And now, on a lighter note, she is becoming hungry, will pick up an audiotour thingie, will

move around some, motion through time, through space, through the building. That is so very

fresh, as one of her instant friends upstairs noted, the walls still smell of fresh paint, they exude

newness. Maybe it is all in the name, new museum.

---

she now sits down on a bench outside of a pizzeria, it is the same place where she sat down the

day before, it is a magical place, actually, that is not true, the author just wants to finish her daily

requirement of written words, five more pages, so she writes as fast as she can, as fast as the

wind, something like that, the art museum left her tired and exhausted, the exclusivity of art

practice kind of nags inside of her, eats away at her enthusiasm, she is very much of the opinion

that artists are picked at random, to succeed, whereas others are shovelled into the gutter.

Maybe relentless, sisyphian trying will ultimately result in success, result in the morphing of

the starving artist into the non-starving one, going through the right schools at the right time,

heavy self-promotion, that kind of thing. The whole business is much too fickle, only a

popularity contest.

Thus, she sits here on a bench in front of a pizzeria, enjoys the sunshine, listens to Sinatra,

while jealousy gnaws at her intestines, well, at least inside of her, that she has not even been able

to conquer her shabby, little degree, let alone have a show.

Maybe she should be more aggressive.

At this time, though, enjoying the sunshine seems like fun, all the intellectual questions are

26

5
somehow, somewhere buried in all these floors of the artmuseum, there were books to be read,

there was an i-pod-tour, to be listened to, there was a five o’clock tour that she could have

attended.

She will go back and listen to it. She liked the neighbourhood project, the collaboration

between the bowerymuseum and a museum in eindhoven, she could go and listen to the tour, but

she is tired, she cannot plump more info into her poor head, at this time she’d rather sit here and

watch the world go by.

Whiffs of pizza come out of the restaurant, a hobo asks her for forty cents exactly, she refused,

adamantly, he did not approve, too bad, starving artist here, starving author here.

She writes away, is getting more hungry, more tired. The place around her is becoming filled

up with individuals rushing to and fro, cars honk, the whole area is so very lively, purple and

white balloons are hanging from the streetlight high up in the air, a very pink woman smokes her

cigarette, pink shades, pink hat, pink bag. The author writes some more words, heaps them onto

the page, hopes that forty pages will be finally finished, ponders, why she sled into this kind of

self-imposed hellhole of constant scribbling, constant writing. A very beautiful black dog strides

by, in a green leash, with two of her or his keepers.

The author is nearing the end of today’s chore, she writes automatically, in the same way a

bricklayer presumably would lay bricks, the body takes over, the words appear automatically on

the page, hopefully slightly meaningful, they are nonetheless magically appearing, her hand

hurts, her arm hurts, her eyes hurt, she is not sure whether the text is able to construct the illusion

of meaning, diffuse negativity is taking over. Respite would be good at this point, hovering over

26

seemingly endless pages of unscratched, uninscribed pages seems utterly fruitless, in vain, futile.
 The time pushes itself towards six o’clock, she might still rush back to the museum and use up

the remainder of the time she has paid for, but her hand just keeps on writing, her legs refuse to

move. Some annoying little dot-like insects fly around her, she looks up at people talking away

next to her into their cell, a brown, utterly poodle catches her eye, a child in a fluffy, fluffed pink

dress, a noisy, rolling black and brown suitcase. Cars roll by, people walk by. Blue shoes, roller

blades, sandals. Another pair of sandals, with red toes.

She feels alone, everybody around her seems to know each other. The author is not amused,

she is very hungry, she feels very alone. She will take out her cellphone and start talking into it,

pretending to have a conversation with an imaginary friend. Which is of course so very normal,

not at all on the other side of sanity. Sanity is highly overrated, anyways. Who needs sanity

anyways, when one can just grab a pen and start writing away, on a bench in front of a pizzeria,

in a strange city, next to two slightly rusty black bicycles. While looking up at the yellow graffiti

on the lamppost to her right, trying to decipher the fading dark-grey imprint on the bottom of the

streetlight. A skateboard rolls by, someone whooshes by on roller-blades, very clumsily, which

seems to be impossible, but there is no other term to describe that.

The author is getting near to the finish line, only two more pages, only two more. Buildings

glisten in the sun, someone from another, slower era is singing, martin, sinatra, bing crosby, who

knows. A grey bicyclist, a grey car.

People walking by, all kinds of looks. Very tall and thin, very short and stocky. The cyclist

takes his bike, unfastens the lock.

26

7
 So many people walk by her, towards her with frozen yoghurt in their hands. A UPS- truck is

parked on the other side of the car, the balconies of the building in front of her are beautifully

ornate, golden against the grey-black backdrop of the window frame.

The author can now call it a day, the words finish today’s narrative, the forgotten plot of a

tourist among tourists, jotting down her constant, seemingly never ending travellog, that demarks

her travels through this city, pushing the songs of this city into the consciousness of herself and

others.

The writing day is over, her writing day is over. Until tomorrow, until forty more pages of

tightly inscribed pieces of paper. Until tomorrow. Here in NYC, on all these benches, all these

tables, searching for word after word after word. All through spring of 2008. All through.

---

she sits down in her favourite coffeeshop around the corner of the tiny apartment in chelsea,

she starts writing, she knows it is some time after ten in the morning, she knows she has to put in

forty pages and she woke up in the middle of the night with this piercing, undefinable, mushy,

non-ceasing pain in her right arm and she knew immediately that the muscles of her arm revolt

against the constant misuse, two months of using exactly the same muscle group is never good

on the system, she longs for being back in vancitay to type this out, on the other hand she is kind

of weary to leave this place, leave its sights to be enjoyed by others. She should find a better,

more concise guide book, instead of the free NYC- yours to discover that she picked up in a

McDonald near Grand Central. She should frequent all the art schools, that kind of stuff, she

should do this, go there.

26

8
 Or she could go back to all the gems she found by herself while making her way through the

city, the animation studio at the end of a leafy garden tucked away near the knitting studio, the

coffeeshop catering to all the knitters of the city. She should go into the computerstore, the scales

in the departmentstore, her very own bench in the subway. The minute that she entered this city

she marked her territory, all my favourite places, the artificiality of making herself at home. The

demarking of reference points in a strange city.

---

she tries to write while the subwaytrain chuggs along, which is not exactly an easy task,

somehow it is not very conducive to exact penmanship. The adventure, though, is good, the pen

has stories to tell, automatically, she can write more fluidly when the train is stopping, obviously.

---

The author stands at the entrance of Columbia. She suddenly has this very real, very surreal

urge to make an intellectual contribution, this as her goal in life, her raison d’etre. She found her

calling, right here, right now.

---

she sits down in the basement of avery hall, trying to figure out the logistics of this place, it is

basically a very informal walkway with tables and it has coffee, tea, muffins at the end, lots of

architectural photos, and a plant that might or might not be real on each table. There is a

computer in a corner, tucked away, so she checked her e-mail. She listened to an anti-war rally,

26

looked at an exhibition and likes this place the most. There is food here, though the lines are

long. The surface of the table, she writes on, is shiny. Shiny being good. As long as we have

shiny surfaces, life is good. These days she is full of instant, oh, so very deep insights like this,
being propelled by the segments of light that are reflected into her field of vision. Round

halfmoon after halfmoon, like the half of an old LP, and actually less than a half, and all of them

arranged like a bee-hive, in bee-hive pattern. It is at times like these that she wishes to take a

photo to hault that visual moment in time, to recreate it later, to document it accurately, visually

copying the image she sees. Alas, words have to do, elaborate shovelling of linguistic fragments,

short codes of understanding, glimpses of light. Something of that kind.

The author is exhausted from too much sun exposure, walking through the sun, standing in the

sun, but, basically, she feels so much at home at a place like this, where studies are conducted,

may be conducted, where civilization meets minds, where intellectual struggle is paramount.

Where intelligentsia might determine future endeavours, undermine future endeavours. Where

academia might prostitute itself, serving its masters. But, where, nonetheless, ideas count. Where

minds are silenced and minds are challenged. Where so much is wrong and so much is right.

Where pens are used to put down ideas. The author knows that she wanted to illustrate one

very essential idea, discuss and mention something important, but she totally forgot what it was.

Amnesia, senility, it comes to her like the feel of ephemerality, of dislocation. She should get a

tea or something, have some food inside her body, reinvestigate her thoughts pertaining to her

ideas about academia. Her strangely love- hatey relation with scholarship, dismissing the worst,

glorifying the best that schools have to offer.

270

The author has to edit her writings more vigorously, more drastically in order to erase glitches,

she has to balance her path between fiction and non-fiction more diligently.

