After days on antibiotics, I started The Hobbit, mostly because I wished I was out of the house on an adventure, but I've been enjoying it still while I'm back in the land of the living.
Lots of issues of Doris and Brainscan last night. Here's another great bit from Doris #28: "I couldn't figure out what she was asking until I said "well, you grab your gluestick..." and the librarian gasped. Yes. Gluestick + scissors + learn to use the photocopier. Make a few copies. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be all wrapped up in ego or self-hate. It's not the end of the world. A little bit scary. A little bit exciting and fun."
Also, whenever I read Doris now I think about how a student in a zine visit class described how she literally could not stop reading it or put it down, even to participate in the conversation about the zine she was reading and to tell everyone how amazing what she was finding what she was reading. Yes.
Been too sick and busy and uninspired to keep up the reading log lately. Read Watchmen yesterday, and some zines today, including Doris #28: "I want to make this place a resource as well as a sanctuary. I want to open it up, but not so open that I can't come home and close my eyes. I want to learn how to give without giving too much. I want to teach what I know, and for someone to teach me. To keep learning so I don't give up. to keep thinking so I don't grow bitter."
Finished Zone One. This is the kind of book that's so bad in so many ways you want to just go on and write your own, a la Octavia Butler. And yet the zombies kept me reading to the end, not that it was necessarily worth it.
Good middle-of-the-night reading, reminding me of 2007 and circles of struggles: If you think getting what you want changes your life, you're most likely mistaken; there you are, still, in your same old body, fucking up, getting it right, no telling which. Taking it apart and picking up the pieces. Loving, fighting, still the same. There are only so many plots for our stories. Always the mess of the world around you, getting messier all the time, you in the middle of it, thinking, I just want to be left alone, I just want the people I love to be left alone. I want us to be safe and fed, I want to go to the doctor when I get sick, I want to know we all know we are loved. Is that so much to ask? Not really, if you ask me. We are not asking for
--The Rejectionist, Monday Night ten pm
Krik? Krak! while on the train, and waiting at the pharmacist. At the office I just read a long stream of symptoms off a screen, diagnosing myself a hypochondriac.
I stared at the shelf full of Philip K. Dick at the bookstore today. What's good to start with if you have only read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and have a bad flavor from it because of reading it perhaps during one of the worst of bad periods (i.e. I hear the rest of his work is nothing like that and is it true)?
Looking at Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, digital humanities blog posts and a couple of career-related letters from 5th and 6th graders