autobiog.txt see 1996


disclaimer: information as true as I can make it. please back-channel any 
and all corrections. certainly my memory may be faulty (see 1996 and the 
Sartre reference); there are spelling errors, errors of omission, distor- 
tion, repression, sublimation; there are errors of remorse, errors of 
hallucination, of the dream- or virtual-world. no errors are intentional, 
none are designed to be hurtful, vengeful, 'setting the record straight.' 
(there are no records to set straight, there are recordings, they set 
nothing. there are no clues, no cues.) 

disclaimer: there are reconstructions, reconfigurations; memories haunt 
me, increasing in frequency and my sense of the obdurate. Time transforms 
into thing; no wonder myths of afterlife and rebirth proliferate - this is 
the dubious gift of reliving narratives which may never have existed, but 
which appear to carry the concrete weight of the world. Memories transform 
into inert substance, a form of hardness, as one grows distant from them. 
One is fashioned by the fashioning of them.

1942 How was I possible? When was I possible? How was I? If there were a 
primal scene, this was it; later, I couldn't imagine such a thing, not at 
all. 

1943-2007 And the faults remain. One artifact of the nature of this 
writing, is that later entries reference/remark the earlier; time collapses 
in what seems to be a misplaced recuperation.

1943 I did not ask to be born. There was no atomic, no hydrogen bomb. 
Television was still pre-network. Computers were partial dreams. The idea 
of distributed community was inconceivable. The world was iron and 
nightmare.

1943 There are early screen memories of _being carried_ on a medical 
gurney past rows of medication bottles; the lighting was fluorescent, a 
nurse pushing the cart - I remember everything from the position of _being 
behind_ her. The walls were tiled, I think, some light beige/ yellow 
coloration. These memories are characterized by the insubstantial; I was 
and was not present, simultaneously.

1943-1997 I have had my faults. Less of them now, but nonetheless. I've 
read about the difference between remorse and regret; the latter I think 
covers _acts_ and the former a state out of one's control. It's the latter 
that haunts me; the former I have no control over. On the other hand, the 
violence and denigration of the world fills anyone, I think, who is 
sensitive to it, with remorse; we are watching the planet turn towards 
slaughter, disease, extinction, torture, tomb. Still, now, 2007, I am 
filled with regrets, immobilized, haunted. I have a knack for error, 
short-circuiting, turning people into objects, objects into games, games 
into lives. I am the inconceivable interior of an open wound; everything I 
do is suture on the edge of failure. Philosophically, this places a thin 
avatar-like layer against the grain of the world - philosophically, one 
exists within a universal deception.

1947 I don't remember radio. I don't remember popular songs. I have vague 
memories of opera; these were surely in the new house of 1952?

1948 Or thereabouts - remembering crying in the car with mother, worried 
that if she kept kissing me, she'd run out of kisses; already I was 
frightened, gathering security and comfort where I could, this very early 
memory. Oddly, I was sitting in the back seat, reaching towards the front; 
her back was to me, the road ahead invisible. 

1950 All through childhood I had to take weekly Saturday allergy shots; I 
was terrified; my arm would swell up like a molten hive. I had hives as 
well in my hair and in camp, once, a huge swollen lip from chewing on a 
plant stem. Grotesque. Now I have an antique microscope from the doctor, 
Doctor Dattner, who was a home practitioner and family friend.

1950 I was given a small film projector with a crank on the side; it was 
crinkled black with a translucent window for viewing the animated 
cartoons.  All of my work has stemmed from this. The magic reminds me of 
the last Bergman film; you saw _through_ the images, in a sense, to the 
light beyond. I may have been playing still with blocks; I remember two 
sets - a German one, of artificial stone cut into basic shapes and died 
pastel; and an English one, of wooden architectural elements, many of 
which were painted. These were my worlds - along with a stuff cocker 
spaniel, I believe; I've always tried to sink back into the maternal and 
the imaginary - I've repeatedly been expelled. 

1952 I really don't have a date but wonder about my early love for Theresa 
who worked for the family and who I think went to an asylum. All my 
memories are like this, vague dates, worried and blanked memories. I 
remember golden hair. I remember a kind of melting into her. Later she 
appeared with different names in my early writing. And now I wonder if I 
might still associate her with the Magdalene. And somewhere around this 
date we had a dog, Tippy, with long hair, silver-grey, small; there are 
photographs with him or her in it. The dog was playful and until recently, 
forgotten. Now, 2007, we are bringing our cat Boojum, this May 29, to Hope 
Clinic for her third operation for breast cancer. I'm worried she won't 
make it out, she's close to 18 years old. And other animals which have 
come in and out of my life appear, their voices mute. Again I reason every 
death is an absolute loss of a world, and it is these worlds, replete, 
fecund, unfathomable, which constitute the real as far as one's concerned. 
Add physics and unforeseen catastrophe to the list, and the constitution 
is complete.

1952 I remember a wonderful British tricycle with large wheels, painted 
black. I remember a red wagon. I remember... The sidewalk in front of the 
house. The tree in the backyard which dominates what the tree in the front 
yard doesn't. The pine to the right of the house which has since been cut 
down. A pogo stick. A pair of stilts.

1952 or perhaps later - receiving the monthly Things of Science in a blue 
cardboard box with yellow label. Early transistors, miniature vacuum 
tubes, basic experiments. But things from the real world, not toys, not 
designed _for_ me, but sent to me, premise or promise.

1952 At the old house on Reynolds Street: There's a surviving 8mm movie. 
I'm being pushed slowly by a woman, Louise? down the street on a tricycle. 
There's an American flag attached to the handlebars. We move towards the 
camera. It's eerie, black-and-white, slow. Shots of my sister later? I 
think around this period, perhaps somewhat earlier. I don't remember my 
brother in the footage, but he's there in footage from Atlantic City, 
playing in the sand.

1952 It was around this year that we moved from Reynolds Street to Ford 
Avenue. I don't think I was friendly with the Brennans any more. We used 
to fight with serrated pieces of wood. The screen-door had a tear in it.
I don't remember moving into the new house or how it was originally set 
up. I do remember a fish-tank with angelfish for example, but this might 
have been a later date. I remember my parents playing bridge with the 
Loebs (?) and somehow the name 'Raub' also comes up. My father would yell 
at everyone during the game; it would wake me. And perhaps it was around 
this time that he caught me reading under the covers. The dates are all 
confused - odd, given the obdurate nature of the real at any particular 
time. There is a permanence in loss; history is of the present and only 
the present - even a document must be read _now._ What's reconstructed 
even here is a synchronous world, shifted slightly as if diachrony were 
possible.

1953 For years my father made up stories with characters like the Snoxfly 
and the Up-and-Down Spider; I think Chicken Little might also have been in 
them as well. This was magical; they were told around the dinner table, 
and it was the one period of my life I felt close to him. Later we asked 
him to write down what he remembered of them, but he didn't, wouldn't; he 
has consistently been a consumer of literary culture, but hasn't written 
himself.

1954 The Blue Coal trains went over a trestle near the house, described 
oddly enough in the first stories by Brad Gooch, who was also from 
Kingston. Coal trains ran constantly when I was a kid, but the Blue Coal 
trains were special - the coal was _intensely_ blue, coated with some sort 
of die. Most of what I remember from Kingston involves grays, brown, 
blacks, and white; the trains were a streak of color. Franz Klein was from 
Wilkes-Barre (where I was born, across the Susquehanna); his pallet made 
perfect sense - it was the pallet of coal, of mining, of poverty and 
endless grey and snowy or rainy days. Years later when I drove down to 
Kingston from Providence (which I did off and on), I knew I was getting 
close to 'home' when everything lost color, turned pallid and corpse-like.

1955 Around this time, I had an operation to have my ears pinned back; it 
was traumatic, hideous; the novacaine didn't remain local and I had 70 
injections, ended up screaming; always felt I was deformed; still remember 
the cutting, the flesh, the sound. This trauma has stayed with me my 
entire life; I feel the fragility of flesh, fragility of the world - for 
example this organized power grid I type into - on a constant basis. 
Nothing leaves me and nothing leaves me alone. (The memory itself is that 
of a _state of pain_ - the images and sensations of continuous injec- 
tions, of the voice itself, seem secondary.)

1955 perhaps. Something about John Kulp or Colp and a book or knife; I see 
a sunlit room with students, we were young, something about sitting on the 
floor. But this was earlier perhaps kindergarten. But the knife was later.

1956 I heard of Elvis. I loved the word "fuck." Someone showed me Elvis' 
picture in the paper. At camp, camp. Was it then I was again miserable? I 
remember crying to Leon, asking why I was the underdog of the bunk. 
Because you deserve to be, he replied. I remember bow and arrow, swimming 
more than a mile in laps, blue when I emerged, the head of the camp, Dave 
Schell's wife, giving me something hot to drink. I favored swimming under- 
water as much as possible; it was my own world down there. The McKenzies, 
Clancy and Al, were counselors who brought their own keel-less canoe; I 
went out one day (with Clancy? with Al?) and we were caught in a storm. We 
used a jacket and oar as sail to come quickly back to shore. This camp 
Brunonia, lake Pleasant, near Casco.

1956 I watched someone masturbate at camp; I was thrilled. Early homoero- 
tic memories, not genitally-centered. He masturbated on the bleachers; I 
forget his name. The same year or close to, others? the obdurate is 
unforgiving - I set a record bouncing a pingpong ball on a paddle - but 
this while campers were leaving. But watching him - was that the beginning
of voyeurism? exhibitionism? What circuit was completed? 

1956 Later this year (or was it this year?), I masturbated ceaselessly in 
the shower and bathtub; sperm stuck to me, everywhere. I associated 
masturbation with urination, retaining the urine, spurting both on myself, 
ecstatically. Sooner or later the bathtub was abandoned; I'd lie on my 
back, my legs spread, etc. etc.

1956-60 I cried myself to sleep, etc. I had a small box on the bed table; 
I'd keep a list of best friends in it as well as a list of "things to do" 
so I could surprise myself - some sort of obscene proxy. To this day I 
remember the softness of the unpainted wood. The box was my friend.

1956-8 I joined the American Forestry Association (or something with a 
similar name) and had images of trees on the walls; I flitted from one to 
another - I couldn't really identify them. I also had the runic alphabet 
up. I cried myself to sleep. If I were only a tree.

1957 The Weiss family was extended all through Kingston, Pennsylvania, 
when I was growing up. There were members in Pottsville or Pottstown, I 
forget which - near Philadelphia, members everywhere. We had a huge family 
reunion in the 90s; I wasn't there, but a booklet was published. The 
family always seemed warm to me; in fact, I've always felt I grew up in a 
shtetl, and part of the anxiety that has followed me has been in relation 
to a kind of expulsion. The family went back several generations, through 
Hungary and Lithuania, and the warmth was both temporal and spatial, a 
kind of hearth within which the soul was nourished. I remember my grand- 
father speaking Yiddish, leading prayers. The shtetl was artificial in a 
way - the family chose to live near one another. Next door was 'Uncle' 
Morty and 'Aunt' Anita, down the street were great-uncle Aaron and great- 
aunt Tess, a few blocks away there was my grandfather Morris and grand- 
mother Bertha, 'Aunt' Sissy and 'Uncle' Stanley with my cousins Kathy and 
Stan Junior (?) lived two blocks away, my uncle Sandy and aunt Gerry lived 
a bit further, Norman Weiss lived three blocks away, Susan Weiss as well 
Steve Weiss was around I think, and there were numerous other Weisses I 
don't remember now - I had cousins Dick and Marilyn Weiss from Sandy and 
Gerry - and all this was just the beginning. The expulsion - I felt like a 
freak in the midst of the warmth which I held onto desperately. And never 
belonging of course. Not even to the outlying Weisses, Ben Weiss who was I 
think a great-uncle, or Bud and Julie or Bud and Elaine, uncle and aunt 
Weisses usually in Massachusetts. In contrast, the Sondheim side of the 
family frightened me; I felt death lurked in what seemed to be emotional 
stonewalling, except for my cousin Sandy. But all of that was filtered 
through my father, who I didn't know, feared, and, after childhood, tried 
to be silent near him, not to encourage his temper (which resulted in 
mental, not physical, despair), stay out of his way, please him, disappear 
forever.

1958 I had a picture of the Bikini hydrogen bomb explosion by the head of 
my bed in Kingston. It was cut out of the local newspaper. Since then, 
nuclear holocaust has seemed to me, not only a possibility, but an inev- 
itability. Even tonight, 1/4/07, I dreamed of a small bomb in three sizes 
located in a run-down shopping mall in Los Angeles, where I was meeting my 
brother; the bombs were yellow-cake-powder, and one was close to ignition. 
Catastrophe, death, is always already around the corner, and the only 
proof of Spirit I can think of is based on the preposterousness of death - 
surely, given an inflationary universe, something else might have been 
created. I have also thought constantly of the horror of Bikini itself, 
the violence done to the humans, plants, and animals of the atoll, the 
unutterable desecration the bomb represented. And back then, 1958, or 
earlier, those rumors of a doomsday machine, always located in Russia's 
backyard, not to mention the neutron bomb. The world is characterized by 
potential explosion, not by our forbearance in ignition.

1958 All through the period reading Dostoevsky; later, after reading The 
Jewish Question etc. I became wary of his Slavophilism. But still the 
seriousness of his writing (and that of Greek theater for example) 
inspired me one way or another. I lived within books; they became _my_ 
worlds and safe.

1958 When did I begin to think that nudity was the absolute incandescence 
of the real? I remember around this time, almost a dream memory, my cousin 
Pat and I in my bedroom; she's looking at my erection, I had my hand down 
her pants. She said later, this wasn't a tussle; I'd wanted her to see me 
naked. I remember feeling hard, ashamed.

1958 Johnny Uhl and I were walking late at night and he threw at the neon 
inn sign and it fell like smashed glass and I didn't tell but was never so 
scared in my life. The world too smashed. I was a coward. The inn was on 
Wyoming Avenue. 

