to be continued...

I’ve decided to switch up how I publicly share about my practice, following my dear friend Beck Gilmer-Osborne, this newsletter will now be quarterly. Maybe a note here and there, but I figure one more newsletter than last year (a whopping 3) is possible . After all we could all have fewer emails we don’t want to read.

It is day 62 of the year, and in less than 100 days I will have completed my graduate degree. This past week I presented the beast which is the written portion of a thesis. Much thanks to my dears for pressuring me to eat (chewing can take so much time) and keeping me alive in the trying days prior. And thank you again to my dears who sent sweet gifts to buoy my hollow spirits upon completion.

I am excited to announce in these same 100 days I’ll be presenting work publicly 3 times. This also means I am about to forfeit sleep and sanity. That means the images I’ll be sharing today will be in progress teasers, as I don’t wish to spoil the delight of a in person audience.

• I’ve been up to (writing, playing)

• takes my attention (reading)

• bag gag: what is the carrier bag theory of fiction

I wrote a thesis on labor, value, craft, industry, and love. Maybe I’ll publish it?
It starts like this:

I perceive value in what is at hand — in the interstice of what is often overlooked yet not inert. I trust in the inherent intelligence and livingness of matter, always testing the boundaries between the cast off as cultural debris and resilient potential. — Ashley Bedet

In Print

• Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

• The Story of Glass by Freda Diamond

• Surface: Matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media by Giuliana Bruno

  

We live in consumer culture. We like seeing what other people are consuming. Collecting in their bags, carrying around to tell the stories of our being. So here are a few of mine.

• The bag? This wagon which dutifully carried over 170 lbs before croaking

• What’s in your bag?
  measuring tape
  portable heating pads
  clementines

• book darts

  

Ursula K. Le Guin is a GOAT. If you don’t know her work in the genre of sci-fi, and that’s your jam, congratulations, you’ve hit the jackpot. She wrote a brief essay on the origin of story telling, and how the first tools may not be weapons or tools of killing like we thought, but instead, tools of gathering. An excerpt as a teaser for you:

Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin