this is if only [dot] org

to the west

admin — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:36:36 +0000

will diminish.

beyond

admin — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 06:40:06 +0000

time. turns flesh. intangible.

for 2008

admin — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:34:40 +0000

half-rooted is no place to write from.

[Exit, Chase-d by a bear.]

admin — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 04:44:33 +0000

Late Shakespeare is about theatre and theatricality. Take The Winter’s Tale: expected tableaux are placed off-stage, forcing the audience to rely upon the mediation of others. Most of all, it suggests that comedy and tragedy are defined by just two things: where you put the start of Act I, and the end of Act V.

a momentary lapse into reason

admin — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:04:42 +0000

in medias res.

remembering leslie

admin — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 20:37:40 +0000

I missed my one best chance to meet Leslie Harpold, but this isn’t about me, except to say that just as my musical tastes were formed in the early 90s and stuck there, my sense of what the web is and does at its best is gathered and knotted around the old-school mid/late 90s, those few pre-blog years when home page and zine converged into something else that got called ‘personal narrative’. Measured and crafted; daring, yet with a sense of the boundaries that sustain daring, too much of it is lost or archived deep; and though you should seek it out, you’ll have to take my word that just being around its creation was very heaven.

Smug mattered. Regarding mattered. And so on, and so on, and so damn on, and I’m going to go back again and again: slowly, though, just so that there’ll always be something new to me. But deeper than the web, having Leslie in our little email cabal these past few years was a privilege she should have billed us for.

She was a maker of things, an artisan in the truest sense. Although a consolation when we mourn makers is that their works remain, it’s different for someone whose entire life was a continuous making. It’s not so much that we miss the works not made, but the experience and sensibility and capacity to guide us in the right direction: we’re left as apprentices without a master. And the master’s longest and most important work is always the ‘prentice, because from that flows the making of mastery.

Your tip for making applesauce worked perfectly, Leslie. Thank you, forever.

flooded

admin — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 09:19:07 +0000

Thirst comes in the guise of hunger; hypothermia wraps itself warmly around.

And though the feeling is one of desiccation, the course of action is to desaturate.

following the band

admin — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:35:01 +0000

break-ups: from not caring if, to never, then to wondering what came after.

journalesque

admin — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 03:50:03 +0000

diaries, not unwritten but unwriting.

prog

admin — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 06:27:58 +0000

‘like a memory, lost.’