1959 I was probably a Junior at the Blue and White dances at Wyoming 
Seminary, hopelessly in love with Platt Townend, yes, dancing breathless 
with her, letting her go, fly across the room. She would never have had 
me, never wanted me, danced out of pity. Platt had blond hair; she was 
everything to me that I couldn't hope to be. I think Episcopalian. For 
some reason I think DAR. But in a long line, Laura, June, Theresa earlier, 
Beth one way or another.

1959 Why am I afraid of dying wanting to die?

1959 I'd fall asleep dreaming of Platt Townend or earlier Margaret Hall, 
always saving them, somehow, desperately, they'd turn toward me, I'd take 
care of them, everything would be all right, eternal life and devotion, 
tears on my pillow, sentiment... Did I say this already? That after I 
wrote the anti-German poem, Platt met me on the corner near her house and 
castigated me, say, "Why do you have to bring this stuff up?" For her it 
was dead and buried. For her it was always dead and buried.

1959 Somewhere around this time found Birth magazine, Tuli Kupferberg, 
he'd published Anais Nin's diaries of a young girl, I looked him up, 
treasured those moments in Birth, met Ed Sanders, went to Gaslight, maybe 
heard Monk around them with my father, at that point just thought noise, I 
knew nothing, heard Lightning Hopkins as if that was the only real thing. 
When later heard Yusef Lateef it was different, that was Copenhagen. And 
that other horn player, the Dew-Drop Inn with hypos on the door. But that 
was with Joel then. All of us hearing.

1960 Ann Welsh or Walsh was my first real girlfriend; we tried to fuck and 
didn't succeed and I was impotent until I was 24. I was completely 
hysteric and insecure with her; her parents finally broke us up. I 
remember her yelling for me to break her arm, I remember a fear of touch, 
the contamination of one body by another. Nothing happened. It was 
terrible. I had written poems at first about her beauty. Everything fell 
apart. It wasn't the first or last time. We tried to fuck: something about 
cleanliness, being unclean. She wanted a towel; I felt she thought it was 
dirty. In my bedroom in Kingston. (I remember her _inconceivable_ breasts 
just as I remember Dina Raker's. Breasts have always seemed other worldly, 
their consistency and weight unlike anything else on the body. And at this 
point, they were simultaneously life and death, my self-disappearance into 
the other, surmounted by the other. Just as a cat often wants almost womb- 
like surroundings when it sleeps - just so, I'd lose myself in breasts, in 
mistaken (perhaps) femininities, metonymies that left me breathless and 
inauthentic.) We tried to fuck, we clawed we struggled. From then on for a 
long time I was clearly impotent; I couldn't sustain an erection at the 
moment of fucking. I was afraid for my life.

1960 Barely made it to the senior prom with Cheri Kanjorski (sp?) who I 
think really hated me; we went over to Don Evans' afterwards and the 
lights were off and I knew secret sexualities were going on and I was 
jealous and Cheri went with me from despair. Cheri didn't have another 
date; I couldn't get one. I remember her not wanting to dance with me. 
Later she was water skiing and the boat swung near a dock and she hit it 
with her face; I heard it was a serious wound.

1960 I just about flunked my first semester at Brown, collapsing until I 
learned to hold myself back, give the faculty what they wanted, hating it 
all the time... My worst class was English composition; I'd buck the 
system. Asked to write a paper with footnotes, I wrote a one-line paper, 
the rest in footnotes. I kept pushing the limits like this. The only 
decent reading - the Salem witch trials. 

1960 I remember reaching for Anne's breast; I was sick and at her 
grandmother's. I couldn't behave myself. At one point we yelled about 
breaking each other's arms. I was working at a Settlement House in East 
Harlem; her parents had arranged this. Now thinking about it "just the 
other day," I wonder - what exactly _was_ the sickness? Perhaps I really 
was hallucinatory, out of control. What constitutes control in a situation 
like this? Ann was horrified.

1960 I volunteered for secret army tests as well - checking out reflex 
times; I came out extremely high. This was also in East Harlem, in a 
basement. The idea was to catch people faking deafness. But my reflex 
broke the record. I was living at a settlement house run by Pete - I 
forget his last name - on, I think, 125th Street. I ran into people who 
had had frontal lobotomies, people literally starving to death, or dying 
of unknown diseases. I ran into a woman who had to weigh at least a ton or 
so, unable to move. I ran into apartments with broken toilets, feces 
everywhere. I ran into the evil of landlords, the decay of buildings, the 
slaughter of the American or any other dream. I ran into two Spanish 
countesses dressed in black. I ran into incredible kids surviving in the 
midst of all of this.

1960 I went to Israel for a summer, living largely in Jerusalem, almost 
became religious, meandered around the country. Didn't I go to Mea Shearim 
at this point, the first time? It's a blur. We were driven around. I mix 
this up with the trip in 1962. This says, for me, a great deal about 
memory - that the _obdurate_ nature of the trip, the very real context of 
the desert for example - waking up in the morning for example - all of 
this has disappeared; I can fictionally reconstitute things, but they're 
meaningless - you'd be as successful as I would.

1960 It was around this period that I had my only "attested" psychic 
experience, with Patti Rogers. She tried to kill herself at Syracuse; I 
was at Brown, and suddenly, walking back to Pembroke, realized I had to 
call her; I did, and calmed her down. She was hysterical. I hadn't spoken 
to her for months and months, but I knew, then and there, that I _had_ to 
do something. I called from the main Pembroke dorm. It took a while to get 
through to her. She was strait-jacketed in a hospital. Later we 
corroborated all this had happened (decades later). Later as well, we had a 
threesome with my first wife, June; I consummated with June, afraid to 
break through the marriage, there and then. She testified-  against me at 
the divorce, although I don't remember actually going through any sort of 
court procedure. And again later, I remember visiting her in New York 
City; she was married to John, had a child, was close to suicidal. Was 
suicidal. And there were cockroaches hiding behind a clock in the tenement 
apartment. And then later she was remarried or with someone else, had 
severe rheumatoid arthritis, became Christian fundamentalist, still 
decades ago. I remember visiting (a farm? a village?) her home; when I 
left, I joked "May the Force be with you," and her husband replied "And 
his name is Jesus."

1960 It's this summer I first go to Israel and almost have a religious 
conversion. I feel relieved that Jew isn't a dirty word, that the blasted 
images I received from reading the Nuremberg trials (medical report) have 
started to clear out... Here I saw a star of David chalked on a wall in 
Jerusalem. And for a moment, this sense of panic. And then realizing where 
I was. And today, 2006, realizing where I was, again. What we did, it was 
a tour, I think Young Judea. It was propaganda, I think now, but more than 
that; it was 15 years after the holocaust, how could anyone think 
straight?

1960 The depressions continue for the rest of my life. From where? From a 
father who would never let me assert myself, who yelled at me almost 
randomly (or so I thought and think), who wanted me to be someone, anyone, 
other than who I was. And from the Nuremberg accounts. And from a great 
fear of anything and everything in the world. And from being physically 
weak, smart but unfocused. And from never being touched by my father, 
rarely by my mother, and from never seeing them touch each other. The fear 
of germs seemed everywhere; my mother made us change the towels every time 
we bathed. And from a closed family, within which I was the black sheep, 
which couldn't in any case last forever. Now the depressions seem medical: 
I feel the chemical transformation as surplus. Nothing wards them off; if 
anything, sleeplessness exacerbates them, as does continued poverty.

1960 Then to Brown University? Early on, I.A. Richards gave a talk to the 
school at large. I pushed my way up to him shortly after, with a sheaf of 
poems of course, asked if he would read them. He took them, said he might 
get back to me in the future, his time was always taken up. The next day 
the poems were in my mailbox - annotated, with his comment that I had 
talent and to keep on working. That was enough, that legitimation. Later 
this year Colin Wilson also spoke; I remember a great fuss surrounding 
him. I hated the dorms. I wanted out no matter what. (But Richards started 
it all; Richards was an approbation that has remained with me. He saw 
something I wanted him to see, wanted to see myself; I settled for the 
former, which was sufficient. I still remember the gesture, handing him 
the poems, this unutterable proffering, his acceptance. And to this day, 
Practical Criticism remains my favorite book of poetry/poetics criticism - 
there's been no other that remained so close to the bone, at the same time 
emphasizing the community of scholars, students.)

1960 These dates, these beginnings are obscure to me, and always have 
been; I bounced myself off of every wall in existence, barely making it 
through the first year, hating the others, but it was at least better than 
high-school misery. What happened? I remember roughly approaching a 
dormitory. I have no idea how I got there. I should not have been admitted 
to Brown. My uncle went to Brown; that helped. My grades in high school 
were always erratic. I remember going to a freshman "mixer" and dancing 
with someone who walked off the floor saying "You dance just like a 
Negro." I remember the mess hall. I don't remember much. I remember 
wanting to get out of there as fast as possible.

1960-1997 Sleeping and waking: insomnia goads me my entire life; there are 
days I can't sleep, days I do nothing but; lowered body temperature is 
accompanied by horrific feelings of submergence and fuzziness; I never am 
fully awake. There's some sort of chemical imbalance, tending not only 
towards depression, but to these states that are remarkably like a serious 
flu; I can't function. My body signals my body the misplacement of 
temperature; I react with suffering.

1961 I almost flunked out of school. My life was a disaster. The dean 
helped me pull through. I fought against everyone. The school seemed 
anti-semitic. Someone put a pig's nose in my bed since I was Jewish. I've 
never felt I belonged at Brown. I think I was writing at this point, 
something more or less traditional.

1961-1962 (from 2007). Now 2007 I'm teaching a course in beginning 
filmmaking at Brown. So I walk around Thayer street; the record store I 
hung around is now Paragon, an upscale restaurant, and the coffeehouse - 
Mama's? perhaps - is long gone. It's there I heard people like Paul 
Geremia, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Ramblin' Jack Eliot, others I 
forget; something comes to mind with Dave van Ronk but I don't quite think 
so...

1961-1962 My second year at Brown was miserable. I hated my roommates; one 
of them spent a semester making toothpicks out of a log. I felt tormented. 
My writing was horrible. I didn't know what I was doing; I wanted to 
escape. Hell. A roommate built transistor radios without cases, the wires 
falling onto the floor. The walls were painted black. There were black 
curtains. My world was black. I felt I didn't belong. I felt my roommates 
victimized me.

1962 I think I remember fumbling with a student from RISD; she had me 
incredibly erect; I didn't know what to do and couldn't do it; these were 
suicidal ecstatic events. Surely this was before Israel? I hardly 
remember. Around this time I began playing guitar. I heard Lightning 
Hopkins. The blues seemed the only way out. When I went abroad I took a 
guitar. When I was sick with jaundice I played a fake one. I had to keep 
my fingers alive; the rest of me seemed all too dead. My friend and I 
brought Leroi Jones Amiri Baraka to the campus. My Black roommate turned 
against me. Baraka created quite a stir. I couldn't stand the complacency 
at Brown. At Hebrew University I remember sitting in front of a bus. The 
scooter, a Lambretta I had but couldn't drive, fell over. This was the 
second time in my life I had useless equipment; the first was the ham 
radio gear WN3DRP I had as a kid; I got the novice license but was too 
scared to contact anyone. Now, I give equipment away when I don't use it. 
I am transitive, an invisible transitive, among the physical-real of the 
world. I am here but I disappear.

1962 I watched the side of the factory open up in the middle of the night 
and a machine (I later identified as an atomic cannon) wheel out, run to 
the end of the valley in Jerusalem, its turret revolving, turn around, and 
go back. Next day, the factory looked exactly the same as ever. The 
factory? A low building, very wide and long, no one ever seen. But the 
flowers kept trimmed, the grass cut. The machine was enormous and furious.

1962 It was this year that I got beat up on the campus by two townies who 
broke my nose, left me covered with blood; I went looking for a friend of 
mine, hoping to scare him. I was an idiot. A guard insisted I go to the 
hospital. My nose is still bent. After I left Brown, I left pretty much 
all of the people I knew there; at this point, I remember Keith Waldrop 
with fondness, the rest a blur. There was a Larry Goldstein. The teachers 
and I have forgotten each other. Now my thesis advisor, Edwin Honig, is in 
an old age home. I want to die before that happens. Or perhaps he isn't, 
perhaps it's only a rumor.

1962 On a trip through the Negev, I saw, from a distance, an atomic 
facility that was, we "knew" intended for the development and production 
of nuclear weapons. Israel was surreal; I identified with the stones, less 
with the Sabras who were intent on eliminating everything of the past. 
Once I was reading (attempting to read at best) Sholem Aleichem in Hebrew; 
my roommate asked what I was doing that for? That we were in the new land 
with new Jews. He was an Israeli spy, had see action in Egypt. There was 
heavy hail in Jerusalem, unexpected stones the size of golf-balls.

1962 Was it during this year, when I was in Israel, that my grandfather 
died? That my cat died as well? I returned home at a loss; I hadn't been 
told. My other grandfather died, I think, in 1953, the result of a car 
accident (maternal). I went to his funeral, my maternal grand- father; I 
had to be carried out. All the way back there, in this list of 1953, 
carried out. After I had thought to myself, I'm not feeling this, sitting 
at the breakfast table. Everything changed when I was encapsulated at 
Temple, by myself, facing death and the world and the one family member I 
really loved.

1962 We managed to get shot at from an absurdly safe distance on the Galil 
in Israel, while witnessing a battle between Israelis and Syrians. At the 
UN, the former were condemned; in real life, it was all too clear that the 
latter had started the attack. I remember Safed and thought through 
Kabbalah as best I could. Then I was introduced to Wittgenstein by Ed 
someone who told me I "was thinking like him." The book was the Tractatus 
Logico-Philosophicus, which has remained one of my favorites; it continues 
to haunt me, as much as the final sentence is taken up far too often, 
without the scaffolding taken into account.

1962 was still, closed up once again. I asked my roommate what it was; he 
kept saying "a textile factory." But there was something else going on... 
[and why is this fragment here? what has been missing, lost, in this list, 
as a result of software? hardware? I leave it here, the atomic cannon 
poised on the brink of the valley and continue on.]

