Miles and Miles: The Inspiration of Laurie AndersonSo it seems that I've come to the end of yet another action-packed week. Now it's "break time," but the meaning of the term is lost on me as a grad student, I'm afraid. I just had a series of conferences with my students about their writing (which went well), and now it's time to turn back to my own (much neglected at this point) work. I'm sort of excited about getting down to writing one of my exams -- value theory, in my case, about aesthetics -- but there are other details to be tended to that I'm not so wild about at the moment (rewriting another exam, doing a translation). I suppose I'll get over it. So although I'm supposed to feel like it's the home stretch at the moment, it really feels like I have so much further to go. I'm going to be in NY for Thanksgiving (mmmm turkey), and again for Christmastime. Hopefully I'll get to see some northern folks while I'm up there, and you all will tell me that my speech pattern has slowed since we've last seen each other.
I feel a bit reinvigorated at the moment. This semester has been eating me alive in a lot of ways. I'd been feeling sort of uninspired about where I was going and what I was doing. The only thing I was into was expanding my expression into the realm of painting. I've dabbled with it in the past, but nothing too serious. I never fancied myself as capable of producing visual images that I liked or that others might like. But I started trying to draw more, and there were some things that I had to say that weren't expressible in words or in musical notes. Sometimes it was about color or shape. Sometimes words snuck in as well (how could they not with me), but mostly it's exploring a whole other side of what my mind and hands are capable of expressing. The reinvigoration has to do with a lot of things, I suppose, but Laurie Anderson probably most directly. She gave a talk at VU on Wednesday, and then performed on Thursday night. Lucas came up to see her with me. It was incredible. I feel like I'm going to be sorting through it for quite a while. There were candles all over the stage, a large arm chair, and an electric violin and synthesizer. She'd tell stories / do spoken word poetry -- it was epic, but all the same, there were aspects of what she was saying that made me feel like she was speaking
directly to me. If her tour comes anywhere near you, GO! Her latest performance piece, entitled
The End of the Moon, which is what I saw, is incredible. For the first time in a long time, I went home and I wrote something. I've been drawing in my journal mostly lately, but then I felt like what I had to express was in words. Welcome back! Perhaps more on this later, but the main point is that I suspect that this inspiration will spring beyond poetics into other aesthetic issues I'm trying to work through. Maybe I'll write those down, too.
I Fear that I am Pathological // "I Wanna Be Adored"?Suffice to say that I've backed myself into a corner yet again. Truth is, I don't really want adoration, I don't want suffocation, and I don't want to feel boxed in. Once a guy shows me undue attention, my hitchhiking thumb starts to itch and I want to go go go. Damn independent spirit. It shouldn't be serious yet, and still I feel if I try to back out of this situation, I'll break this guy's heart.
So I've gotta ask myself here: Do I go in for the ones that are going to severly mess me up? Do I go for the assholes that won't pay attention? Do I go for the ones that aren't tamed instead of the ones that try to tame me? I just want to know.
