List Of Topics Discussed

I talked on here a few weeks ago about my artists residency program CTRI Innovations, where we go out for coffee and that's it, and I had a few people reach out recently with the same question so I thought I'd just share that on here before getting to this week's featurette.

The question is: Oh No, I Wanted To Do This But I Missed The Deadline! or I guess that's a statement, not a question, but the implied question is Is That OK? and the answer to that question is yes. Usually I try to be a stickler for deadlines, or at least personally I try to maintain an attitude of taking them seriously. But in this case the deadline (as listed on the CTRI Innovations residency) is fake. Using a small bit of computer code, the deadline changes constantly, based on the last time you visited the website. If you look at it today or tomorrow or three weeks from now, it will display as 1 week into the future (from today or tomorrow or three weeks from now). I did this as a service for those people that can't do anything without a looming deadline. Those people should treat the deadline as serious, as long as it inspires them to act. But at the point when it provides an excuse for inaction (aka when you blow the deadline and are unchained from the obligations of the task) it becomes null and void. I'm sorry to anyone that got tangled in this snare.

The featurette is as follows:

As previously discussed, I keep notes on each instance of the residency, just a short little roundup of some of the things we talked about. I don't write down everything, and I don't know why I write some things and not others. Well anyway, once I had a few months of these notes together I realized I had a funny opportunity to look and see, what are the sort of things I talk about all the time?? If a topic is like a song in the set, then what's the complete repertoire? so I sorted through the text of the website for "we talked about" and then made a list of every comma-separated value that followed. Then I sorted them alphabetically.

There's something very funny to me about the list format. It's just a string of objects whose context is underdeclared-- when I read it my mind goes into overdrive trying to pull out some type of narrative, or looking at the poetic qualities, the rhythms and rhymes. In this case ("Things I Talk About"), it's funny to imagine that these alphabetized nodes were reached in this order naturally.

• bags and backpacks
• Baile Funk
• Baltimore
• band names
• baseball
• Bashō
• basketball in general
• beaches
• beaches both non-magical and magical
• being a character in someone else's story
• being a consultant
• being "a good drawer"
• being a kid and starting to develop class awareness
• being a metal head that gets into disco

I love that this one has "basketball in general", when "basketball in general" is more specific than just "basketball". But you wouldn't think of it if it wasn't preceded by "baseball". You could imagine that when we talked about baseball it was pretty concrete, like "I was a fan of the Red Sox up to 2004", but then something happened in the conversation when we pivoted to (17th century Japanese poet) Bashō that caused this very intentional zoom out into a purposely abstracted view of a different sport. We stop talking about personalities and we're just cataloging sensations-- the squeak of shoes on the parquet, sound of a brick on the rim, a still moment before a foul shot. Again, these topics did not occur in this order originally, this is a conversation we're inventing, based on an arbitraty chunk of a needlessly alphabetized reduction of over a hundred conversations with nearly as many people.

There's a lot of repeats, because there are some things that come up often. It would be easy for me to put a number next to repeat topics, like grants⁵, goth ASMR³, Jervyn's Clasp¹¹ but I decided to leave them in, for poetry reasons.

• boats
• boats
• boats
• body builders
• books
• books
• bookstores
• books you read in the fifth grade
• Bowie
• Brancusi
• bread
• breakfast
• breakfast
• Breton
• Brian Blomerth (he's great)
• bricolage
• bricolage problems
• bricolage problems
• bringing back old work
• Bromp Treb
• brush pens
• Buckminster Fuller
• building an incorruptable chariot for your immortal soul to ride

or

• donuts
• double A batteries
• drawing
• drawing
• drawing
• drawing
• drawing as a form of high-stakes meditation
• drawing backgrounds for a cartoon show
• dreams
• dreams
• drinking coffee
• dub music
• Duchamp
• Duchamp
• Duchamp
• Dwarf Fortress
• Dwarf Fortress
• Dwarf Fortress
• Dwarf Fortress

the how-to section is rich:

• how architecture shapes your life
• how being a rock star is actually a lousy job
• how great it is to not be in school
• how he got into machine work
• how scenes can default to shitty and/or mean when there isn't a nice option
• how to find a four leaf clover (we each have a method)
• how to get back in the habit when you're out of the habit
• how to get lore of an area
• how to meet people
• how to stay loose in a sketchbook

I love making/finding these little poems within any large enough list, deciding where each one should begin and end. It's a creative type of reading that requires you to be both reader and editor at the same time. Once you've pulled a poem out, it's hard not to infer some sort of character arc or Hero's Journey to it. Something leaves home and returns changed. OK when I started writing this post, the ones above were initially just examples. But now I think they're actually poems. They're all poems.

• memory
• memory
• mental health
• merch ideas
• metal
• metal
• metal dudes
• MFA pros and cons

...

• Sir Richard Burton
• Sister Corita Kent
• Sister Corita Kent
• Sister Corita Kent
• skateboarding (neither of us skate)
• sketchbook methods
• sketch books
• sketchbooks
• sketchbooks
• sketchbooks
• sketchbooks and sketchbook strategies
• sketchbook strategies
• sketchbook styles
• slam poetry
• slam poetry voice
• Slayer
• slime
• small birds
• small museums

OK I promised myself I wouldn't be here all day! Here's the link to the whole list: [CTRI Innovations: all topics discussed]. I'm still (still!) fiddling with how to get comments on my website but in the meantime, if you get these posts via substack, and you find any good poems in the list, feel free to post them on the substack comments. But I insist on the rule that you can't edit the poem beyond selecting the beginning and endpoint! Don't worry about aligning them to the Hero's Journey, I think that just happens regardless.

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Links

• the CTRI Innovations website is here: [link] and you should apply if it seems interesting to you. We do not have to be friends or know each other in order for you to do this.
• the previous post on this subject is here: [link]
• I reserve the right to do "more favorite lists" at a later date. I know that Greg Harvester loves stuff like this, that's all I need really. Watap Greg, hayadoon!
• if you're zooming in on my notebooks and wondering what is "SKRAMMELLEGEPLADS", I just re-looked it up and I was pleasantly surprised. Not entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. [wikipedia]

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