Saturday, January 14, 2006

The Dream of Names

“The crystal was white, yellow, silver, blank.
Transparence a matter of slowly mattering, coming
to focus under sun under thumb. You never
see beyond but through.”

From The Crystal Text, Clark Coolidge

Lunch with Clark Coolidge and Michael Gizzi yesterday. Today reading Robert Duncan and Alli Warren. Duncan’s Oyez chapbook Of the War: Passages 22-27.

Dream of names at the MLA: Brent Cunningham and Patrick Durgin in the SPD booth. Patrick’s collection of ties. Constant visits by Aldon Nielsen. Juliana Spahr in the bar. Finally meeting Shanxing Wang author of Mad Science in Imperial City. Seeing him pour over Chinese Sun by Arkadii Dragomoschenko. Running into Tyrone Williams in the hotel copy place. Next night the reading. Saturnian presence of Rod Smith at the reading and in the exhibitors hall, seeming, like all of us, a spy in the house of love.

Joshua Clover in the lobby of the hotel on the last day advising us what to do with our last hours in DC. Going to Hirshhorn Museum on his advice. Running into Brian McHale as we came in and then Tom Orange, (both of them enamored of the Ann Hamilton installation there), Stephen Cope, Catherine Taylor and Bill Howe. Seeing (in a dazed somnabulent state) amazing videos by Hiraki Sawa in which something that moves (goats, planes, a caravan) is laid over daily life in the apartment.




“You never see beyond but through.” & every word of the poem rings true.

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