rocket to nowhere

[All red text, Roni Horn. All green text, John Waters' annotations. Block quotes clearly labeled. Video and music found by me, inspired by John Waters.]

         


         
Anatomy and Geography
English opera about an imperious but sexy gynecologist directed by Peter Greenaway

Being Purple
Sad musical about the decline and paranoia of rock star Prince

Dictionary of Water
Elegantly maddening wordplay exercise featuring a script including only nouns beginning with the letter “w”

Doubt by Two
True-crime mystery focusing on the deliberations of two holdout jurors in the second trial of Leslie Van Houten

Key and Cue
The fictitious biography of the Clue board game’s Colonel Mustard

Molly’s Other Bloom
Lesbian punk coming-out picture that dares to concentrate on anal sex [LINK]

Puff
The Magic Dragon gets throat cancer

Untitled (Flannery)
Lupus, peacocks, and blue-chip fame—how she did it and why it will last

“‘And rest in peace, William Inge (22), why did you have to do it? Jean Rhys (23), Jane Bowles (24), Witold Gombrowicz (25), I miss you too. Flannery O’Connor (26), you’re the tops.’ Anybody who wrote of being so obsessed with collecting chickens that she actually made clothes for them is A-OK with me. She may be famous for later raising peacocks but I’ll always imagine her dreaming up Wise Blood (27) as she stitched away on evening gowns for her darling little birdies.”
          —John Waters, The Obsessions of, “Puff Piece (101 Things I Love),” p. 59

Water, Still
John Waters’s third autobiography told from beyond the grave

“I’d better get home beause I’m thirsty, and drinking water is too personal to do anywhere but in th eprivacy of your own kitchen.”
          —John Waters, The Obsessions of, “Puff Piece (101 Things I Love),” p. 65

When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes
The story of Michael Cunningham’s surprise bestseller

When the How and the What are the Same
Italian retitling of third sequel to The Hulk

You are the Weather
Recruiting film for the revival of ’60s hippie terrorist group

         

• Every sound means the house is falling apart. #uselessparanoia #
• Beautifully sunny new house, scritchy cats, and a wonderful woman. #
• Shelving books is therapeutic until you run out of shelf. #
• Scrambled eggs, fried ham, buttered toast, mom’s coffee cake, and Kaladi Bros. coffee. #
• “Tho I found myself engaged sexually, I could only wonder how I was going to work the sock off of my left foot without being conspicuous.” #
• Frustrated by the imbalancing act of moving vs. school. And yet, I wouldn’t go back. #
• Found a bird skull in the back yard. #
• I now own a shovel, a rake, and a utility sink. #
• Started the day by mowing my lawn. Now onto hours and hours of Henry James. #
• Did I say something about Henry James? #
• The Renee Gladman reading was really quite nice. It’s quite a feat to read the silences in the book without being silent. #
• The Denver Police Bike Auction was a good time, even if we didn’t buy anything. #
• There’s no plot. #
• @hudspkl 9 Songs in reply to hudspkl #

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[Constructed by intersecting bits of text from Wonderwater—Roni Horn/Anne Carson and bits of text from my response/s to the first bits of text.]

Uncertainty is what makes them interesting. My blood looks uncertain. What runs at the bottom of everything is simply exchange. Or is it “if not yes, then no”? Maybe a gesture will form. But also not that as “spiritual” is usually “seelig.” A substance that became visible. Hybridity as resurrection?

Bits of text.

