[NetBehaviour] Lousy

[Alan Sondheim]

Thank you, Brooklyn seems almost my mother, and my father, well he played 
into the Lousy piece. But with Brooklyn, I don't seem to be able to stop 
crashing over leaving. I just read a piece about being financially forced 
out of NY (on Alternet) and it resonated. I don't know what the answer is; 
Providence is peaceful but there's not the edge and obsessiveness that 
keeps me going, keeps me alive...

and thank you again, Alan


On Tue, 24 Sep 2013, Martha Deed wrote:

> Alan--
> 
> I am really touched by some of your writing -- and this piece especially.
> 
> What feels selfish to me is to feel so privileged to read a text that so
> clearly comes from deep pain.
> 
> I am not a person who believes in the nobility of suffering.  If I hadn't
> rejected that idea before, living with Millie would have disabused me of
> it.  She could have done so much more, lay in bed with new ideas that never
> came to fruition, because her body and her pain would not allow for it.
> 
> Here you are, Alan, creative, innovative, determined to do what you can. 
> Sometimes I read and wish you had wiser doctors -- and wonder if there isn't
> something physical that could, at least, be alleviated enough to give you a
> better quality of life.  Sometimes I read and think about Brooklyn and the
> horror of what has happened in your neighborhood.  Sometimes it's the
> hospital executives who think they can close if they feel like it -- without
> due consideration for the community that depends upon them.
> 
> In the case of hospital closings anyway, it looks as if the state health
> department is finally stepping in. . .
> 
> Certainly, I understand the pain of moving from Brooklyn.  It was similar
> for me when I moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan 30 years ago.  I
> knew I was giving up a lot in the way of neighborhood culture as well as
> access to museums.
> 
> All I can say is that while Millie always missed NYC and returned there as
> often as she could, Providence was very good for her, and once she left
> Providence, she missed it and her life there almost as much as she missed
> NYC.
> 
> I hope for better days ahead for you, Alan.  I hope for some lifting of
> those shadows -- and that Providence will work out well despite the loss of
> your Brooklyn surroundings (some of which you have already lost, thanks to
> Barclay).
> 
> Best,
> Martha
> 
> Alan Sondheim wrote:
> 
> 
> Lousy
> 
> 
> My recent work has been lousy, repetitive, mediocre.
> I go over the same grounds again and again as I attempt
> to hold onto my sanity in a world of ultra-violence.
> Any response I might have to this world is lost in the
> symbolic, nothing is left, nothing left behind.
> I see our move to Providence as exile from the edginess
> of Brooklyn, for me the last locus of alternative
> negation. I see myself going over the same musical
> grounds, playing alone or with Azure, without the dark
> energy of the dominant saxophone. And I see my own good
> ideas already on the block and lost. I'm lousy with a
> mind corrosive with self-pity, drive, obsession, and an
> easy way out. I watch the body close down: carpal-
> tunnel, stretched muscles, tinnitus, insomnia, sweat,
> difficult breathing, clumsiness, stress, confusion:
> what's left forms the few notes of the shakuhachi. I
> take note of everything; I'm drowning in my own
> mediocrity. My end-blow flute-playing is lousy, my
> theory drags out thinkers from before the wars, my
> virtual world work imitates itself and I'm lazy in
> terms of new programming, my writing's pretty much
> ignored for good reason, and I still write from the
> outmoded positionings of the murmur and the scream. I'm
> exhausted with theory, I haven't read nearly enough, I
> take shortcuts, my lousy thinking infects everything,
> turning to paranoia at the slightest provocation.
> There - you see - "slightest provocation" - a lousy
> trite phrase, because my thinking short-circuits
> itself, comes up with nothing new but a fabricated
> lousy honest that's close to unhinged. I wish for
> something new, some catalyst - students perhaps or a
> Festschrift (I dare dream!) - to bring me out of this
> study in gray, but I've wished for such all my life,
> and this kind of wish is never granted, or granted
> at best in retrospect - and certainly not for the
> kind of lousy work I do. I type and think through the
> autonomous nervous system, as if my circuits were
> jolted by some sort of external machinery from the
> gods, content be damned. I write but it writes itself
> and in this case, this writing, this thinking, these
> virtual worlds, these video, these images, this music,
> is lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy. An epitaph -
> stupidly, in spite of himself, he kept trying. The
> rest of us knew enough to ignore the results. He was
> his own worst result. He was lousy.
> 
> He was lousy because he took the easy way out, as if
> there were laurels to collect, choices made for him.
> He went with whatever fell the fastest. He kept
> waiting for his life and work to turn around, for
> something to turn them around, for him. He thought
> practice, not insight, makes perfect. His thought was
> lousy too.
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> The Last Collaboration
> http://www.amazon.com
> Read online
> http://www.furtherfield.org/friendsofspork/
> Intro by Edward Picot
> http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/last-collaboration
> 
> City Bird: Selected Poems (1991-2009) by Millie Niss, edited by Martha Deed
> http://blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/
> 
>

==
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==