I’m interested in the phenomenon of my wrongness. Wrongness has an ambient quality. When you’re very wrong about a lot of things, it’s perhaps easier to conceive of the wrongness as something that is all around you. I’m not talking about externalizing or blaming. I just mean something obvious here… that when you’re wrong you see things differently than if you weren’t wrong, or were less generally wrong. So, being wrong makes the world around you different than it would otherwise be. And so, you see your wrongness everywhere, but don’t recognize it as such. Everything you lay eyes on is your wrongness.

And I’ve long regarded it as a romantic idea, one that I am suspicious of because of how appealing I find it. The idea that I might be dramatically wrong about a lot of things. But just because something is desirable doesn’t necessarily mean that it is not the case.

So I am currently a little more receptive than usual to the idea that I might be very generally wrong about things. It is optimism. And it’s a practice. Yes, it’s not something that one could detect while stationary. Movement, and I really mean any kind of movement, is crucial. Almost any kind of movement. I guess some movements are so repetitive that they no longer function as such. Habits. So, it gets a little tricky there.

But it’s a practice of mind, somehow, as well. It is really something very much like using the imagination. It might even be using the imagination. All the way from the bottom. Underneath everything. Certainly most everything.

I know what I mean by all this about two-thirds. I know what I mean almost enough to be sure that I’m saying something. It’s the kind of thing where if you read it or even write it, you could settle on a meaning that isn’t good enough, by an order of magnitude. I’m about two-thirds sure that it’s something.

* * *

I just got quite a bit poorer. Accounting error on my part. A check I thought was on the way had already come. It came by direct deposit in March. Oops. I forgot I had set up direct deposit with that klient. Kind of a big payment. So that’s why I was so rich, but not anymore, not so much. But I’m not broke.

* * *

The DCAC event yesterday was excessively awesome. You had to really scramble to catch as much of it as you could even if you were there. I found myself constantly at capacity, fumbling away impressions and ideas that I might have held onto at another event, but in this case had to relinquish because new things arose so frequently.

Lauren Bender was a mime in person and also on the big projector screen. And there were oreos. The Lauren in the video and the one physically at DCAC were interracting, offering one another things, or mainly it was the one in the video offering things to the one at DCAC. And the live Lauren would reach into the screen to receive these things and so it was like a real transfer, at least from my angle. And there were signs and words. And then, later, conflicts. The video Lauren struck the live Lauren and knocked her to the floor in slow motion. That reversed then repeated. Early, the video Lauren was slowly and demonstrably separating the oreo halves, then displaying the creamless side and frowning for the audience, then showing the cream side and smiling. The live Lauren ate a lot of oreos. The video Lauren appeared to write something very quickly with an oreo, like the oreo was a pencil, and then turned the poster around to show us a long message neatly written as with a sharpie.

Because of the mime facepaint, the painted tear, and some french stuff on the screen, there was a bit of, I think, poking fun at some idea of pretense in art, I guess you’d say. Some kind of distance implied from a historic & foreign idea of avant-garde practice, something away off in Europe and in the past, but not something that can actually be located by anyone whose experience of those ideas has come from, something, at some remove. Cartoons. Things on TV. Or something. Though I think someone on TV was recently saying that tattooed tears are common in present-day French prisons. Not sure. At one point the video Lauren led the audience in rhythmic clapping. It was peculiar because we were clapping in the same pace as the video Lauren but we weren’t coordinated with the image. Our claps happened in between hers. This was our fault. Also the video Lauren at one point kept trying to kiss the live Lauren, but the live Lauren kept protesting. There were no spoken words.

David Gatten showed a couple films in response to the life and library of William Byrd. Byrd’s library was eventually purchased by Thomas Jefferson and thus helped provide much of the collection that became the Library of Congress. Gatten told us a bit about Byrd’s life, particulary some books Byrd authored which, if I understand correctly, are considered important to American historians because they deal with establishment of borders of some of the states. Just going on memory. Also Byrd had a long correspondence with a woman and there is the story of Byrd about to meet the woman after their long correspondence… Byrd has been overseas and arrives on a ship at the planned meeting place, but he has been tied up by another of the woman’s suitors, and thus is prevented from leaving the boat. The boat goes back out to sea and then disappears.

The two Gatten films dealt directly with texts themselves. Whether those written by Byrd or some from (I think) his library. And quotations by Wittgenstein and others. Silent films. Texts scroll across the screen at a readable pace, or more quickly than is readable. Or one text encroaches on another from the side, with a rapidly wavering line dividing the two, and the first one, on the left, pushing out the one on the right. Images of books. Sides of books. One film was 20 minutes long and one 37 minutes long, but as I told Gatten afterwards, to me they were exactly the same length. No films online, and no DVDs, but some info here and here.