dollars.  I almost save money like this. The fabric still also contains the hours of the lives of farmers and shepherds and chemists and factory workers and truckers and salespeople and the first buyers.  Sewing is difficult.  There is a reason girls were trained in it from toddler-hood onward, years and years spent at practice, and still -- even then -- might not have been good.  Sometimes when you look at smoothly joining two different sized pieces of curving material you think that there is no way ever this could happen, yet sometimes it does.

*

This remind me of the person who temporarily pushes away her steak dinner in order to urge others to forever stop eating meat.


/


But even heroic refusals often aren't that heroic, or some more heroic than others.

*

Reached for Kafka’s diaries but pulled out a field guide to birds.  That embarrassed me, was a "poetic" accident, the sort of thing I don't want to see in movies.


Put the field guide back and took out Kafka’s diaries.  Love the part about using one hand to wave the despair away from one’s face and the other hand to write a record of the world, though don’t really feel any disproportionate despair.  It is more like using one hand to wave the world away from one's face and the other to write a record of the world. Wish Kafka had been more interested in clothes. Do share with him the desire for a trade.  This seems to be common in many writers’ journals:  if only I did something real someday.

*

It really feels better as a renunciate, not of everything in the world, but of one thing, this. Renunciation would be even better if you could talk about it.  Recently you spoke to the master tradesman who is bored with his trade.  “But you are so lucky to have that!” you say, wishing you understood electricity. Your friend has a great job at a factory, always chasing after the record of how much assembled when.

*

Suddenly I am interested in writing again but only if it is a test of grace/cunning/fortitude.

*

Removal of anything is exhausting.  The body just doesn’t want to let go.  I was awake, and I was not sufficiently deadened, and it was brutal, or more brutal than anyone could have known beforehand, but the stubborn way that my body clung to the bit of itself made me proud, as if I had a sort of epic tenacity, and was brilliant at keeping parts of myself to myself, so much that I had fused that which was not meant to be fused

One really wonders how it is surgeons got that way.

The problem is after when one just replays the event, also the recovery, and all the work from all the jobs piling up, none of it caring whether or not one is up off the ground.

*

None of this represents anything occurring in “real time.”  It is an illusion of “real time.” It is an “unreal time.”  It is an aleatory exercise which requires no exercise at all.   

*

Idleness depresses me.  Also not fond of intoxication.  This makes convalescence almost impossible.   I envy the idle, how good they are at sitting around.  They just sit there.  They are appeased by screens or by repetitive motions which play out on screens. They like the nothing of doing nothing.  They are often spectacular at doing just enough and spending the rest of the time on nothing.   They look comfortable doing this.  They look good without moving. They are reptilian.  They know how to stay still. Doing nothing does not cause them to sink into an abyss, or if they are in an abyss, they are cool there, as it requires nothing from them.

*

The greatest disappointment has been NO INVISIBILITY CLOAK.

*

I’m okay with subjectivity.  It’s silky wovens that mess me up.  I put everything back in its place, thinking I ought to be sewing less and writing more.  Everyday I have a list called “Everyday.”

*

It's boring if you don't like to stare at broken things. 

It would have been easier had those toes not been eaten by sharks.
Of course that left me with what to do with myself, having fully absorbed the rituals and values and syntax, like a person who leaves her family but cannot leave her family even after she has left.

*

I hope that soon this will be about books, but right now, it is about sewing.  Got better.  Set in sleeves.  Perfected the skirt.  Have made one bright blue cord A-line skirt, one brown twill narrow skirt, one blue narrow skirt (no yoke), one brown linen top with dolman sleeves and three mother of pearl buttons, one brown twill top with a black yoke, one black wrap top from a vintage pattern. Learned the key to everything was not the time spent on the machine but the time spent with a needle in hand. The plan -- perhaps naive -- is to sew everything.  Or rather, to spend a year learning to sew well, after twenty years of sewing badly, and then sew everything.  I will always wear what I sew, even when it is not so nearly good as what I didn’t sew.  This is called “Slow Clothes.”  I can’t believe the logic behind it. There is only the pleasure of having made things.

Yesterday decided against the American Pattern Companies.  Many people hate the American Pattern Companies.  The American Pattern Companies have some awful thoughts about the women who sew.  They take awful pictures of awful models in awful poses wearing awful clothes. One can imagine terrible things about a life spent wearing these clothes. One must look at the technical drawings and do a lot of imagining.  One must stare and imagine a lot.  Hazel can’t do it.  She looks at the photos provided by the American Pattern Companies and says no thank you.  She has the best style, bought a little lime green vintage 40’s jacket with country western details and glamorous buttons and wears this with her bob and a brown plaid scarf.  The hairdresser told her, “I can tell you are not a normal ten year old,” though of course she is.

Vintage patterns work the opposite way:  the illustrations are so lovely that one can only imagined oneself so glamorous, wasp-waisted, etc.  I have many of these patterns, but none in the right size, always too big or too small. The clothes aren’t always as good as the illustrations of women wearing the clothes. I suspect the Japanese pattern books are the same.  Many times these are just basic shapes, but the women wearing the shapes are so lovely that one wants to sew the shapes only to be that lovely.  Sometimes I read a French Bulletin Board devoted entirely to sewing Japanese clothes, and I think “Oh French women, why must you want to dress Japanese?”   It’s like how I am always looking lovingly at Marie Claire Idees, as if it is okay to make doily crafts if these aren’t American.

My thoughts were that the American pattern companies are awful, and the Japanese books are for tiny women who look excellent wearing architecture but not for me, and so my only hope is with the Europeans.  I’m waiting for my first copy of the famous trans-European pattern magazine.  Goodbye, American Pattern Companies!  The next time you see will be dressed more like this.

*

Assuming my passion for collecting sewing patterns is a little like my love for blank calendars.  In this same vein: course descriptions.   Everything is always possibility, like falling in love. Ordered a thousand different desk copies for Western Thought. I want to read everything, to know everything, to describe in detail the perambulations of the philosophers of Athens or the cooked Roman sow with live birds sewn into her belly. A student said "I am here because art is the best way of knowing, and I want to know everything." I like to practice sentence writing, but that’s it. All those other kinds of writing cause trouble, for real.

*

It’s really not better to imitate ready-to-wear.  People who don’t sew don’t know this.  Hazel brings me some knitwear: but can you do that? She’s pointing to a double-stitched finishing.  Yeah, I say, I have double needle, but that doesn’t mean I want to use it, not now. There’s also that problem of people who think things are always better if done by machine. I mean, so did I, so guilty, really, thinking badly of hand-picked zippers.  I realize the absurdity of this amateur study of garment making.  I had to write something, so I wrote this. It’s okay, finally. I could spend a year learning to do well what I have spent twenty years doing badly, and after that year, I could still be bad at what I do.

*

There’s a lot of sleepless nights over seam finishes.  In the heat of things, one does things simply, crudely, mowing down the right-side-together 5/8s thingy, eager to see what is flat turn into what has shape.  Then regret -- with a little planning, that could have been a french seam, or something better, exotic or sturdy or spectacularly imitative of ready-to-wear.   The sewing book says the quality of one’s seam is really the measure of one’s character.  You hear that repeated a lot. That’s bad news. I think of some future for the garment, inspected in the thrift store at which it will someday, for some reason, rest:  this was not a lovely, attentive sewist, the future shopper thinks, and wrinkles her nose or whatever, shrugs.  It’s me always praying no one will ever look at the inside of my navy blue skirt.  To never leave evidence of excitement (someday, soon, finally).