1962-1963 Went to Israel for a year, living mainly in Jerusalem. Took an 
overdose of opium, had jaundice, saw wonders. Saw fox. Wrote about omens 
following omens. Studied stone tools with Stekelis, Bible - story of 
Joseph - with Nachamah Leibowitz. Hebrew was relatively bad. Wrote poetry, 
saw a house blown up (I asked my roommate, the Israeli spy, what was 
happening to the house over there? He replied, What house? I asked again, 
received the same reply. Sometimes he'd listen for coded messages on the 
radio.) We traveled to the Galil; I found some Mousterian tools in a cave 
while Stekelis droned on. We saw Olduvai in a trench; I realized the last 
person to have touched the tools wasn't quite human.

1964 Terri Wellman and I were driving near the river somewhere in 
Providence at night. At one point we were approached by an angry group of 
people saying I'd run over their dog. I didn't see the dog, never saw it, 
never felt it.  Terri started screaming to drive on and I did; she was 
frightened and I panicked. To this day I don't know if this was hit and 
run or self-preservation; it teetered on both. This was the same period I 
was followed, people were being pulled out of cars. It wasn't nice. I 
heard Terri later ended up in Mexico as part of a cult terrorizing the 
countryside; I have no idea if this was true or not.

1965 Was I working through blues? Did I meet Son House? Was this the first 
Cambridge summer? Somerville? Or when was it I attended the Newport Folk 
Festival; was that the time Dylan played electric? Was I there? I remember 
being there, in the back room, a back room, Mance Lipscomb playing. Who 
was I with? Who did I love? Wasn't that a time?

1965 I walked into the Pembroke bookstore on the Brown University campus. 
The clerk said I looked like Bob Dylan. He said because of that I could 
buy any book for ten per cent of the price. I walked out with an armload. 
Shortly after the bookstore closed.

1966 Went to Europe for the summer; met Joel Zabor who became the drummer 
of the group; stayed at a Borstal in Dover (they thought I was on drugs).

1967 It's around now I'm in Europe. I met you (I forget your name) - knew 
you from Israel. You saved me. I wanted to take pills, kill myself. You 
gave me some, said take them. Vitamins. I tried to fuck a black woman who 
wanted me. I couldn't, cried.

1967 Met her at the record store on Thayer Street. Did I review Ravi 
Shankar then or earlier? I bought a number of Indian records on sale; the 
store tried to build on Shankar, but couldn't. I remember the paintings of 
evil in doorways. Was the coffeeshop called Mama's?

1967 *** I don't feel I can speak here, given the repressive climate of 
the country. This entry, concerned with sexuality, the loss of virginity, 
tragedy, has been removed. Say I lost my virginity. Let it go at that. The 
rest is closed. This isn't the time for revelation.

1967 I lived on Keene Street. I owned a burglar alarm. I remember every- 
thing. I worked my band harder and harder. I felt out of control and 
probably wasn't.

1967 *** The second entry removed. The world is full of secrets; not 
everything must come to light. It was around this time that The Songs was 
released. I remember working later with June Fellows on a piece with the 
words "i'm tired" in Sprechstimme; they were words about death. But that 
was in 1969 and I don't remember the rest of it; there was also a libretto 
that accompanied The Songs.

1967-1968 Put out three records with a group, two with ESP, one with 
Riverboat, an independent. Greg Johnson kept things under control (played 
flute); only later could I break out. The ESPs got a bad review later in 
the Penguin Encyclopedia of Jazz. See The Songs above. Now I feel 
vindicated; even the Riverboat record The Songs has done well. But this is 
decades later. At the time I thought I knew what I was doing; then I 
thought I didn't have the slightest idea; now I go back to the original 
opinion. In any case, ESP brought their records out again, as did ZYX 
first, all of this in the 90s as far as I know. And Firemuseum republished 
The Songs, which was Riverboat. The ESPs were Ritual All 770 - the first - 
named in part after an Ampex tape recorder model, and T'Other Little Tune, 
influenced more by June, my wife, and Greg Johnson.

1967-1970 Did I speak of the Great Fear of country and anarchy I had, that 
it wasn't my own madness setting in, that it was elsewhere, the destruc- 
tion of all good things, that I was doomed, cowardly, unable to cross the 
line, secretly conservative? That I thought suicide, lived in death's 
shadow? That my moments of exaltation were real and few?

1968 Did I live then with N., Aram Saroyan, Clark Coolidge, in Somerville? 
Did Saroyan put the furniture out on the lawn, watch Clark the genius? 
Were the doors in the house broken down, the result of a drug raid? Did 
this presage Large Lime in Providence? Was N. there with me for a while? 
Was it just a bit later Aram told me I should stick to music, when we 
drove aimlessly around Brooklyn w/ Rene Ricard, Aram freaking at the arch  
in Prospect Park, freaking I knew some Hebrew, freaking I wrote and did 
other than Aram?

1968 I bought a red IBM Selectric, my first real electric typewriter, 
which I used for years, did An,ode on. Later it went to Jerry and Joe in 
Dallas; as far as I know (1997), they still have it, almost worn out... I 
loved the feel and the sound and... I wrote like crazy this year, it was 
the year I think of the second ESP record, T'Other Little Tune. No more 
music, I wanted writing, philosophy, things serious. I think June and I 
divorced somewhere around here; she received alimony which we both decided 
on - the lawyers were ready for battle; we weren't. We'd had a basement 
apartment near the Waldrops; I remember editing "ppress" - a hand-printed 
magazine with people like Acconci and Benedikt in it. But I found monotype 
aesthetics problematic; in a way it was too easy to create beautiful 
images, a "style," meaning in design. (I thought yes... philosophy - or at 
least working towards philosophy - art has always been so many distrac-
tions. First it was Wittgenstein, then AI through MIT, Weyl, Wiener; I 
ignored post-structuralism - when I finally discovered it, I was ravenous.

1968 I had An,ode published by the Waldrops' Burning Deck Press in 
Providence. An,ode was my M.A. thesis - a work of experimental poetry 
(so-called); Keith Long from RISD did the cover. It was my first real 
publication, however slight.

1968 I lived for a summer in Minneapolis with June. It was a poor area. 
The asphalt was melting in the heat. There were tornado warnings and 
tornados. At one point we ran down into the cellar; everything roared 
overhead. When we emerged, all the trees were down - a car slammed into 
one of them and the driver left, muttering to himself. 

1968 I think June and I were married; it was a traditional wedding. I was 
afraid of her father's anti-semitism. *** Again, a removal, hopefully the 
last in the series. One cannot always face oneself; certainly, one cannot 
always face others. *** And later, what is meant by a removal here? What 
this silence I constantly grapple with? The house remains where it always 
us. It's the same color, same dire aspect. The sky is darker, screaming 
alarm. The floor is covered with meat. The dogs howl. The walls are torn 
down. The walls were never built. 

1968 There's this but it might have been any year: this _obdurate_ quality 
of the real, the return of memory. Yes, there are structured reconstruc- 
tions from limited information - but what comes forward is full, replete, 
the sun in the back of Carr House at Rhode Island School of Design, my 8mm 
camera close in on Beth's eye, the iris enlarging, contracting. It's not 
just this scenario, which resulted in a film; it's the sense of the yard 
around us. I don't remember whether we were standing or not (I think we 
were); I remember the trees. And because the memories are so sharp, 
they're present - one can't say that "decades have passed" - they're 
present, pre-set, _now._ It's this _now_ that fascinates me, not wandering 
through the past, but wandering through the collapsed and flattened 
present - a present which has always been collapsed and flattened. Did I 
speak of this before? Beth took a class or classes with me. I remember her 
with acid standing near a cop on a street-corner by Carr House at RISD 
and 
my hustling her away. I remember the disruption I had in relation to June 
and the continuation of a lineage of regrets.

1969 Vito and I in our dismally-cathected relationship, talked about 
swapping women (they never would have gone along); I already sensed 
something was wrong with June and me... I've wondered about this 
cathecting for a long time now; it wasn't sexual, and stemmed largely from 
me (perhaps not at first, perhaps then it was mutual). I thought Acconci a 
genius, one of the only ones I've met. But it was too much. Between 
Acconci and Acker (later) and Laurie Anderson (later), I found myself in 
the ionosphere. I didn't belong there. As I may have mentioned somewhere 
along the line, Acconci later insisted I wasn't an artist, on the same day 
Anderson insisted I was. As for Aram Saroyan (earlier), he wanted me out 
of the game, out of his game. His purity terrified and angered me. Then 
there was Bernadette Mayer, who appears on occasion here. I don't know 
these people now; I don't think I knew them then. (What I did know - that 
there was an emphasis on art before everything, that art was "tough art," 
that it was serious and always already historical, that these people - 
that I - were important. They were all successful; I wasn't. I couldn't 
buy - _constitutionally_ couldn't buy - into the idea of an _artist_ as 
opposed to someone, say, who worked with and through wonder, who skittered 
across cultural landscapes. I was an _edge._)

1970-71 Perhaps Beth Cannon and I married during this period? I left June 
for Birth; June was lost in me, it felt, and I was lost. Earlier, above, I 
wrote about the divorce proceedings but perhaps they were later? Earlier? 
June had beautiful blond hair which she cut off in protest; it was awful 
for her and I was out of control. At that point I think she thought I was 
a genius instead of a heel; I was a heel. I met Beth giving away pills in 
Providence; she had taken a lot of acid, and at one point said to me she 
didn't know whether it was her or the chemistry talking. Beth and I lived 
in Big Lime or Lyme- I think the that's the name - that notorious commune 
in Providence. We stopped paying rent when we figured the house was 
illegally owned. The light switched sparked and stopped working. The 
basement was filled with shit, literal shit, since the plumbing didn't 
work, and Charlie (who if I remember had been a student of mine and wrote 
well) went down and covered everything with quicklime. The heating didn't 
work and someone in the back of the house had starting taking the wood 
from the walls and ceilings for fuel to burn. I had two large loudspeakers 
on ten foot poles and played electric guitar through them. We later moved 
onto what, Elmgrove Avenue perhaps? I remember first with June near Keith 
and Rosmarie Waldrop, and then later we were out a bit in a house rental 
for $500, an enormous sum. It was isolated. We were near a macrobiotic 
restaurant. "As usual I was a lousy lover." (I cover my tracks with 
quotation marks.) A lousy lover: too fast, unable to please women, 
fumbling, locked in myself, trying unsuccessfully to get out. Orgasm 
seemed to be accompanied by despair - simultaneously. It was an obsession 
that sent me veering, but on this level made it difficult to recognize the 
other. I was fully "there" and gone, lost, as well. (Is this all true? 
There have been times I've been closer to women, able to please them, 
bring them or they bringing me quickly to mutual orgasm. But always, 
always, there seemed a descent, fear, mumbling after death.) Somewhere 
around this time I ran over one of Gregert Johnson's cats - who had run 
under the car (again I never saw it). I felt horrible; there was nothing I 
could do. Since then I've been nervous every time there's been an animal 
on the street.

1970-71 We had two kittens; I forget where we got them, Jasper and Miflin
or Mifflin. One of them was killed by a neighborhood dog; we let them out. 
I remember one of them coming in the house covered with praying mantises - 
he'd had a fight and won. Around the same time there was a song, our house 
is a very very very nice house with two cats ... - every time I hear it I 
cry, even now.

1970 Perhaps I filmed Chris and Don around this period? I forget their 
last names; they summed up a kind of lifestyle for me, both students; both 
disappearing from my life. The film was 8mm, beautiful. I worked with a 
lot of overlays then, layer after laying, not to cover up or create meta- 
phor, but to uncover something hidden that could only be revealed through 
translucency. (Later: Chris is Christine Goich, I think; I had a crush on 
her and what I perceived as infinite depth. I couldn't find them on the 
Net. Perhaps Gooch, I don't remember. They were hippies and had a quality 
of informality, relaxing, I could never achieve. There were so many people 
I was jealous of during this period; I felt others had answers, were doing 
things, making differences even through non- or in-differences, that I 
never could, that I kept stumbling about, trying to remake myself or make 
or remake the immediate world, just to stay alive, feel relevant. I knew I 
could never contribute, in depth, to anything, and this lack collided with 
an ambition that seems to be the only thing that's held me together; it's 
also made me, or allowed me, to run roughshod over everything good in my 
life... - written July 11, 2008 (date below is wrong, see end of para- 
graph).

1970: Four Dead in O-hi-o - written July 6, 2008:
Several bars of the 1970 song about the Kent State student massacre came 
on the radio; I began crying. First, there was the trauma of reliving the 
event, already at a distance when it happened; second, there was the 
energy and fulcrum of an entire era displayed; third, there was mourning 
for aging - May '68 is almost forty years ago; fourth, there's the 
imminence of all of this, as if it's happening now, here; sixth, there's 
the incontrovertible bar, obdurate time-gap which portends a masquerade of 
space; seventh, there's the realization that the bar is sublime if any- 
thing is, and in fact the sublime lies within the temporal, not the 
spatial, not with due or undue measurement; eighth, there's the integra- 
tion of time's granularity with temporal distance; ninth, there's the 
issue of internal time-consciousness and its presencing which is always a 
form of mourning imminence; tenth, there's the billowing of time which 
plays out psychologically in spatial dimensions; eleventh, it's as if one 
might say, Oh, if only I could reach out, I would touch Four Dead in 
O-hi-o, I would touch the song, the fury, the energy, the habitus, the 
communality, the immanence of the burgeoning eco-political, the momentary 
lapse in pessimism as against the most pessimistic of wars and bombs one 
might consider the flower at the end of a barrel of a gun; twelfth, it's 
the ringing of death itself or rather the horizon of death which lies in 
any temporal horizon whatsoever as worlds are always already irretriev- 
able; thirteenth, it's thinking through the playing out of these irre- 
trievable worlds within the organization and granularity of the billowing 
of the habitus, as if mourning consisted in watching the world of someone 
one loves withering away; fourteenth, it's the recognition that such 
withering is the foundation of the cosmos, Bell's theorem notwithstand- 
ing; fifteenth, one only has to look at one's own withering, our cat for 
example growing thinner by the way, her rounded and more robust form a 
memory reconstituted either through video or photography, or, more likely, 
through thinking through billowing, through the pleasure embedding all her 
gestures in an indefinite and infinite world of spring and summer, which 
was inescapably vectored towards this present and beyond, towards her 
death which we pray is not immediate, not soon; sixteenth, recognizing 
that billowing is a form of comfort, even among starvation, extinction, 
torture, a form of comfort within which the smallest things are absorbed 
and the temporal sublime appears as if in translation towards the glory of 
an inconceivable Absolute; seventeenth, coming to the realization that the 
comfort of the world is all the comfort there is, and the awkwardness and 
pain of the world, our awkwardness and pain, is all there is as well; 
eighteenth, it's as if Four Dead in O-hi-o never happened, it's as if that 
energy were stillborn, our memories playing tricks, an accumulation of 
subterfuges; nineteenth, yes we are living that impossible dream, impossi- 
ble because of the stretch entailed as if implication were the fundamental 
operation of the propositional logic; and twentieth, the gestural logics 
of the breakdown of distributive laws - it's as if they're holding out 
some sort of promise, but then the refrain of the song comes back, there 
are bodies lying there, equally stillborn, there is the image of the 
student looking up, towards the camera, someone dead and present, present 
in the way our own deaths are present even in the most fundamental acts of 
speaking, thinking, writing, this. (Perhaps June 6th? This wasn't written 
four days ago... Or perhaps 2007? - I'm writing this July 11th, 2008.)

