think to yourself

 

A Stack of Diaries, Lorna Simpson, 1993.

Dear Diary,

Today I feel very pale; I checked, yes, of course, and no, the mirror reports I am no paler than usual.  I thought maybe it started when I got out of bed and decided that breathing like this, through 10 feet of dense felt, could be improved by albuterol.  I dearly love albuterol!  I wonder often, do people know about this stuff??  Why isn't it dealt out of the trunks of cars in back alleys?  But, it may have started in the night, when I awoke with the old tiresome series of dreams that have me missing classes, whole days, important social clues, waiting in long lines for the restroom only to be let into a changing room, with just a mirror and a thin curtain.  Or, yet further back, yesterday, when I sat in the cold wind, because the diner had closed, and I listened to a friend enumerate her sadnesses.  Or, maybe it is the change in the weather from a storm that rages to the north and will arrive in a day or two....

Or maybe this paleness erupted after a spate of anger I felt in recounting another lunchtime listening; two older women, who break my heart with their intense longing to be younger and striving physically to push back aging and death, toiling at their gyms and their gratitude journals.  I am horrified by their Sisyphean efforts, and yes, yes, of course this makes me a monster, a nihilist, and cynic, a lazybones, a quitter, a quivering jelly.  I have thought it all through a thousand times, but I still say we, our culture, has made a pariah of aging- an inevitable failure of cellular tissue is a failure now of will and faith.  Still, I say, no good can come from force.  Or, maybe it is more accurate to say that there will be consequences- the 'push' down, back, away, at this locus will erupt in another.

But, no, this pale feeling may have come when I read the words "denk dir;" in Yoko Tawada's Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, which I could have been wholly satisfied with by only the title; it could have found a place in the revered top of the bookshelf, with the favorite books, some dozen or so, that live side by side, in reading only the beautiful, evocative title.  What more can a writer do if they have already accomplished so much in just the title?  Denk dir, denk dir- the book says it comes from a Celan poem; that it means "think to yourself," or "imagine."  Thinking to yourself is imagining.  Oh my, yes, it makes me pale, quail, to think it again.  Think to yourself.  Imagine.

Think to yourself, imagine.

Imagine!  Think to yourself!

Think to; yourself.

Imagine.

Regardez ce film.

 Chong Gon Byun

Untitled, 29” x 21” x 9.75," Oil on Trunk, 1990

Dear Holiday Revelers,

Here at the Dodo, and maybe where you are too, we have extra time in the long, dark, winter evenings, and we have spent many of them 'rotting our minds' on TV, as my parents' used to say to me.  There is no need for you to rot your mind, though, because we have sorted the mind rotting material into two piles: pile one, like junk food, will not really bear discussion; pile two, includes this really lovely surrealist film by Marie Losier.  It's a film of artist Chong Gon Byun, and what I have for you here, is this excerpt:  Byun, Objet Trouvé.

The entire film can be found on The Criterion Channel, which is a thing you will have to pay for, or at least agree to a 'free trial' of.  It's 7 minutes of really beautiful, actual, saturated, developed, cut and spliced, film, and here at the Dodo, we found it worth at least double the price of the free trial.

PS     Now that you have that free trial, you might also watch this charming adaptation of The Railway Children.  It's a movie that one imagines young Wes Anderson being inspired by.  It was an absolute favorite novel of mine when I was young and impressionable, written by E. Nesbit; a writer you should know, and if you don't believe me, maybe you'll take Gore Vidal's word for it (yes, to read it, you will need another free trial and to register and sign up and secret password and, and, and....)

small bits

Dear Little Pieces,

Today your song is called Fragment II; and it's what they call a musical project, which is kind of nowspeak for what we might once have called a 'band.' 

I have been thinking about my own musical projects, in a kind of fantasy baseball way.  Here is a rundown of the projects I have been working on, albeit wishfully, and only in my imagination.

I have been playing cowbell for Exene Cervenka now for about a decade, and later this year, we will head out on tour, opening for Laurie Anderson.  I have been co-writing a song with Jonathan Richman; it will come out sometime next year.  In January, I will play keyboards in a project with Y La Bamba, and do some vocals too, on a filmscore for a new John Sayles movie.  For the holidays, I am doing a duet with Elvis Costello; we will be singing Greg Lake's I Believe in Father Christmas.  I am also playing the buzzing fish shaped percussion thingy that I can't remember the name of, in a supergroup called Torch and Twang- we cover Kraftwork songs, and we are really killing it with the Sylvan Esso fans.