It's been awhile since I've updated. I thought my birthday was a good re-starting point. It's lovely outside, too. Springtime. I'm rejuvenated! A real flower. Here's a quick overview of the projects I am planning on working with/completing in Spring/Summer of this year:

• An edition of 20 artist books utilizing magazine cut-ups. The aesthetic of each book is driven by uniformity, though the content to each will be unique. I plan to distribute 16 of them to my DIY Publishing classmates/teacher and the other 4 will go to Quimby's. This edition will be followed by others and (hopefully) a hard cover book.
• A page-by-page excision of Gravity's Rainbow.
• A film with my dear friends Daniel Baeza and Emily Eddy. We've only started talking about this, but I'm excited. It'll be good. Hopefully to be completed this summer.
• A new edition of my print-on-demand, to be re-published in the next 4-5 weeks.

And here's this amusing article from the Boston Sun.

artist's book, preview

early revision, poem currently untitled

America's age-all        abundance!
           
            Come!
   
    Consider the
    leafy-rose milk
    dripping thru holes in Mary's breast
   
while she (the now of old) lays belly-up in her living room
    thumbing over her floor-length housecoat
    containing:            1 pack of Virginia Slims
                                  1 wad of cat hair
                                  1 lipstick, used

The sonic sons,
    (a lawyer, a bank robber)
    hold the child's dark ear
    ask her to speak gentle the moon or manger:

"What if we were to act through number?
Change will occur through the calculation of your oddity -
Speak us planets, woman. The country is conquered."

She                revised, domesticated,
    is unlovely
        wetting herself to the dust squall mirrored bird.

summer 2011

This will serve as a reminder. My friend Anna and I have set goals. These are those goals:

1. Start a talk show called "A mornin' cup with Anna and Christl"

2. Do yoga in the park.

3. Lift ourselves out of sleep at a decent hour to complete above.

4. Get muscle-man fit.

5. Find the cupcake cart.

6. Sit around, lovin' life, eating cupcakes from the cupcake cart.

Failure will not occur. 

On two other notes: my friend Maxwell got me on the idea of doing a project together fashioned after traditional story-time radio. I will update more about this in the future as I'm (currently) near the end of my semester and too busy to breathe. I'd love to leave it up to him for the time being (I know he'd do an amazing job) but I planted the seed and should involve myself.

On March 20th of this year I took part in a live-writing collaboration titled "An American Life in Writing". The work of myself and some other lovely folks is now available in print! You can purchase a copy of An American Life in Writing: Live Writing Series Volume 1 for $7.43 on Blurb. I've had a chance to look through the book in it's printed form and I think everything turned out very nicely. There will be more volumes and an anthology to come.

uh-oh.

I haven't had much time this week to do anything, but here is the cover for the book I just completed. The content is an experiment in melding fiction/prose/poetry. Much of the work considers dreams, nostalgia, historical figures, religion and American life. I can't say I love it, but we'll see.

Thanks to the poor friends I bombarded with readings. I appreciate the time you spent and all the lovely feedback. I am yours, always.

stephen caspar at archmere academy; delaware, 1968.

Charles Simic: The World Doesn't End

My friend Patrick Sanchez recently lent this book of prose/poetry (prose poetry?) by Charles Simic. I need to return the copy, but I'm caught in the middle of my third re-read. Buy/borrow/steal it for yourself. It's a good little book to have.

Excerpts:

"Ghost stories written as algebraic equations. Little Emily at the blackboard is very frightened. The X's look like a graveyard at night. The teacher wants her to poke among them with a piece of chalk. All the children hold their breath. The white chalk squeaks once among the plus and minus signs, and then it's quiet again. pg. 13

"A poem about sitting on a New York rooftop on a chill autumn evening, drinking red wine, surrounded by tall buildings, the little kids running dangerously to the edge, the beautiful girl everyone's secretly in love with sitting by herself. She will die young but we don't know that yet. she has a hole in her black stocking, big toe showing, toe painted red...And the skyscrapers...in the failing light...like new Chaldeans, pythonesses, Cassandras...because of their many blind windows." pg. 32

moviebarcode.tumblr.com

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) (2006)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

Go follow them on Tumblr. Go watch these movies.

"on the misery of the human condition"

I am required to take a class called History of Ideas. It is what it sounds like. I'm not particularly dedicated (the material is far too general), but I was going through a set of old notes and found this. I'm not sure what I was doing - I think I droned out - but, it may be of some interest. Nothing's been changed with the exception of spacing in the fourth line.

“On the Misery of the Human Condition”

            Humanity is, on it’s own, lost

            Trapped in matter

            Corrupted by lust and greed

            Defined by sin or

                                        by sun

People are ani-mals! Everyone is covered in parasites! Everyone is scratchy! Everyone is dirty! We have one thing going for us: JESUS CHRIST. CHURCH, CHURCH, CHURCH, CASA JESUS. What a world! What an incalculable tragedy.

Human perfectibility

diet coke jerky: a project statement

1. Production of material; non-stop, 24/7, available year-round.
2. Mentions of literature and jar creatures.
3. Critical/psychosexual self-deprivation.
4. Hyperventilation.
5. Railroads, though I've never been.
6. An impregnable penchant towards ineluctable doom.
7. Theory.
8. Form, process, form, process, form, commas, process.
9. Mistrust, skepticism (the erotic vision).
10. Cursive, typewriters, scans.

You've the idea.