1972 I remember two of Beth's diets; perhaps like everything else here, 
perhaps made up? One was carrots, and the tips of her fingers and toes, as 
well as around her nipples, turned orange. After that there was a vinegar 
diet but I think that one lasted less than a day.

1972 or 73, invited James Lee Byars, who I met through John Brockman, to 
RISD for a performance. He passed out sticks to the audience, had them 
click them once, a tiny and beautiful performance. I was running a 
visiting artist series; I remember Michael Snow, Acconci, Oppenheim, Les 
Levine, La Monte Young, and others coming up. Snow showed a number of 
films for only $200, what we could afford, and it was wonderful. Acconci 
did a piece, "Makine a Good Impression," with a bottle cap; he also 
performed on a circular sculptural base, pointing and threatening, turning 
with closed eyes; this was stopped by two obviously involved RISD females 
who may have gone off with him. Someone told me Dennis became involved 
with a student as well and later came up driving his car around her place, 
horn beeping, but this seems distorted or fiction. Don Monroe and a 
student I forget brought up Levine and Young; the latter asked for a lot 
of money which I think we found. I believe Kubelka also came as part of 
another program. I felt more and more embedded in the NY artworld; now, in 
2007, it seems like a series of dioramas that died out as my work and 
personality seemed more and more problematic. I had as much or more ego 
than anyone else, but I couldn't "make it," make myself acceptable. I was 
always awkward, always appeared arrogant, never fit in, never drank or 
took drugs, wandered about.

1973 At the Paris Biennale I put up "The World's Smallest Sculpture" 
created with a scanning electron microscope; a piece based on an 
assassination of President Nixon; and diagrams relating to the "general 
structure" of the world. I met the French head of the USIA and wrote two 
articles for him. Or were these later? One was done with Rosemarie; the 
other by myself. At this point I thought myself well on the way to some 
sort of fame; I felt stable artistically, although I was teetering in 
fact. So there was first Beth and the Biennale - this was one of the few 
times in my life I felt I _belonged._ The next year I was a recommender (I 
think I proposed Adrian Piper) and that was that.

1973-1974 I went to Europe with Beth; we lived for a month in Copenhagen 
(where we made love with a voyeur watching across, from one empty 
apartment to another) and longer in Paris, where I was in the Paris 
Biennale. In Paris, Beth found a way from our room to the subway - around 
the entire block. It was dizzying. Did we meet artists along the way? I 
have no recollection.

1973 Around this time - again I'm not sure - I went to London, met Ian 
Murray and Barbara Reise there; I also met and spent one or two afternoons 
with David Bohm, discussing quantum reality and art. Somewhere I have part 
of his manuscript of The Implicate Order. Reise was a critic concerned 
primarily with Greenburg and conceptual art; it was her life and also a 
source of power. In our conversations, she had to dominate. Later she was 
found dead in her flat in Camdentown? Kentishtown? And how are these 
written. Her flat was amazing, with stairs between floors built on a 
pattern of Leonardo's. She was alcoholic, discovered apparently decaying 
after a period of time. Once she was talking about concept art and I 
interrupted; she was furious and said something to the effect that I 
should listen to the premiere critic of the time. I remember her driving 
away, almost hitting someone. Bohm had a major influence on me - both in 
terms of the implicate order (which reminds me of the Flower Ornament 
Sutra) and breadth of knowledge/personality. Later I found out he was 
born in Wilkes-Barre; his parents were introduced to each other, I think, 
by friends of my parents. At one point Ian lost his camera on the wall of 
Birkbeck College; someone took it inside and he recovered it. I thought 
that wouldn't happen in America.

1973 I think this was the year Gail Klaymink (sp?) committed suicide; as I 
remember, she threw herself in front of a train. She was a student of mine 
at RISD. Her work was harshly criticized at a critique I went to; I 
remember feeling differently, that elsewhere she might have been accepted. 
It was in the style of support-surface, rolled canvas with stains that 
went through, exhibited unrolled with amazing rhythm across it. I knew her 
fairly well.

1974 Around this time, I remember living off and on with Rosemary Mayer; 
she left the loft one day, and I said Take care of yourself, and she said, 
I always do... Her drawings were everywhere. She was still obsessed with 
Acconci; she had a drawing of his on the wall which she'd turn backside 
out when she was angry with him. I felt I was living the Isenheim 
Altarpiece. When we fucked with me under her, her crucifix went in and out 
of my mouth. Mayer and I went to Munich together; I paid from the book 
Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America that I had edited. There was a 
$4000 advance; she received $2000 plus her commission. So she came out 
ahead. After we returned, I visited her loft one day; her diary was open 
(I think she expected me to read it); it said I was a "rat" and she hated 
fucking me; she only did it because I was paying for the trip. Sometimes a 
great notion. I was devastated. Later she wanted to be friends; she 
visited me on Greenwich Street. I didn't see her until years after that; I 
couldn't deal and still can't with what I felt was a violation.

1974 I think then I was living on Greenwich Street, right below the World 
Trade Center, which was still undergoing construction. I went into the 
architects' map-room and saw the blueprints. Ian Murray lived downstairs 
from me; we played chess constantly. Being bored, lightning chess was the 
only way to go. There was also an abstract expressionist artist in the 
building - now I forget her name... A woman, Ann? or Anne? someone? She 
was important, the people in the building were important. 

1974 I lectured all over the place, UCSD, Cal Arts, RISD (with Kathy), 
Yale (with Kathy), Wesleyan, etc. Kathy and I parted dubious friends. 
Later she told Allison I was crazy; Allison told me; I told Allison Kathy 
was crazy. We showed the Blue Tape we had made together. The reactions 
were always strong; at St Marks place, the audience wept; at Yale, they 
laughed. It depended on the first responder; everyone followed suit, 
everyone was on an emotional edge. What was the tape? Kathy and I met in 
New York, perhaps through Bernadette Mayer; in any case, she went back to 
San Diego, and I raised money for her to come and make a tape with me. She 
called me her father; I was falling in love with her, from a distance, 
from what now would be considered the virtual, introjection and 
projection. The tape was sexually explicit; Emily Cheng ran the camera. 
Kathy feels trapped in it; I felt trapped in loving her. It was shot in a 
day in the apartment on 16th or 17th street. At one point Emily and I went 
out to eat; Kathy didn't want to come. When we returned, she was on the 
landing, locked out of the apartment, and talking suicidally. Later, we 
made an "inverse" of the tape, both sexually and in terms of mood. Now 
that inverse seems lost, and in any case, the old EIAJ reels would have 
decayed. The tape has haunted me since then, largely as a record of Kathy 
- for some of her followers like Chris Kraus, I was an accessory at best. 
But the truth is that the tape was my idea, it was a total collaboration, 
and we took turns on deciding what to do and how to do it. 

1974 Logic of consciousness worked out, The Book as System of Military 
Defense (about Tina Weymouth), The Fourteen Stations of the Cross 
presented at St. Mark's Church (influenced by Rosemary Mayer), Two Suites 
of Figure Drawings, Acker/Sondheim tapes. Why Tina? We had an affair after 
I moved to New York; she came to the city to see me. She and Chris Franz 
had an opening at RISD; Kathy and I showed the tape there, went to the 
opening, and afterwards, I returned shaken to New York. Tina stayed with 
Chris, wrote at one point she wished she were a cockroach on my wall. To 
the best of my knowledge. I think shortly after Mary Boone, who had been a 
student of mine, and I also slept together; that was once, and I remember 
the coldness of the furniture. Boone was one of the best students I had 
had; her sculptural work was remarkable. She told me she couldn't be both 
artist and gallerist, and decided on the latter, at first representing her 
friends' works.

1974 Rosemary warned me about Vito, that he wasn't as good a friend as he 
said. He told her I was a pest, told me the same about Dara Birnbaum, told 
her the same about me, told me the same about Rosemary. Acconci was always 
in control, always saw the world in terms of desire and control. I don't 
know if that ever changed; I had to stop speaking with him. For me it was 
a difficult break; I don't think he cared.

1975 Around this period, Laurie accompanied me at a poetry reading at St. 
Mark's On-the-Bowery. She borrowed a video camera from me, and set it up in 
her loft, aimed out the window. An image was burned in; she had to replace 
the tube. I hung around her loft. It was perfect, she was perfect, Bob 
Bielecki was perfect (and now I hear he teaches at Bard and I want to see 
him again). The world _meshed._ Her performances were astonishing, begin- 
ning exactly at 8:00 - no one could get in after that. They were multi- 
media, home-grown, and there was always that tension between projection 
and her story-telling, speaking, that created some of the most intense 
experiences of my life. This was the beginning of a revolution of sorts in 
Soho - when Acconci and company performed, people left quietly and sullen 
- when Laurie / Bob performed, there were standing ovations...

1975 My friend Sue in the West Village had a refrigerator with a huge 
jar of LSD in pill form. She was going to sell it. Somehow I think it 
remained in the refrigerator.

1975 I'm guessing around this time I saw Jon Woodson again; I knew him 
when I was going to school in Rhode Island; he was at URI and we did 
poetry readings and improvisations (what would pass for slams now) 
together in a coffeeshop - there was also a church nearby where I played 
(and recorded) organ, probably poorly. When I saw him again - whenever it 
was - he was in Rhode Island, married to Lynn (I remember giving him 
five dollars, jokingly, if he would! - but that had nothing to do with 
it); I remember the children as well. But around this time or maybe even 
much later we went walking in the woods, I think Rhode Island, looking 
at possible dolmens, ruins from Viking or other visitors, etc., probably 
just stone - and we were eating delicious blueberries from the woods, 
acres of them on the side of the mountain, it was wonderful. Jon was 
beaten up for protesting the war at URI. But URI saved me as well; I went 
down there a lot when I was an undergraduate and graduate at Brown - it 
seemed more real, less snobbish, more open, more working-class, and for 
that matter, more accepting of what I was doing myself. URI is in 
Kingston, Rhode Island; I'd drive down.

1975 I knew Marcia Resnick; we slept together once. I lived with Jeffrey 
Deitch who seemed to be in love with her. She lived on an unbelievable 
edge, distraught, an amazing photographer, documentarian who lived her 
subjects. I still have original prints from her John Belushi series. She 
was friends with Kathy Acker, lived in the same building that Pooh Kaye 
and Laurie Anderson did, 530 Canal Street. Years later I brought her to 
talk at University of Texas, Dallas; she had so much metal on that she had 
to practically strip to get through the detectors at the airport. I iden- 
tified with her, felt swallowed up by her. Her eyes, neuroses. I lived in 
fantasy. Perhaps this was 1974. There were years here that tend to slide 
into each other. Now I see her close to absent online.

1975 Rosemary Mayer and I split vowing to remain friends. It didn't remain 
that way. During this period, I worked with Laurie Anderson; I was 
somewhat in love with her - that same kind of damaging worship that 
affected me with Margaret. And this period was so _thick,_ so exciting - I 
felt I was on to something, that the world was moving forward, not teeter- 
ing, moving forward, however awkwardly. 

1976 Ellen Israel and I met; we later married. We went to Nova Scotia 
together where I taught once more at the Nova Scotia College of Art and 
Design (NSCAD) under David Askevold or with David Askevold. We were 
friends with Robin Collyer and Shirley Witasaalo; Robin and I wanted to go 
to Lake Hazen in northern Ellesmere Island, but we couldn't raise the 
funds. At one point we were at Peggy's Cove in the dead of winter; I fell 
in and almost drowned in the midst of the sea ice and ice-covered rocks. 
Laurie Anderson came up on my invitation - was it then I shot the 
Vladivostok tape, using the container port as backdrop? Or earlier? Laurie 
was like a madonna to the students. She spoke simply, no-nonsense, and 
presented a radically different way of thinking about artmaking and 
performance, one that emphasized grace, the gift of giving to an audience, 
entertainment, doing the best one can, and so forth. She was important in 
particular to the female students, who were in a highly male and phallo- 
centric environment.

1976-1977 I work on the Structure of Reality, a text composed of the 
hysteria of information, network theory, annihilation in code-particles. 
It's printed in Halifax and Williams College, two editions. Parts surface 
later in an article in C magazine. The model worked off networking and 
threshold logics, and attempted to construct a "logic of consciousness." I 
felt I succeeded; to this day, I feel I've succeeded. There were tradeoffs 
between formalisms and phenomenologies, descriptions and threshold models, 
that still excite me. But this work demands a rereading and interpreter...

1977 Around this date I thought that if aliens came from another world, 
they would contact me, because I comprehended the world, as much as 
possible. I would dream like this, reminiscent of childhood fantasizing, 
salvaging planets, desires, beings, being. I thought: This is the way the 
world _is._ I thought - and still think - there are no _superior_ beings - 
only _different_ beings, just as there are no _weeds,_ just generalists.

