but i am glum.  i got up yesterday morning with a hankering to drive to the local outlet mall, some 50 miles away, because why not, where else is there?  i drove down there singing in the car, very like, and stopped for a late breakfast at a “family restaurant.” it appears i was attempting food again.  possibly not such a good idea?  i then went to said mall (it’s a real, old fashioned mall, outdoors) and had barely set foot in the saks outlet when i realized i needed a “restroom” pronto.  this is an outlet mall, mind, which has no restrooms in the stores, but only large airport-like stall chambers at strategic points along the concourses.  luckily i was not far and i talked myself into making it there in time, where i paused for about half an hour in a cold sweat and dire straits.  50 miles from home.  long story short, after another limited, similarly aborted attempt a store, i asked myself what i was doing there, called it quits and drove back home, took to my bed and slept for the rest of the afternoon.  and that was my shopping outing. i wasn’t going to buy anything anyway.

so much for eating again, says i.  i made my humble vegetable dinner and this morning i had some of the bread toasted, with peanut butter, and it seems fine.  what was that, i wonder?  i am limited now to lembas?

what the…how???

i’ve been getting several hits from foreign climes and i’m wondering what gives, so i traced back a referral path and, voila!  this humble blog is the numero uno listing in google images for its brief reference last december, albeit with weblinked picture, to “the legendary critic and curator”  badabada.

sorry folks, can’t say i know the man, took a class with him going on 30 years ago, and he was a houseguest, and all-around great guy, and it was a privilege to be in his exalted &tc (although he didn’t act that way at all, i don’t mean, except he hated the coffee which i don’t blame him, i think it was instant—hey, we were art students!)  i will take this as my 15 minutes, thank you, and not unlike the various wikipedia entries that only i know i wrote, which not infrequently are handed to me in workshops as background on whatever is the subject in question.  apparently i wrote the book.

solipsism? anyone?

it’s been four weeks now, and next week i have the art workshop for elementary teachers every day during schoolish hours, so it’s about time to think about resuming my regularly scheduled life.  i’m hoping (hoping) it won’t completely immerse my own life as it did last year.  it’s actually been quite a four weeks.  completely alone, often not out of the house for several days at a time, i learned again to study, at least what i want to study, and concentrated for a good bit of time on art influences.  i learned again, pretty much, to eat meals of food.  i didn’t get done what i had planned to do but, hey, there’s still time, right?  i did get the study cleared out (at least at surface level) and it looks good again and i’m quite invited to be in there—the screening area is especially nice—and i spent some days reading in the morning, knitting at mid-day and then watching in my dvd space from late afternoon until bedtime, when i checked the net.  how much complaining can i do about that?  so it’s been lonely, or it was until i got used to it, but it’s been good.  i’m going to have to get used to NOT doing that, now.

as i said, i moved to middle earth, working my way through the incredible dvd sets that show how the movies were made.  (i had said, when they began to come out years ago, that i was going to wait until they were all out before beginning, so i could do it all at once and not have to pause; and then when they were all out i was otherwise engaged) really made me nostalgic for my theater days.  they seem unaware that the unique feeling of kinship to which they kept alluding has a precedent in repertory theatre—which MacKellan, at least,  can’t have forgotten so i’m sure he’s just being disingenuous—which made me homesick or the first time in many years for those days at OSFA.  that and the fact that i went to art school with the special effect supervisor really cued me in in a way that began actually to make me jealous until i remembered that making movies is the seventh ring of hell.  they forgot to mention that part; or they mentioned it (he actually began to seem quite unpleasant with the complaining—i notice he hasn’t continued to work with weta but has moved on to other movies, which is only to be expected as he ws a flown-in american expert, after all, but still, it seems the kind of thing one would throw ones life over to continue to do if at all possible, i would, or i would if i were a 20-something boy, which it seems is the majority of people on the film) but in such a way as to glamorize it.  but anyway, i persevered with the whole thing, and am reading the books again, and getting lots of influences.  I even got the online MMORPG in order to keep the thing rolling.  I don’t know if it will work.  I’ve only tried one of those and it didn’t work for me at all and i soon uninstalled it, but then LOTR itself didn’t work for me for many years, either, and now it’s providing great influence, so who knows?  I can’t tell because it’s taking hours and hours to install.  First 2 hours to install from 2 dvdroms, and then, once i logged in, it started downloading game updates which it’s still doing hours later.  thing’s only been out since april.  so we shall see (somehow, to the obsessive me, that sounds promising.)

sigh… still only 35% downloaded…

i cannot believe that this is what is coming out of this summer alone but there it is:  i am contemplating going back to philosophy, resuming my identity as intellect, trying to convince myself that this sudden repatriation does not constitute a diversion from art practice, or not merely that. i think want to go back and get a masters in aesthetics, which should be a simple matter of writing a thesis, if it’s possible to do at all.  i haven’t the heart at present to outline for you the road that seems to have led me from the abd ph.d to this pass, for those of you who are following along out there (except for you, faithful nancy, who was there; i continue to be indebted to all that you do) but it seems that this is becoming the case: ex nihilo aliquis sunt.  as i commented elsewhere:

i am starting the idea by thinking, for the next 4 weeks i have left (just under 4,) about one of the incompletes i would need to dissolve, this one by writing a paper on kant.  who’s kant again? transcendental wha?

but progress has been made this morning by 1) identifying the book i imagine need to read; 2) perceiving its possible resting place among the 5,000 volumes to be in one of many boxes, if anywhere, and therefore unavailable; 3) amazoning the title even amidst my own disgust at the contemplation already of further redundant purchase before i even begin this questionable quest; 3) amazon parenthetically informing me that the work in question is also anthologized in the great books set published the year i was born and, therefore, miraculously to hand in a still-standing bookcase in the newly mined study; 3) perusal of said text leading me to footnotes that point to the text i actually should be writing about, and; 3) so i am begun.

3: RTFM, fool; it seems the omens are in place after all.

o the places we went.  and the places we didn’t, and the places we came back from.  and the places we didn’t.