10's, Week 10

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• A brown horse laying in the sun like a dog in a fenced-in field.
  
• A plump, brown squirrel hunched over on a brick gate, chewing a peanut open with his mouth.
  
• An ominous, gray curtain of clouds hovering over I-94.
  
• Orange plates of fish wrapped in round, seaweed-rice packages revolve on a metal conveyor.
  
• A group of students gathered on the Diag in Ann Arbor, clapping and cheering as the major speaks.
  
• A collection of tween girls on either side of the neighborhood street with colorful balloons in hand, nothing but the wet cement between them.
  
• A silver pot of water rolling with green and white and orange vegetables.
  
• Two pounds of milk chocolate, packaged and shaped like a friendly bunny.
  
• Ghosts of outfits lie on the bedroom carpet like war casualties.
  
• A stack of folded papers in a wire cage, each the same as its neighbor below.
  

10 "Treasures":

• "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." --Carl Jung on "The Shadow"
  
• "Where we live, the skies are heavy with sleep. Sometimes high-flying jets come down encrusted with it, like bees dusted with pollen." --Stacy Levine, "Sleep" from My Horse and Other Stories
• "The best art and writing is almost like an assignment; it is so vibrant that you feel compelled to make something in response." --from Learningtoloveyoumore.com
• "For a brief moment it seems wonderfully easy to live and love and create breathtaking things..in the same way that the ocean gives the assignment of breathing deeply, and kissing instructs us to stop thinking." --from Learningtoloveyoumore.com
  
• "Don't look back, all you'll ever get is the dust from the steps before." --Zooey Deschanel (of She & Him), lyrics to "Don't Look Back"
  
• "Well alright, it's ok, we all get the slip sometimes everyday. I'll just keep it to myself in the sun." --Zooey Deschanel (of She & Him), lyrics to "In the Sun"
  
• "Sunshine, we all see the same sky. Looking, learning, asking the same why?" --Belle & Sebastian, lyrics from "Song for Sunshine"
  
• "Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant." --from Posterous.com
  
• "If anyone's curious what I look like with a beard, it's this ?:^(0) Coincidentally, that's also my ATM pin number." --Conan O'Brien, from his Twitter
  
• "America likes stuff that's familiar #healthcareforeveryoneisscarycauseitsnew." --Sarah Silverman, from her Twitter
  

Photobiography

Learning To Love You More:

Assignment #11: Photograph a scar and write about it.

This is a scar from a surgery I had in April 2008. In hopes of fixing my malformed foot I regretfully and apprehensively underwent a lapidus bunionectomy. After six months of crutches and wearing a big black boot, this is what I have to show for it.



Assignment #27: Take a picture of the sun.




Assignment #50: Take a flash photo under your bed.

Shadow Narrative:

Photograph, illustrate or write a narrative for your personal shadow.

Sappho Collaboration

"Aiga"

Spangled is
Your skin glistening in the sun
The earth with her crowns
Stretches far and wide
I would lead
You down the winding paths, between stones stacked like
Wedding gifts,
The land was called
Aiga,
A peaceful,
Non-evil
Sanctuary for us from the
Paingiver
In our lives, like
A vine that grows up trees
We
Channel
The emergence of
Dawn



**The 10 Sappho lines are in italic and were taken from 168C-175 (p.345-9) in If Not, Winter.

10's, Week 9

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• A white note card on the speckled, gray concrete sidewalk that simply reads "leap".
  
• Three giant post-consumer plastic bags hanging on a wood fence, each labeled for the appropriate plastic they contain (by number: 1, 2, 3).
  
• Ten pairs of shoes lined up in a row along the wall next to the front door.
  
• A mannequin head on display in a vintage store window, pale-faced with bright blue painted eyes, elaborate with painted eyelashes and rosy cheeks.
  
• A team of women pick up the countless necklaces off the shop floor from the fallen shelves.
  
• A line of people waiting outside State Theatre, under the neon-lit marquee that reads "CLOCKWORK ORANGE MIDNIGHT TIX SIX BUX."
  
• Various antique family glassware, stacked inside cardboard boxes, newspaper separating one piece from another.
  