         
Every contemplated face becomes landscape

         —Hélène Cixous, Wonderwater, written in 2003

         
   But now an almost insoluble problem confronted him, and it was no use trying to decipher it in Elisabeth’s face, for her face itself constituted the problem. Lying back in her chair she was gazing at the autumn landscape, and her up-tilted face, thrown back almost at a right angle to the taut line of the throat, was like an irregular roof set upon the pillar of her neck. One could perhaps say just as well that it rested like a leaf on the calyx of the throat, or that it was a lid covering the throat, for it was really no longer a face, merely a continuation of the throat, an extension from the throat, with a far-off resemblance to the head of a serpent. Joachim followed the line of her throat; the chin jutted out like a hill, behind which lay the landscape of her face. Softly rounded the rim of the crater which was her mouth, dark the cavern of the nose, divided by a white pillar. Like a miniature beard sprouted the hedge of the eyebrows, and beyond the clearing of the forehead, cut by finely ploughed furrows, was the edge of the forest, Joachim was again forced to ask the question why a woman can be desirable, but nothing gave him an answer; it remained insoluble and perplexing. He shut his eyelids a little and peered through the slits at the landscape of that extended face. It blended at once with the real landscape, the woodland verge of the hair bordered the yellowing leaves of the forest, and the glass balls that decorated the rose-beds in the garden glittered with the same light as the jewel that in the shadow of the cheek—ah, was it still a cheek?—shone as an ear-ring. This was both startling and comforting, and when the eye combined these separate things into a unity so strange, past all disjoining, one was curiously reminded of something, transposed into some mode that lay beyond convention far back in childhood, and the unsolved riddle was like a sign that had emerged from the sea of memory.

         —Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers, written between 1928-1932

         

• Asking myself what part of me is gone in my desiring. #
• Moved two cars full of boxes this morning. Now at school till 10 p.m. #
• Could the wirelessness here be any more cumbersome? #
• The X is filling my notebook nicely. #
• Wishing I had taken a nap. #
• “As a single balloon must stand for a lifetime of thinking about balloons . . .” #
• Behind in everything. Behind everything. #
• Dreamed an LC call number. Can’t remember it now. #
• Dear Mr. Percival Everett: Your writing has made me put down my pencil. And pick it back up. And forget about it completely in my hand. #
• Snow forecast for moving weekend. #shouldamovedintheCOwinter #
• Honeycomb cereal, even in yummy milk, does not live up to the promise of nostalgia. #
• Finished Erasure by Percival Everett last night. Still think it has depth and feeling through the layers of surface and irony and PoMoToGo. #
• The movers are coming at 8. The movers are coming at 8? #
• 300 days of sunshine and then this. At least the move went smoothly! #
• This seems to be a new kind of exhaustion. #

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       Das Angenehme dieser Welt

Das Angenehme dieser Welt hab’ ich genossen,
Die Jugendstunden sind, wie lang! wie lang! verflossen,
April und Mai und Julius sind ferne,
Ich bin nichts mehr, ich lebe nicht mehr gerne!

         

       An Zimmern

Die Linien des Lebens sind verschieden
Wie Wege sind, und wie der Berge Gränzen.
Was hier wir sind, kan dort ein Gott ergänzen
Mit Harmonien und ewigem Lohn und Frieden.

                  —Hölderlin

         

His method was to take hold of every item of the original diction and wrench it across into German exactly as it stood in its syntax, word order, and lexical sense. The result was strange. He made it stranger. Judging his first versions of Oedipus “not lively enough,” he reworked them, choosing ever the more violent word, pulling toward that smell of burning.
—Anne Carson’s annotation of Wonderwater by Roni Horn

         

       The Pleasurable of this World

The pleasurable of this world have I enjoyed,
The youthhours are, how long! how long! elapsed,
April and May and July are remote,
I am nothing more, I live not more willingly!

         

       To Zimmer

The lines of the life are deceased
How ways are, and how the mountain’s borders.
What here we are, can there a god replenish
With harmonies and eternal meed and peace.

         

[Sadly, I don't think it is quite as "strange" from German to English as it was from Greek to German.]

         

