Tuesday, February 26
8:12 PM
just watched
sweet and lowdown and you should too.
Sunday, February 24
3:33 PM
last night's dream
the power was out when i tried to flip on my bedroom light in the middle of the night. on my bed were about thirty really big batteries that went with a flashlight, but none of them worked. then finally i found one that did, and i went outside into an endless parking lot to my car. i opened my trunk looking for my batteries, realizing that i'd had a battery class all semester that i was supposed to be going to but i had forgotten about. i was worried that someone would attack me from behind and close the trunk, but i hoped if they did, i would drop the keys in the trunk so they couldn't steal the car.
i started walking away from the car, apace with a few people nearby, whom i observed suspiciously. i also saw christian cottrell, a guy from high school. we got to an elevator that went underground, but i didn't go down it. i think i just kept wandering the parking lot.
12:09 AM
so, an ok birthday. mom and dad came up and took me to lunch, then to cosi. one of the coolest things there was this panel made up of copper tubes; every other tube was warm and the rest cold. when you put your hand on the panel, you got the sensation that your hand was burning! but it was just an illusion caused by the contrast of the warm and cold. it was the strangest thing.
there were some other cool things not recorded here. after mom and dad left i didn't really do much else. i finished
grim fandango. overall, an all right day.
Friday, February 22
11:05 PM
oh yeah, i almost got in another car accident last night when somebody coming from the opposite direction turned in front of me. not my fault this time.
5:28 AM
ah, shoot. virginia hamilton died.
Thursday, February 21
2:12 PM
il mio compleanno in due giorni.
Monday, February 18
4:24 PM
I went home for the weekend, spent some time with Mom and Dad and Kate. Saturday night Kate and I saw
Donnie Darko at the Drexel; it was sweet. (Not like sugar-sweet.) It was my kind of movie, I guess, with sci-fi and an awkward main character. Then yesterday I saw
The Man Who Wasn't There at the dollar theater (for 50 cents, since it was matinee). Also a good movie. I like how the Cohen brothers keep using some of the same actors from previous movies. Other directors do that too, and it makes it like a theater company that puts on several different plays. The girl in that movie was.. enchanting. I am in love with her.
I got Windows XP for 10 bucks with a student discount and I installed it. It's cool and it seems more stable than 98, which I had before. I am pleased.
Friday, February 15
2:59 AM
I started a new drawing today and I'm liking it so far. I'm starting to look at a little bit of typography and the history of the written word. I've always been interested in it but was too lazy to do any research before; now I think the information will be useful.
Thursday, February 14
12:49 PM
Joy sent me a valentine! and a nice letter. Having sisters is one of the coolest things.
My professor, Campbell, in the Benjamin Franklin class is inspiring in me more and more respect for him. He knows a lot and I like how he explains things. It seems like everybody's afraid to discuss anything at length in that class, probably because they all feel ignorant about philosophy compared to Campbell (at least I feel that way, so I don't say much).
This doctor Chris Giannou on Fresh Air today, he's got the most captivating voice. I love deep voices. I'm capable of speaking in a low voice, but it's not my natural inclination, unfortunately.
Wednesday, February 13
2:44 AM
I made a monotype on my big piece of plexi but it sucked, so I have to try again soon.
I need a haircut and my four-week-old beard is itchy.
I'm feeling rather useless.
Monday, February 11
2:08 AM
Almost Famous wasn't as good as I was expecting it to be. Or maybe it just gave me several reasons why being a rock star wouldn't be such a great career. (e.g., I don't like parties with a lot of people, and I don't listen to rock music because it's part of a larger rock lifestyle, I just like the music). There seemed to be some purposefully bad acting in it, like the Rolling Stone editor. It was weird to see Jay Baruchel from
Undeclared in it. His voice was higher (ha) and his hair wasn't long enough to fit in with everybody else. But I'm complaining too much. It was an all right flick.
Another David Lehman poem:
MARCH 21
The vernal equinox is to blame
for the celestial uproar, Anne
Carson said, and nothing surprises
me more than the streaks of white
sunlight in the morning with Dexter
Gordon's version of "Tangerine"
in my mind the day is a rhyme
the pencil broke, no need to shout,
I want a girl to write sonnets about
in college & love is the food
that nourishes what it consumes
in springlike days in furnished rooms
I'm hungry, please come and touch me
and I'll whisper your name the only
thing missing in this picture is you
Saturday, February 9
11:52 PM
Oh. The poem Lehman read wasn't in fact the one he wrote yesterday, because I came across it in the book. But it was yesterday's poem (February 8). "After all," he said, "today is nothing but yesterday's tomorrow" to a chuckling audience. Or something like that.
FEBRUARY 8
There are two kinds
of love songs:
"You're marvelous"
and "I'm heartbroken."
We live in the era
of the premature memoir
but I refuse to confess
or complain and when
you call I start singing
"Too Marvelous for Words"
instead of saying hello.
I'm not out of control.
I just flirt with everybody
because I love her.
The three of us
made a very disarming pair.
9:57 PM
Shannon and I both rented
All About My Mother independently of each other last night, coincidentally. She's seen it before, but I haven't. I just watched it, and... I don't know what to think. I liked it. I feel like I should see
A Streetcar Named Desire now.
Tomorrow:
Almost Famous.
7:10 PM
This afternoon I went to a
dialogue between artist Jane Hammond and poet David Lehman at an exhibit of her work. The 44 titles for this group of paintings were given to Hammond by poet John Ashbery (he wrote them in about 4 minutes, according to the catalog). It was a pretty interesting discussion, but I think I was slightly more interested in Lehman (at least what he had to say) than Hammond. Hammond's paintings were good though. I think my favorite title is "Midwife to gargoyles". Kind of Pollard-esque, isn't it? There was another one that was something like "Nobody wins at the Hurricane bar." Cool!