The author had a tea in the cafeteria and four mini-muffins in a plastic container, that she will

dispose of, which is not at all good for the environment and the sugar and the chocolate chips in

the mini muffins are not good for her body and the non-refilling of the tea is not good either.
Basically, columbia does not seem to be as recyclinish as ubc, there are definitely problems here,

and basically, all of the east of North America is pretty wasteful and inconsiderate to greenness,

to environmental concerns, when compared with the west-coast mentality. There are very

obvious discrepancies in mindset, in mentality, and west coast would definitely win, glean more

brownie points in eco-friendliness. In terms of brashness, matter-of-factness, entitlement and

can-do-attitude this part of Northamerica would win. Thus pairing both ideologies, if one could

call it that, would be a positive thing. Give me sustainability, give me comfort with implementing

change. Give me NY- attitude. Make things happen. Let us change the world. If sitting in a

basement at Columbia will propel the world forward, so be it. The author is sitting here, in the

poshness of her privileged life and writes away. At the other tables there are two women, about

her age, both clad in red tops and black bottoms, writing away on their laptops. Maybe, change is

somewhere in the making. But, the author knows, that change of the guard in itself will not foster

change, not forge progress. The author looks at her tea, starts reflecting on her two months of

travelling, her constant writing. She enjoyed shiny tables, light dots on tables, the change of the

season, but most and foremost her constant writing, her constant tackling of observing,

documenting the mundane, and the not-so-mundane. She looks up at the photographs

27

put up by the architecture students, buildings in black and white, in sepia, some green, fragments

of buildings, giant clocks, the fascination with the built form, the geometry, the ornate, the linear

and the curvilinear, volumetrics, planes, lines, the mix of dark and light, the resulting drama of

the image, the spectacle, the theater, the mimicking of a stage, the cinematographic aspects of the

built environment. She can look at all the images in front of her, on the wall and notices how

significantly they play up the drama that a building possesses, how a 3-dimensional structure will
always be seen as a 2-dimensional image or as a multitude of 2-dimensional images, if the

viewer walks around a building, or through a building.

The author thinks about her flight home to Vancouver, she has butterflies already. Today is

Thursday, and next thursday, she has to board her plane at about this time. Feel sketchy and

scared for approximately five hours.

The author writes away, while enjoying the casualness of this place, the optimism, it exudes.

This place is very light and bright, it is the most positive and happy and optimistic place in an art

school or an architecture school, she has ever encountered. It is not burgeoning sentimental, not

broody, not suicidal. It is happy, calling for people to build happy, new buildings. It is more like

an engineering school, it smells like the fun and the excitement of applied science. She loves the

basement of avery hall, she will come here again and again for the next seven days. She will sit

down at exactly this table, facing the three totally blacklish photographs of night, some night-

city-scape, the black building in snow, and the clock fragment, she will look at the half-plant,

half-artificial flower in the green plastic pot with the cut-outs at the bottom, the curly, checkers

of the table top will propel her writing, make it use language to conjure up images, the visual, the

27

black and white film, that plots along in her inner eye, in front of her inner eye, in front of her

inner eye. She will think, long ever so slightly for the one, she left behind, but she will finally

erase his memory and start thinking of him as a regular being, stopping herself from worshipping

his “holiness”. She smiles slightly, scratches her head, trying to figure out whether she should

include the highly personal in her writing or whether she should stick to the pragmatic, logical,

the public. The author writes away, she is amused by being asked by the other woman to keep an
eye on her belongings for a second, it is the same in any school, be it columbia, be it langara, be

it emily carr.

The author wonders, if she can just sit in in a lecture, try to explore this place a tad. Maybe she

should stop writing for the moment. Hault the flow of words. Interrupt the constant humming in

her poor brain, stop wordiness and go for a walk. Through the building, up the steps, down the

steps, through the rooms of this place.

---

she sits down on a bench in front of a gigantic black sculpture, an asymmetric wave, in front of

the business school at columbia, maybe it is called urbis hall or ibis hall, something ending in -is,

maybe, could be, who knows. people are on the lawn, the weather is nice. So she writes. people

are playing frisbee with a ring, a frisbee without, a centerless frisbee. What kind of world is that,

where bottoms fall out of frisbee. It’s the end of the world. She sits within reach of flying

footballs and flying frisbees. What if it flies on her head. These people seem so utterly

incompetent. She should leave. Before getting injured. The people do not know what they are

27

doing, the person to her right says, how do you work this, smushes it up someone’s head, who is

barely hit, but does not notice it, the woman laughs. - “We are scary people,” the author says:

“that’s it” and leaves, this is all funny, playful, a woman in purple leggings walks by, it must be

the end of the semester, because the school is a tad too happy, or, maybe, it is always like this.

The author has been here before, four years ago, she liked the parklike ambience, the easiness of

the school, the happiness. A bird frolicks on the bench near her, then on the ground, the wind is

blowing, the author does not want to leave. But she should keep moving, finding sujets to write

about, other issues, other items than yellow jackets, red pants, gothic columns, green-topped
buildings. She should write some more, revise the gothic column-description, because actually

all the buildings here look like transplants from athens, acropolisesque or acropoliesque stone

informations, stuff doric, ionic, corinthic. And the hall to her right is called “Dodge”. Euro

centrism et.al. The author leaves this.

---

she sits down at the whole foods place in the mall at columbus circle, near the everchanging

screen, which is blue right now, but will morph into another colour in seconds, for some weird

reason it refuses to do so and seems to stay, actually it became purple and lavender, and even

more red of a purple, she loves these ever changing screens, it is now deep pink and now pink

red, it becomes orange red, light orange, light yellow, lemony yellow, guess, green now and,

supposedly, blue after that only to start the circle again. She took a taster at jambalaya juice,

which is very good and very fruity, and she is sitting here writing her days away, and a lady sits

opposite of her and people are sitting behind her and the colors are constantly changing in the

27

glass wall beside her, the glass is milky and fascinating, she wonders what else she should write

about, the woman leaves, the author does not know if she should have instigated a polite

conversation, instead of continuing to write, the woman left now, the persons behind her are still

conversing, very loudly, she writes away, the screen is now clear blue, very deepskylike, the

author would like to skedaddle over to jambalaya juice and get another taster, because she does

not feel like standing in endless lines, she has to write, write, and her forty pages are far from

over, they are a requirement, the requirement for this day, the people behind her left, and the

noise in this place is unbearably loud, people conversing utterly loud, the roaring of the

jambalaya juice blenders is extremely loud, the loudspeaker yells, this is one noisy food-place, it
sounds more like a factory that blends all those smoothies and the lines at whole foods are long

and winding. The screen is blue again, she manages to put down one page between blue and

blue, everyone here is extra-yelly, this is one loud place and she says that again and again,

repeats her writing, which might take her lingo into utter boringness, the screen is now red,

constantly morphing, the passage of time, slowly changing colors, constant morphing, rainbow in

slow motion, without sudden interruption, without motion, just blending into each other, like the

ever-present blending of the smoothies at Jambalaya Juice, smushing of food into each other,

smushing of colors into each other, and at this moment, the author is viscerally, physically

feeling all her days smush together into this very moment of writing, of putting down letters, of

trying to put all her moments into one over-arching tableau, into one image.

The april here is warm and heavyhandedly galloping towards summer, no april showers in this

city, knock on wood, People are wearing summery stuff, flip-flops, tank tops, T-shirts, the author,

though, is pretty happy in her warm and toasty turtleneck.

27

She is wondering, what time it is, she knows, she should fish for her cell phone and push the

button and then another button to decipher the time, which is actually quite an undertaking,

because she can’t really make out, what the numbers say because of her eyesight, so she has to

find her cell and then her glasses, so everything gets a tad too complicated and she feels that no

one, no one would ever be interested in reading this, so she might as well take all her books and

throw them into the Hudson River, or into a recycling bin, and she is utterly filled with self –

doubt, not in a traumatic pierce of self-doubt, more in a constant living with self-doubt, self-

doubt as a non-acute aching, a state of utter negativity or, maybe, a state of glimpse at reality. But

she writes anyways, she knows that she has to white-knuckle it, write through the ebbs and the
highs, low stuff, high stuff, there is no constant in art, muse is there or is not, some days are

better than others. Tomorrow she will figure out how to get to an exhibition by Herzog and de

Meuron at the Architectural League, it should be somewhere on 53rd. street, tomorrow she will

make her way to the Moma, which will cost about fifteen bucks, tomorrow she will get a visitor

pass for all the 22 libraries at Columbia. The author is not very much into sights where she has to

pay. She might as well make her way to Pratt which has an open house today, from 6 to 8. It will

keep her busy and it is interesting. A project, a project. To kill time, positively, in a positive

manner. That kind of stuff.

---

she sits in front of a sculpture in pratt and there is something like a reading going on, and she

doesn’t really know where the open house is, but she likes, actually love the school, it is just one

big sculpture garden and it is very artsy, though much more hippie-mippie than emily carr,

27

though it really has the aura of anti-science, and she knows that she would really excel here in

this very non-mathematical environment, she can just write herself through grad school, in the

same way that she scribbled and wrote and talked herself through artschool, to the brink of

graduation, even though it took some years. The readings are just pure crappy, all the same,

white middle class protesty stuff, but that seems to be the trend here, just like the white-guilt shit

back in Vancouver.