• Lucille’s shrimp and grits + 2 café au lait = nap? #
• It’s only a tragedy if we first have sympathy for the bufoon Charles Bovary? #
• The mouth is like a lubricated hand. #
• Being close-minded about meditation sort of defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it? What am I doing? #
• I need a bicycle. Badly. #
• @andrewwickliffe Please send me your infos. We will make an appointment. I will look at it and possibly offer you monies. Thanks! in reply to andrewwickliffe #
• “Like a woodpecker absorbed with a tree is the bird’s new appreciation for the truck.” #reading #
• Maybe this afternoon. The crescent holding the remains of the new. Maybe Friday. #
• Exciting workshop! Great students! Good writing! #
• Decided to come to the house to read for a while, despite the lack of comfy chairs. #
• worrying about first impressions . . . #
• worrying about worrying . . . #
• @tierack Parking permit? in reply to tierack #
• We did not buy any exercise eqipment, but did purchase a weed-eater for $5. #
• At Peter Tat2 for the moon. #
• J says the moon looks like a cartoon bird’s eye. #
• Reading Percival Everett and thinking about a conversation I had the first coupla months into my MFA. Embarrassed even now. #
• I own a pair of overalls? #notanymore #
• Up to my neck in moving boxes. #
• @msjuliejulie They do still exist, but they’re going to Goodwill. Moving is about overcoming sentimentalism. in reply to msjuliejulie #
• I will draw an X on my hand and hopefully not the ire of the poets. #

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“‘When we investigated the sites manually it worked better,’ he added.”*

*The final sentence in a BBC article about the Swedish government’s efforts to collect taxes from web-cam strippers.

• What’s the first half of the word “painting”? Pain. #
• “IMMEDIATELY create a strong suction to draw the plastic material up into the roof of the mouth and onto the sides of the teeth.” #
• Will the new room work? Is it a cave? Why the “keep this door closed during class” sign? I want to see in! #
• “the beneficient play of criticism” #
• “(like the sight of the forest of the adage, which fails for the presence of the trees)” #
• It was like not knowing. It was like not knowing and not knowing that you didn’t know. That’s what it was like. #
• All fear is in the future. #
• The only breaks I had today were to eat. I say that like the day is over. Now to read more! #
• “Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.” #
• I really like everyone in the class I’m teaching! They, however, are still unsure about me. #
• @LairdHunt Reading Slaughterhouse 5 this morning, Vonnegut used the word “radium” twice. Both times about a watch face. in reply to LairdHunt #
• Dear Matmos, Your album “The Civil War” is making me very happy at the moment. Thank you. #
• Representation imitated?! Mr. James, could you please complicate that further? #
• Helped Dani buy a new computer. Will now help her set it up. #
• Pushing fattening, but tasty, but fattening food into my body, drinking drinking drinking coffee, and reading David Wirthlin’s work. #
• @LairdHunt Is the bowler cocked down over his eyebrows? in reply to LairdHunt #
• Another poorly attended grad reading. Not even the people who asked that they no longer be on Friday. #

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“as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on.” —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

1. Song Sung Glue

    The librarian who doesn’t know how to read
    She sets the books in rows
    Ear Lubricant is necessary
    Curiosity is not
                        (do not wake the cat,
                        which is sleeping,
                        understand your limits)

    I make the research
    You make the connections

         

2. I’m A Star In NY

    To have the energy and the persistence to
    to replace fear by trust or at least by
    by expectation

         

3. O Wo Is Mio

    Sometimes I try to make people admit that they do not like the anatomy of a want
              (me)
    Finally, I guess they don’t

         

4. I Am That I

    Sometimes I try to make people admit that I am portrayed by what I do not know.
    Finally, I guess they don’t

                        Ich Bin Tatsächlich Ein Haus
                        Worin
                        Ich Einen Platz Machen Kann

         

5. All The Screamers

    Screaming, endless screaming, uninterrupted screaming,
    just for the sake of emptying yourself of the pain

    A germ of rage lives in you

    If you would not work in the world of emotions
    you would not have any deceptions

         

6. MupPet Sounds

    Memories
    Take care of
    The fear of the past: nostalgia
    Take care of
    Themselves

         

7. We Don’t Go Too Far

    That is what fear does—
    it establishes the distance between the immediate and the eternal.

    I know it and I am taking care of it.

         

8. Tweety Takes A Holiday

    Das Bett umgestürzt.

    In the morning as you wake up,
    you come out of a bumpy
    night and are on the other side
    to write one’s sleep

         

9. Look What You’ve Done

    it is going to be too late

    Mach Leere, Leere
    Ich Will Eine Leere Sein

    guilt—the boots of the dead

         

Titles and linked songs by PLU
Text originally by Louise Bourgeois but rearranged by me.