It’s a simple thing. 
Give them what they want. 
Sweet or sultry. 
Just open the case.
Anne Imhof’s “Faust”: Weird and Not
Anne Imhof’s “Faust”, German’s 2017 entry at the Venice Bienalle, offers little on the surface, except the surface.
It’s more about the people watching than the performers – all the legs passing by.
And the arms and hands. 
And then it is high above on a glass platform.
And that’s just weird.
Words VIII: Ambivalence
You think you know the meaning of ambivalence? Actually, probably not because it isn’t “disinterest”. It’s this: having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something.
And you thought you knew that.
Writing Camp: Final Day at Kenyon
I learned a lot at my Kenyon College writing camp. I learned about when to use different forms of dialogue. I learned about revelations, voice and x and y. I learned about repetition. I learned to listen. 
Chris Tilghman is a lovely man. He guides with self-deprecating wisdom. He shares his soul in an easy, remarkable fashion. He and my colleagues – especially Caitlin Fitzpatrick, our writing fellow – buoyed my spirits, reminded me to be less of an ass and more a writer. Just listen.
The final lesson: Endings need to be surprising and yet inevitable. The writer needs to resolve things and have something else to say in the end.
Writing Camp: Day Seven at Kenyon College
A writing guidebook doesn’t exist, and if it did, that would only confuse.
A story can’t be someone reflecting about their self. That’s boring. Same with the Uber Voice. Boring. The first person is interesting because it looks out at the world. The third person examines others in detail as well as, of course, the self. 
Seeing someone else through another’s eyes just might be the highest level of interiority. Omniscient first person, that’s the thing. Half of us are firsters. Half of us are thirders. In the end, first and third person is mere grammar. Boom, boom.
Writing Camp: Day Six at Kenyon College
Chris Tilghman, our adviser, has shared many words from poet, Jane Hirshfield:
The work of existence devours its own unfolding/ What dissolves will dissolve. 
There is no name for the thing you care about most.
Writing Camp: Day Five at Kenyon College
Camp is good. I’m learning:
a. Showing is an illusion of telling, because it’s all on the page.
b. Dramatizing consciousness is the thing.
c. You need to cut through the thicket. You’ve got to get there in the end.
Writing Camp: Day Four at Kenyon College
I did a reading last evening, which was this: There weren’t any hours. They didn’t exist. Dee thought about that too much, every day she had been on this ship, every day if days had existed. But they didn’t. Those things, those ticks, didn’t exist, not anymore. And she didn’t understand what the point was of pretending they did. There were no months, no years, no millennia, no seconds. There was none of that. They didn’t have a sun, no weather, no storm coming, no frost, nothing like that, nothing that was real, nothing. They were relative to nothing. Absolutely nothing. 
She hated thinking about that, thinking it again and again. In spite of all of their schedules and notifications, their habits, despite what everyone said, none of that existed. They just didn’t have time anymore. There was no planet, no star, no system. They were relative to nothing. It was that simple. They no longer rotated. They no longer revolved around anything, and nothing revolved around them. There was no longer a gravitational field, nothing to hold them, to give them weight. They had removed themselves, purposely dropped themselves into the abyss. They had left. They were relative to nothing. And nothing was relative to them. 
They were separate, moving, independent, away, further, closer, something else, deeper, whatever the word would be, whatever they would concoct in the days, the not-days, the not-months, the not-years to come, that word that defined their current state, their collective morass, their disappearing, connected to nothingness, broken free, going too fast – .91 light speed? Really that speed? Really that?
Writing Camp: Day Three at Kenyon College
Notes from the morning session:
Readers read through their body, making them move. If there is something to hold, they want to feel that.
An implicature: “It’s cold in here.” (Meaning close the window.)
A bad echo is an alliteration that isn’t effective.
Novel is the work of accumulation, not selection.
Writing Camp: Day Two at Kenyon College
Focus is everything. Despite a tepid reaction to my first assignment – and being told that my character (me?) is an unlikable jerk, perhaps racist – I found myself getting on track. 
The details are the thing. And today’s work at Kenyon College on a variety of ways to implement dialogue is a good way to move things forward:
Dee reached in for the last of the pups, already half out of the incubator, not wanting to be alone. “I was six months old. You don’t remember anything at that age.”
“You can remember some things,” Calli replied. “I can remember lots of smells, like that blue blanket. I turn back into a baby when I remember it.”
Ashe laughed. “No way.”
“I think about your aunt as a little girl – she was barely three – trying to get our mother to wake up and not understanding why she wouldn’t.” The images coursed through Dee, almost like Calli had described, the smells of the kitchen, the sun across the floor and then the dark, her own stink rising with her mother’s. “I was crying too. Don’t forget that. She had to feed me cereal and bread, handfuls and handfuls of it. And still I wouldn’t stop.”
Ashe had her face pressed close to the pup’s. “How long were you there with her?”
“Three days,” Calli answered. “She’s told us like a million times.”