The author does not know, if this kind of jadedness is really that good, that authentic, or

basically totally hypocritical.

After all, what difference does it really make, if protest is propelled by survivor’s guilt, by

repressed hate against authority, by whatever. As long as we know as a species that the status quo
is never enough, that we have to fight the good fight, that it is our obligation, whatever the fuck

our background is.

Cold anger he said in his book. Cold anger. Debatable, but true.

So she writes.

---

One of the students who was listening to the readings, was laughing and smiling to her, while

she looked up, when writing, and he was standing behind her, she hopes that he was just

acknowledging her writing and that he did not read that she called the subjectmatter and the

readings crappy, she was dissing the work alright, but she sure has utter respect for people who

stand up in front of an audience and read their shit out loudly, that takes gutsiness, to make

27

oneself that much open to criticism, open those vulnerable parts of oneself to total strangers, she

applauds the readers, the writers to submit their stuff, to read it, she just dismisses it on the basis

of artistic meritlessness, on the basis of, in the end, taste. The readings were just not her cup of

tea. They were shitty. To her, that is. In the same way that she sits here in awe looking at all these

sculptures. It is getting dark, she should leave. Up in the sky is a light line inscribed by an

airplane into the sky. Life is good. Full of lines, of sculpture, of metal standing up. Poetry in

space.

---

She can see herself studying here. The problem is, of course, that she’d rather stay in

Vancouver. As fascinating as this city is, as dynamic as it is, as inviting as it is for artists, it lacks

false creek, lacks rain, lacks familiarity. It is not home and it will never be, can never be. She

misses the city she calls home, the ever so slight illusion of home, she misses Vancitay. But she is
still fascinated by this so very strange city. And, then again, one could argue, that Vancouver is,

of course not her birth place. Hamburg is. And so she sits here, grapples with notions of flighting

identity. At this point it is getting dark, she should make her way to the apartment in chelsea. She

should find her phone and not lose her key. Again. She should put herself together and act

slightly on the mature side. If that is possible. At age 53, in NYC, in April 2008.

---

she sits in front of the library at pratt, she looks at a really giant white marble head, a giant

wheel, green, white, black, dark-green, well, for the lack of a better term, thingie, she looks at

two silvery thingies, and curly, rainbowy stuff. And then there are all the brickbuildings, the

27

sculptures we live in. One day, she will build, ehem, something, but until that day words and

drawings have to suffice, so nothing will disintegrate, nothing will implode, no cranes will

tumble to the ground, people so much better than her, so utterly more ept than her have designed

structures that ultimately collapsed, maybe, just maybe, origamifigures are all 3-D structures, she

should dare to design, and if , she gets really edgy, really daring, she might hang her papercranes,

her paperships from the ceiling and let a mobile blow in the wind, she might build sand castles,

write lines in the sand, until the waves wash over them and make them disintegrate, smush them

into oblivion, back into water, back into earth, back into wind and air. Dust to dust, that kind of

stuff. The author watches dusk take over, the shadows are getting longer, the two schoolgirls here

on the brooklyn campus are chatting the day away, she feels so very calm, so very contended, so

very much at peace. With herself, with the world. It is time to go home, wherever that might be.

---
 she sits down in the coffeeshop where she usually has her coffee, this being april 25, and

usually seems to have set in within the span of the last 25 days, she has her usual hangouts, is a

creature of habit and navigates through this city, taking it out of strangeness and claiming it for

herself, forging her temporary existence. She could go all philosophical and liken this

phenomenon to our existence on this planet, but then again, there are total inconsistencies, minor

and major discrepancies, thus likening, metaphorizing, forging allegories will not necessarily

hold true, make sense.

The author prefers to stick to describing what she can see, the round table on which she writes,

27

on which her notebook lies. The table is round and has a chessboard pattern on it, but the squares

are not all in the same kind of brown, the brown squares near to the rim are dark, the ones in the

middle are light. Who designs these tables, which are the same in Vancouver, in Zurich, in New

York. She has her coffee, tries to plan her trip to the MOMA. Marilyn still is there somewhere

layered under the beige napkin with green leaves on it. A woman with a Louis Vuitton- patterned

handbag stands at the counter, this is a totally new design of the old LV-logo, a fresh

repatterning. The woman herself is disgustingly ugly, utterly uglyish. The author finds, discovers

her inner bitch. This is nice, travelling too much does not bring out the best in her. She might

fulfill her writing assignments, but her ethics just swoosh down the drain. She’d better stop. For

now. Three pages are filled already.

---

the author sits down in the MOMA on a bench, she is slightly tired which means her feet are

killing her, she needs respite and she seems to be better suited for plunking herself on this bench

and for writing notes, observations, which is actually not a precise description, because all that
she is observing at this time is her pen on the paper, in this very non-well-lit room, her pen is

only 0.5 mm, the store did not have 0.7 mm, which might as well be, less ink, and it still does the

job, actually, it does the job better, differently than the 0.7 mm point, because there is more a

scratching feel, in her hand, she feels more like she inscribes something, like hammering

hieroglyphs into stone, like scratching lines into branches of trees, that lie on the ground or like

taking a branch and forcing lines into wet, dark, rained-in, most earth, that is dark and black.

The author looks up, she is surrounded by greatness, jackson pollock, Rothko, Giacometti,

28

and she still does not know how many c’s and how many t’s make for Giaccometti. How about

more m’s, more g’s. She feels like writing, but might look kind of weird, she is supposed to

watch stuff, but her legs say “no”. She liked the exhibition in the 3rd. floor, wondering whether

she had seen the artist talk in room # 260 on the second floor in the north building of emily carr.

She saw a jeff wall poster, the minute she entered Moma. The author wonders, whether she

herself should forge her artcareer a little bit more forceful, with vigor instead of with a totally

laid-back, potheady, west-coasty attitude. She is so much too old, does not really feel like

proving anything, is not so very hungry. Then again, maybe she will fish for a happy alliance,

once she is back to Vancouver, try to construct some kind of studio practice, establish something,

contact the better business bureau, incorporate something called delta-b, which she wanted to do

20, 30 years ago and before that it was a place called H. None of these plans got really realized,

they are still latent, they surfaced in other realizations, in other forms of appearance. Like water

morphing into ice and then into vapour. fluid, solid, gas. The same happens to our dreams, they

do not vanish, they come back to haunt us and propel us forward in slightly different forms, in

newer but essentially same-being forms. The author grapples with the language, while writing
away, while looking up at paintings, while noticing legs and feet walk by within her field of

vision, but this room being so very dark and muted, and lightless, she is more concentrated on

formulating her own line of thought, following her line of thought. The author thinks that this

place here within Moma is pretty lightless, so that nothing happens to the images. She wonders,

like always, what sets artist a apart from artist b, is it self-promotion, marketing, luck? In her

mind, the main thing would be stamina, politics aside. The “hanging-in-there” factor

alwaysprevails. She wrote enough, maybe she should move, maybe she can move, what with her

bad

28

knee and all. She could find an audio-guide, but then again, maybe sitting here in stale air is fun,

too. Gasping for air. The air is not really stale, there is a steady flow of air, the staleness is more

caused by her feel of depressed alienation, which is haulted by dots of interacting with all the

other slightly overwhelmed or underwhelmed fart-lovers. Art, art, art. She would really like to

just lie down on this bench, stretch herself, with her arms under her head, looking at the ceiling,

which is so much more fascinating then all the images, white with brown-black, inletted lines in

them, perfectly geometric, a blue print, the plan for a building on the back of a white napkin.

A tour leader talks about the painting, she is standing in front of a jackson-pollock and,

basically, is yelling at the group of listeners.

---

The author should stop writing. For now.

---

she sits down in the blinding, glistening sun and starts writing, in front of a fountain, in front of

a starshaped, golden sculpture, the fountain-water-lines are exactly like the sculpture’s lines,
beams, glistening, at this point even the trace of each of her letters in ink is glistening, wind

blows, people are walking by, it is somewhere here in midtown manhattan, sometime around

midday and she feels somewhere in the mid of bliss and torture. A child bumps his green ball on

the ground, a girl in pink balances on her checkered skateboard, a mix between skateboard and

skooter, something new-fangled, the author had seen on the sky-train in new-west. The world

walks by, she is tired of stating this again and again. The MoMa was ok. ish, not that great, it

28

does not really make sense to revisit museums. She should go to the FIT, at least it is free. And

free is what makes and breaks a place. Free good, Non-free bad. It is too sunny here, too

sunburn-inducing. She has to find shadow, shelter from the sun, the brightness. Streams of the

fountain pulsate into the pool, calming, soothing, the voice, the noise of water, songs of water

interrupted by click-clack of shoes on the pavement. New York City, somewhere midtown,

somehow noonish. April 25, 2008.

