worms, white noise, and so on

so i suppose i should get this blog going again. here goes.

i overwhelmed myself this summer with source material, and have perhaps doomed myself as a result. going into my second year, i should maybe feel a bit more streamlined, conceptually. focused. but this summer, i opened up an existential can of worms...or maybe i would rather arrange that phrase as can of existential worms. yes. i would. it is taking some serious time and reflection to sift through it all.

and speaking of worms. i started the new academic year off with an experiment in installation. worms were only implied, and not actually present. maybe that's what it was missing. i don't think the piece was a success, but it is a new mode of working for me, and one i assembled very instinctively, which is not something i often allow myself to do. in that regard, it felt very good. i have no images because i broke my camera at the coast again.

i am re-reading one of my favorite books - don delillo's white noise. i cited this book in last year's "personal canon" paper written for a theory class as an influential piece of work. i think of it as a particularly first-rate example of the aestheticization (this should be a word) of death, among other things. speaking of aesthetics, i love this first edition cover design. typical.

last year, in late summer upon first moving to portland, i did something similar. i passed up my modest pile of books-i-own-but-have-yet-to-read to re-read an old stand-by. wow, that was a lot of hyphens...sorry.

and now, instead of drawing, i am reading interviews with, and academic analyses of delillo's work.

i HAVE been doing some work, contrary to the tone of this post. sometimes i get into a place where the source gathering feels equally, if not more satisfying than the production. i am in a grey area between the two places, currently. here's a quick low-quality cell phone shot of a sample of said work...or rather re-work:

in recycling and reworking past pieces, they have a way of feeling brand new, once i decide how to actually resolve them. even if it does take almost a year. yeah...i'm one of those.