| Paul Evan Hughes
MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Goddard G3 Packet04 Dearest Pam, So it’s been four weeks instead of three. I’ve spent the time trying to fill my life with reading and writing and building and engaging in scintillating online dialogue. It’s been a time of pause, one in which I get a handful of hours of sleep for as many fingers of days, one in which the binge-drinking week of Florida reversed many months of successful neurochemical re-engineering at the hands of SSRIs Lexapro and Wellbutrin. I’ve become manic, twitchy, random, unpredictable. My writing spirals off into areas of storyline that I’d never expected lurked beneath the surface of an already-muddied storyline. My reading stops and starts in spurts of blood and piss and shit as I struggle through “The Mad Man.” My dawns are filled with bleary-eyed viewings of cannibal and zombie movies… And I ask myself why. Perhaps the ultimate impotence: the camera still sits in the repair shop, waiting for a replacement firewire port. I want to work in video; I need to work in video. I can’t work in video. I feel that I’m somehow wasting this semester with you, wasting a valuable resource with whom I might not be able to work again. I want to show you video! I can’t show you video. Many sighs ensue. Collapsing into music and obsession and past. Some days I want to call Seattle. Some days I tell myself that I should tell her never to contact me ever again. Dates with girls I don’t remotely like just to prove to friends and family that I still have it in me. Maxed credit cards and rolling eyes over their complaints to servers, babbling about ex-boyfriends, half-assed pecks on the cheek goodnight and then the startling and comedic drunk-dials that happen when I’m trying to work and don’t need blah blah I really like you but you’re so intense too intense for me blah blah. Life confuses, and all I want is to fall asleep with my arms wrapped around someone who feels as deeply for me as I feel for her. One-year anniversaries are limit experiences. Personal life spills over into academia and public spaces: recurring theme in this life. I shouldn’t have bought a coffee maker. I’m never going to sleep again. And I wonder what I’ll find amidst these sunsets and silver and memory and desire. How far can I incorporate my art into my seemingly-impending self-destruction? Why do I like hyphens so much? I sigh again. A line from my very first video: tired and lonesome and falling apart. I hope you’re enjoying the spring. Sit on the roof like I do! It’s fun. With beer. with much love,
G3 Packet 04: Response to Pam’s Packet 03 Response: My Dear Paul, What a total bummer about your camera. Perhaps the gods are speaking… and you need somehow this time of “ideas, plans and words” . Sometimes it is not at all a bad thing to take a breath, lay down our speaking tools, and simply “listen”, absorb, digest. To feed. I wrote in my little livejournal: “If this is God’s plan, God can go fuck Himself. Happy Easter!” I know this is a good time for me to pause and listen and turn within, but I find it so difficult to turn off this manic desire to immerse myself in the camera and Pinnacle and just create. I’m out of my comfort zone. This is good. This is one of the hardest things to reconcile with past semesters where I set a goal and achieved it. I find myself now forced to break out of that safety of certainty and experiment with sound, with words, with uncomfort. Maybe this is the “playing” we’d intended. I can remember well my own frustrations of being absent or distant from “studio” practice… hungry to keep my hands on… worried that I would lose, or mislay, or somehow let go of my skills, or ideas, or capabilities to render them. I can also recall well, noticing how much I had grown, sharpened, and strengthened during such absences. Things grow and deepen all the time… the eye, the belly, the heart, the brain… all working, even if one’s “hands” are still. So… yup, it’s a bummer, but hey, things break. It’s not as if you had no other “ways to speak”… Maybe that’s the greatest fear… That I’ve been camera-less since the beginning of February and I’m somehow forgetting what I’ve already learned at Goddard, that somehow this “time off” from video is somehow going to permanently adversely affect all of my art. Through it all, I wonder where the confidence I’d built in my practice has gone. Is this uncertainty just a symptom of a greater personal collapse? Something is screwed up on your site… I can’t access the Lonely Bear. mpg… not by clicking on the listing under video, or by typing in the URL you included in your packet. That’s MY bummer, since I was looking forward to seeing the little critter, and how his continuing adventures are unfolding. My sister delivered the Lonely Bear’s Mama Bear to me on Easter, so ideas are percolating… Sorry that you’ve not been able to access the link. In case you want to try again, it’s: http://www.resurrender.com/bearhighband01.mpg. Once I get my technological shit together (sigh), I’ll be able to output the video for you and snail-mail it. I’ll be sure to bring the bear(s) to the next residency. Wooooha! Florida sounds wonderful in some ways, and kind of spooky in others. Your journal entry seems to draw deeply on that special sense of disconnection we feel when surrounded by friends… more later on that. Florida continues to fascinate and strike me with a healthy amount of The Fear. Recent ripples from Gulf Coast waves include the _____. The Fear prevents me from elaborating on that until certainties arise from visitation. I don’t know whether to be sorry or delighted that Susan seems to have re-entered your life somehow. Is it a re-entry with possibility… with potential? One which brings evidence of permanent loss? As with all things Susan, the contact was random and unexpected and hasn’t been repeated. The re-entry forced me to re-evaluate many things Paul. I could end all contact with a simple email, but I’m not strong enough or brave enough to do so. I don’t have what it takes to tell her to fuck off and leave me alone, since every time she reappears, I spend a month wondering and babbling and hoping, when it would be so much simpler to just have certainty that there is no hope of re-connection. I want to spend my life with her, but I know I should hate her for what she’s done. I’m tired. Sometimes silence is more hopeful than interaction.
