Nat’l Blab

I was going through some old emails and found this, which I had written to a friend. It was written long before I started this show, but it might have something to do with something, if you're trying to understand from whence this all comes.

When I say "overarching narrative," I mean a particular cosmology, understood not as some mythic "truth" but rather as an assemblage. It is a series of resonances brought into some sort of alignment. An atomic cosmology: disparate, discrete units of meaning. And also: always in flux but approximating constancy. This is all to say: Sandra Bullock means something, right?

As we are loosened from space, so too is information (the local disappears, etc., etc.). Conceptions of the world mutate necessarily into conceptions of "a world" (and, therefore, worlds). Possibilities, well, proliferate. Yes. I am drawing a shaky line around a group of ideas, people, places, images, products, styles, etc.

My national bag.

This is really a process of distillation and bricolage. Things are not so much created as located and reformulated. (Personal anthropology?) But important too is the redistribution of elements, if only by providing a new map. Navigation within some specific creative continuum (painting, the novel, the play, criticism, design, etc.) matters less than using each to its own best end.

And so on.

Amusingly, the following was her response. Which is perhaps the only response possible.

Actually, shortly after penning my last note, which referred to Seventh Heaven activities, I was summoned to an important affair at 9:30 tonight. Something to do with editing (as a class). Did you say there was something at 7? Well, we'll just see what happens. Maybe reruns for me.