13 FEB 06


11 FEB 06
Is abstract painting finally passe, consigned to appear only in retrospectives and documentary films? *
If ____ is finally over, doesn't that mean it's almost back?
9 FEB 06

Max & I have been doing a diary experiment: 7 sentences a day. At the end of the first week (yesterday), we read our entries to each other, to compare what we'd taken from the days.
Of 98 sentences, I lifted 14. 7 mine, 7 his:
Met with handmade calendars (printer broke). Hospital air, hospital light, the slowed clock of it. Don't get too wrapped up in "what is god what is love." He said the worst part was the way he could hear everything they said. I want something like a story. He kept the eye shades on. I want a story, but don't tell me too much. "When I learn English, there will be more to say." It started snowing. I found a new harmony. There were unopened letters also ("after she died, they kept coming"). It was snowing, all over Germany. More than half the letters were from him. They've seen it all.
7 FEB 06
For dinner wanted just a boiled potato, fried egg on top. A meal she invented at that time and stuck to like an alibi. Stopped talking, started eating upstairs.
I did my share of reading the stars, and washing up the dishes of the rich. I wrote the book, How To Clean Practically Anything. Well, I could have.
Some Mistakes in Reading *
No blinking or wrong blinking
Trying to see many words at a time
Trying to see black instead of glancing at white
Distance more than is needed
5 FEB 06
We can't escape who we are.
People have their own ideas, based
on what they're trying to hide.
Though more than half, not all
is illuminated.
The structure becomes inherent.
"It's almost like you had a secret interest
in architecture." But what's the point, as he said.
Not many people walk by.
Following the motion
of objects in the real world:
"He's a gentle soul," she said.
"You always look so tired,"
she said.
"Horned melon," they call it.

(Affection between people is mysterious,
and often based upon a dream.)
3 FEB 06

There was an old cast iron bathtub in the field behind the house. Why? I don't think we knew. He brought hot water in pots from the stove and I took a bath out there. Clothed--it seems to me now--in my youthful body. In my youthful skin.
1 FEB 06
Every encounter produces, even if for only the flash of an instant, a xenia--the occurrence of coexistence which is also an event of strangeness or foreignness. A strange occurrence that, nonetheless, happens constantly--we have no other experience of living than encounters. We have no other use for language than to have them.
Foreignness is different from alienation; the two notions are differently nuanced. Alienation connotes separation, detachment. Foreignness, of course, may suggest that too, in that a feeling of foreignness is a feeling of being where one doesn't belong--but where alienation involves a step back from a situation, foreignness involves a step into it. The alienated withdraws, the foreigner proceeds and becomes a guest. (Lyn Hejinian *)
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