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous words. Gorgeous thoughts. Meditative thoughts. I’m struggling to heal, but I’m afraid to take that step because I suspect that my art would be somehow muted, somehow forever sullied. This, of course, is none of my business… and certainly it does not seem to be as much an obstacle to your work as the broken camera. BUT… if you want or need a place to dialogue about this clearly important part of your heart… feel free to use me that way. I have perhaps, more in common with you than you might imagine, though there is often little solace in knowing one is not, after all, alone. I truly appreciate that. We must commiserate with booze and smokes this summer. Glad to hear your work in revamping illout.com has been successful, and also that it is advancing your community-building work. Rock on, web-master. It’s a long and arduous process, one that I had hoped Goddard community members would be more involved with, but it seems that this semester people have been quiet on the list and on the boards. Maybe they’re just afraid I’ll talk more about killing cows with a sledgehammer. PETA rules! Thanks also for your response-to-response dialogue. I love this part of packets… and was better informed and happily provoked by your thoughtful conversation around my questions. It’s my favourite part of packets, and honestly just about the only part where I feel like I’m giving you anything of worth to peruse. Please know, in this regard, that my queries re: your shooting style were not intended as a “critique”… the still, fixed frame… the slow dissolves… the “stillness” … can all be incredibly powerful and provocative visual and narrative strategies. I am glad you plan to fool with some more intentional motion… but see this as a muscle-building… vocabulary-stretching kind of process, rather than as some kind of preferred or more “effective” approach to the camera. It is all about choices and language and options for building meaning… so after all, the more “vocabulary” you have at your disposal… the more possibilities. Yes? I don’t think I could ever replace the fixed frame/slow dissolve/stillness style that seems my signature with a “preferred” style, and I never took your queries as that kind of suggestion, so no worries. This semester seems to be about stretching and vocabulary, even in my camera-less state. Was also delighted to hear more about your interest and experiences with audio installations… you should check out the work of Janet Cardiff and her partner George Bures Miller… http://www.abbeymedia.com/Janweb/ and Bill Fontana and there is a page below from Mass MoCA with other sound-based installation artists they have shown in the past, aside from Wilson’s 14 Stations. Also in the “sound” department… here are some sites that might lead
you somewhere interesting in terms of what some others are up to in the
diverse terrain of sound and audio work.