1977 I taught for a year in Hartford, at the Hartford College of Art. 
David Salle was there. Robert Cummings had just left. Rita Meyer took over 
from me. The students were conservative. I met Laura, and Marcia Dalby. My 
marriage to Ellen was on the rocks. I thought Laura had the answer to 
everything; Laura was looking for the answer to everything. I remember 
going into a faculty meeting and saying I wanted to the students to learn 
more about the _world,_ culture and so forth - and David Salle replying - 
"Alan, that's _your_ style, that's not _my_ style." Culture and cultural 
politics were to become the "style" of the 80s, as they are once again. 
But yes, Salle was something new, was issuing in something new; I contin- 
ued to work, squirrel-like, and he continued to _fly._

1977 Joanna was born; I was totally unprepared. Everyone's relationship to 
me immediately changed; I couldn't handle it, and Ellen wouldn't hear of a 
babysitter at this point. Tensions became really difficult; I left for 
Irvine, and Ellen came later. When she was born, I was on a train from New 
Haven back to New York; I had been visiting Robert Horvitz. What then? I 
made calls from the train through the conductor. I rushed to the hospital. 
But I had been traveling when Joanna was born, had missed the birth 
itself.

1977 Secretly, I think I know everything. More secretly still, I think I'm 
worthless. Throughout my life, I've veered between arrogance and self- 
loathing - and they're exactly the same.

1977 Tamara Bowers fucking me, the first and only totally rewarding anal 
sex, her saying I've had my eyes on you for a long time, later - now, I 
remember, having written this before, and then, later, in Tasmania, her 
telling me to go to hell... (Because I wrote her in Tasmania: I'm thinking 
about you, I'm masturbating. After turning her down, running back into a 
failing marriage. And her writing in return: Go to hell. I was destroyed - 
I mean this literally. What then? In the summer of 2006 I saw her again 
and we spoke, and this never came up; I felt nothing but sorrow.)

1977 The Whitney shows the tape Kathy Acker and I made; there's a guard at 
the door. My parents go; I've asked them not to. I agree only if they 
never mention the show to me. Worlds fall apart. Over the years, Kathy and 
I make $2000-$3000 from the tape. Over the years, the split with my 
parents widened; how could they have seen that tape without total 
collapse? But for them the Whitney was a kind of validation; years later, 
I had a letter about unemployment published (and mutilated) in Time 
magazine - and this was similar, although for me it was painful.

1977-1997 Relating to Joanna; I never see her enough; as she gets older I 
can relate more and more to her, an indication of my own failings. I've 
always been honest with her, as best I can, only when younger, keeping my 
work from her; it's disturbing.

1978 Remembering Laura Hayes, who became an erotic image / imaginary for 
me, for almost a decade, remembering her in a garden, wooden house, 
parents, sunlight bright in Pennsylvania, her small breasts, intensity, 
eyes, eyes, eyes.

1978-1979 I taught for a year at the University of California, Irvine; I 
left Ellen and joined Laura Hayes in Hartford, commuting to Montreal 
weekly to teach at Concordia University, and University of Ottawa.

1980 I get involved with women who are as crazy as I am; no one saner 
would put up with me. My relationships are characterized by extremes of 
intensity, hysteria, exhaustion, sexuality. I'm worn out, wear people out. 
A bad catch...

1980 I saw Vito for one of the last times, and stopped speaking to him; I 
couldn't take his notion of "my generation / your generation" and 
remembered all too well his sexism, mild deceit, and the feeling that I 
had been used.

1980 The year where my writing began to coalesce; I was 37 already. Lived 
with Laura Hayes for part of the year in Montreal and was there for the 
Quebecois referendum. I discovered Nicole Brossard, feminin ecriture, and 
Hubert Acquin; they resonated.

1980-1982 I taught at UCLA for two years, in the art and art history 
departments. I met Sungja Lee and we lived together for a year, traveling 
back to Montreal. Allison Rossiter said I mistreated her. She spoke 
English badly, accusing me of everything.

1982 Allison and I left for Queenstown in the eastern center of the 
island. We were warned we might be killed; we got off the bus and traffic 
stopped. People pulled over to the side of the road and watched. We ran 
back in, dressed as punks, terrified...

1982 I left for three and a half years - to teach in Tasmania - lasted 
three and a half months, returning with Allison Ritch; I was asked to 
resign. The only time in my life I drank, and the closest I've come to a 
nervous breakdown.

1982 I went to Tasmania where I met Allison Ritch and returned with her; 
before that, I wrote Tamara Bowers (who I had slept with at Irvine and who 
wrote back telling me to go to hell) and June, who never wrote back after 
the first letter.

1982 In Queenstown we end up at the home of a Belgian hairdresser on the 
outskirts of town; the home is made of television set cabinets. He gives 
us whatever we look at. All of us I think are very close to breakdown. I 
don't remember where I got the time.

1983 I take over the curatorial position at Nexus Contemporary Arts 
Center. Allison and I move to Atlanta. I get drunk at the first 
opening/function I attend, go home and have a horrific breakdown, putting 
my head through the wall. Allison freaks. My curating is populist at 
heart, but also a form of nurturing. I showed a young artist, Patricia 
Thornley, five times; later, I chose her as an artist from Georgia to 
exhibit at Artists Space in New York - she received a favorable review 
from the New York Times. We opened a special room at Nexus, one that was 
upstairs in the rebuilt and restored schoolbuilding, that would allow us 
to have shows of artists at relatively short notice - this allowed Nexus 
to really respond to regional and not-so-regional work quickly, and with a 
real sense of excitement.

1983-85 After teaching for a semester at Ontario College of Art, with 
Allison staying in Amherst, New York, because she couldn't cross the 
border (we fought, were depressed), I took up the curatorship at Nexus in 
Atlanta.

1984 At Nexus, we began the Atlanta Biennale; the first exhibition cost 
only $800. One of the few times I felt I did "good" for people. The show 
was hung salon-style and involved an alternative arts community that had 
rarely shown. We had a number of exciting shows - a 'Body' show, an 
Alternative Biennale, a photography show that included work by Susan 
Meiselas, who also curated it; another photography show curated from, I 
think, New Orleans - all sorts of beautiful and amazing work coming out of 
these. There were several artists - E.K. Huckaby, Thornley, Margaret 
Curtis, Tyler Stallings, Sarah Koffman (sp?), whose work I loved and had 
the opportunity to show; I learned more from them, I think, then they from 
me. And there were always good audiences, and a real sense of belonging to 
a vibrant and innovative community.

1985-6 Later Paul Celan's poetry would take off from where Theresa began; 
his poetry of elegy and holocaust related to the pure milk skin memories 
of desire I still retain - perhaps an afterthought, afterbirth, 
projection...

1985-87 I left Nexus, Allison left me, I went to University of Texas at 
Dallas, under Dean Robert Corrigan's multi-disciplinary program; fourteen 
of us arrived and eleven left by the end of the two years. I met Denise 
de la Cerda.

1986 I first met Denise at a punk/industrial music night; her musicians 
didn't show up and she played with our group (Damaged Life). She moved in 
a week later. Her voice was incredible; she immediately replaced our 
singer and all the other musicians.

1987 Denise tied me up, spread her period across me; she urinated on me; 
another time, she drew a perfect cunt between my asshole and prick. I was 
ecstatic, transported; I sucked her tampax. Images made a perfect grid on 
the wall, counterpoint to music. We made a piece, fuck, doing just that, 
with a microphone inserted, fed into electronics. We played at the Starck 
club in Dallas, basement room with live cameras and mics, fed into 
speakers elsewhere; some of the audience was at the door, some upstairs. 
In that closed-location it was similar to the piece with Bill Viola in 
Florence, 74 perhaps, when we played electricians old building - the 
audience stood outside, listened. We played them as horns, creating 
standing waves in the corners, etc. Amazing sound. Some- where to this day 
I have a recording.

1987 When she left me, Denise had worn a sore into her forehead, out of 
pure tension. She never disagreed with anything I said; we were both 
frustrated and mad with each other. She left suddenly; she had to. We were 
devouring ourselves. We did remain friends; there wasn't any animosity. 
And her singing - like North Indian scales, North Saharan scales - I've 
never heard anything like it.

1988 And I had never been treated so badly as I was with Nancy. She 
threatened to kill me when we split, after I had met Margaret, and had 
become all too close to Shellie Fleming, the film Curator at Image in 
Atlanta. I didn't behave well with Shellie. When Margaret and I fucked, 
the world I was living in came to an end, rushing over to her place in the 
basement, Rush Linbaugh always on the landlord's radio - when we did that, 
my life split in two. I've rushed too often into the good or bad fuck, 
world-destroyer. We lived together just from then for a while; at Atlanta 
College of Art we entered separately w/ red hair, it's as if I were 
baiting the authorities, I can't speak for her - one day showed up with a 
single fingernail painted red; we'd arrive at the same time from opposite 
ends, everyone knew, everyone was screwing teachers and students & no one 
caired, I was called before the dean, I'd promise anything, yes, we'd stay 
away from each other until she graduated -

1988 Around this time we met Greta Snyder who was studying painting at 
Buffalo. She hated the place and I identified with her. One night - her 
last there - she came to our place very late - we went back to hers - she 
was leaving just then - I think she went to New York or Canada first then 
back across country to San Francisco - anyway we took some of her 
paintings and food and odds and ends - she left suddenly, told no one - 
later I heard one of the photo teachers saying Gretchen wasn't in class; 
he wondered what happened. She became/is a brilliant filmmaker, but I lost 
sight of what she was doing.

1988 I also met Nancy Golden while at Hallwalls; this was the beginning of 
another disaster. She moved in the day we met, upon my invitation; we got 
along for the first two weeks or so, before psychosis and hysteria set in. 
I never behaved so badly.

1988 I became Artistic Director at Hallways Contemporary Arts Center. The 
job was a disaster, and the position undefined. I fought it all the way, 
having arguments in particular with Chris Tebes, the new executive 
director. By April I had resigned.

1988 I took up the Artistic Directorship of Hallwalls Contemporary 
Artcenter in Buffalo, of which I have already written.

1989 At the end of the year, Margaret and I left Atlanta for New York. I 
thought we'd last forever. We felt hounded out of town; everyone we knew 
"sided" with Nancy and condemned our relationship. People went silent when 
we walked in the room...

1989 Margaret and I are driving through western North Carolina; it's 
summer or spring and I start crying. I've never been so happy; I know I'll 
never be so happy again. She's behind the wheel of the red Civic. I'm 
watching _everything._

1989 or so - we're driving across country and have a bad fight. I get out 
of the car in the middle of nowhere, a neurotic mess/mass. Later she comes 
back and picks me up by the side of the highway. It was desperate for me; 
my life was / is always desperate, but at that point I couldn't avoid what 
seemed a suicidal course. I think Curtis (her last name, the Vth) became 
exhausted with me. So much energy was wasted.

1990 This is when we moved to New York, 432 Dean Street in Brooklyn, a 
small loft. Pieter Holstein owned it and at first we rented; when Margaret 
left, I stayed on and eventually my parents bought it. I'm still here; 
there are leaks, the outer wall of the building itself had to be replaced, 
but Azure has made it comfortable in spite of what appears to be a 
somewhat ruined ceiling. The area has been gentrified in the past seven 
years or so; we can't really afford the local restaurants. And it may be 
around this period that I began having migraines - or noticing that they 
_were_ migraines, complete with flashes, weakness, and so forth. Now, in 
2007, I have constant headaches, sometimes really debilitating; I don't 
have the money to follow through on any sort of treatment.

1989-91 During the years with Margaret I had the feeling we could get in 
the car and go _anywhere_ and we did. Even with depression, fighting, 
silences, the trips were ecstatic and moments of intense work for me - 
hours of video, film, audio, and writing. Margaret was from Chattanooga 
high society; I didn't fit in. At one point one of her relatives suggested 
that the President be given absolute power. I tried to keep my mouth shut. 
I hate this kind of society and its closures; I've run into it a lot in my 
life and generally behave like a bad boy as a result. The house was nice, 
the neighborhood had a lot of barking dogs as I walked at night. Religion 
seemed just around the corner. Margaret was a descendent of Tennessee's 
first governor and I think DAR or potentially so. Laurie Anderson was DAR, 
Frances van Scoy (head of the VEL at West Virginia) is DAR. Why do I know 
these things? And are they even correct?

1991 Or so, found out the ESP records had been reissued as CDs by ZYX 
records who never got in touch - how could they? I didn't even have a 
contract with Bernard (Bernie) Stollman for the second; it didn't matter. 
The stuff was out there, remembered. Later, Stollman reissued them through 
a revamped ESP label; they're available again, and led to a renewed career 
in music/soundwork.

1992 Margaret walked out after my severe depressions; she told me she was 
committed to me the day she left. I remember the truck pulling away, the 
expression on the face of her mother. I was stunned... She met her future 
husband within the hour.

1993 Finally started on the Internet with an IBM XT. My first post was to 
the Derrida list. I met Michael Current after going on Future Culture 
through a recommendation by John Frost (through Robert Horvitz advertising 
the Art Papers issue). Future Culture was amazing - far-thinking, 
communal, extropian (there was also an Extropian list and I think a Leri 
list - not sure - all interrelated).

1993 My fiftieth birthday; my parents sent some money and made a fuss - I 
remember a cake. (Where was I?) At that point I still thought I might live 
for a relatively long time (when I wasn't depressed). But I realized that 
given a miracle, well more than half my life was over. I could pretend up 
until that year. This was one of the last times I felt 'warmth' from the 
family.

1993 My first cyber-relationship experience with a grad student in 
Toronto; I met her on Chris Keep's postmodern list. (Maybe it was 
Kingston?) She asked me if we were cyber-fucking. Later we met in the NS 
library and didn't get along - depressing.

1994 Began Cybermind and Fiction-of-Philosophy email lists with Michael 
Current who died in July. Slept with Gail who kept talking about an Arab 
prince (I think) she was interested in. I felt used. Shuddered with 
useless anticipation. What were we thinking. Current and I spoke daily; he 
was the moderator of the Deleuze- Guattari list, a gay activist, 
brilliant. I think he was 31 when he died as a result of heart failure.

