the more absent i am from here,

the more present i am in daily life. this makes me wonder that if i discontinued tending this blog, would i finish more of my tangible projects? perhaps if i stopped for a time, just to see what would happen with my daily patterns. how does this strike you?

maybe it's related to spring, and wanting to be outside, digging in the dirt and ferreting out hiking trails with the dog, and wanting to be drawing and writing a book and making pots on the wheel, and baking cupcakes and relearning to cook.

but i have also grown to love this blog universe and feel quite a bit of resistance to the idea of leaving it.

any thoughts?

perfume: the story of a murderer

i cannot shake the riotous perfume of this movie. the chords it played in me are still ringing high and low. it is the most beautiful movie about a serial killer as i think there could ever be. it makes me think of a line from another movie, one from the thirties or forties but i can't remember its name, in which someone says "crime is just a left handed form of human endeavor."

the main character's single-minded desire to preserve scent is really only his quest to capture the fleetingness of beauty in life. born into a loveless existence of squalor, his sense of smell is the only part of him that seems capable of developing to maturity. in other aspects he remains stunted; his movements and expressions take on a feral quality. scent for him is the only form of higher beauty to which he can aspire, as it is given without any exchange of consent. in all other ways he is locked out of the world of exchange between human beings. his uncanny ability to identify and orchestrate scents into inebriating harmonies is precluded by the fact that he has no identifying smell of his own, no sense of a familiar origin. the source of his primary strength lies in his most profound lack, which his strength cannot correct.

isn't it within this tension, between what we have and what we are missing, that all of us must make our alchemy?

roxanne cleans house

well, that's what she would like people to believe...

origin of the x-ray

the x-ray was first called the roentgen ray--in honor of the scientist who discovered it. but he preferred to call it x-ray, because x is the algebraic symbol of the unknown, and at that time he didn't understand the nature of what it was he had discovered.

i found this wonderful photo here, by darkyard. it is one in a small series of naughty x-rays, and if you're interested they do get a bit naughtier.

earth is invisible at this scale

go to the size of our world to get the full magnitude of our smallness.

thanks to del.icio.us for bringing this to my attention.




and now comes the announcement of our new little blog, which from now on will be known simply as egg-on: "your one-stop shop for daily motivation." we hope you'll like it and visit us often.

the best of the worst

i found this over at moba (the museum of bad art site), in their "unseen forces" collection, but honestly i think it's wonderful.

poised for something

i removed the dream from yesterday's post. it was just a restaurant anxiety dream with an ending i couldn't really remember. i wasn't happy with it as a dream to be shared; too much of its substance had dissipated by the time i was fully awake.
what is left of it now is only the outline around it, shaped by these words-- my justification for erasing it. somehow this brings the luster back into it. it's absence makes it much more interesting than it was when it was there.

the flags are all still at half mast. on the way to school the other day, sophie and i were talking about the surge of respect death brings. she said: 'the world is weird. when you're alive you're nobody, but when you die you become the most important person who ever lived.'



it has been so cold the last few days, so clear and bright at night the stars seem like small pointed teeth. at the dog park this morning even my thick wooly gloves were no match for the cold. one of the men, he comes to the park occasionally with his 20 year old dog, mona lisa, said to me: 'mittens are better. your fingers keep each other warm.'

forget me not

it's uncanny sometimes the way subjects coincide. for christmas i received a book from kay titled "forget me not: photography and remembrance," by geoffrey batchen, concerning the embellished photograph to enhance memory-- the way the photograph embedded into a treasured momento makes it more saturated for the purposes of memory.

then from chris at bright stupid confetti i was given this link to square america, a gallery full of vintage photographs. one of the most compelling sections of this website is called 'defaced,' all pictures in which faces have been somehow obliterated.







in some of them the faces have been scratched out with something sharp. they seem to belong to a different category than these, in which the faces seem to have been lifted out to put into something smaller and easy to keep with its admirer at all times. these pictures seem less ghostly if we think of the part missing as not a part discarded, but a part kept, even more important than what it was extracted from, even; worth defacing the original for.




and then, on top of this, i'm reading austerlitz, by w.b. sebald, a story about making up one's identity from scratch, from objects and photographs left behind, from scraps of others' identities.







what is it, if not loss, that makes the collector?

"if illusions are always illusions of a reality, reality, for its part, is never the reality of anything but an illusion."--baudrillard

in the vocabulary of wine terminology, there is something called the 'threshold of sensation: the smallest concentration of a stimulus that can produce a general but unidentifiable sensation. lower than the threshold of perception.'

from this sentence i became aware that the imperceptible quality of a thing arises from there being a scarcity of it. just enough to sense it but not enough to name it, to put it into words. the inexpressible is merely the world outside of language. you would think this world would have shrunk into nothingness by now; you'd think the sprawl of language would have spread over every square inch of perception. oddly, i think the reverse is true, as the inexpressible is infinite and the expressible is not. it seems to me at times that language is, at its root, a substitution of what we have for what we don't have.

i think i find myself so drawn to the french language because this idea is somehow innate within its structure. in english, we think 'about' something. in french, we think 'toward' it, away from ourselves as the center of thought, toward thought as a place outside of ourselves. in english we say 'i miss you,' but in french we say 'vous me manquez:,' it is you who i lack. i learned this difference earlier in my french study, but not in the same concentration as i learned it today. i got a very sudden sense of something vast that i could not hold onto. it was only a passing glimpse and then it was gone, irretreivable, like a blissful odor from childhood, or a name that was just on the tip of my tongue.