ENJOY... Trust me, I did enjoy and I’m continuing to enjoy those links. There’s some great stuff there. Included in this packet, you’ll find just a tiny experiment in sound I threw together, “Phones.” Sometimes raw material just falls into my lap. In this case, it was a drunken message left on my answering machine from an "ex." Not much, but I’m satisfied with it for now. So… as I said I couldn’t get to the Lonely Bear… but your description of plans for Motion of Light…, Dog scared by…, and Excerpts…, all sound wonderful and I look forward to seeing them as they finally find their way through your camera. What Do You Hear also sounds very intriguing, and again, I am hungry to hear/see it. It’s so frustrating. I’m ravenous to begin these projects. I sense a lot less writing and reading and other crap for packet five and pure video goodness. Wars of Desire and Technology:
The phenomenon of online journaling is one rooted firmly in the desire to connect. There are anonymous, hidden journals out there, sure, but the vast majority of journals are public, readily-available to a global audience. These journals are innately steeped in the public/private and reality/virtuality conflicts. Authors must choose exactly how much of themselves to reveal to an audience that is essentially uncontrollable. How much of offline Paul should I incorporate into online Paul to maintain a sense of reality in an unreal medium and at the same time protect my offline self from threats that can originate online, both physical and emotional? Roll into these conflicts the creation of distinct online personae that may or may not reflect the offline author, and there’s tables upon tables of food for thought. In my own online journaling, I try to take as realistic an approach as possible while living up to the expectations of the perceived audience in terms of honesty, vulgarity, playfulness with words, etc. I write for myself sometimes, but I’m always aware that everything I write online will be read by thousands upon thousands of readers, and some of those very well may be people who know me in real life. It’s a form of communication with impossibility; I’ve written things into journal entries before specifically because I knew that Susan read my journals, and if that’s the only form of communication that can pass between us as she retreats into silence, I’ll take that active role and put as much out there as I can. My journal is therapy. It’s often a bitch session. Writing entries is often an act of working through what’s been bothering me with words and intense retro- and introspection. Could I write such entries and not make them publicly available? Yes, but I choose to let people read them because I know at least within my limited resurrender.net community there are quite a few other people dealing with the same issues of loss that haunt me daily, and if even a single sentence I write helps someone work through their pain or prevents someone from making an irreversible mistake, then it’s worth it to me. It’s about community: baring one’s soul so that others may find solace in words. It’s about surrender: giving in again and again to the intensity of loss, of ruin. My journal’s a safety valve. And also I responded easily… pulled from one word to the next… one sentence to the next… everything clear and sweetly phrased and pulling…pulling me through the pages. This writing voice so different from your speculative fiction voice… which stops me… demands close attention… makes me stumble for understanding… struggle to surrender to images and ideas that are “wanting comprehension”. This journal voice delivers unto… where the SF voice withholds. Is this just me, I wonder? It’s not just you… I feel the same way, honestly. It’s a different sort of writing, just as it’s a different form of reading. I’ve not yet figured out how to balance my voices. It’s so difficult for me to write entries in Broken Tomorrows, but I can spill a journal entry in fifteen minutes. Perhaps it’s the difficulty in playing with words of fiction versus words taken from experience. It’s as if in the journal, all the meaning is right there, ladled on top of the words, piping hot, but in the fiction, all of the meaning is hidden in chapters not yet conceived, simmering. There’s no sense of immediacy when all throughout the writing process for fiction, I’m thinking three hundred pages ahead, just giving the reader enough clues that hopefully they’ll store some of them in RAM and retrieve them at appropriate moments. I am not a reader of speculative fiction… in fact in recent years I find I read very little fiction of any kind on a regular basis. So I stumble through broken tomorrows… feel inadequate to the task of making sense of it all. Am driven by my need to “know what is going on”… ( how embarrassing a confession, yes?) Feel a “sharper mind” than mine is called for… one less concerned perhaps with “figuring out”, and more capable of just sinking into the world you are creating. Part of this shortcoming on my part, I will confess, lies in my dependence on visual imagery (not to mention “control”)… and my ability to “picture”… and to “make a place” in my mind where things are happening… where Maire IS… where Michael IS/WAS, etc. Oh dear…. I am missing your camera. This is not to say I have NO idea what is “going on” in chapter one: of loss of ruin… nor to say I am not intrigued to “find out” what else will be going on as the story unfolds. It is only to say, that I had to read it three times to come to my current, and perhaps entirely erroneous “theory” about what is going on… I am BAD with time travel of any kind, I’m afraid. Useless to you. (God, I hope there IS a shift in time !!!!!) Please don’t feel inadequate for reading this book just yet! I do so much stumbling as I write it, that I don’t really expect the readers to really “get” any of it yet. This project is the culminating chapter in my silver trilogy, so it’s combining almost six hundred pages of backstory (each with their own confusions and mysteries) into a brand-spanking-new book where sets of characters from both are now forced to interact in a world that is the combination of the previous two worlds. Imagine taking (and these are just easy examples; I’m in no way comparing my mediocre writing to either) the entire Star Wars and Star Trek universes and combining them into one coherent storyline. That’s essentially what I’m trying to do with enemy + An End = broken tomorrows. You’re right about the time travel. ;-D Anyway, my sweet, if wounded boy/man…I look forward to the next packet, and truly hope you reclaim your healed camera… who perhaps is broken-hearted too? It wouldn’t surprise me, with some of the things I’ve made that camera shoot! Also, I need to remind you to write up your G3 Progress Report…
and send it along when you have it done. I assume you have received the
G3 Handout from Danielle, and if you want feedback or input on your draft,
just let me know that when you send it to me.