1995 I closed down Fiction-of-Philosophy email list after attacks by John 
Young and Deborah Natsios which I couldn't handle. The whole situation was 
awful. I reopened FoP asking people to resub on the provision they didn't 
attack the moderator. I handled a bad situation really badly. Marius Watz 
left and never came back. The list faltered for a while, then grew; now, 
as Wryting, it's one of the most interesting venues I've seen online for 
experimental writing.

1996 At the end of November, attended the Cybermind96 conference in Perth, 
Australia, where I was keynote speaker and participated in a number of 
panels; I also showed video and spoke at Murdoch, met Kim, Antonio, Jason, 
and Summa, among others.

1996 I meet Allison in Sydney after the Perth conference. She begins by 
telling me I treat women badly. I said I treated her badly possibly but 
she shouldn't generalize; she agrees. I said she treated me badly. Seeing 
her was intense.

1996 I think Allison and I worked through some of our differences, but it 
was/is very shaky.

1996 Worked through Mike Gurstein in Sydney, Nova Scotia, on pilot 
projects wiring up the province for community development (Internet); fell 
in love with Natalie MacMaster and her music; the woman never knew...

1996 thought of this program as a way to begin to create an autobiography, 
everything ordered through dates. The program:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
# biography

$| = 1; 
`cp .bio .bio.old`;
print "Would you like to add to bio information? If so, type y.\n";
chop($str=<STDIN>);
if ($str eq "y") {print "Begin with date.\n";
print "Write single line, use ^d to end.\n";
open(APPEND, ">> .bio");
@text=<STDIN>;
print APPEND @text;
close APPEND;}
`sort -o .bio .bio`;
exit(0);

So that everything is ordered by date; I enter when I can, the dates are 
arranged alphabetically; when I add to the lines, the sections lose their 
dictionary symptomology.

Now in 2007, it's strange, what appears is this: that there are two sorts 
of event-texts - those that are written at the time, first person, taking 
off for example from this moment on, the activation of this code snippet 
so many years ago, and those that are clearly memories of reconstruction - 
perhaps long-term memories related to Sartre's Psychology of the Imagina- 
tion. The difference might be as well short-term vs. long-term memories, 
but there's also the third category - that of the imminent - what I am 
seeing write/right in front of me, now - or an extended notion of the 
imminent - what I am writing now in relation to any of the three categor-
ies - which means in fact that the category of imminent(imminent) tends 
towards a form of recursion, brought to a halt (i.e. levels) by the 
limitation of the mind itself.

In any case, there are layers and layers 'here,' within the text; in many 
cases it might not be all that clear, what was written when, in relation 
to what, in relation to the exigencies and mechanisms of memory as well.

1997 After the book launch party, Doctress Neutopia took photographs of me 
masturbating while having net sex; she said she'd place them on her Web 
Site - I never spoke to her again. I believe I kicked her out. Around this 
time - from 1994-1996 or so - I had a number of affairs beginning with net 
sex and ending in the real world, travel, fear. I traveled to Kentucky, to 
North Carolina, to Denver. The Denver relationship was sexually obsessive 
and possibly extreme; it was also the most comforting, had the most depth. 
But none of them felt right and there was a circulation of what can only 
be called an economy of sadness. One of the relationships, with a woman in 
England, was sexually extreme - we used CuSeeMe extensively and as 
explicitly as possible. I discovered my own limits, one of which centered 
around the possibility of my chest cut slightly - "it won't scar" - a 
situation which would reduce me, incandescently, into the thing of s/m 
which swallows the world, is swallowed by it as well.

1997 Back in Sydney again for a second round, dealing with a wider range 
of issues, but less grass-roots. This was a trip to visit Lexie's 
relatives, to simply travel, to create a closer relationship, to have 
companionship. We were mutually fish out of water, mammals out of air. I 
remember the bioluminescence of the beach, glowing footsteps behind us, 
glowing waves against the shores of a foreign planet.

1997 But when Robert apologized, it was too late, and our friendship, 
which had existed from the early seventies, was over.

1997 I lived at 4-7-7 Chiyo, Hakata-Ku, Fukuoka-Shi 812, Japan, 
81-92-633-6048

1997 I return over and over again to this, in an attempt to reduce the 
noise in my head, clarify the strands of incomprehensible thinking. I 
think: "my life's like gnarled sinew." I think: rhizomatic. And: "I owe 
everything to you." 1997 I think I'm so smart.

1997 January 7-22 worked with C\CEN in Sydney for economic development 
vis-a-vis the Internet, listened to Lisa MacArthur play strathspeys, wrote 
about freighters while staying at Kristin's and Jason's, returned to 
comparative emptiness.

1997 Late, I think, my brother Mark comes over and joins Lexie and me for 
four days

1997 Lexie and I make a tour down the coast of Oregon; she had come to 
meet me in NYC for lunch, stayed for a few days, and I joined her two 
weeks later. Then after two weeks, returned to NY; two months later, to 
Fukuoka

1997 Met Lexie Don and fell in love with her hard, in 2 days, in New York. 
Now I try to understand this, and will meet her in Seattle, travel with 
her to Victoria to my brother's family. This was the beginning of a sad 
affair mostly instigated by me; in New York I was almost hysteric when she 
left. I damn myself (somewhat) for this, for the losing of myself yet 
again, dragging someone with me. I believe the dragging was mutual, but it 
was dragging nonetheless.

1997 November went to Fukuoka to join Lexie Don

1997 Stromatolites, cyanobacteria, tendrils.

1997 Today I received a carton of my older work from Ted Byfield; it was 
sent to Robert Horvitz over the years. Horvitz and I had a falling out 
when Ellen and I split; he felt that I treated her badly, treated him 
badly, and used him. Later he apologized.

1997 Wrote the first version of The Case of the Real in Fukuoka; the 
Jennifer book is published; rewrote the book for Saul Ostrow in November

1997 z, I use you "z" for coda, denouement. This is the jargon of 
autobiography, screen or peripheral memories, asides, eyes or bodies 
locked. I think I've learned nothing. I remember dates poorly. I haven't 
grown up. I endure the stories.

1997 za, They're partial or transitional accounts. They come and go. No 
matter how much you condemn me, I further condemn myself; I love and work 
in corners. That I haven't learned: to navigate. That I've lost custom. 
That I've never had.

1997 Somewhere around here, list troubles reached an apex of sort - there 
were people trying to bring the Cybermind list down. But I've always been
somewhat volatile on lists - signing off furiously (I use that word a lot 
I notice) from Poetics, then returning; leaving (2007) imitationpoetics 
after a spat, leaving nettime (2006) and returning; I may have even left 
futureculture (which Robert Horvitz had recommended to me, and which led 
ultimately to Cybermind) - I don't remember. I had arguments with Spoons. 
In real life, I had arguments with the English department at RISD, with 
the English department at Brown, with some of the faculty at UTD, with 
just about everyone at FIU; possibly with the art department head, Ray 
Brown, at UCLA; with the replacement head (not Melinda Wortz) at UCI; and 
with no one that I can remember in Canada, or at Hartford, or Atlanta 
(except for the usual squabbling). Life is a list you can't unsubscribe 
from. (I realize I shouldn't have said something so moronic, but I'll let 
it go; it sounds pop.)

1998 April 30 left Fukuoka to return jobless to New York; Lexie and I had 
crash-landed.

1998 August 15 to beginning of September, Lexie comes; the situation was 
hopeless.

1998 Finally around November, divorce comes through with Allison Ritch, 
thanks to Jon Marshall's help in Sydney.

1998 Kathy Acker and Christine Tamblyn die.

1998 Late April trip to Kyoto with Lexie; Feb 20-March 20 in Australia 
with her. I remember kangaroos and wallabies in the bush, and a friend of 
Lexie's brother (?) talking about 'culling' - i.e. killing - them.

1998 Met Azure Nicole Carter in Huntington Beach - we begin an amatory 
correspondence. 

1998 November 2-15, tour of Southern California then in Dec., MLA Conf., 
SF. This was when I met Azure Carter; we would start corresponding as soon 
as I returned to New York.

1998 Potes and Poets brought out The Case of the Real, which I then 
revised online; earlier, I visited Jerry in Canberra, and considered going 
for the Phd. I begin to work on ideas of 's/ms' and develop Nikuko, who 
started in 1997

1999 Azure comes out to live with me. I meet her at the airport at 5 in 
the morning. I remember walking around the empty building waiting for her 
to arrive. Somehow I knew she was the one, even then. I remember Tom and 
Leslie telling me that I had a responsibility to her. The day she arrived 
I had to teach in New Jersey; she came with me. From then on my life 
really did seem to stabilize. I literally owe everything to her.

1999 Appointed virtual writer-in-residence, Nottingham-Trent University, 
England, beginning September through February 2000. This was a fascinat- 
ing position - it went through the millennium "hinge" and gave me the 
opportunity to work with "messy" formats. Of course see below. One of the 
most successful works was the Lost project - people would enter a jiggling 
form (which looked "broken"), enter their names and something or someone 
they had lost. Within the project, the names were listed in one place, and 
what was lost in another. It was a kind of mourning, names separated from 
things, an obdurate database that held its secrets.

1999 Cheryl Ito dies near the beginning of the year, found alone in 
apartment

1999 Around this time I helped Allan forget-his-name set up his 2nd hand
bookstore in Brooklyn. He was a brilliant buyer but crazy otherwise. 
Things went from bad to worse; eventually I had to ask to have him kicked 
out of a Salvation Army - he was screaming at me and finally threw a heavy 
book.

1999 I start as the 2nd virtual writer-in-residence for trAce; I run or 
intervene on the bulletin boards, racking up I think over 2000 replies 
and comments. I felt an obligation to participate, to deal with everyone 
else. Azure was here while I rang the changes.

2000 I knew Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko - he had been a member of the 
Cybermind list. May 8, he committed suicide. He was a brilliant trans- 
humanist/extropian; I think I first encountered him on Futureculture. He 
was depressive, a Russian immigrant; there's an article on him in 
Wikipedia.

2000 I'm working with trAce online writing community from Nottingham- 
Trent University, headed by Sue Thomas. 2nd virtual writer-in-residence. I 
created several projects, deliberately making them a "mess" in format. 
Over the 1999-2000 hinge, I recorded traceroute from a number of sources; 
other people contributed as well. The result was a huge amount of data on 
the Y2K problem, which didn't exist - it was also a mapping of Internet 
routing at that time.

2000 March 19th my mother dies after a long illness. The funeral and 
events after were devastating. Since that time I've been on terrible terms 
with my father, and often with my sister and her family. My mother held 
the family together; I always felt close to her but I never thought it was 
reciprocal. Bus-loads of Hadassah members came to Kingston for the funeral; 
there were over 400 cards to write. My father and Sandy and Gerry Weiss 
stopped speaking at this point, and for me the rift has been extremely 
deep; I had felt close to the Weiss, not the Sondheim, side of the family. 
I'd always been frightened of my father's anger - now it came out in full 
force, and I haven't been able to really get along with him since. There 
were two breaks - in Toronto while staying at my sister's place, and at 
Joanna's wedding. Since the former, Margie and I have been distant and 
since the latter, my father and I hardly speak. I don't know how to get 
along with these people - what's left of my family - and I tire of being 
the outcast, black sheep, what have you.

2001 Azure and I marry June 14th, reception July 14th. The marriage was at 
the bureau in the Municipal Building; Tom and Leslie were witnesses. We 
ate around the corner at an Irish pub, then went over to Ellen Zweig's. 
The reception was at Tom and Leslie's; I remember (I think) Joel Zabor, 
now Rafi Zabor coming - he was the drummer I worked with years before, and 
now had completed a successful novel, The Bear Comes Home, which won the 
Faulkner prize for fiction that year.

2001 We move to Miami; I'm teaching new media at Florida International 
University. I had gone for an interview - and felt I was simply promised a 
situation - facilities, programs, technologies, funding - that simply 
didn't exist. For the school year 2001-2002 I was in Miami. At the end of 
the first semester, there was supposed to be a "review" - but I was the 
only one reviewed. My contract wasn't renewed, and the entire line was 
eliminated. The school continued to lie to me; Carol Damian, who was the 
department head, made veiled threats. To this day I'm not sure why I was 
let go. We had to fight constantly to get the facility in shape; the 
studio was built on low ground that flooded - it was a in a tin warehouse 
- and the air-conditioner didn't work, there was no ceiling (just lights 
hanging down from the tin) and no floor (it was raw cement covered with 
glue and never finished). There were two or three computers and no 
internet access; there was one low-grade consumer camcorder that broke 
soon after classes began. I was told I'd get something like $20,000 to 
get everything up to date etc. - and got nothing. 

2002 During the same period we went almost daily or nightly to the 
Everglades. I couldn't face the other faculty or the school; I roamed the 
halls of the art building (separate from the multi media shed) late at 
night, even getting my mail that way. I didn't go to faculty meetings or 
crits. I was invisible. Jacek my graduate student took over my classes. 
But the Everglades saved me; at first we noticed only the alligators and 
larger birds - by the time we left Miami, we were looking at periphyton, 
walking off trail day and night, and observing invertebrates. I believe to 
this day we found several new species of hemiptera; we have the 
photographs possibly to prove it.

2002 Here are materials somewhat disguised related to my dismissal from 
Florida International University ("Devil" - Carol Damian, then head of 
department). These snippets are from letters written to everyone from, I 
believe, the assistant provost to the faculty union grievance representa- 
tive; they give a fair indication of my mood at the time. I include these 
because of the resulting trauma. This was, don't forget, a short time 
after my mother died, and 9/11 occurred the second month we were down 
there. Between these, and feeling I had been lied to about the condition 
of the new media area, I had very little psychlogical energy to go on:


First - I never did get any TA help at all; is there any chance this will
change? The area needs both tech support on an on and off basis, and a TA
who would also be a lab monitor. I will give out the password, as we
talked about, but I'm not completely comfortable with this; still, I don't
see any other possibility. As in the past, we'll have a signup sheet and
students can come in when they want. (I do want to note for the record
that every media room I've seen has had both lab monitor and full-time or
part time tech (sysadmin) help - if we do anything more than graphics or
video (and we need to upgrade here - have to use the department credit
card to pay online once someone wires the computers in), the latter is
essential. Even 2-3 hours every two weeks would be an enormous help.)

