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Alan-- I am really touched by some of your writing -- and this piece especially. What feels selfish to me is to feel so privileged to read a text that so clearly comes from deep pain. I am not a person who believes in the nobility of suffering. If I hadn't rejected that idea before, living with Millie would have disabused me of it. She could have done so much more, lay in bed with new ideas that never came to fruition, because her body and her pain would not allow for it. Here you are, Alan, creative, innovative, determined to do what you can. Sometimes I read and wish you had wiser doctors -- and wonder if there isn't something physical that could, at least, be alleviated enough to give you a better quality of life. Sometimes I read and think about Brooklyn and the horror of what has happened in your neighborhood. Sometimes it's the hospital executives who think they can close if they feel like it -- without due consideration for the community that depends upon them. In the case of hospital closings anyway, it looks as if the state health department is finally stepping in. . . Certainly, I understand the pain of moving from Brooklyn. It was similar for me when I moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan 30 years ago. I knew I was giving up a lot in the way of neighborhood culture as well as access to museums. All I can say is that while Millie always missed NYC and returned there as often as she could, Providence was very good for her, and once she left Providence, she missed it and her life there almost as much as she missed NYC. I hope for better days ahead for you, Alan. I hope for some lifting of those shadows -- and that Providence will work out well despite the loss of your Brooklyn surroundings (some of which you have already lost, thanks to Barclay). Best, Martha Alan Sondheim wrote: LousyMy recent work has been lousy, repetitive, mediocre. I go over the same grounds again and again as I attempt to hold onto my sanity in a world of ultra-violence. Any response I might have to this world is lost in the symbolic, nothing is left, nothing left behind. I see our move to Providence as exile from the edginess of Brooklyn, for me the last locus of alternative negation. I see myself going over the same musical grounds, playing alone or with Azure, without the dark energy of the dominant saxophone. And I see my own good ideas already on the block and lost. I'm lousy with a mind corrosive with self-pity, drive, obsession, and an easy way out. I watch the body close down: carpal- tunnel, stretched muscles, tinnitus, insomnia, sweat, difficult breathing, clumsiness, stress, confusion: what's left forms the few notes of the shakuhachi. I take note of everything; I'm drowning in my own mediocrity. My end-blow flute-playing is lousy, my theory drags out thinkers from before the wars, my virtual world work imitates itself and I'm lazy in terms of new programming, my writing's pretty much ignored for good reason, and I still write from the outmoded positionings of the murmur and the scream. I'm exhausted with theory, I haven't read nearly enough, I take shortcuts, my lousy thinking infects everything, turning to paranoia at the slightest provocation. There - you see - "slightest provocation" - a lousy trite phrase, because my thinking short-circuits itself, comes up with nothing new but a fabricated lousy honest that's close to unhinged. I wish for something new, some catalyst - students perhaps or a Festschrift (I dare dream!) - to bring me out of this study in gray, but I've wished for such all my life, and this kind of wish is never granted, or granted at best in retrospect - and certainly not for the kind of lousy work I do. I type and think through the autonomous nervous system, as if my circuits were jolted by some sort of external machinery from the gods, content be damned. I write but it writes itself and in this case, this writing, this thinking, these virtual worlds, these video, these images, this music, is lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy. An epitaph - stupidly, in spite of himself, he kept trying. The rest of us knew enough to ignore the results. He was his own worst result. He was lousy. He was lousy because he took the easy way out, as if there were laurels to collect, choices made for him. He went with whatever fell the fastest. He kept waiting for his life and work to turn around, for something to turn them around, for him. He thought practice, not insight, makes perfect. His thought was lousy too. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour -- The Last Collaboration http://www.amazon.com Read online http://www.furtherfield.org/friendsofspork/ Intro by Edward Picot http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/last-collaboration City Bird: Selected Poems (1991-2009) by Millie Niss, edited by Martha Deed http://blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/ |
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