---

she found a more shadowy place near another arrangement of fountains, wind is blowing,

oversized transparent fabric-triangles are in the air, people from all the offices in the highrises are

picking up lunches and afterlunches, she writes here, because the street seems to be her office,

here at the foot of skyscrapers, where there are waterfalls, seats to sit, it is like in a small valley

surrounded by high cliffs, high rocks, mountains streaming up to the sky. She writes away,

feeling kind of hungry, wishing that she could spot the nearest restaurant without walking

forever, she had enough of all this pattering over the grey pavement. A woman next to her

changes her red flip-flops to beige flats and goes to her office, something with yahoo judging
from her yahoo-lanyard. Everyone around here has lunch in hand, supposedly having food at

desk is the trend.

The author is tired of writing, writing, writing. All that is there to be said, has been said

already. She liked the design exhibition on the 6th. floor at Moma, it was called design for

elasticity and it was more like science world. It was just fun and good and very cinematic, very

28

theatrical. And then there was a color exhibition, which was ok. ish. But, basically, walking

through the Brooklyn Campus of Pratt was more fun, more sculpture, more interest, less tourists,

or, better said, no tourists, only her.

The wind is blowing too harsh here, into her neck, the wind takes her away to a new place,

through the streets of this funny city. Cars honk, the water splatters and whooshes.

---

she sits down on a green chair in bryant park. Under very old trees, she does not have shadow

here. The better shadowy seats, the ones with table, are reserved for reading room people. Not

that anyone notices, in the end she could decide on an ideal or semi-ideal table, no sand on the

ground, not too much stuff from the trees, one person, though, who tells his life story to two

others. The author tries to concentrate, tries to block out voices, tries to listen to the honking

though, the ambulance, the rushing by of traffic, she tries to notice city, first and foremost, tries

to look up at people, at buses, at Metropolitan Hardware and Lumber, which she actually knows

the location thereof by now, and her feet are witness, she saw more of this city then of any other,

ever, or so it seems. There will be a test.

 The hardware van whooshed by, she looks at the pigeons here, which are black and have a

white tail, they are from a different pigeon family than the Central parky ones.

The author thinks, that, maybe, she should just watch the city, let it whoosh over her, instead of

taking all these so very obsessive, relentless notes. A yellow concrete mixer rolls by, lemon-

yellow. She suddenly misses the ocean concrete mixers, the one in blue and white near the

28

artschool. Green dots from the trees are falling down on her, on the table, on her paper into the

holes of the wires, she ponders, whether they will have animals and insects coming out of them,

hatching, once she puts her eleven books into her suitcase and heads home to Vancouver. All

kinds of animals will come out and fill up her suitcase on the flight, within five hours. A girl next

to her is starting a monologue for her friends, me, me, something like that, a free performance

and the director is there, too. You have to be more sad, now he wants to act. See, and you want to

pay for a broadway show, this city is chockfull of free performances, free readings and the best

that saxophones and guitars can bring out of people all over the subway. And she can write, so

very, very easily, the wind, the buildings, the curved glass of the pyramid beside her, the wind,

the cars, the light take her by the hand and force her pen over the paper. A bird, a black crow flies

over her, she is lying, suspendedly, over the table, watching the ink scratch over the paper.

Grass is in front of her, around the bottom of the tree, all knee high, leafy, green stuff, with lots

of triangly leaves that are, for some reason, lower than all the grass.

There are so many more leaves in her notebook, unwritten, not written yet. Spielberg next to

her talks way too much, or is it Stanislavsky. He sure has a lot to say about drama and theater and

acting. There are rules that have to be followed to a T.

 The author loves the building next to her, white, asymmetrical grids on black glass. She is

falling asleep, her hand cramps up. She should stop writing. Less is more. In writing as in life.

This does not make sense. Platitude galore. A man with very thick glasses is reading. She is

losing it. Thus, she stops writing. The words do their own thing, anyways, do not follow any

virtuous rules. They bump into each other and make no sense. They are clumsy and awkward and

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screech. This is not her day, fatigue has set in. A grey, glistening truck drives by. She will not be

able to put down forty pages today. She has to make up for this at a later time. Her right hand

will thank her.

---

The author ponders if she should name herself “Lola” in this story and thus make it less

autobiographical. It would be the story of someone named Lola in New York City. And the name

“Lola” is so, well, non-cheesy. No offence to Lolas the world over. Maybe the author should

stick to calling the main character, the protagonist “the author”. It has a certain unisexy quality.

She ponders, if she wants that. At this point she just wants to stop scribbling away. She feels pity

for the one who has to type and edit all this. Maybe even the reader. Maybe.

---

She counted, she still has to write twenty-four pages, her right knuckle, the one between ring

finger and little finger is hurting, is too much in one position, the muscles are pressing the

nerves. Something like that. Who knows how it is really anatomically, something bugs her.

Anyways. Some man is walking by, talking to himself, scaring her.

The people at the other table talk about him, too. The sweeper with the green broom comes by.

The author writes away. She could write about the red flowers that she sees from here. She has

nothing more to write about. She is bored. Bored by her own sentences. The conversation at the
table next to her is so much more interesting. Her own words make her fall asleep. She should

find a subjectmatter. Instead of shovelling words onto paper. Into eternity.

--- 286

A group named Amerique goes by. A tour group, leader with red amerique flag, followers with

red amerique backpacks. She suddenly notices the golden ornaments on a black fence all around

Bryant Park. She does not describe it accurately, but she can assure the reader that it is kind of

beautiful. The wind blows around this place, she feels so very tired. But there are fifteen more

pages to be written, it is a chore and someone has to do it. Besides, if one writes all day long,

suddenly, insights fly towards the notebook. Supposedly. So she has heard, so she was told. One

should court success, intelligent insights, they just come. Or should come. Over time.

While she is writing, someone gives her a magazine and asks for money for the homeless. The

magazine is free all over town, it is at every streetcorner. He just took a bunch out of the stand

and now distributes it to the tourists.

This is how it goes.

She writes away. Fourteen more pages to fill. With junk, maybe. With good stuff, maybe.

Writing used to be so very easy, like drinking water. Ever since being critiqued one too many

times, she has lost her confidence, has to scramble for words, she has to write incessantly and

still not have one good sentence to show for all that effort. But she does not really care, she

writes anyways. The words will come, have to come. If it kills her, the whole week has to be

spent writing. Today is friday, the author will take saturday and sunday off, only to start fresh on

monday and follow through on tuesday. Wednesday, she will pack her stuff, thursday she will

board the plane back to Vancitay. These are her plans, and plans might just take the words along,

squeeze meaning onto the page, like toothpaste out of the toothpaste-container. The building in

front of her is greenish-blue, glassy, not necessarily classy. She is happy, the words rhyme.
 28

Inadvertedly. The trees here are very spring green very young, very delicately leaved.

She likes it here, kind of, everyone is conversing, sight-seeing buses are constantly driving by.

Red ones, blue ones, grey ones. One after the other. So many people are taking pictures, but no

one seems to use words to document the city. The author ponders, whether she stumbled upon a

niche-market, though she knows very well, that book after book has been written about this very

city. Not by her, though, not by her.

The author wonders, what time it is, she really liked the exhibitions at the Moma and she

knows that she can still go back until 9 o’clock and watch the rest, she could see the movie,

which starts at a quarter to seven, she could walk through the rooms full of light and shadow by

the Icelandic artist whose name she can’t pronounce, olafur something. Maybe Gustavson?

Maybe.

She looks up at the inscriptions on the sun-umbrellas next to her. They all say “Reading Room-

Bryant Park”, she looks at the brown dog that is walked by two serious, elegant women, she

notices how many less dogs there are here in midtown manhattan, when compared the residential

areas. Seems, nobody lives here, this is only an area of business, office upon office upon office.

Seems the mixed neighbourhood concept is not that popular in New York, then again, there are

always tourists roaming around, so it does not really get unsafe. And mugging seems to be less

than it used to be. If push comes to shove, she does not really know, does not really care, at this

point she just wants to finish her daily requirement of written pages. She is down to eight pages,

which she has to scribble full of deep, oh, so deep insights. The accumulation of her fifty-three

years here on this planet. This is getting a tad too tense, a lot too dense. She can feel the back of
 28

her right arm tense up, she can feel her right back muscle. It seems to be like weight-training

with the problem being, that she is overdoing it and only using one particular part of her body.

She knows that she will be sore, her body will act up. Either way, she is walking too much, or

she is writing too much, drawing too much, or sitting in front of the computer too much.

She has to do it all together, change positions constantly. Like the pigeons on the ground,

picking stuff up, flying away. Well, flying is not really possible.

---

She sits down near the B.P. Café , the Bryant Park café, which is chock-full with people, it is

like a giant cocktail-party and it is kind of diagonally behind her, everyone is talking, though one

male voice seems to be monologuing away, propelled by alcohol, it kind of smells like alcohol, a

slight whiff, though it must be four or five in the afternoon, or maybe six, lots of people are

walking by, promenading by, she grabs the handle of her purse, what with her passport, keys,

wallet, everything in it, only her metrocard, the subway card is in her jeans pocket, she is pretty

happy, that she put on her toasty black sweater, with turtle neck, it is pretty cold and breezy here,

maybe, with all the tall buildings around the windblowing is exasperated, she writes away,

writes, writes, writes.

