[08/11/21]

Hi,
Today I have finished three bags of crisps and slipped finished apple cores into their dusty bags. I also lay for too long on a sprung wood floor trying to solve the puzzle of a text in which I think I’m stuck on an admission of love (help!?). I was singing it, falling asleep to the hum of the electric heater. I feel somehow warned and warmed by one re-reading of Bhanu Kapil’s extraordinary Ban en Banlieue.

She writes in 6b [epigraphs]:

“One thing next to another doesn’t mean they touch.”

She also reproduces a passage “at random” from a series of notebooks related to the project, which I want to scavenge, reproduce, reaching greedily for the bits that I want to resonate. Sorry; feeling conscious of everything that is emitted. (Wait, ha, realised I mean omitted, rather than emitted, but seems fair to leave in the mistake. I meant my active role in erasure beside highlighting.)

Notebook 11 [2/1/08] [Rogue Notebook]:

“Strata. Orbital.”

Notebook 12 [12/31/09]:

“The sentence as the site of expropriation. A ritual of release. Texture. Let it begin with me. Basket, sense, fugitive. Notes, waiting for a ‘crown’. Qualities displaced by a customer, customers asking for more: fur, content, ritual. Waiting for a ‘crown’ as a room. I was a bitch today.”

(...)

Notebook 14 [7/22/11]:

“A telegraphic English. A topical, alienated English. Regional English. A cosmology of English in which the verbs rotate on the tongue then drop onto the floor. Like rhythms. Like a speech that can’t be sustained by the nerves. Frightening English. The English that gets through. Unlike archaic English. A fundamental address. And thus a text. A culminating, enduring text.”

[08/11/21]

Aujourd’hui, j’ai terminé un autre sachet de chips et jeté les noyaux de pommes finies au sol. Je suis resté trop longtemps allongé sur le dancefloor, essayant de résoudre le puzzle d’un texte dans lequel je regrette d'avoir exposé mon amour. Je le chantais en m'alignant sur le bourdonnement de l’air à condition. Aussi, je me suis senti en quelque sorte échaudé d'abord, refroidi ensuite par la relecture de ce texte de Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue .

Elle écrit (ma traduction) en 6b [épigraphes] :

“Une chose à côté d’une autre ne signifie pas qu’elles se touchent.”

Elle reproduit également «au hasard» un passage d’un de ses carnets de notes

Carnet 11 [2/1/08] [Cahier Escroc] :

“Strates. Orbitales.”

Carnet 12 [31/12/09] :

“La sentence comme lieu d’expropriation. Le rituel de libération. Texture. Que cela commence par moi. Panier, sens, fugitif. Notes en attente d’une ‘couronne’. Des qualités déplacées par un client, des clients qui en redemandent : fourrure, contenu, rituel. En attente d’une ‘couronne’ comme pièce à vivre. J’ai été une salope aujourd’hui.”

Carnet 14 [22/07/11] :

“Un anglais télégraphique. Un anglais d’actualité, aliéné. Un anglais régional. Une cosmologie d’anglais autour de laquelle les verbes nassent la langue puis tombent au sol. Comme un rythme. Comme un discours que les nerfs ne supportent plus. Anglais effrayant. L’anglais qui transperce, qui passe à travers. Contrairement à l’anglais archaïque. Une adresse fondamentale. Et donc un texte. Un texte culminant, qui reste.”

In this other text I’m trying to coax at the moment, I’m thinking so intensely of the oracle, of having it spoken first in the native language of the country before I speak it. I want to ask someone with a beautiful voice to whisper it against my fleshy cheek, and projected into my hear. Or have you read translations of Alejandra Pizarnik? I read reviews before I read the poems and imagined already that they’d be exquisite. Still thinking about the muddled space of mediation and memorial, review or commentary as ellipsis, which maybe is an expansion on the nuttiness of punctuation; how choreographic it is (with the perjorative bias that choreography is deliberated, controlled, excessive, containing time. decorative). I need to use this space for explicit citation.

I don’t think I know how else to say that I am constantly using material written by Mihnea Mircan for Afterall about Jill Magid, and a transcription from a podcast where Ariana Reines promotes her latest book A Sand Book.

How did you first learn about the ‘pre-Columbian’ warp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s California residences?

In The Marbled Swarm, Dennis Cooper laboriously outlines a pretty extraordinary house for watching, for moving or dwelling between exterior and interior, where it’s suggested the chateau could be the narrator’s voice, the secret passages are subtexts, and his words are the chateau’s furniture. There is a patrimonial language, which is, I think, the eponymous marbled swarm––“trains of sticky sentences that round up thoughts as broadly as a vacuum.” There was a passage that I still cannot forget:

"The magic show featured numbingly familiar tricks to do with card decks, top hats, scarves, a scantily attired assistant sawed in two, and so forth, which the magician enacted with a certain itemized grace for which he’d been revered.

At some point, he’d made a showgirl vanish for several minutes. While her reemergence rolled my father’s younger eyes, he said he’d felt disturbingly unworried while her disappearance was an issue.

Instead, he’d wondered what she would be thinking, poised backstage, he guessed, surely peeking through some curtain slit, waiting for her cue, watching strangers’ eyes shred the stage in search of her, knowing that, in her nonexistence, she was briefly more important than the billion times more popular magician."

I dreamt you were playing the musical saw, and then sawed into a box that held this figure that we’ve discussed and stayed with. It didn’t tear, just became a finally satisfactory display device; a moment of sleight, another impossible shell. We’re trying to build a box now. And so in this humble-ish intro, assembled to leave a trace of our thoughts as we again vacate space, I split a flow of thinking and context into two voices (notionally or falsely mine) into a restored and preserved space (imagine a tour of the restored Donald Judd loft in SoHo). So, haunted by the image of a body appearing to split into two; the consenting, subsiding body of the assistant, I guess it passes to you for the world building task of translation––creating a new foreign body out of the native elements.

Much love ;-)
x

p.s. the flavours were thin crisp ‘Forest Mushroom’, a rice chip with ‘Blue Cheese’, and ribbled ‘American Ranch’.