And so this is the end of the semester…  Strange trip.  It’s been a packet period of traveling around, drinking too much, searching for inspiration for the final thrust to get the video completed.  Being sick, smoking all my cigarettes, trying to sleep, unexpected communications, scotch.  Bleh.  I wasn’t feeling very much like working on video editing so I went to Boston and drank with some old friends and all they wanted to do was talk about Susan.  Ha!  What divine fun.  I wasn’t feeling very much like working on video editing so I went to Saratoga Springs and drank with Amy Handfield G1.  What a fascinating young woman.  We talked about art for two days and finished off an old bottle of scotch and discussed all those delicious topics brought up on the listserv (because she’s one of those too-afraid-to-post types) and looked at a book of Jock Sturges nudes she’d taken from the Skidmore library for free because they were going to discard it for being “pornography.”  I wasn’t feeling very much like working on video editing (and the parents were quite concerned when I said that I just wanted to spend Thanksgiving alone in my apartment) so I went to the farm and suddenly became inspired, although most of my equipment was two hours and one giant blizzard belt away.  Finally drove back to Syracuse after a meditative week in NNY with a truck full of turkey and a brain full of ideas so I sat down and edited most of the footage together all at once.  That’s the video I’ve sent you.

In other news, Susan sent me an instant message.  She misses me, is so proud of everything that I’ve done since she left and has read everything that I’ve written.  I told her that I didn’t know what to say, told her to take care of herself and that I love her and I logged off IM and sat around shaking for a while.  I had to stop taking those fun fun pills so I could become manic and get this project out of my head.  She certainly knew exactly when to strike.

In other other news, it’s been decided that there will be a resurrender NOLA03 convention in New Orleans from 13-17February2002, and I’m supposed to go because I founded the network.  This is craziness and far beyond anything I ever expected.  Consider this an engraved invitation if you’re interested in attending.  Details are available from my senior event co-ordinator, Raines Rushin, at rrushin@i-55.com.  I’m trying to think of some way to turn this conference into a practicum…  I’ll keep thinking.

In friendship news, my best friend and co-founder of timeforkink.com has just proposed to his girlfriend of three years, who dumped him just after Susan left me then came running back after she got lonely.  I don’t like her.  My tongue hurts because I’ve been biting it since I heard of the engagement.  I am a good friend.  I will make an even gooder best man.  Bleh.

In musical news, I’m still infatuated with the new Benton Falls and Beth Gibbons albums, but I’ve decided that I’m in love with Liz Phair.

That’s about all I have to say right now, I guess.  It’s been a pleasure and honor to have you as my advisor this semester, and I hope to work with you again later in my Goddard career.

Take care, Catherine.

Paul.
05 December 2002.
 

Audio:
I created an audio montage of about a dozen of Jacob’s songs to use as the first gesture of the soundtrack to The Stillness.  I went through quite a few hours of old analog cassettes to find a suitable conversation between him and myself to use as the outtro for the project.  Those two gestures, combined with the “Call Me Back/OK” composition from packet 04 comprise the entire eight-minute soundtrack of the project.

Webdesign:
http://www.timeforkink.com
Site updated with a new entry made of the drawings described and linked below.

http://www.thestillness.com
Front page re-designed and link structure re-ordered in preparation for video project completion.  I intend to render and make available a low-resolution version of the project for free download from the site.

http://www.ifihadamonkey.com
Front page re-design and guest entry upload.  Also updated my own List of Evil.

http://www.offensemechanism.com
It’s my intention when this semester is over to open up the offense mechanism message board to anyone who cares to post, since it was pretty disappointing in terms of use by our advising group, and I know that other Goddard students and artists I’ve met online would appreciate a place to discuss contemporary art.  In preparation for that, I’ve begun changing the back end of offensemechanism.com to accept new members once the semester is over.

Reading:
I’ve now finished reading Stone’s War of Desire and Technology and Delany’s Nova and Triton.  Annotations are below.  I’ve begun re-reading and revising my first science fiction novel, enemy, in preparation for a second edition to be released early next year.

Writing:
I’ve attached two short entries from my Stillness journal from dyingdays.com, the first a reaction to the general dissatisfaction with life I’ve been experiencing, interrupted in-process by an unexpected communication from Susan, the second a little babble about things for which I’m thankful, playing with words, and a collection of lyrics with a not-so-subtle hidden message.

Drawing:
http://www.timeforkink.com/hooligans.jpg
http://www.timeforkink.com/hooligans01.jpg
http://www.timeforkink.com/hooligans02.jpg
http://www.timeforkink.com/hooligans03.jpg
http://www.timeforkink.com/hooligans04.jpg
http://www.timeforkink.com/hooligans05.jpg
http://www.timeforkink.com/hooligans06.jpg
http://www.timeforkink.com/hooligans07.jpg

This is a series of drawings I’ve been doing with my timeforkink.com co-conspirator and best friend Jason Beerman at Hooligan’s Monday Night Football One-Cent Wing Night each week on the back of paper placemats as we get drunk.

