Library Book

"In “The Road” a boy and his father lurch across the cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. The imagery is brutal even by Cormac McCarthy’s high standards for despair. This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes." Maslin, NYTIMES

On Cell

Four Objectifications

930 am: I was riding my bike on University when a small dumpy truck with a huge cargo cab (the kind you sleep/live in) pulls up next to me and a black man approximately age 60 starts speaking some Southern gibberish, something mostly incomprehensible. And in between the puttering exhaust pipe, puffing and grumbling, I heard, I think "White girls from behind......black girls...white ladies too!.....since I was 20 year ole....so I just think....good for you...Have a nice day! OKay!?" So I said, "Okay," and turned down the alley behind the "Gainesville Dojo." Then the water main burst right in front of me.

5 30 pm: I was jogging near the hospital when a large blue van passes on the opposite side of the street, from behind. A man, yells out, "Looking good! Why don't you come hop in mah BLUE vay-an."

5 35 pm: While jogging past the International Grocery Store I past a black man approximately age 50, thin and carrying two bags of groceries. He said hi, and I reciprocated. Then he said "I like the way those shake." I laughed sharply at a high pitch. Then once we passed he cried out "I sure do!"

6 30 pm: I was drinking from the water fountain in the Gold's Gym. A black man approximately age 30, wearing a black sweatshirt cinched high at the waist with a weight lifting belt, passes me. (His sweatshirt had a screen-on photograph of his wife or girlfriend. She was smiling, exposing a mouth full of gold teeth. He also had gold teeth, and terrible pock marks, and a pony tail of long braids with beaded ends.) I was sipping and he said to his white friend as he passed, "She is fine. I think I'm gonna get some stretch pants. I should get some stretch! pants!" White man looks at me and we laugh together. It was my first day.

A Creation

a funny one

"I began to include doorways or windows..."

"I began putting light fixtures in the frame..."
"it would help me take the sacred out of religion."

- Dianne Hagaman, How I learned Not to be a Photojournalist

me

me

Domestic Landscapes

bertteunissen

Days some time ago.

"Trouble Free Beauty"

Crystal Clear Fountains

Charmed the pants away

Someone had to tell me once that I should “leave something to be desired.”
And I see this as an artistic rule of thumb and have since left it unexamined and have absorbed it as true. But, have since failed to apply it experientially to something I thought was art-free, the interpersonal. Save in these forms, pictures and words, all the mystery it seems I can leave is just here. And all that I desire, in not these forms, I throw myself at. In the act of being something other than pictures and words, in being the person, I am interminably an un-mysterious case.

Field Notes #2

Man appears in a surprising way.

The way we all expected him to arrive was in his usual pick-up, diesel growling and with perhaps an unnecessary bgggrrrrarm over something like a speed bump in the parking lot. We are the wagering type of colleagues, in fact few, even menial, things slip through our colander of speculation, before they are boiled up in ever ludicrous schemes to garner vending machine money and goofy favors. But today, today's event was a fat one. And all afternoon it lie limp and warm at the base of our concave snide desiring surfaces. And we shook ourselves with hunger, and wrung our hands, and pressed our chests together like gladiators buffing breast plates.

We stood beneath the pebble decorated cement threshold of the building. In one's standard orange outside lighting. Mark lit a cigarette and almost immediately flicked a tiny amount of ash into a pebble cement cylindrical ash try, which matched the building. It was his move, this flick, a motion that discarded almost nothing needing, save his own self-conscious smoking-is-cool shtick.

And then man appears in a surprising way and Mark coughs.

Mark coughs so violently, that we hear the de-clumping of clots of mucus off his lungs. And once the protective plugs peeled away, the fit slips down into the burning parts of his deep insides, and we heard that too. And we knew that that's when coughing becomes more akin to scratching a red welp. And that's when we all felt like this wasn't going to be a pretty end.

The man was approaching, and a palm tree eclipsed a lamppost, cast a long steady shadow which ended at Mark's wresting body.

Small Sums

"When I got back from Iraq they stuck me with a fine of almost a 1000 bucks. For missing pieces from my gear during check outs. But its like, really gay and all, because everybody had little parts missing because we had to move around so much, from base to base. And shit got stolen all the time too. So that came out of my pay check...And when I got back I was giving plasma and I thought, shit, that's all I did in the army, just sticking people with needles. This will be easy. So I started this job and its not bad at all, but the army in general is really gay like that. That's how they make their money, I guess."

Michael on Making Room

Michael is the featured artist in Making Room Magazine blog this week. Yay!