Fragments

 Living like a ghost in a castle. Floating around. Up and down the stairs. Reading dusty books. Half listening to music. Staying silent. All day long. A whisper. 

What are you trying to write? Eating. Walking. Sleeping. Spending time. Waiting for things to change. How and when will things change? You read a little. Nor for long, just enough to make you feel less alone. Then you return to panicking. You wonder if you are trapped in a nightmare. The inability to do anything, the dumbfounding reality, the difficulty to connect with other living subjects—aren’t these all the constitutive elements of a dream? Except, they say, that you can’t write in a dream. Maybe writing is what you are using to resist the nightmare. Maybe through writing you can escape, like Sophie and Alberto. Then lucidity and control will return. But what if you never wake up? What if you slowly wither in your velvet fortress? The white flowers are dying, they see, and the red curtains are staring into you, calling you out: Get ahold of yourself, you amoebic slug! The incandescent sap of loneliness is oozing out of you like tears. Hold it back. Hold it in. Your faltering breath

I had a dream last night about packing. Clothes, shoes, skincare, makeup, books, electronics…everything meticulously put in its place, into oddly shaped baskets and bags that fit together into a pale mass. I don’t remember where I was setting off from, neither where I was going, but I was not planning to return. Sometimes I feel like my waking self is even less cognizant of what is going on in my life than my sleeping self. The things I worry about—scholarships, jobs, thesis, and boys—float about in my head, pulling me in one way or another, keeping me in a constant state of mild panic.

“Davey’s predilections as a writer echoes those she displays as an artist.”—Brian Sholis  Photography and writing comes together in Moyra Davey's works. It occured to me, after a painful night at this year's edition of Art Taipei, a frustrating morning with Gertrude Stein, and a quick run to the photo developement shop just now, that perhaps I, too, am a writer first and foremost, and a photographer second.  I have always struggled to express my obsession with abstract lines, shapes, and textures. I find these in contemporary art as well as poetry, and cherish the experience of looking at them--intensely--until they are fixed to my retinas. Is not this a kind of photography? The pleasure of this looking is extraodinarily similar to the pleasure of looking through a viewfinder. I lose the sense of time and space, and the pleasure of encountering this visual feast gushes forth from deep within my body.  The distinction, of course, is that photography has an end goal. It all stops

Lately, I've been living with a constant state of exhaustion - often mixed with excitement, exhilaration, or abandon, and sometimes, granted, with self-pitying concern, like right now - that rises and falls, according to the time of the day and the days of the week, rushing into each moment and pulling back from the next... Spiritually, I'm doing better than ever. My days are filled with learning (stimulating ideas!), reading, and I dare say highly productive work. Always surrounded by the people I love. But the physical exhaustion tugs at me. The 8 hours a night isn't helping. Neither does 10...

(Notes from the graduate seminar: The Modern Aesthetics and Politics, professor Liou Liang-Ya) Week 2 Girl with Mandolin (1910) by Pablo Picasso Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” (1925), The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Woolf breaks the assumption that modern practice of the art is an improvement upon the old. What is missing from the conventional novels - which she calls “materialist” - is the interiority of the characters. Writers like H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennet, and John Galsworthy are restricted by the conventions of plot, narrative, and description of realistic details. However, Woolf feels that their characters seem fake, lacking in vivacity. In contrast, Woolf holds James Joyce in high esteem. In Ulysses, Woolf argues, we have life itself. However, she still finds that Ulysses lacks certain rough and realistic details of life (comparing it to Tristram Shandy by Sterne). Hardy belongs to the Late-Victorian period; when she is already questioning certain concept