For the past five years Lehman has tried to write a poem a day. I liked the couple of poems that he read before the dialogue (he read the poem he wrote yesterday), so I bought his book
The Daily Mirror which is a selection of such poems, combining some from several years.
Mysoon was there. So were a couple others from the art museum and art department.
...
Shannon and I are going to see Ryan Adams in St. Paul.
4:39 AM
Do you ever worry about an expansiveness unfolding before you? As if everything is now bigger than you thought it was, that your (and the world's) potential stretches much farther than you thought? I've got that right now. And then you bump into something that's comforting and close, something that makes sense of the rest of it. It's nice to know that you're always looking through a filter, and so is everybody else; maybe you can see where someone else is coming from.
Thursday, February 7
6:21 PM
I have three sores in my mouth. It's bothersome to eat.
Still peaceful.
5:58 PM
I feel peaceful.
I've just been burning some cds and reading some poems. I met with Joel to talk about my poems. First we talked about fonts and typefaces - just before our meeting Diana had shown him the drawings I'm working on - for a while, and he showed me some great books. Then he actually read my poems, which was strange because I've never shown them to anyone with criticism or editing in mind. Probably this was the first step toward an end of naivete (to a certain extent) which, in the end, is a good thing, but is still frightening. So he saw some good things and some bad things, and I admitted that I put stuff in my poems just for flourish, to impress people. It's difficult for me to excise what's unnecessary... and I almost never edit poems after the initial writing.
So he recommended a bunch of poets, most of whom I'd heard of but only a few whom I'd read. Following his recommendations as closely as I could, I went to the campus library and checked out:
Nothing Doing Cid Corman
Pieces Robert Creeley
Loba Diane di Prima
Mexico City Blues Jack Kerouac
The Book of Nightmares Galway Kinnell
The Collected Poems Frank O'Hara
The Collected Poems William Carlos Williams
I've checked out the Cid Corman book before. According to the due date sheet in the back, there was only one other person who checked it out. . . My psychologist gave me a Galway Kinnell book (
Body Rags) right before I left for Italy, so I've read some of his stuff. I also got
Him by EE Cummings just for leisure, but I don't know if I'll have time to get into it. Plus, earlier I checked out all those books on the history of the written and printed letter.
Weird that I'm going in a particular direction, rather than just imagining several directions and not going anywhere.
Wednesday, February 6
1:56 PM
Had a bizarre dream last night, about a religious experience. It sort of
was religious in a way. Shannon and I were hurrying down this wide city street that was flooded with a foot of water. Ahead of us were escaped mental patients in orange jumpsuits. One of them grabbed Shannon and was going to take her somehow, but I grabbed him and he let her go. Then we were warped into this kind of spiritual dimension, still in the same place physically (it was visually sort of like when Frodo puts on the ring in the Lord of the Rings movie). We skidded on the water far past where we were, and I was visited, or I visited three saints (I forget which ones - I think they were all martyrs). The details are fuzzy, but there was something about a large knife. I was standing on it as it slid over tiles on the floor that had images printed on them; the images were of parts of the body, maybe. The whole time I was experiencing intense physical pain, maybe like I was being cut. Some other things happened but I don't remember. The insane man was still with me somehow. And then the other-dimension thing was over, and I was explaining what happened to my mom (in the dream). I woke up and realized that it didn't actually happen, but it felt very real in the moment, even the supernatural stuff. I don't know what to make of it.
Sunday, February 3
7:25 PM
Jenny's recital at Baldwin Wallace was a good time. I recorded it to minidisc, heh heh. I might put an mp3 up, if I have room to do it. Afterwards I went to dinner with her and her friends and family at a Chinese restaurant. The restaurant owners gave Jenny a t-shirt to congratulate her.
Saturday, February 2
4:04 AM
The ice storm from the other day knocked out power in parts all over the city, and it's still not all back on. Luckily I didn't lose mine.
Tonight I went to a lecture given by the artist Olivia Parker, who was the juror for a photo exhibition at the CVA (our art building). She's a photographer who now mostly works with digital imagery, which is cool to me, because she's 60 years old and knows way more than most people do about Photoshop because she's been working with it for such a long time. She had some pretty interesting work.
Afterwards I was talking to Mysoon, which is always sort of awkward for me because I just want to listen to and admire her, but she's never talks at great length. She expects me to actually converse with her and not just listen to her, which is not how most people talk. I mean most people just want to talk at you, it seems. I'm usually that way, anyway. But she introduced me to a professor that my BFA committee wants me to talk to about my poetry, so I arranged to meet with him, and I'm interested in what will happen. Then a museum curator came by and she and Mysoon and I were talking about more artists that were coming for lectures, and that I could look at some work in the print study room (which is always fun to do), specifically about images that deal with text, which is what I'm doing now. So, cool. And we were going to wait to see if anybody else I needed to talk to would walk by, but they didn't.
In separate conversations too, Mysoon and Laura both mentioned Ann Hamilton to me, who Shannon just told me last night is the aunt of one of her friends. And Mysoon is going to get her to give a lecture next spring! And Laura did some kind of research project on her! And Shannon is going to have lunch or dinner with her and her friend in a few days! Wow!
And I'm going to my friend Jenny's recital tomorrow (well, technically today). She sent me one of those survey things, and one of the questions was what your earliest memory was, and one of hers was about me, amazingly. She said she remembered being mean to me in my backyard, that she didn't want to swing next to me. :)
Friday, February 1
2:39 AM
Some videos with Mark Eitzel against a blue wall. He's really goofy-looking! He looks a bit like Mike, my roommate in Florence.
2:22 AM
Michael Moore is really dramatic in
this letter. If it's entirely true, it's a shame.