random continuations

4. I obviously don't trust my laptop that just conked out on me a few minutes ago, or the internet connection, or the possibility that I'm going to press a wrong button and my words are going to be lost (like a long letter I had written for maita that's bound to be at the heart of whatever purgatory lost words end up in.) Within a book's another book where no endings end, no thrown balls land on no dark rivers, no pages turn unturned, no last page lasts. Always beginning-- the old book within the lost book one forgot to read because the world was too busy, and the reader's eye too tired to hold onto whatever last thing it was that made sense.

5. I feel like I'm getting more pretentious by the minute. I think I'm going to stop here. No---

6. Last book I bought was a textbook called Picturing Texts. Uses images and photographs to teach composition. Extends the definition of "text". Recognizes the long and lazy dance of words and photographs. How did people imagine their lives before photography? Memory has always seemed to be a series of pictures. Almost unimaginable to think of the world before the photo, the pose, the smile for the camera. Did people smile differently? Look away differently? What did it mean to "look away"?

7. I want to trip respect. Rip the teeth out of manners. Embarrass whatever is deemed proper by the day, on that day. Surprise the sentences we send to each other by feigning an end.

very well, random thoughts then

as random as random can get

1. having my first painting-collaboration exhibit by the end of next month. working with some gay painters/writers from cebu in the first (I think) gay exhibit in cebu. I hope it pushes through. The theme's going to be: How did I know--- a look at that first moment when we realize we were different. I'm thinking of doing a series of fragments-phrases and turning it into a visual artifact. It will be my first painting.

2. on my desktop is a picture of Zadie Smith. The beautiful writer of the hottest new book of the week: On Beauty. The last time I tried reading her was maybe two years ago when I gave White Teeth a shot. My slow-mo mind took me only up to the first ten pages: too many voices, too many things happening, all the randomness of the intercultural, urban landscape caught on the page. Made me realize I liked my books small town, slow, and uncomplicated on the surface. Too much surface in many novels. Maybe the novel (like film) IS about surface. My instinct has always made me look for the hidden, the unsaid, the unchanging. No wonder I'd only reach for a novel on a rainy day, or a long week-end, or in the rare possibility that I've finished reading all the nonfiction that's on shelf. On Beauty.

3. let me post this before these entries get lost.

The end of one

By the end of this week, I'll be done with the first test of my comprehensive exams.
And a good friend will be on a plane leaving for Canada.
Endings always make me nervous.