I am so sorry to have been slow, but time has been chewed up by things I 
don’t understand, including looking for the video you sent me and which I 
cannot find any of the usual stacks. Having asked you to send me better 
output it’s idiotic to have lost it.   I think it went off with a fat packet 
of galley xeroxes.  I am sorry for its departure and hope that you will send 
another one regardless as I still want actually to see what you’re doing.  

Quite all right…  I lose things all the time in the maze of my apartment.  According to my friends, when I’m old, people will call me a “pack rat,” but right now I’m just “eccentric.”  I just realized that I forgot to send you another copy of Happy Kitten Jamboree!, but I’ll show it at the residency.  The video of The Stillness I’ve sent incorporates most of what I sent in the last packet, anyways.

I am sorry about your friend.   I hope things are as well as they can be at 
home.

Before this year, I’d only been in a cemetery once on a school field trip where we looked at really old headstones.  This year, I’ve spent more time than I’d like to acknowledge sitting in various cemeteries talking to my dead friends and family.

So you’ve not written much, read much, or watched much but The Flight Club.  
That happens.  The educational structure is, even at Goddard, a kind of 
surveillance system.   Student produces for each packet, which arrives of 
course, on specified Mondays, after panicked weekends.   Faculty member reads 
packet and outputs response by following Friday.   Everyone evaluates each 
other at least twice, and answers questions about punctuality.   Someone, 
somewhere,  skims evaluations for the fuck-ups.   Or perhaps that person was 
fired due to budget cuts and we are policing ourselves, having ingested the 
system we said we hated.   

I don’t know why returning to the farm inspired me so much this time…  I’d been panicking and PANICKING about getting the video done, but then I went home without my hardware and suddenly I had to take one of the brown paper wash-towels from the work cart while helping my father milk the first night and I just started to scrawl ideas down with the trusty Bic Micro Metal pen that I always keep in-pocket.  I was having a difficult time deciding just how to arrange the very distinct segments of video into a coherent product, not just a random collection of disparate images.  I hope I was successful, although I know that this project will appeal to and be understood much more by those who knew Jacob, know me, and know of our relationship.  It was a conscious decision to incorporate imagery that won’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense to the majority of the audience because I know that those who knew him will immediately associate those images and understand what I’m doing with them.  So basically I was burnt out and needed a few weeks to get my mind together.  It happened, I think.

You work and you will work.   Unlike many other people, you need to work.  I 
trust this.  

Friends and family have observed before that I will from time to time work on something so intensely and exhaustively that I completely disregard my own physical and emotional well-being for great periods of time, whether that comes in the form of unloading thirty wagons of hay bales on one scalding-hot summer day or in the form of sequestering myself away from human contact until I extract a video project from my head.  I work until I can’t breathe anymore.  Then I crash.  I’m in the post-crash stage right now.

I hope To Wound makes it into festivals and your book comes back right and 
your subwoofer doesn’t break.

No response from festivals yet (not that I expected any so soon), my book finally came back printed perfectly, and my subwoofer beats on, woofing against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.

So you worry about your image.  Interesting.  You think about pulling past 
books off the market.  Interesting.  You can’t doodle in public.  
Interesting.  You feel, I gather, a little hounded by the need to 
feed the gaping maw of your audience, yet you’ve made an audience and you 
need an audience.    How on earth do you expect not to regret or dislike some 
of what you write later?   Of course you’ll hate your youthful blunders.    
Everyone does.   You’re human.   The doodles are interesting.   Trust me on 
this.  Hearing someone think is interesting.    Make the space.  You don’t 
have to be a public figure.  You can take a sabbatical.   Come back later.  
Come back as someone else.   How do I know Mark Brand isn’t Paul Hughes?

It’s interesting that you responded to the concept of pulling past books off the market…  I agree that it’s foolish of me to feel so disconcerted about these naïve “young” books, and just after I sent the last packet, my now-engaged friend Beerman got a drunken three-a.m. phone call from my ex, Jaime, a major character in two of my despised non-fictions.  She’d just read them both and was so sad because of what I’d written about the dissolution of our relationship, not in an angry way, but in a despairing way, because she had no idea how deeply her departure had cut.  She was also upset about the fact that I referred constantly to her Chi Omega sorority (of which she was the president and is now a national representative) the Chi Homega sorority.  She is concerned if her employers ever traced that book to her, she’d never be national XO president.  What fun!

I’ve been revising enemy in preparation for next year’s second edition now that it’s been chosen as a booksurge.com editors’ choice selection, and I constantly have to fight the urge to re-write every line of dialogue, incorporate it more smoothly with its An End non-sequel, or just make it flow in a more adult sense.  I began writing it in 1994, so there are still original sections that are quite juvenile.  So far I’ve fought the revision urge successfully.  It’s the conflict of not judging old work by current standards.  I know that AE is a vastly superior book.  It’s contextualizing within the moment…  The very reason that I’m not starting a class-action suit against Italy right now for throwing my Catholic ancestors to the lions during Roman times.  I hate it when people try to see the past in terms of the present, because we can’t force our value systems or progressive ways of thinking on to moments in human history when such concepts didn’t even exist….  But again, I’m a white heterosexual male from a conservative background, so what do I know?