• Globs of green toothpaste stick to the porcelain sink bowl, left for someone else to clean.
  
• A stack of pristine, white paper waits uniformly in the top of the gray printer for the day it will be called to service.
  
• A refrigerator filled with brown paper sacks, Tupperware, and stacked Styrofoam containers of wasted food that will wait until garbage day.
  

10 "Treasures":

• "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." --Nelson Mandela (from an Honest Tea lid)
  
• "Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use." --Wendell Johnson (from and Honest Tea lid)
  
• "Choose being kind over being right and you'll be right every time." --Richard Carlson (from an Honest Tea lid)
  
• "Consider the letters of the alphabet and all of their various phonetic interpretations. Each individual character has its own history, its own stages of evolution, and its own place among the others. Some stand alone and others are hopelessly paired. Some are virtually unemployed while others are over-worked and abused." --Anatole France, "Alphabet" from The Garden of Epicurus (read from The Arcades Project)
  
• "Randomness: There are an infinite number of random entry points to this project. It can be accessed in countless contexts. Try going here and seeing that you can find interesting in the list of keywords." --The Arcades Project
  
• "The relationship between the mental landscape of the interior and the physical landscape of the exterior is a crucial aspect of the flaneur narrator's effectiveness as a literary device." --Walter Benjamin (from The Arcades Project, an analysis of Thoreau)
  
• "To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." --Walter Benjamin
  
• "In a shop on the Rue LEgendre, in Batingnolles, a whole serious of female busts, without heads or legs, with curtain hooks in place of arms and a percaline skin of arbitrary hue--bean brown, glaring pink, hard black--are lined up like a row of onions, impaled on rods, or set out on tables. . . The sight of this ebb tide of bosoms, the Musee Curtius of breasts, puts on vaguely in mind of those vaults in the Louvre where classical sculptures are housed, when one and the same torso, eternally repeated, beguiles the time for those who look over it, with a yawn, on rainy days. . ." --J.K. Huysmans, Croquis Parisiens (from The Doll, The Automaton)
  
• "Boredom waits for death." --Johann Peter Hebel
  
• "Waiting is life." --Victor Hugo
  

10's, Week 8

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• A grey-haired man in black robe behind a desk, centered between the American flag and Michigan's state flag, speaking to a man miles away via the 40" LCD television mounted on the wall.
  
• A blue sign overhead that reads, "Aisle 9: Breakfast Foods, Candy, Healthy Living."
  
• A closet rack tangled with hangers and shirts, with neat stacks of folded clothes above on the shelf.
  
• A gray unshapely stain on the concrete, the wet shadow of ice once there.
  
• The brown and gold couch pillows scattered all over the living room carpet, like stepping stones.
  
• A white ceramic bowl sprinkled in ashes and crumpled up cigarette butts like a battlefield.
  
• Burgundy water, white with foam, running down the bathtub drain as she rinses her hair under the running water.
  
• Seven brown boxes stacked crookedly on top of one another and banished to the corner of the room.
  
• A red plastic box that reads "City of Ypsilanti," overflowing with empty cardboard food boxes and plastic milk jugs.
  
• The green number ":23" glowing on the microwave where the time should be.
  

10 "Treasures":

• "Someone will remember us I say even in another time." --Sappho, from If Not, Winter by Anne Carson (147)
  
• "As long as you want." --Sappho, from If Not, Winter by Anne Carson (45)
  
• "And on the eyes of black sleep of night." --Sappho, from If Not, Winter by Anne Carson (151)
  
• "With what eyes?" --Sappho, from If Not, Winter by Anne Carson (162)
  
• "Whiter by far than an egg." --Sappho, from If Not, Winter by Anne Carson (167)
  
• "Spangled is the earth with her crowns." --Sappho, from If Not, Winter by Anne Carson (168C)
  
• "People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes." --Heraclitus, Fragments (4)
  
• "From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony." --Heraclitus, Fragments (46)
  
• "The way up is the way back." --Heraclitus, Fragments (69)
  
• "Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within." --Heraclitus, Fragments (80)
  

Body Part Narrative

One in Ten

I'm here in line with the others, usually unnoticed. My twin on the other side, more valued, I feel. The pressure of pens and pencils weigh down on my daily--so much so I've changed shape. When decorated like the others, my paint always chips first. When bowling I'm the only one who aches the next morning, enlarged with blisters. I do a lot, but receive no special praise because I am merely one in ten.