All these words, they have to be neatly typed, eventually, at some time, her journal. She looks

up, another person is writing away, in his journal, supposedly, he looks kind of dumbfounded.

The author, of course, dismisses him, because he is “The competition”. Well, not everybody here

is writing “the next big thing”, people seem to prefer to sip their beverages, feed their kids, walk

their dogs, though there are no dogs here, the whole place has a very strong leisurely aura, the
 28

weather is so very nice and lovely, all the crowds are streaming to this oasis within the city. She

ponders, whether she should have planned her trip to New York more, well, plannedly, at this

point, she merely roamed around and came upon places by accident. She talked to the people

who live here, though, and was able to navigate her way through this city. Somehow. She really

likes it here, in midtown, it is very cosmopolitan, very far from over the world. United Nationey.

When she looks up, she can see the big white sign with black letters that spell out: “SUNY-

State College of Optometry”. She can see an ornate stone-“thingie” in grey, which should sit

smack on the entrance to the subway station, it is becoming louder around her, everyone is

talking. She seems to be the only one who sits and “talks” to her piece of paper, but actually so

does the model like creature with her laptop at the other table.

The wind is blowing the whiff of alcohol towards her, which is disgusting, she can’t stand the

smell of alcohol. Too many dogs are suddenly here, and they are all barking.

She has to finish her writing, she has only three more pages to fill up with her excellent

musings. In front of her is an over-sized grey flower pot and a dog owner is sitting next to her,

luckily he left politely, when he noticed that his scrunchy dog was hovering under his chair. Back

to the description of the flowers, blue, red and, of course, green, for the leaves. The dog-owner is

back, with a friend in a pink shirt.

The author changes her seat, she has to concentrate on her last pages, her last words for the

day. She feels like a diligent schoolgirl, sitting here, seriously, studiously putting down letter

after letter, in a foreign language, in a foreign city, in print.

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0
 She reads the sign in white letters on blue, that says “polonia” and has a phone number under

it, she looks at the curved building in front of her, that a French tour leader was discussing with

the members of the tour, he was leading, she is writing away, amassing all these totally trivial

observations about all these strangers, in this very strange city, where her only friends are all

these buildings, her pen, her notebook.

She feels as alienated as the very professional looking photographer-woman, all clad in black,

with black camera-equipment, who very professionally bends down to take a shoot, she feels as

alienated and at the same time very serious, very professional at dotting down, what goes on

around her, she feels that this is her obligation to seriously document her surroundings at a time

when film, photo, word interlace, when audio and 3-dimensional representation are interlaced, at

a time, when new forms of expression are and should be explored. The city seems to still be the

catalysator for individuals to try to invent and reinvent modes of expression, and she, in her own

so very alienated, singular place, tries to focus on writing down, what she sees and notices, hears

and, to use an overused term, feels, she is partly propelled by the exhibition she saw at the moma

this morning, hints at futurist, fauvist, cubist, fin-de-siecle-explorations, but most of all, it is the

city itself that dictates its story, its stories to her.

---

so this is the week that she will leave this city and make her way either back to ontario or back

to Vancouver, it is very rainy, wet, not pouring, just a wet city, she sits in the coffeeshop, it is still

the morning crowd streaming in, one upon the other, the author just takes up one seat with her

yellow-black polka-dotted umbrella on the ground near her, smushed between her chair and

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1
the milk station, half-opened, half-closed like a giant yellow flower upside down on the ground

with a silvery stem poking out, she has her blue, slightly wet plasticbag behind her, and her purse

hanging, too, all the coffeedrinkers stand next to her, put sugar or half-and-half in their coffees,

people are constantly tossing the little sugarbags, a familiar sound, the sugar has to be equally

distributed in the little paperbag, why, is not really evident, would it flow not that evenly if not

shaken first?

The author writes away listening to the cranberries, stories of oppression, whining about

suffering, colonialism, taking of the land by power, by force, she has never been to ireland, but

music has definitely helped the IRA make a point, she is not quite sure, if she knows the politics

that well, she is not quite sure if a pen, a song can really forge change, this romanticized notion

that standing up for one’s right will stop brute force, she thinks about this, while sitting here

looking at the green dress of the woman with big white flowers, she ponders about her own task,

the author, that is.

She wrote for close to two months, without pay, without recognition. She wonders, if that

makes her an obvious bum, and if publication of her words, circulating it and thus creating jobs,

would rectify this waste of time, energy, means, that happens when one merely haults life and

scribbles ideas on paper. Like vomit, he said, like vomit. If you just create without a plan, it is

like vomit. Something like that. She has her marble-loaf, her coffee, tosses the paperbag

crumpled up into the hole in the table, move over, shaq, she sprinkles her observations with

forcedly interesting observations, she looks out of the window, sees part of the new york sports

club, she has so much, so very much to write, in the rain, she has to sit here or somewhere,

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indoors, write, write, until her hands can’t do anymore, at least she can look up and see motion,

hecticness, which is more than office workers see inside the cubicle, then again they see their

coworkers.

The author tries to write as fast as she can, she still has to clean the small apartment, pack and

repack her stuff, wash the seats, buy a thank-you present, some chocolate, some alcohol, a whole

array of chores to be finished over the next days, while writing all these notes, amassing all these

words.

The author did not write over the weekend, she went to new haven and listened to all the

presentations in a symposium for art historians, at yale. It was just amazing, so very good, very

intellectual. She is still reeling from it, fascinated by what can be done, what can be achieved by

using words. This is the world, she wants to enter, eventually. After she graduates from art

school, if she ever graduates from art school. At this point, she is writing away, wondering, if she

can edit these her words and, basically, sell them. Bind them in a book and distribute them, for

money. For cold cash. One word, one buck. What is the market value of words, do monosyllabic

words demand a higher price, do polysyllabic words commands higher remuneration? How

much should be charged for semicolons, what about exclamation marks? A statement condensed

into a line and a dot, a statement, forceful, dramatic. Like the clasp of the heels of the beautiful

woman at the milk-counter.

Are challenging ideas good or pure, old sycophancy? Words, words, power of words. What

about words that just flow along, like a subtle, always moving, harmless creek. Never standing

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still, but never making big waves. No high-tide. Stalagmites, forged by one drop over time.

Constant, silent movement, that eventually erodes rocks, constant motion that moves continents.

The author writes, contemplating, well, stuff.

The persons next to her, smush as many expletives, as they can, into their conversation. The

author wonders, what time it is. She should go somewhere else, rest, change position, start again.

There are forty pages to be filled up, still.

---

Eventually, she might name this “the new york chronicles”, pair it with her “kingston

chronicles”, “montreal, vancouver, toronto and train” chronicles, smush them all into a book and,

well, market them, somehow.

She ponders about that, while she sits here looking at “the breadstix café”, that is now out of

sight with a big, white van in front of it and a police car, a yellow cab. She writes this down, the

scenery changes, in an instant, the café can be seen, again, in all its glory. The person at the milk

counter next to her smells too overperfumed, and he has to stand here forever, manipulating his

cell or i-pod, he left, taking his cell or i-pod, he left, taking his still lingering smell with him, for

the most part. But the disgusting smell is still bugging the author, it makes her feel nauseated.

She will leave. Write somewhere else, all over this silly town. She is getting tired of her status as

a wandering poet, now she starts offending the city. She takes some phone calls, is not that happy

that she can be reached that easily on her cell, she feels kind of weird starting to yell into her cell

in a crowded public place, in Azeri, she herself does not really like when people use their cells,

anywhere, anytime, but it seems to be part of the culture, especially here, people are definitely

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not that anti-cell phonish anymore, it is part of life, she liked the idea of using Azeri, hey, look, I

can use a language that nobody understands, how very elegant/ exotic. Given that she has a very

decidedly plain-jane aura playing up the interest of foreignness would be definitely good.

People come in, all-rained-in, all with wet umbrellas, the author just writes away, thankful that

no one asks her to leave, as of yet, what with occupying this table for 13 pages straight now, she

writes away, hopes that the person next to her will not wet her page with his super-sized coffee.

She should leave. Through the rain, walk through the rain and find another place to write,

another space to pen her masterpiece. She refers to all her notebooks lovingly as a monumental

piece of literature, wondering, of course, if she might even scratch the surface of literary

mediocracy, if her words make sense, if they are able to adequately illustrate her thoughts, that

kind of thing. Her days in this city are numbered, she has to get ready for leaving, but she cannot

really make herself leave this her “writing-post” in the coffeeshop, people are taking shelter from

the elements here, all wet, the floor here in this place starts to look like a big amalgamation of

glistening puddles. She will leave now, change will be good. She feels like she is hogging this

chair, this seat, she should wander off, change her place, her space, her pace, and she notices that

she is a poet. She knows it. How very funny, how exquisite a thought. How eloquent a wordplay.