Like the scar list, very much,  and the scar section.   Also the I-would-have 
section as confession and recitation:  memory as keloid, the scar that grows 
beyond the edges of the original scar.    Inventories as tissue that binds 
wound together.    How far can we take this scar thing?  There are people who 
cut themselves because the sense of power it gives them brings peace.   

There are people presently in the MFA-IA program that are “cutters.”  I cut myself with a kitchen knife on 9-11-01 without even thinking…  There is power and peace in that pain.  I sense that the scar motif will become more and more prevalent as I continue writing broken tomorrows.  I love the concept of memory as keloid; I’ve never considered that.  In this semester of “Imagining Memory,” perhaps each painful little memory that I’ve dug up has added to the overall blemish.

Have you read, apropos of cuts and scars and writing, The Penal Colony 
(Kafka)?    If not, get it.    Also go and see Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes). 
 Keep reading Sandy Stone.

I’ll add to my reading and seeing list before the residency.

OK.  I’m exhausted.  Also looking forward to the next packet and the video.  
Will you please, if you can, while it’s on my mind,  bring the Delany tape to 
Goddard, assuming it’s yours.   I worry a bit about January, The crack about 
eco phlegm shut down the whole discussion.  Poof.

I’ll definitely bring the Delany video; I bought it from amazon.  In the spirit of Imagining Memory, I’ll also bring that little Marker gem La Jetee, because it is nice and makes me happy… although there are memories associated with it, times and places and scents and tastes that I have to forget before I can be complete again.

Why don’t you transfer to Temple, or wherever, to take Delaney’s classes?    
You’re ready to listen to him and he has a lot to offer you, probably more 
than anyone else.    He already knows your work.  He won’t be around forever. 
 Life is short.   Art isn’t long enough.   Etc.

Definitely something I’m considering.  Someday I think the two of us should sit down with Chip and have a drink and a smoke and a scathing intellectual discussion about Star Wars: Episode I.  You take care, Catherine.  Thanks for everything!

Delany, Samuel R. Nova. New York: Doubleday, 1968.
• A story of one man’s obsession to enter a star as it goes nova and retrieve an inconceivable wealth in the form of seven tons of Illyrion, the most precious power source known to humanity.  Most intriguing aspects to me were Delany’s descriptions of the conflicts, military, political, and economic, between the Pleides and Draco areas of human spheres of influence and the distinct language patterns he created for each.  It made me wonder if George Lucas stole his Yoda-speak from Delany’s Pleides Federation.  I also appreciated the ultimate multi-media instrument owned by the Mouse, a young wanderer, the sensory syrynx, which permeates the audience with a visceral, sensual attack, and is actually used as a weapon in one key scene in the book.  Sensory overload seems to be a recurring theme, with Dan, the ex-crewman forever blinded and deafened by the inside of a star, and the captain’s own self-inflicted sensory death.

Delany, Samuel R. Triton. New York: Bantam, 1976.
• Delany seems quite adept at building political suspense, and in Triton, he builds the conflict between Earth and the moons of the solar system to a fevered pitch.  As in other Delany books, on Triton there is a sexual utopia of sorts, where marriage and prostitution are illegal but completely open sexuality is the norm.  Dissatisfied people of both sexes undergo re-assignments to voluntarily become either hetero- or homo-sexual if one doesn’t please them.  Most people live in co-ops and communes of various make-ups, either co-ed, split by gender or sexual orientation.  What strikes me most is the ease with which his characters float from one sexual community to the next, with no social or personal repercussions.  I’m reminded of his writing in Times Square about the perfect society of free, open sexual activities in designated areas.  There is something quaint about his Triton utopia; I don’t think our species would ever allow such contentment with sexuality, which is certainly unfortunate.

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
• I think what I appreciated the most about Stone’s book was her use of anecdotes to relay the history of what has become the internet, a history that until now I only had a vague knowledge of.  The anecdotes themselves tie what is essentially a non-space to our physical world by explaining those first hesitant steps of cyberspace pioneers, like those who participated in DARPANET, MOOs and MUDs, Tree networks, and the ill-fated Atari Research Lab.  I see a lot of the innovation and communication that those virtual communities experienced in my own present network of pages and online community, from the basic technological structure of the vB system that runs resurrender.org, a direct descendant of Tree networks, to the collaborative creations that “my authors” have made, reminiscent of the creative culture of the Atari lab.  Stone’s discussion of technological prostheses fascinates me, as does her revelation of the darker side of virtual communities and self-constructed online identities, from the hoax played on a chat room by a male psychologist who pretended to be a disabled woman for several years before admitting it was a fraud (the first documented case of online gender manipulation) to the criminal case where a woman with multiple personalities was raped by a man who took advantage of one of her lesser and more-sexual identities.  The book certainly provides much food for thought in the area of subjective identity within communicative technologies.