Clap
On: Being Alone and Reading
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Stories
in and out of time. Stories of We Talk About These Things A Lot and also stories of This One Tuesday In November of 1998. As though the pretty twins specificity and generality
had got into a knockdown, drag out, pay-per-view fight.
On
the CD-Rom "Nightwalks," the user views a series of mysterious
street scenes in 360 degree virtual reality. You have control over the
images and you can zoom in and out. You can see every hair on every
knuckle in the photographs, but you have no idea what's really going
on in the pictures. You just switch back and forth between details and
landscapes, hoping to make sense of some of it. It seems that in the
writings, time works something like that.
Stories in and out of public. Things everybody saw a lot of times, and things
that happened once and nobody else saw.
These things gain equal weight in the telling. Or reveal it. Everything seen might have been
important. It seems best to let
you remember the bits you like. Drunkenness
(1) A lot of drunk stories. Stories about pretending to be drunk, stories about getting drunk for real with other drunks who won’t stop drinking. A drinking that always seems to carry the drinker through the night and into the morning without even noticing. Drinking in strange cities or with strangers from other cities. Drinking to keep everyone talking out loud together. Especially when they are visiting from somewhere far away and haven’t got a lot in common. Drinking as a way to make things take long enough. Drinking until you run out of movies to watch or until someone finally gets up onto the stage and mucks up the set. Making conversations last all night, drinking to keep everyone in the same room. ‘My
love--’ I’m sometimes in the first person. You are too. Sometimes, it is necessary to tell things to someone specific who I know will read this. Often, the distance is a more useful sort of feeling for the work. Sometimes it seems I am happy to tell you anything. Writing as a best friend whispering secrets from a sleeping bag across the room. But it might even be you are eavesdropping on a very private dialogue between me and someone else. Drunkenness
(2) A sort of gloss on the drunkenness that seems to pervade so much of the writing. Too humble to call itself a mythology, but a kind of mythology nonetheless. A half-lit warm room where all the stories live. They all sound true but nobody got too hurt. If someone did get hurt, that was a long time ago, and now you are safe and we can laugh about it. Maybe it is the stories themselves that are drunk. Stories that are more like liquid than like regular stories. Ideas that don’t build exactly, but don’t dissipate either. Slosh back and forth between themselves, leaving traces of small waves on the inside of the cup. Ideas that spend as much time in your liver as in your brain. Not like other kinds of ideas that you read about. Naming
and Re-Naming Always stories about people, and almost always about people with names. Cathy and Claire and Rob and Richard and Miles. Sometimes, though, the light gets dimmer and people become single letters. You can piece it together if you like, of course. A code that you’ve already been taught. It feels more polite than just gossiping, and everyone deserves a little privacy. We’re in this together, but only from your perspective. |