Her days are going by her, she keeps utterly busy, trying to project the world around her on

paper, smush it between the leaves of a notebook, again and again, like seemingly same-ing

snapshots of the same building, reiterating the same subjectmatter again and again, discussing

her pet peeves, with herself, with the world.

---

295
 She is this woman, who sits on the ever-so-moving subway train and writes away, in the same

way that others are reading on the moving train, she puts down all the letters that she can find,

she waits for the train to stop, so that she can write without being annoyed, outside, in the tunnel,

blue lights flash by, the train stops in 23rd. St. and Ely Avenue, it screeches loudly, very surreal,

like a ride to hell. She wonders, where this train is going. And, there is the answer: Queens Plaza.

The train is now somewhere in Queens. The train stops somewhere in a station called 71st.

Avenue, she does not know where that is, she does not have a map, there are two maps in this

car, but people are sitting in front of them, so she just sits here without orientation, slightly

disorientated. The train stops at a place called union turnpike, two passengers leave. The author

just keeps on sitting here, feeling seasick, trainsick, tries to think of other, less nauseating, things.

The station now is called Van Wyck, but the train just rushes through. She writes, she writes, a

red light goes by, another one, still another one. Sporadically, there are blue ones. The station

now is called Jamaica- Van Wyck and it is not lit. She should look at the map, to fight

disorientation, to fight the urge to barf all over the floor in this train. Others here are sleeping,

there are only four more people left here, one very scary man, now only two are left, Mr. Scary

and Mrs. Normal. And herself, somewhere in between: the subwayexploring tourist. On the road

to nowhere. The E-train is not necessarily mentioned in guide books, but it is now

commemorated, here in her little notebook, her seminal text. The author writes away, wondering

why the train is waiting for so long in this one station. Someone says something on the

loudspeaker, that she does not understand. This place seems so desolate. The doors close, the

voyage goes on. The train rumples away, screechingly, loud, hollering. Someone wrote on the

walls in the tunnel. She leaves the E-train, in the last stop, which is called “Jamaica Center” and

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it says, “Parsons/Archer” on the outside of the train, too, in the little window, where the

destinations of the trains are displayed. She is wondering, whether she should go out and explore

this place, but she really likes the bench, she is sitting on, it is made out of metal, it looks nice.

Outside it might be raining. She could go back to Manhattan, this train goes down to the World

Trade Center. But she had enough from trainriding, for the moment. She is no Hobo, or maybe,

she is. A modern day Hobo, a poet on a train. Very nice, very elegant. Jack Kerouac revisited,

Jack London, how come, the people who pen certain genres, are all called Jack? Another E-train

comes in, the E-train that goes downtown has not left yet. She writes away, a woman asks her for

directions. These days, everyone asks her for directions, she must have an aura of knowledge

about this city about her. She always looks like the locals, blends into the background. There is

definitely an explanation for this phenomenon, but she does not really care. At this moment. She

should pick up her stuff and move up the escalator.

She finds a coffee place where she orders a small tea, with milk, and she has a black-and-white

cookie. She starts writing, while looking out at the rainy street. People are walking by, all

umbrellas, all raincoats, behind her the TV is giving the 12 o’clock news. It is once more the

discussion of construction- accidents which happened all through this year, cranes collapsing on

people, a disproportionate number of fatal incidents. It has always been one of the major

deterrents for the author, to go into the building industry, this capacity of death-inducing

materials, the very real life and death consequences of mistakes. Human error consequences for a

poet are supposedly miniscule, they are much more grave for someone constructing buildings,

real structures. She looks at the beautiful red-brick church outside of the window, admiring the

final, elegant finished project, but wondering about the blood and sweat that made that possible.

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People come into this Java-shop with folded umbrellas. She likes this place, she likes this table,

which is kind of wobbly, but not too wobbly. She has fifteen pages more to write and she

wonders if she can fabricate something deep, delineate something insightful from very trivial

observations, whether the sheer “look” of her black-and-white cookie in its glistening, light-

reflecting plasticbag will make her write good stuff, whether looking at the lady in her business

suit will automatically result in utterly insightful thoughts, spitted-out truths, that kind of stuffy-

muffy. She is back to using terms like “stuffy-muffy", trying to trivialize the world around her,

paying homage to simplicity slightly near to vulgarity, courting low denominators, trying to

simplify the language, take it away from scholarship.

She knows that language is the same, lingo A though has superiority when compared to lingo

B. Words like “stuffy-muffy” do not necessarily lend themselves to multifaceted observations

they belong into the world of slang, common-people-muttered, well, “stuffy-muffy”. Seems

everything has to do with hierarchy, hibrow, lobrow and the mix of these in order to construct

style, that is interesting and thoughtful, both at the same time.

Her tea is getting cold, while the lunch crowd is streaming in, what with the exacting time of

twelve o’clock noon, outside is nothing but rain, she writes her days away, wondering, whether

she is taking up too much space here, her being just a useless flaneur, a total bum, in this place

where everyone seems to have a goal. Even her lunch is frivolous, sugar en masse, she did not

like the sandwiches here in this place, and the cake was much too yellow, too food-colored, she

writes her days away. Next to her people are talking about court, about CNN, people are

discussing current affairs. She looks out at the rain, she is happy. She looks up at the sign that

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says “crunch coffee”, she writes away. The people next to her, talked about Al-Jazeera, wanted to

become political, then stopped, went on to more trivial stuff. They kind of looked around, self-

censoring. She is kind of flabbergasted by the propensity of the people in this city, not to say

what they think, it is as if the media of this country really dictates what people think. This is not

good.

---

The person next to her has a very professional photo apparatus hanging around her neck, so she

will definitely take photos for journalistical purposes, she will take images, he will write, they

are newspeople and very, very young, twenty max, the author prefers her way of writing, she

produces the final draft and sells it afterwards, she does not answer to contracts, she produces

something and sells it later, the problem, though, would be, if she can’t sell this. A poem, a poem,

where one can charge a certain amount per word. She looks at the sign that says “Fruit

Smoothies” and at the other sign, that has the image of a sandwich wrap. She is not quite sure, if

the place that she is sitting in, is even conducive to writing, all she can see from here is a street

bathed in rain, a religious building, buses, cars, umbrellas, and feet walking by. The middle is not

visible, the part between umbrella, head and feet, because all the signs are in-between, layering

over the view, obstructing the view. She fishes her cell phone out of her pocket, automatically

pushing the button for the watch. It is 12:49 p.m. and she is not quite sure what the date is. It is

sometime at the end of april, she knows that and her flight back will be on May 1st, worker’s

day. She wanted to call it labour day, but she knows that that would be a different day in this

country. May 1st has a slightly communist slant, International day that commemorates,

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9
celebrates, glorifies manual work. Put in place by people like the author, whose manual labour

constitutes whooshing a pen over paper, who flip pages to write some more, who type, who push

buttons on keyboards. The author is happy, she is finishing page 33, today the ink flows ever so

freely, the two-day hiatus has been good for her capacity to formulate scenes of this city and

accumulate them on paper. Behind her someone bumps his chair into her, which is kind of

annoying, especially when she tries to lean forward, and her black sweater gets caught in the

chairs, the person behind her, though, is totally oblivious, in his own world. Now he is shaking a

bottle, which the author can hear, especially because the woman opposite of him is yelling

“Shake the bottle, shake the bottle”. As long as he does not shake it over her precious War and

Peace-Wannabe, her notebook numero eleven.

People are gathering in front of the counter, all in officey garb, she feels so much in tune with

them, she, too, is sitting in her little office, her mobile office that consists of the V5 - Precise pen

and her eleventh notebook, that is plastered on tables all over the city, eagerly awaiting to absorb

her thoughts, her visual sketches, that are using words instead of silhouettes, color, lines. The

counter is so very busy, a woman is leaning on the counter, while ordering. Someone comes in

with a suitcase, though there are definitely much less suitcases here than in chelsea, where

everyone seems to be a tourist. People in this part of town speak English or Spanish, in the coffee

shop near the apartment in Chelsea, people are waving around maps and talking Italian or

German. The author wonders whether her slight caricatures are too simplistic, whether it is

enough to take one strong line in her environment, her environments and highlight that, stress it

and interpret it in her utterly subjective manner. It is now page 36, that is coming to an end, she

30

0
is wondering whether she has the stamina, to write through, sprinkle the mundane surrounding

with interest to weave a narrative that manages to incure the visual and cinematic effects of what

she sees. In other words, can she document what she sees as accurately as a camera could, as

perfect as an audiorecorder could. While writing, she infuses her own world into the

subjectmatter, she gives everything her own slant, the world is documented through her lens. If

she would take pictures, the final image would be slanted by the machine, the camera and the

photographer would create reality by cropping the image, using colored filters or contrast-dulling

lenses, by retouching the image in photoshop. The photographer would manipulate the image at

random, but the final image would look more true to reality, more like recreated reality, less like

created image.