Take good care until next round… I send you great affection, and all the rushing juices of Spring. Pam I’ll try to take care and not be too darned crazy. It’s hard! Love,
G3 Packet 04 Substantive Work: Video:
i don't need the government to tell me that i'm sinning. isn't that what they like to do? it's awful to drink. it's awful to smoke. buckle up. wear a seat belt. don't stick your head in the microwave in an attempt to dry your hair. i don't need the government to attempt to stop me from doing stupid things that might hurt me, but they try, and try, and try. new york city (and by summer's end, all of new york state) recently passed a ban on smoking in almost all public places where second-hand smoke would present a health risk for workers, thus removing liability from employers. add this ban to a drastic sin tax placed on cigarettes by the city and state, and we have a government plan just set to backfire completely, a plan just soaking with holier-than-thou attitude, faked concern for for the health of our fellow citizens, and the ex-smoker Bloomberg now turning his back on his former nicotine-addict peers. revenues from cigarette taxes are falling. are people quitting? a few. are people turning to reservations and the internet as a place to buy cigarettes? in droves. in essence, NYC anticipated $250 million in additional revenue from the tax increase, but has only seen a net revenue of $43 million because of evasion. smokers aren't stupid. we'll find a way to get cheaper smokes. since when was it the government's job to make sure we don't make stupid decisions? should the government protect every citizen from themselves? government intervention seems to me a threat to natural selection. as a species, we might stop evolving if the government keeps holding our hands through life. "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" doesn't mean popular daycare. people are stupid. people will make stupid decisions. people will smoke, as stupid as we know smoking is for us. what about the poor second-hand crowd? you know them. they're the *cough cough* people who wrinkle their noses and roll their eyes when smoke drifts near them in a bar. guess what, people? smoking is as much an integral part of the bar scene as drinking and taking the fat chick home after last call. my philosophy is that if you don't like smoke, don't go to a bar. if you have to go to a bar, don't complain about the smoke. i don't hear people who only drink liquor bitching about all those obnoxious beer drinkers in the bar. i don't hear girls complain that they have to pop a squat in the alley outside because the bar bathroom is smeared in bodily fluids. it is all a part of the bar experience, and as such, i think bars should be exempt from Herr Bloomberg's new morality tactics. as for restaurants, certainly, at least design specific, environmentally-isolated smoking and non-smoking areas. i have no problem with that, and i don't know any smokers who do. it's hard to fill your face with chicken fingers when you're hanging a butt from your bottom lip, anyways. smokers are a marginalized culture. i can't imagine living when everyone smoked, when the Marlboro Man was a hero, when doctors would endorse brands of cigarettes on television according to their smooth, delicious taste. in these first fragile few steps into the twenty-first century, the smoking culture is an easy target. there have been other easily-targeted minorities in our nation's past. let's focus on a particular marginal culture that NYC has worked feverishly to push even further from mainstream culture. in Samuel Delany's study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the author presents a scathing criticism of the gentrification and Disney-fication of Times Square by the Giuliani morality police. the area once known for its blatant display of sexuality in all forms has now become a corporate paradise, the headquarters of MTV and media conglomerates, a giant walking, talking, flashing, screaming AOLTimeWarnerDisneyNikeMcDonald's billboard. what was once a thriving community and safe space for so many sub- and counter-cultures has become the epitome of capitalist American culture. this is happening all over the nation. small segments of large cities that were once overflowing with art and sex are being acquired by corporations and put through the yuppie meatgrinder in an attempt to create a nicer, hipper, but mostly safer America. think Providence, Rhode Island. think San Francisco. those areas once the breeding grounds of anti-establishment thought are now exactly establishment. what was once as symbolic of Times Square as the MTV studios are today? sex shows. theaters. strip clubs. bathhouses. Times Square was sex. and even in this post-Stonewall age, people are still hesitant to discuss the overwhelming population of those sex businesses: gay men. the theaters and bathhouses provided a safe space, a meeting ground where a largely self-policed community could gather and engage is consensual acts of public sex in private spaces. these acts once posed no danger to anyone in the outside community, but with the advent of AIDS, NYC took it upon itself to begin the process of eliminating these meeting places in the interest of "public health." NYC apparently believes that it has an obligation to protect people from activities that could only