Currently Reading

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, JournallingsLeave a comment

Greetings and so many thanks for those of you who take the time to investigate my works here.  Our lives have been a bit topsy-turvy in the ekphrastic household – I’m adjusting back into another semester of Library & Information Science, Holly is busy practicing and painting and starting more graduate education in Expressive Arts Therapy, the kids are growing and struggling and succeeding and being beautiful young people in our world.  All that to say I haven’t had the open spaces for creative composition that function effectively for creating new verbal connections – I’m sure they’re happening, I just haven’t had the time to attend very closely and note them down.  I received a request to update my Currently Reading page, which I usually do 2 or 3 times a year, or as the books-at-hand protecting my desk/work area experience significant change.  My “To the Library” post offered a number of new (to me) books that I’m currently intently poring through, and here are a few more titles this week:

Frank by R.M. Berry

and I’ll work on a refresher of my Currently Reading page soon!

New (and oh-so-welcome) Arrivals – Feb. 4

On By NW FilbertIn Art2 Comments

fRiction

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces1 Comment

“The more narrowly we examine language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement.  (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation; it was a requirement.)  The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. – We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk.  We want to walk; so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

“Language is a labyrinth of paths.  You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”

TO THE LIBRARY!!!!

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces7 Comments

Weekend classes in Library & Information Science =

here’s a glorious sample to browse the “information”: Language & Representation, David Blair

with the music of:

Fictions of Family, pt. 10

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

the developing words:

FAMILY A FICTION

Family 1

and part 10:

10

It taking so long to figure it out.  What it’s “about.”

Discombobulates like sporadic noise.  The fragments living are.

 

Four decades, seven children from three wives until he recognizes relation.  Which changes things.  Significantly.

It is the third wife (times charm) – out three strikes she staid on.  Stays on.  The difference between things.

In relation to one another.  Evolving perception.  The what-not, call it “aboutness.”  Or in relation to…

 

This in relation to that is about this much this high this far.  Or else nothing at all.  In itself.  By itself.

By himself, barely amount, insignificant cipher, plus three plus seven plus anything adding up, er, becomes.

Alone is less than one, or, not a number.  It takes 1 to know 1, in other words, all-one really means no 1.  Unless distinguished from something else, another 1, an other.

 

This he could tell.  The third wife, the difference between.  The aboutness.  Differing shapes entirely, nearer still, at this distance.

1 cannot equal.  Impossible equation.  Might as well be naught, be 0 – a 1 wrapped around itself (turned-in) – revealing just a hole, something seen through.  Looked straight through.

Telescope, microscope, still substance unseen, a looking at, really, looking for.  Simply looking, opened at both ends.  Perhaps a simple function.  What an organism is, alone.

 

She calls out, in fact pursues him halfway across.  As if to say she sees something, peering through her self-same circularity – that he is there.  He begins experience, begins to get it – something else must be looking, another 1, for him to be seen, to hear of himself.

In what she tells him.

 

Multiple inputs introduce noise (read chaos, read being), make possibilities, provide things to figure out.  With all the variables it takes a lot of time (to get what it’s about).

The Anniversary

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes43 Comments

FRIDAY FICTIONEERS – WEEK OF February 1

(please consider joining us)

The Anniversary

I remember what the sculptor said, at our wedding:

“How very many years it takes to get to this – the unitary lean.  Two figures completed in one.  So much stripping and friction, hacking and cuts.  So very many tools applied.  The hurt and the loss, the heat and the cold.  Form and substance are hard to reshape.  A person is a stubborn thing.  Nuance and habits of matter overcome.  Natural processes and straining retrained.  Rock removed from its quarry – blasted and torn where it rested and grew.  A new context of becoming so forceful and delicate.  Ravaged and renewing till it holds itself up.”

– how our weight is supported, these 22 years.

On By NW FilbertIn Writing2 Comments

I have to say I have strong urges to insist that no one’s gone farther…yet

meyerlanewrites's avatarMeyer Lane's Short Attention Span Press

“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
from Worstward Ho

“You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.”

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
from Waiting for Godot

“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
from Endgame

“Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.”

“I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I…

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Today’s Nonlinear Equations

On By NW FilbertIn Graphotos, Journallings1 Comment

 +  +  +  +  + 

=

Question

Live Models

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing2 Comments

Notes on Fiction and Philosophy

(complete text linked)

Brian Evenson

I thickly recommend you print and mark up the entire essay, but to tantalize your imaginative mental taste buds, here’s a representative nuggety excerpt:

“Good fiction, I would argue, always poses problems – ethical, linguistic, epistemological, ontological – and writers and readers, I believe, should be willing to draw on everything around them to pose tentative answers to those problems and, by way of them, pose problems of their own.  For innovative writers, I believe, philosophy is always best an errant affair, a personal and intense wandering, a series of tools that one can employ, move beyond, come back to; it is our ability as writers to stay curious, to borrow, to bricoler, and to adapt and move on that keeps us from becoming stale.”

Fiction in Families – 9

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

the collective to now:

language

9

“There was something tragic in fighting the borders, the heroism of shortcomings, the panic of passion.”

-Bruno Schulz/Jonathan Safran Foer-

Remembering first site: where met, what seen, who did, said and how.

We can go there, recreationally, anew.

Tangly garden, the smell of food, moisty air and a she and a him wandering through florid trellises on barely trails.  Something begins.

An arrival, a vision, a breath.

 

They eat and speak, jostling giggles, tangling knees.  They are happy with anticipation to realize.

Eye-movements and alcohol, presenting.  Blending to flavor their mouths for the meeting.  And further still, past introduction – names and facts and telephones – for months of hours.

Even sleeping through nights, receivers awake in their slumber.  But face-to-face invented an optimal – expression exceeding – verbal/aural toward visually kinetic.

Hand to dancing leg, uplifted and exposed, a slight flirtation interlocking and embrace.  The sky was leaking bliss and they without umbrellas, faces opened and upraised to be forward.

 

The rented room, hesitant jumble.  Limbs like ganglia on music, flailing and pulsing and alternating rhythms.  On such a scale.  Spiraling themes, and everything improvised.

 

Which became the uncanny and announcements to friends.  “That’s a lot of baggage,” they replied to excitement, calculating spouses, careers, digiting the children and distant thousands of miles.  Let alone all the dangling remainders.

 

And yet they persist.  Airfare and phonelines, sitters and several states.  Unable to locate square roots, figuring unresolvable answers to nonlinear equations.

 

Seemingly insoluble.  They worked at the problems, nearly convinced of their theories.  Hypotheses and tangents matched excuses unrestrained.  A mountain hollow downpoured with rain.  Something fell, an infidelity to measures.  And again, wrapped in a mail bomb of message.  Risk was reported.  Purporting fear.

 

The letters flew over the lines, bodies mired in their pasts.  Something was bound up to break.  And fracturing, she did.