Second - as far as (from what I recall yesterday) the students finding me
depressed - I _am_ depressed. It's difficult for me, as a new faculty
member here only a month, to have to deal with things like a roof, floor,
and biohazardous materials, no TA, and a lot of student complaints about
equipment. When I was told I'd have to build up the area, I never assumed
it was literally from construction onward. As I mentioned, it's been far
too much work, considering I'm also teaching, trying to research equipment
for the area, etc.

Someone said we might be able still to hire adjuncts? Is there a freeze
also on this? Working with someone who is a Mac/Flash expert would be a
huge relief to the area. What I'm expert in - Internet studies, the Net,
etc. - simply isn't set up, as you know, in 105. I'm hoping we can hire
IRM to configure the Mac computers to connect to the Net through the phone
line - that should be possible? (For some reason I couldn't get them to
work - I have a Mac here at home and it connected immediately.)

Third, I wrote Satan about the vendor situation - do you know any
creative way around purchase orders? There are huge discounts in the
retail shops (I went to Circuit City and Comp USA a few times to research
this, as well as some smaller retailers); if we have to order through
official channels, we're likely to get a lot less equipment for the $4000.

Again, any help/advice greatly appreciated. I'll be in tomorrow around
noon (meeting with Stephen Heins from another dept.) and will check on the
room again at that point (as well as today); in other words, I'll be in
and out of the university tomorrow and possibly Monday.

yours, Alan

Sounds good; I called God and am waiting to hear from him.

Impatience unfortunately is built into what you want from me. For example,
as you know, the university can't fix the camera. This is the one camera
we have for all 20 students - who now have to wait until we can get it
commercially fixed. And I have to explain this to the students - and I
will have to field complaints. (It's already been out for two weeks.)

Did a TA ever come through for us? We desperately need one, but I haven't
heard back from you on this.

All of this is really disenheartening. I should be focusing, I believe, on
teaching and trying to settle in Miami, and instead there seem to be con-
stant difficulties with the multimedia area.

Anyway I will not be aggressive with God or anyone else.

yours, Alan

Does this mean I'm in danger of losing my job at the moment? I absolutely
need to know, because if it's the case, I have to start making other plans
of course -

yours, Alan

Hello - I was the faculty member from new media you met at the luncheon.

As you probably know, my position, my job (as first-year tenure-track
faculty member), and the new media area have all been eliminated.

I understand there is no recourse, no appeal to this decision. The Dean
called me in and handed me a termination notice. There was no discussion,
and at no time during the semester did he bother to find out what we were
doing in the studio.

Art departments all over the country are EMPHASIZING, not cutting back new
media; this is even true in Florida. The situation at FIU is deplorable -
the students are quite honestly being robbed of working in what is the
hottest and most prevalent international medium today.

As for myself - if you do a search on http://www.google.com - you will
find at last 3500-4000 listings for "Alan Sondheim" (use the quotes to
exclude other references). This will give you some idea of my online
community presence and reputation - which I was bringing to FIU.

As for my relationships within the department - for the first half of the
semester (I arrived around August 15), they were very edgy; I was
"whiny" and quite honestly depressed - and the students knew it. I was
teaching in substandard space, with no finished floor (cement with glue),
with no ceiling (tin roof), and air conditioner (not working); there were
termite droppings on the equipment, dead lizards and waterbugs in the
space, and both white and black powders over everything - probably insec-
ticides. After considerable complaining, we got a drop ceiling put in
(there are probably still termites above it - this is W10, RM 105),
flooring put down, the room cleaned - including biohazard testing, and the
air-conditioner working. But this took a tremendous amount out of me, the
department, and the class - and in spite of that my students did profes-
sional work (for the most part), and I received very good evaluations from
them.

And on top of this - to be terminated at this point, to have the whole
area closed down - this is intolerable, particularly given what you passed
out - the university mandate. I had hoped to help several of my students
towards online and offline exhibitions by the end of this semester - this
is blatantly unfair to them as well.

I am well aware this letter will do absolutely no good, but I found the
luncheon was not a good time to bring this all up, and it wasn't until the
next day that I received the termination notice.

sincerely,

Alan Sondheim

Of course I won't be teaching this summer, etc.; I also won't be advising
at this point.

I'll be going to the student crits, etc., but I will use the faculty meet-
ing time for working on job applications, etc. I'm not getting anywhere,
but I've been working the whole vacation on this stuff. We'll have a
furniture etc. sale in mid-April and leave after that. I'm going to go to
Human Resources next week to find out about TIAA/CREF, health and unem-
ployment, etc. etc. It's a very depressing time.

I'm going to be working with two students outside of class (I think) - one
will be doing a one-credit course, and Jehovah is the other. If there are
any difficulties, I'll get in touch with Beezlebub.

I cancelled out of the Sorbonne (and England - I was also asked to speak
there); I'm going to Minnesota late February for a few days, but that's
all. The courses will work around that.

Hope your holidays are good -

yours, Alan

I just wanted to add a few things.

Although it's technically irrelevant, I was told verbally I'd get startup
monies for the department area (new media) - none came through.

I'm really not sure why the position was terminated. Two reasons - budget 
and the fact the Dean didn't think I'd stay the whole time and "the 
university's investment in the position wouldn't pay off" make little 
sense to me in a lot of ways. I have reason to think there was something 
else - someone hinted at it - but I don't know what it is. It may be that 
I had an argument with the Devil early on and asked if I would be able to 
take the startup equipment with me if I left in a year or two. According 
to Evil One I said that I was definitely leaving after one year "and 
everyone heard me." But I didn't say that, Angel was there and didn't hear 
it, and I wouldn't have said it. I was despairing at that point of teach- 
ing altogether, because as I pointed out the room I was given was in 
terrible disrepair (as was/is a lot of the equipment) - and Evil kept 
insisting "I knew what I was getting into" - that I was told everything 
during the interview. But I wasn't - I had no idea about the termites, the 
flooding, the broken air-conditioner, the ripped-up flooring, the lack of 
a ceiling... The job was a mess at first. I have before-and-after pictures 
of the room - we did manage over two months to get it repaired - but we 
also lost around a month's studio time for my classes in the process....

I can't follow through on any of this because I don't want to lose my
recommendations/references - I'm applying for other jobs.

Most of the time I try and stay level; I have a huge amount of anger in
me. I told the Dean the university should never have advertised the job,
and if they did, I would try and write everyone I know to stop the hiring.
I knew the last finalist very well for example. I feel bound to do this -
and do whatever I can - because at this point I'm feeling basically raped
- it's the only way I can put it. I'm 58, one of the oldest people in the
department, and it was a HUGE move for Azure (my wife) and I to come down
here. Right now it's catastrophic, affecting my health, etc.

Anyway the Dean said if I wrote anything it would affect his letter of
recommendation "of course" - I said I would never ask him for one, and he
said that the Deans are always consulted. I don't think this is true in
the slightest, but I need the letter from Evil One - she gave me one
already, but if she's called on it, I have to appear positive to her.

Another one of the promises - Angel is young and wants to study museology
- I was told at the interview that there would be a certification program
with the Smithsonian. As soon as we were here we were told it was
postponed - and now I don't know if it's ever going to happen. Angel has
had nothing to do as a result vis-a-vis the university. This may seem
minor, but we were told in absolute terms that the program was in place.
There was a lot of this stuff.

Sorry to vent like this. If you need specific information, I can supply
it, to the best of my knowledge. The paper trail is thin; the email trail
is a bit thicker, but a lot of what's gone on has been verbal. I've
taught, often as a visiting artist, at a number of other places, and I've
never had reason to distrust any of them - unfortunately this hasn't been
my experience here.

yours,

Alan Sondheim

I'll try to make all the crits. I have to apply for work elsewhere at this
point and there are a lot of deadlines in January/February. Please excuse
me if I don't make every one. This semester is going to be difficult for
Angel and myself; the termination of the job and area has been finanically
and emotionally devastating for us. The union has taken an interest, but
this doesn't affect my termination; they want to try and ensure this sort
of thing (i.e. first year tenure-track) won't happen again.

I worry about the art / art history department. Forgetting whether or not
I'm liked, the elimination of the new media area is terrible - if you look
at the CAA listings, this area is becoming one of the most important in
schools all across the country/Canada. Given this, and the problems with
the student gallery, I'm surprised that tenured faculty aren't protesting
(again). The school has some of the best undergraduates I've seen - What
am I to tell my students who might want to major in new media? My only
option is to suggest they go elsewhere if they really want to pursue, say,
Internet studies, cdroms, etc. And that's awful.

I want to thank those of you who have given us letters of recommendation
and emotional support through all of this. It's been very difficult.

- Alan

I'm sending this out, somewhat for protection. I have told my students
about what happened - I felt I owed them this - and that the new media
area of the school is closing down - what Satan said when he termin-
ated my contract. Now the head of the department is insisting I not pass
on negative information, that the area will continue. This woman has also
written a letter of recommendation for me which will be required, I'm
sure, if I'm to be hired elsewhere. She's lied consistently to me, as far
as I'm concerned; she wants me to lie to the students. Fact: There's no
one to teach new media, no money for hiring even adjuncts. Fact: There's
only one video camera still, 2 G4 stations, one half-working Sony station
- and I have a total of  26 students. Fact: There's no budget for more
equipment, the new media line has been taken away, there's no budget for
visiting artists, there's no budget for software. I spend half the time
dealing with students groaning - in spite of which I get good recommend-
ations. There's no budget for technical support. There's no budget for
lab monitors. The students are barely getting an education, and I'm the
only one who can teach new media or Internet in the Art / Art History
area. I'm afraid of lying; I don't want my better students to lose their
own chances at careers because the department head puts the university
ahead of the truth.

This woman has also threatened me, telling me I don't want to know what
the real reasons for the termination are - "Don't go there" - and "I'm
married to a lawyer, so I know when to keep my mouth shut."

How in hell am I to get another teaching job? I've been getting physically
sick with stress at this point; I can't cope. I feel like a victim in
someone's paranoid fantasy. I've spoken to the union who want to publicize
things (and probably will) because the situation is so unusual (and they
want to prevent it from happening again) - but that will make it even
harder for me to get work elsewhere, student evaluations notwithstanding.
I keep a partial paper trail, but so much of what's gone on has been
verbal - the meeting with the Satan, the woman's threats, etc. I've never
seen such an insane situation in my life.

What does one do? I'm a damn good teacher. I'm applying to various
schools. The first thing they'll notice is the one year termination. How
do I protect myself? How do I survive?

Alan

I am writing you to ascertain the reasons for my contract termination. I
understand my situation is unusual, and I need to find out why I was let
go at such an early date.

Thank you very much for your help in this matter.

Sincerely yours,
Alan Sondheim

(End of quotations related to Florida International University matter)


2002 During the second semester, as a result, I had a panic attack and wet 
to the hospital overnight. I played with the monitor sensors and managed to 
make it appear that I was dying or in some state; the crescendo was 
placing the sensors in my mouth. (There were various kinds, all connected 
to heart, blood, lung monitors, etc.) Gary Wiebke visited at the time. 
Later that day - that night in fact - we went back to Shark Valley in the 
Everglades with just flashlight; it was amazing. It was then I saw the 
moth - which I still haven't been able to identify.

2002 I think this is the last of my Experimental Television Center 
residencies. We worked with Foofwa d'Imobilite, creating a series of 
pieces - perhaps the Parables were from this period? These were based on 
The Parables of Nikuko, published (poorly) by Potes and Poets Press - 
texts that were later reprinted, I think, in .echo (Alt-X books, publish- 
on-demand).

2003 Boojum the cat who adopted me in 1990, developed breast cancer. She 
went for a serious operation and wasn't expected to survive. Now, four 
years later, she's doing fine. We had to have a small spot removed since 
then, but that's all.

2003 Perhaps? Developed a 'lime-like' disease complete with corolla (?) on 
my arm; this lasted for a number of months. I've always suffered from 
mostly mild allergies which sometimes flare up; this, however, was unusual 
- it was localized. What I've called my 'low-temperature' illness, since 
it seems related to that symptom, has affected me almost my entire life; I 
can't get away from it. The result is those severe flu symptoms I've 
mentioned, I think, elsewhere here; I end up taking codeine or other 
medicine to try and relieve them. There have been entire days I've been 
woozy, unable to work. At this point, the symptoms occur about every third 
day, sometimes less, sometimes more. Doctors haven't been able to diagnose 
it, and even I wonder if it's psychosomatic.

2004 I begin to recognize how much tinnitus is taking out of me. It's 
always present; I live with this constancy of high-pitched continuous 
tones, against which everything else is backdrop. It sounds like radia- 
tion; it's not. The rest of the world muffles in comparison. I sense the 
harmonics ascend into the ultrasonics. And every so often, I write about 
writing-philosophy with (what is considered) impairment. Philosophical 
texts, speculations, deconstructions, presume the health of the writer 
(Levinas an important exception), and this isn't always the case. As far 
back as my 1984 Disorders of the Real, I considered writing-under-fever, 
and just as depression might associate stringently with the 'real,' so 
might fever, which appears to couple with the dominant state of the 
cosmos, plasma. Is clear thinking - "to think clearly" - necessary for 
philosophical discourse? If the clarity is illusory, all right then - 
unclarity might be considered a subset of clarity. But in fact clarity is 
by far the minority state-of-affairs (re: the fragility of the good in 
category theory); all those illnesses - tinnitus, headache, exhaustion and 
insomnia, arousal and despair, broken bones, unutterable pain - say other- 
wise (as if they could speak). In my case, I'm _bounded_ by tinnitus; it's 
there, just as the nightmares are there (and they're related). Think of it 
this way - tinnitus, like my near-sightedness, is a kind of withdrawal 
from the world. This too figured in some of the works in Disorders.

2004 Last year I think of working with Florian Cramer on the Unstable 
Digest for the Nettime email list. The Digest was an occasional collection 
of codework pieces. Later I would be 'purged' from the list as a result of 
ad hominem attacks that lasted for almost a month. 