possibly hurt themselves. there are more similarities than one might realize between the de-sexualization of Times Square and the city-wide smoking ban. will people stop smoking? no. will people stop having sex? no. you can take away the bars and the bathhouses, but people are still going to engage in that particular set of activities that our society has deemed dangerous. what happened after the de-sexualization of Times Square? people didn't stop having sex, didn't stop engaging in public sex, and didn't stop getting AIDS. what we have now instead is a family-oriented, business-oriented Times Square and a marginalized culture pushed even farther and further to the limits of the city. the acts that once took place in self-policed communities within the city have been pushed to the outskirts, where certainly a higher risk of crime exists. Delany vividly describes the mobile, de-centralized sexual communities that have appeared. NYC's policy seems to imply that men can fuck men, but they can't fuck men deep inside the city. the same is true for smokers. you can smoke, but you can't smoke here. municipalities and states that have enacted anti-smoking laws seek to create and nourish a new sub-culture that will never go away. sin taxes don't work. anti-smoking laws only force smokers to go elsewhere. our government wants to protect people from their own stupidity. that's never going to happen. smoking might be a slow suicide to some, but it's that kind of rhetoric that teetotaler activists used in pre-Prohibition America, and we all know how well that went. who's going to be the Al Capone of the smoking subculture? certainly not Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man. anybody got a light? Practicum:
G3 Packet 04 Resource List Delany, Samuel R. The Fall of the Towers. New York: Ace, 1966. This trilogy has special meaning to me because it was the second Delany project (after Dhalgren) to implant itself in my life. I’d given up trying to read Dhalgren years before, and I was searching online for information about 9-11-01 when I stumbled across a reference to the Towers trilogy. It inspired me to dust off my copy of Dhalgren and start reading it again. In one of those inexplicable cosmic intersections, I contacted Delany and he gave me permission to use the first line of Dhalgren as the title for a 9-11 anthology I edited that fall. That was the beginning of this long and winding road of Delany fascination that has become a major focus of my Goddard experience. Now, almost two years later, I’ve finally finished reading his Towers series. What strikes me the most about these three closely-intertwined books, after now reading and studying almost every available Delany novel in print, is that they seem the departure point for a new phase of his writing. Subsequent novels begin to tentatively explore realms of alternate sexuality… perhaps given the turmoil of Delany’s personal life and his self-imposed exile to Europe for almost a year during and after the publication of these three books. These seem the last books where the main characters are squarely and obviously heterosexual and engage in traditional gender roles. It’s interesting to me that the relationships focused on in Towers are all male/female, heterosexual. It’s difficult to find examples of similar relationships in any of his later work, and that seems to spiral on exponentially. The Towers trilogy, while well-written and engaging enough to keep my interest, still comes across as a marginal money-maker that Delany wrote solely for publication, without the personal investment in character development and autobiographical themes that are a signature of his later work. Delany, Samuel R. The Mad Man. New York: Richard Kasak, 1994. Almost done… That’s not all I can say about this novel, but it’s getting more and more difficult to read. As the novel progresses, our protagonist slips further down a path to complete sexual abandon. As I’ve pointed out in previous packets, this novel is literally stomach-churning for me to read, and it only seems to get worse as the novel goes on. Delany is pulling out all the stops as the story progresses. What began as an odd reference to piss drinking or public park blowjobs has degenerated into a frenzy of shit smeared on walls, orgies drenched in urine, and just about every other bodily fluid that can be spilled being spilled. It annoys me that I’m reacting so viscerally to this novel; these are just words on paper, but I’m having a hard time turning each page, never knowing what I’ll drag my eyes across on the next. I shouldn’t hate this, but I do. It’s beautifully-written; I can’t imagine anyone else describing a thirst for urine so poetically. I sense that this is the reaction Delany intended, to describe such base human behavior in a way that’s interesting and captivating and utterly, completely disgusting. The difficulty in reading this book lies in the fact that it’s a murder mystery buried amidst graphic sexual encounters. I want more of the murder and less of the shitting. I don’t want to be distracted by eight pages describing the scent of unwashed scrotums and three paragraphs of genuine plot development. This is Delany’s “pornotopia.” This is the world within which our protagonist operates, and as such, the reader is immersed in real-time as the chaos of sex and desire unfolds. |