The writer, the author has differing tools, the language does not necessarily have the same

power of persuasion as an image has. The author knows that observations like this have been and

will be worded more eloquently, but she nonetheless takes a stab at defining the differences

between literature and cinema, between word and image, static or moving. The author feels time

standing still, she writes away to, basically, reach the finish line, she can feel the hurt in her right

arm, her right hand, nonetheless she wants to finish today’s requirement, so that she can live her

life, sightsee, enjoy her last days here, in this city, she wants to finish the ink in this pen of hers,

so that she needs to buy only one more pen, so that she is finished and done with pen buying,

with obsessive, erratic, never ending page filling. She does not really care about a conclusion, an

end, she can end anywhere, once tomorrow comes, tomorrow’s page forty fills up, automatically,

this story is finished, the last word automatically ends the story, the narrative has to be cut

somewhere, sometime, in midair, it has to still have the flow of the perfect curve, it has

30

1
to hint at the propensity to loop into infinity, like a bridge, like an elegant strong line in an image,

like the visual manifestation of a moment in time, like words that further the flight, the flights of

our collective imagination.

The author haults, wondering, pondering, if these are merely wishful thoughts, or realities, her

reality.

---

it is may 1st, she sits in JFK, she watches the little birds fly all over the seating area, it is

inside, an interior, but still there are birds in this waiting hall, someone is feeding them, the

author is kind of tired, and hot, and she feels agitated. She can feel her cheeks be all red, she

looks at the phone card she just tore up. She bought a phone card for five bucks and wanted to

use it up, but everyone was at work and had no time to talk to her and she does not know anyone

who can use it, maybe she should just have given it to anyone, because it had still 3 bucks and 50

cents on it, she could have given it to anyone, but that would have been weird, thus she tore it up.

She watches basketball on TV, on two screens, she knows the face of the basketball player, he is

famous and she has not written in two days, this is her last part of her last note book. She feels

surreal, not quite normal, somehow in transition, she is pissed off that she had to pay 150 bucks

for her overweight luggage, only to find out that she would have to pay only 25 bucks, if she

would have put her luggage into two bags instead of one, she had the luggage originally in two

bags, then she put them into one and gave the other one to the salvation army near her apartment

in chelsea, well, not her apartment, but the one she had lived in for one month.

30

The author has all her notebooks in a “Godiva” bag and she will put that in the overhead and

she has to make her way now to the gate, but she does not feel like sitting there, because she has
to wait there, too. Then again, maybe, she should go. The author is slightly losing her head, she

feels so utterly disoriented, dislocated. Looking at her pen keeps her grounded, familiarity, letters

made by her, her own handwriting. A plane whooshes by. A woman reads something Dutch “Ik

noet ye something, something vertellen” or it could be “je”, basically, the title of her book should

mean “I want to tell you something”, so the woman in her green T-shirt listens to what someone

wants to tell her. As a species we seem to be very eager to talk, and the author sure likes to tell

her banal lifestory to her notebook. “I want to tell you something”. She should find her gate,

though. Stop chatting up the paper. Finish her tea, find a trashcan to put her junk into it, tea cup,

bag, some paper, torn-up phone-card. And then she has to find gate 27. Delta flight 161. To Salt

Lake City.

---

she found her way to the boarding gate. Everyone is still waiting. This hall is so much bigger

than the other one, lots of shops. The author wonders if she should get a waterbottle, but thinks

that maybe not. She has to deactivate her cell. She learned how to do that yesterday.

For a second she got scared, she could not shut it down. She has to stop writing, fish her

passport and boarding pass out of her purse. Put her cell in her pocket. Try to not get a heart

attack. What with flying and the notion of planes falling out of the skies. What with the notion

that walking is too much for her, she can hardly handle that anymore. At her age. Let alone board

a plane. He should have taken a train. All the way to Vancitay. Four days of watching the world

30

move by, roll by. She has to go on the plane now.

---
 she sits on the plane now, she would really like to use the facilities, but, given that she has a

windowseat, she must ask the nice lady to let her go through and she does not really feel like

doing that, she fishes her chewing gum out of her purse, she notices something which she forgot

to write down, because she has to get ready for the flite, table up, buckle up, stopping to write.

---

she is up in the air, with clouds beneath her, she reaches up for the air-conditioner, she is

slightly scared. She detests flying. She has about thirty pages to fill up and what better than

whining. Maybe, in Salt Lake City she’ll just take the train. She knows that that will not happen.

She just hates to fly. And she has to use, well, you know what. And the college student is now

sleeping. The author would like to kill herself, just strangle herself. It is too hot, she cannot hop

over the lady, she should stay put. She cannot fill thirty pages with talking about, you know, that

she has to write something insightful, a meaningful ending to all her texts, something to pull it all

together, a kick-ass conclusion. But she does not have anything, she looks at her pen, that guides

itself over the paper, without her doing much, the sun shines on her left cheek, the artificial wind

from above does not cool, it just blows her hair into her face, her ear needs swallowing, she still

has her metrocard in her pocket. She writes, writes, writes. She should move her legs, her feet

what with deep-seated, vein, thrombosis, you know, something, something syndrome. She feels

like she is near to a heart attack. She is sleepy, too. This is not fun. Flying, flying. There is not

much to say, not much to do. Not much to see. She should find the food menu. Her neighbour

30

brought a starbucks bag. The author did not bring anything. She feels hungry. Already. Hopefully

they provide tomato juice. The author always drinks tomato juice on planes. Makes her feel

grown-up. “I used to fly in the old times”. Her first flight was in 1963. When she was eight years
old. With PIA or PTA, must have been PIA. A Pakistani airline, the pakistani airline. From

Hamburg to Iran. And back. Yeah, the good old times. When she was sweet and young. Not non-

sweet and old. Like now. The pilot talks a lot about taxi. She likes his voice, his accent. Very

matter-of-fact. Like baseballish. A base-ball-fan. Very middle-america. Unpretentious. At least

that is how he sounds. The woman comes around and gives out the Menu, saying something like

Insider menu or Consider menu or Spider menu. The author wants to lose weight. She will eat in

Salt Lake City. the local fare, something with salt. From the lake. Funny, huh. The author, the

author. Is tired from authoring, put all her notebooks in the crumpled-up Godiva-bag in the

overhead. It might stumble down on someone, if the overhead is opened. Someone might spill

milk on it. She has seen baby milk seep out of the overhead on people sitting below. The author

has put the notebooks in a plasticbag and, after that, into the shopping bag. But still, the shopping

bag is open. Her “war and peace” might get destroyed, her “dr.zhivago”. No, more “War and

Peace”. Or, to quote Elaine “War- what is it good For? Absolutely nothing.” The author always

watches Seinfeld. It has to be watched. The author hopes for tomato juice. Tomato juice. The

lady said something about food. The author was writing, so she is not quite sure, if there was

something said about complimentary. A baby cries. Not much, though. Wait, there it is again. The

author feels like having a heart attack. She thinks about today, yesterday, the day before. But

she’d rather reflect this moment in her notebook, inscribing the page in very upright letters

instead of her usual tilted ones. Desperate times call for desperate measures, matters, something

30

like that. Stiff-upper-lip, hold yourself straight, we might all die. Die. So, pull yourself together,

sit straight. If we plummet to our death, sitting straight will have my bones in perfect condition.

What rubbish, why do we have to fly anyways? People should walk. No flying. No modern
stuffy-muffy. Good old times. And where is the tomato-juice. She is on page sixteen, so she still

has to put down fourteen pages, no, twenty-four pages. Make that twenty-two. She used up two

pages for other purposes. Outside there was a line of a cloud, the same kind one sees in the sky

behind an airplane. She hates flying. Hate, hate, hate. Pure and simple. Hate, hate, hate. She has

to bring these notebooks back to vancitay, all eleven of them. Type them out. That will take all

summer. Boring, boring. Or she might just toss it into a landfill. Into the recycling bin. Into

something. False Creek. Let’s see what we can do. Tomato juice, tomato juice. This is all so very

mature. What time it is? The woman with the food is still so very far away. And she might have

complimentary tomatojuice or she might not.

The author notices, that a plane ride is so utterly non-conducive to writing, so very much on the

boring side. People are just sleeping. The author just wishes she was dead. Not that dead, though.

Not the scattered into a thousand little pieces- dead. More the whining, rhetorical dead. And the

author does not even know, if using the word rhetorical makes any sense here. It just sounds

good. And that is what counts. After all.

The author wishes to express her innermost thoughts, feelings. The woman beside her went to

the restroom, so the author sprints after her. The author still does not know, where it is restroom,

where washroom. I guess, in canada one rests. In Farsi, the same, actually in Azeri, too. But, then

again, Azeri borrows it from Farsi. And Farsi might have borrowed it from Arabic. Then again,

30

maybe not. The language purists might scold her.

