A Statute of the Inhabitable

April 10

April 4

April 3

April 1

El Paso

Santa Fe

These last two (c) Z.C.

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We live in space, in these spaces, these towns, this countryside, these corridors, these parks. That seems obvious to us. Perhaps indeed it should be obvious. But it isn't obvious, not just a matter of course. It's real, obviously, and as a consequence most likely rational.

--Georges Perec


I carved our names into a tree
I walked on decomposing leaves
I skated on a frozen sea
It's real as far as I can see

--Real Estate

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I've never been very good at visualizing the rooms described in the books I read. I can rarely render them as anything more than sitcom rooms, so that I can never change the angle from which I view a room, for fear of revealing the wall that doesn't exist. Other times, they are pale, non-accommodating versions of rooms I've personally lived in or visited. But never have I been able to build the room in my mind as the author describes it. Which is weird, since my dreams are endless with impossibly grand rooms and buildings. The key word being "impossibly," I guess.

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The most tired line in film criticism: A movie version of a play fails to "open up the action" (whatever that means). [Insert various frames from Carnage in which four movie stars are impeccably arranged in a perfectly cinematic room.]

Do they call it the "famous" gummy bear sequence from Hedwig & The Angry Inch? Because it should be famous. Suffocation:

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Some video games I used to enjoy:

Yo! Noid, NES, 1990

M.C. Kids, NES, 1992

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I've never encountered, in all the intergalactic SF I've read and seen, a sufficient sense of relief that humanity has forever vanquished its own extinction (by spreading itself beyond fragile Earth). Must the great fear always be replaced with another fear? Or plot?

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Three Graces

1. Tolerance is provisional; homosexuality is only accepted in frivolous eras, right? How far back will the apocalypse set us? (I ask this in a spirit of fun—I’ve been lucky to never have sensed anything cruelly provisional in any of the love or friendship I’ve known.)

2. When we’re 65 and the first openly gay president has just been elected, we’ll talk at the bar of “how it once was, so different and yet the same,” and the young men won’t care.

3. If his intermittently disappearing and reappearing workspace is any indication, I have the exact same sexual and/or aesthetic orientation as Michael Stipe.

Concepts:
a. Delmas Howe
b. Frot