2004 Thanks to the recommendation of Ken Wark, The Wayward is published by 
Salt; the book is a collection of pieces related to the poetics of the 
Internet Text. At this point we're living off Azure's student loans - my 
ability to get work after the FIU fiasco, given my age, is close to non- 
existent. 

2004 Salt published The Wayward; Salt was recommended me by Ken Wark. This 
was the first upscale paperback since Disorders of the Real, and it con- 
tained a feast of codepoetry, codepoetics, and avant-garde work of various 
sorts. I'm more than proud of this, something odd and precious to me. By 
this time, .echo and VEL had been published, and all of these together 
were a kind of milestone; VEL contained new theoretical work, and .echo 
contained the full Parables of Nikuko series. The 'jutting' of this auto- 
biography also demands publication; if I were writing for myself, I 
wouldn't observe such stricture. If you are interested, of course, I would 
like to hear from you...

2004 VEL is published by Blazevox as print-on-demand. The title is from 
WVU's Virtual Environments Laboratory, run by Frances van Scoy; it's also 
the name of a logical function used by Lacan. The book is a series of 
texts related to motion capture and other 'avatar' issues. It was through 
the VEL that I began to work seriously with motion capture, remapping the 
nodes of the body into 'inconceivable' configurations, clothing those with 
Poser bodies or Blender abstractions. The result is a series of studies of 
the tensed body, half-virtual, half-'real.'

2005 I see Tamara Bowers at that opening; she seemed incredibly sad to 
me, somewhat lost.

2005 I sell both my Kathy Acker manuscript materials and James Lee Byars 
sculpture - I need the money. The Acker materials weighed on me; the 
relationship was short and insecure. I've tried not to hold on to artwork 
if it can find a better home; my tendency is to give away whatever I own, 
whenever I can, sometimes with regrets. But not here.

2005 I think this is when FireMuseum released The Songs. I met Bernard 
Stollman of ESP again at an opening at Grand Central Artist Center. He 
suggested putting out another cd. I also saw Tamara Bowers performing in 
front of the GCAC; she was writing sad and lonely words with a brush and 
water on the pavement. She seemed troubled and unfathomable; she was very 
friendly, which I hadn't expected.

2005 In October, Joanna and Eugene Lim marry; it was a wonderful wedding, 
and I'm feeling close to both of them. Family problems at the wedding; I 
stopped speaking to my sister and my father - I couldn't handle their 
attitudes towards me. My father screamed at me in front of everyone; he 
seemed a bit drunk. And he and other family members made sarcastic remarks 
during some of the speeches, which were heard. It was extremely upsetting. 
These situations create an aporia, a kind of knot which is doubly-bound, 
without any conceivable resolution; whatever I do, I'm in the wrong. 
Because of the earlier closeness with the family, it's hard to stay 
distant but when I don't, the pattern starts all over again. 

2005 When was it? I shall put it here, when Alice called from California, 
speaking suicide, "I'm going to take my dog and go into the desert and I'm 
going to shoot my dog." "I'm going to shoot my dog because I don't want 
him left behind." Then silence. Now still alive. 

2005 Residency in Santa Ana, Grand Central Art Center, for the summer. Two 
cds released. Azure and I worked with very low frequency (VLF) radio; I 
produced an incredible body of work, ranging from music to video. We 
explored the Bolsa Chica wetlands, helped a graduate student release a 
toad back into the wild; I constructed more complex avatars integrated 
into series that included performances of all sorts, often nude.

2005 This is just too harsh, to self-loathing, too selfish. I haven't 
contributed anything for six years. It's time I formally abandoned this.
In the summer Azure and I visited the raptor sanctuary again. Annie is 
still alive. Slowly releasing birds back into the wild is called hacking. 
The following year, 2006, I would watch a kestrel for three days running 
in Salt Lake City; it was absolutely alone (perched on electrical wires 
next to an open field), a world-pivot. 

2005 have a headache from Gary's hammering today! Our building continues 
to leak; it's leaked ever since the new wall was put in. Later it turned 
out that water was seeping through the mortar. We're still in this state 
of stained walls and corners around the windows, mold behind them to be 
sure.

2005 so long since anything's been put here. It's incredible. Nothing to 
say. Some periods, 2004, what happened? Was that summer the first at the 
Virtual Environments Laboratory in West Virginia? I began working with 
avatars then through motion capture and Poser. We created a number of 
scenarios, some involving West Virginia scenery as background. Later the 
avatars would form the background to more abstract mocap images, as well 
as scanning work that would be completed in the summer of 2006. The images 
from 2004 were exhibited at the Track16 Gallery show in L.A. in 2006 as 
well.

2006 Azure and I are still together and it is such a blessing.

2006 Barry Sugarman committed suicide; he was the hand drummer in our 
group and played on The Songs. And we haven't heard from Joel Zabor in a 
long time now; he's out of touch. I haven't read his autobiography. I've 
been reading Johnson's Dictionary.

2006 For the first time I wonder about my sanity. I can't take the 
pressure of joblessness, bad family relations, bad health and bad 
health-care, lack of money, fear, nightmares, depressions, any more.

2006 Played music in public again for the first time in years, at Tonic 
(NYC); I'm also recording again. Working with alpine zither extensively, 
as well as the usual guitars. Started a blog. Feel like a hungry ghost.

2006 Sandy Baldwin is working on a book inspired by my theoretical work; 
we're also trying to get a manuscript of my essays published. I've been 
thinking, still, through the analog and digital, through defuge, through 
issues dealing with the future of the planet.

2006 Successful show at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, with Leslie 
Thornton. Called em/bedded, it features 12 channels of video/audio, 
including five projections, deals with war, sexuality, memory. For me an 
encapsulation of sorts - distorted avatar work of the past five years.

2006 We performed some sexualized work with Foofwa which created a bit of 
a scandal. And worked then in the Alps: around the Aletsch glacier, and 
near Gruyere in the Pre-alps. Around Geneva. The Alps _were_ sublime, not 
only in terms of representation - or rather in terms of hermeneutics.

2006 We're still $84,000 in debt from Azure's school loans. I'm selling 
off some books. I'm generally sleepless, the nightmares are worse, the 
brain twitches have come back, etc. I take three medications, aspirin, 
Welbutrin (which I'd like to get off of), and something for cholesterol.

2006 Worked on a dancepiece in Geneve three times, Incidence. Azure 
accompanied me twice. The following preceded this. Maud Liardon dropped 
out before the Lausanne performance, as if she had been betrayed. One of 
the best dancers I've seen, the worst to deal with. I had it in for her 
bourgeoisie.

2006 Worked with Foofwa and his company in Geneve twice; Azure went over 
with me once. The dance was Incidences. The experience was incredible for 
me - the dance intense and brilliant; he continues to break new ground.

2006 ski/nn came out with FireMuseum and I've been playing the harmonica; 
the latter is portable and the chromatic gives me the full scale. ski/nn 
is classical or parlor guitar and Alpine zither, which I've been playing 
since the first Geneve trip.

2006 Foofwa, Azure, and I create Crepuscule/Twilight in Geneva, a work of 
sexuality dance that already creates tremors; I want to release this as 
soon as possible. We made it one night, nude at the Grutli; there are 
fourteen parts in the work which lasts 41 minutes.

2006 Began working a bit with Second Life, with Youtube, with a blog at 
nikuko.blogspot.com. I'm not sure why any of this? Increasingly tired of 
the Net which seems to unravel; the recent earthquake in Taiwan really 
broke it down locally for example. Too much havoc coming through spam; I 
face daily abject illegality, of a particularly vicious sort. We're being 
eaten up alive, and willingly.

2006 Salt Lake City and the sight west of West Jordan of a flock of 10,000 
starlings, possibly the largest I've seen (or perhaps the flock of white 
ibis was greater? in the Everglades? towards dusk? roaring like so many 
planes above us - the _sound_ of it?). I envied their clear and evident 
communality.

2006 I have a dream about a student of mine who had a mentally-impaired 
sister, years - decades - ago. I think the mother had taken the blame for 
a wrong dosage of medicine? In the dream, the student is naked with a 
penis and a crippled hand coming out of the head, on one side. Margaret 
also had a mentally-impaired sister; some of the people I've known have 
had the personality disorder of our time (partially developed ego, neuras- 
thenic, and that word I can't, Freudian-wise, remember). Then there are 
the disasters through drugs, through suicides, through rages, through 
wars, through angers - through pushing annihilation to the limit, through 
pushing to the limit of annihilation - or just before. When I walk, the 
world teeters. When I sleep, it rages in fury, daring me to walk again.

2006 Re: Entry above - already the alphabetic ordering is lost...

2006 The Peregrine falcons for the first time - a young one in the 
vicinity. Later, we'll see another on Dean Street; this one is on Bergen, 
a block away. Channel 1 comes along and I erroneously identify the age of 
the bird on-air. Around the same time we see two brown creepers, small 
sparrow-like birds which spiral up a tree, move out on a high branch 
hanging upside-down, fly to the base of another tree, spiral up, and so 
forth, all at high speed - eating insects along the way. 

2006 We visit Azure's aunt, I see the kestrel, and later in Brooklyn, the 
heron; these are isolated inhabitants, and I prefer the starlings and 
their community. I feel isolated with Azure; we're not really part of any 
community here, in spite of close friends. I write into the night; if 
you're reading this, you most likely have never met us. I continue to find 
more and more people living almost like dolmens, in stoned/stony isolation 
- what saves me is Azure, my work, and an incessant pushing against the 
harsh devastation of the world.

2006-2007 Gerald Jones visits, 2006, brings a book on Manatees, loving and 
considerate; he records a "Dance is" video for some ongoing work. He was 
far sicker than we had imagined; he died in 2007 and there was a memorial 
I couldn't attend. His work was always brilliant; he lived on an edge I 
couldn't conceive, of technology, income, sexuality, labor, art. We had 
gone into the Everglades together. He came to New York, we visited him in 
Miami, I knew him from Atlanta. I miss him badly. 

2007 almost: This memo, memorial, memory, memory-graph, meme, remembrance, 
autobiography, reminiscence, mnemonic, skitters back-and-forth; it remains 
undone; there's nothing of _thought_ in it; what remains are events; 
they're already dissolving; I can't "believe" events.

2007 'Biog' and 'blog' are a letter l apart, i apart; they server and 
suffer the same indolence, same narcissism. One wouldn't read this for the 
events - if for anything, the tenor of things within and without. And that 
becomes something that veers in all directions - tenor is always unstable, 
even contested. If I have criminal activity, it's remote here; this is too 
skeletal. If I have secrets, most of them are given. 

2007 I'm finding old cassettes - of my work with Laurie Anderson, Chris 
Franz, Bill Viola - these old sessions - and putting some up online; there 
are also at least a couple of dozen interview/conversations (with Adrian 
Piper for example) and discussions (with Krister Hennix, Nancy Kitchel, 
etc.). I sound the same then as now; I sound idiotic. The theoretical 
content was different - on phenomenological/abstract/immersive structures 
and so forth, but the emphasis was the same - on language, sexuality, 
abstraction, reception, consciousness, mathesis, hysteria, politics, 
structures of exhilaration and annihilation, etc. And I'm uncomfortable 
with this historicizing. Meanwhile I'm selling off everything I can to 
help pay our debts - the Kelmscott and the numismatic books are gone, as 
are some autographs and rare American poetry/poetics books. I dislike 
doing this, but the debts are overwhelming and there's no end to them.

2007 This is the year beginning in cold rain. I think about the biog.txt 
to date - not only skittering, but awkwardly written - an occasional turn 
of phrase as if it makes any difference. There are no New Years resol- 
utions - just to continue with music / video / texts etc. Everything (when 
I think of it) appears scattered; the biog.txt represents so little of the 
world I've inhabited, or dreamed of inhabiting. It's an attempt to corral 
the scattering of my material culture, memories, after my death. When you 
read this, think that behind every word was a Proust, behind every Proust, 
yet another. And how worlds shatter, imminent, with death! - What has been 
ordered, treasured, conceived - what has been familiar, loving, cherished 
as the pages of a book are cherished - becomes the debris of others - 
everything is torn asunder, wounded, just as the world falls apart, less 
and less rebuilt elsewhere. Think of these sections, then, as the last 
remnant of coherency - what remains of an infinite richness of thought. 
Worlds devolve words devolve, hold fast, at least momentarily, past the 
living body, sunk into living language. Everything else, except perhaps 
for Azure, for Joanna, leaves and forgets the shattering which releases, 
not light, but order returned to substance. There is more to me than there 
is to the sun, to any star; there is less and less upon inclement return. 
And today, yesterday on the cusp, the announcement of the 3000th soldier 
to die in Iraq, all worlds, words, crashing to the ground, revised in the 
false resurrection of the war memorial. The rain falls against orders, 
against commands; we're lost, against all odds.

2007 The nightmares. I shouldn't be writing at 7 a.m. after going to sleep 
at 5. But the nightmares come again, as usual, and I wake up, shaking, 
adrenalin surging - this has always accompanied me. New ruined landscapes 
tonight - first, Azure and I were being shown a small antique leather- 
bound book; it was a codex of sorts, with the laws written in the 2nd half 
and oddly indexed. Then the switch - down that avenue on the beach past 
the stores, and the landscape changed; the ocean was dark, grey, poisonous 
- the sky darker still, and the beach littered with twisted ruins. I made 
my way along, alone; I didn't know if another person was alive on earth. I 
tried to climb up the embankment on some broken stairs, pulling up towards 
the dead marshgrass, and woke almost unable to breathe. There are dreams 
like this every night now, and I'm certain they will kill me. The land- 
scapes return again and again - those buildings partly by the beach, 
partly on it, the small house or two at the end of the devastated and 
isolated spit of flat land, scrub grass and sand, meandering into the 
Atlantic, the houses at the top of high stairs on a cliff again in 
Providence, Rhode Island, the ruined airliner crashed against the side of 
my childhood house in Kingston, medicine bottles spilling out of racks, 
the room with the posters of past bands and lives in a teetering building 
again in Providence - all these familiar places which don't exist, which 
won't leave me alone. I live broken from nightmare to nightmare; there's 
no recourse. They shatter the night, shatter the following day. They 
distort my health, my we