The author writes, writes. She watches out of the corner of her eyes someone trying to fix the

airconditioner- buttony- thingie, a woman with long hair, big nose and golden blouse comes by,

the baby makes noise, very happy, la-la-la, la-la, la. Where is the tomato- juice? Outside Clouds.
The author can do without that view. Clouds are scary, they look benign, but they are filled with

H2O. The author really manages to come up with profound observations, thrilling associations,

word- associations, that is. She cannot really write while fear for life, fear of death is gnawing at

here bones from inside. She wonders where the location of fear is? In the tip of her nose, on the

most outer edge of her honker? And is it honker or hunker? Or something else. This is what

happens when tomato juice is lacking in the system. Words do not fall into place, not into their

right rightful places. They gibber down into gibberish.

The author prefers to write about buildings, structures. She likes to describe things she can see,

she can make out with her eyes. She ponders about non- narrative lines, linear piling up of

words, mounting escalating tirades with strong, abrupt valleys, the conducting of a beautiful

symphony of words, utterings, mutterings, silent moments, long, self- reflecting pauses, staccato.

Rhythm. Like buildings, like the buildings in a city. A cityscape, any cityscape. Industry

manifested. The author still did not hunt down “Delirious Manhattan- a retroactive manifesto”

and maybe she never will. She used to read parts of “City in Motion” by Nigel Coates, use his

wording in so many of her early works in artschool. In essay after assay, in animations, in

presentations. She based her whole artstudent career on his book, his books. She is dawn to the

place, the space, the locale, where film, art, architecture, design, math, intersect. Where science

30

meets art, where they say hi, nod to each other. She would like to use better words, concise ones,

correct ones. Words, that make a perfect line, a perfect curve. That exact.

She misses something. Anything. Time stands slightly still. The tomatojuice is coming.

---
 she is finally in salt lake city, sitting near to a big clock, that shows the time: 8:33, she still has

to write, write until she finishes today’s requirement, she can see the airport directory from here,

something purple and blue and white on it, it is a really good map, as she can see from here,

good, concise, wayfinding system, everything here seems pretty clear and concise, big on

contrasting colors, idiot proof, but that is actually a derogative term, the author means positivity,

her first impression is well-planned, so did the city itself look from the air, well-planned, on a

grid, and the salty lake was impressive. A horrible creature sat next to the author for a short, a

very short while, an utterly rude, obnoxious one, the author is still flabbergasted.

The author looks at the trash can, that is in front of her, to the right, to the right, it says

recycles, no SLO recycles in big letters, very, very good, NYC was pretty horrible in recycling,

SLO seems to be much more west-coasty, with the total normalcy of environmentalism, a total

mainstreaming of the “green” consciousness. And these are the observations of a person that

arrived here about half an hour ago, is sitting on a bench in the airport, in the transit section, has

talked to one person, went to one washroom, who needs real engagement with a culture, when

snap judgements, in a quarter of a second, can do.

The author writes away, has no time to explore, she can see a framed poster depicting

30

something brown- beige, very tasteful, she can see a stand that says premium chocolate- a little

bite, and looks nice, she can see the very nice, very bauhausy white partition, a woman who

recycled and looked nice, the clock that now says 8:49, she can see Millcreek coffee, from here,

where she would like to have coffee, she can see a white bench, that is nice, a shiny surface, and

at this time everything here seems nice, clean, fresh. The pilot said that salt lake city had snow

today, it is May first, so the author, is not quite sure whether she heard right. The author should
look for her gate, she should have a coffee, she should explore, she could write. She feels

compelled to finish this notebook, write as fast as she can, with letters as big as a house, well,

that is partially a metaphor, the clock is 8:45, the numbers are red, lit, in black background,

forcing the author to write fast, strong words, she likes the ATM- machine, which looks artsy-

fartsy, people speak italian, the author writes, looks at the red dots in her notebook, where the red

cover shows through the three holes, the author should look for her gate, she finished page

twenty- eight. Hooray.

She can see Yovana Cinnabon from here, a man in green, who scratches his chin, the author

can see the people who are coming into the airport from here, as they are inspected, searched.

---

she sits down in this tiny, tiny aircraft to fly back to Vancitay, it is so very tiny, she wonders

how long the flight will be, how much the elements will throw her through the sky, she hates

flying, as was stated before, but at least she can write away, briskly, very fast, the plane is still

boarding, people are still streaming in, pushing their bags into overheads, she has the

30

airconditioner stream exactly onto her hair, onto her scalp, she feels weird taking notes here, but

no one seems to mind, everyone is wearing red, pink, strong pink, light pink, four females all

around the author are in different shades of red, the author writes very fast, very brisk, she can

still see the reflection of her notebook in the window with the pen flowing over it, ten pages to

go, the flight is one hour and seventeen minutes, something like that, she could write more, once

she is back at YVR. The author feels so very homesick, right now, right here, so very far still, so

very near. Flying agitates her, tears hauntedly at her nervestrings, she scrambles around for

finding ever more strong words to seize the moment, describe these her last minutes of this
voyage, she tries to quiet her fears, her anxieties, she wonders how people feel, who do this for a

living, flight attendants, pilots, day-in, day-out. Connections or something, the woman in the

uniform says, the author writes away, looks out at parked white cars, baggage-cars, or service

cars, they are all white, it is dark outside, but well-lit. The author means that it is night, but the

surface, the pavement is well-lit. The author has problems with her words now.

---

Up in the air, it is dark outside, she can see the reflection in the window even more

pronounced, slightly yellow, her hand writing, the pen very pronounced moving, kind of jittery,

the reflection seems so much more pronounced, the pen very fast, very strong writing, she tries

to put as many pages down, she does not really feel like holding her journal in her hand once she

is back, where home is now, she will end her story here in the air, up in the air, sentences that

glide over the paper, mush together in hopefully perfect unison, whatever that means, she is

pretty happy that eleven notebooks are filled, to the rim, editing will come later, the draft is down

31

and that is all that matters, the abstract is in her head, abstract for non-narrative, wanna-be

scholarly treatise, the words that cascade on each other, trying to forge meaning into thin air, out

of thin air, trying to trace blueprints for meaning, meanings, for insight, but first and foremost

recapturing of reality at a time when image is paramount, where a cell phone can take a film, pin

down reality, document it for posterity, at this time, words have to and should mimick cinema,

film, cinematic elements in use of language can and should enrich the language, any language.

The author haults, insights have to wait, tomato juice and crackers are served. That is more

important. At this time. Writing has to wait. For now, that is. She stretches her sentences

anyways, writes pure rubbish just to fill the pages. It is not good, not good at all. Then again,
vancouver is somewhere down there, Kits, Kerrisdale, False Creek, everything and anything that

a city should be. And her own bed.

The author writes as fast as she can, given that the airplane is roaring away, given that there is

not much light, given that the letters are starting to swim. It is late at night for her, she doesn’t

really know, if it is 2 or 3 at night. Something like that.

---

The author looked it up, it is ten to eleven here on the westcoast, so she would be on ten to two

east coast time, in the middle of the night. The apartment in chelsea should be by now inhabited

by its real owner, she misses the light in the apartment, the place which is basically so much part

of the street, facing the narrow street, where light from the street lights is everywhere in the

room, where the plant is omnipresent, the plant smack in the middle of the room.

311

Outside the airplane roars, her last sentences are put down on the paper, her hand flies, leaving

sporadic sketches of ink, heaping thin traces of black, lines, line upon line on the last pages of

this her eleventh notebook. She wrote all winter, all spring, all of winter and spring. Starting

2008 like this, writing and drawing, uploading animations, submitting her “all of winter 2008-

shorter version” to the NFB-shorts-contest and the mobile phone animation site. And she wrote,

all through Vancouver, all through Toronto, through Kingston and Montreal, through New York

City, through train and plane, airports, subway stations, streetcorners, through Brooklyn and

Queens. It was fun and utterly exhausting. The life of a flaneur, or so they used to call it. She

observed protests at Columbia, she watched the day go by on princess street. Through it all, she

tried to hone her craft, to develop writing. As a woman at a table in a small bakery on 9th and

23rd. said to her friend: “I think one should just start writing and see where it takes you”, as the

writing on the wall of the clinton elementary school for writers and artists, the one outside of the
apartment with the tree inside of it stated “When we write, when we read, we become heroes, we

grow wings, we go to places, we have never been and we will never be”, as she wrote away on

benches in subway stations like the dislocated lunatic she was, she created a world of awe, while

she watched where her pen was taking her. All the buildings, she saw, all the hustle and bustle,

the hecticness, all the rush and the silences, the pauses, of so many people, all the quietness, the

land, the nature, she observed from the train, while crossing from east through west, all of this is

sketched down in all these books, on all these pages, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter,

because the journey, the voyage, the process was, what was fun, the sheer excitement of

grappling with all these words, all these ideas, day-in, day-out, all these moments, all these songs

of a city, all the silence of the land, all through winter, laying over, playing over into spring of

this year, of 2008. 312