Poem Box

"Cantiga 12: Birth of Venus"

From Cosmic Canticle by Ernesto Cardenal

Who'd have said that out of such confusion
there would one day emerge such a beautiful and fragile filigree,
life.
Fresh from the sea like Venus
life.
The sea was born from the wedding of hydrogen and oxygen
and life was born from the sea
in the salt transparency
molecules transforming into protoplasm.
Venus dripping, fresh from the sea.
The composition of our blood much akin,
according to Cousteau,
to that of sea water.

The salt of sweat and of our tears
is from the sea
...dripping.
Even now our bodies gush sea water.
Hence our need for water. Thirst.
Venus gushing water--the first algae.
Then the first prints in the sand.
The first eyes opened
and already the earth was green.
Plants. (From gas and water and sunlight).
The stench of mud and crushed leaves
created the sense of smell.
Toads and frogs were the first to hear.
Life came out of the sea, which explains
this oceanic to and fro in our veins.
And the moon's hold on us.

Life came out of the sea
like a bather on Corn Island beach.
Coconut palms in the foreground,
against the blue, the blues,
bluest of blues and
green swathes
like light-green rivers between the blue
dark blue
blue-black patches,
and the sky is scarcely blue at all against so many blues
and on the shore, on the stones: crystal, colorless, crystal;
closer in, sugar-like sand,
and coconut palms with coconuts in the foreground.
And the female bather saunters towards us
dripping wet.
Life came out of the sea. Venus gushing water.
That's why our blood is salty like the ocean
and the proportion of salt is the same.
And likewise the sodium, the potassium in our veins
come from the primeval ocean.
Gushing blood and tears.

10's, Week 7

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• Hand to dog's ears to dog's back to French fries to mouth to jeans. Repeat. Hand back to mouth, this time one finger at a time.
  
• The collection of snowflakes melting on your dark brown hair and big blue scarf as you walk through the door.
  
• Countless bare, brown trees sprouting up through the snow-covered, round Pennsylvania mountains, like hair on a scalp.
  
• Buildings covered in bright LCD screens, flashing advertisements for several blocks. Banner atop of sign atop of LCD screen.
  
• Three slips of white paper, each with numbers and punched holes, clipped to the back of the seat ahead.
  
• An abandoned 18-wheeler resting on its side in a snowy ditch, like an animal carcass.
  
• Five Chihuahua puppies wrestling through mountains of shredded paper in a glass window that reads: "Le Petit Puppy," hand painted in gold letters.
  
• The golden sun shines through the gutter's bars revealing a collection of things long lost: a pair of sunglasses, some bracelets, pens, markers, lids, gum in the mold of a particular set of teeth, plastic wrappers, a metro card, cigarette butts, and plastic utensils.
  
• A window of mannequin heads, wearing wigs in all colors: from brown to pink to green.
  
• A crinkled-up, blue umbrella broken and forlorn in a pile of snow.
  

10 "Treasures":

• "Because we dream of where we walk and walk to where we dream, we are always lost." --Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg
  
• "My father died, with nothing left to do, he died." --Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg
  
• "Back to the task of disentangling myself from this town." --Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg
  
• "Quickly covered up by the forgetfulness of our snow." --Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg
  
• "Everything that happens in this town is a euphemism." --Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg
  
• "IF I JUMP I THINK I CAN MAKE IT." --Peter Vidani, "Not Quite"
  
• "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." --Dr. Carl Sagan
  
• "You've lost your muchness." --Johnny Depp (as the mad hatter) in Alice in Wonderland
  
• "Leave my head demagnetized; tell me where the trauma lies: in the scan of pathogen or the shadow of my sin." --Charlotte Gainsbourg, lyrics from "IRM"
  
• "And these songs that you sing, do they mean anything to the people you're singing them to, people like you." --Charlotte Gainsbourg, lyrics from "The Songs That We Sing"