ruins, framing, images and cnn

watching my boyfriend in the camera
and seeing him simultaneously on the set
he is not the same person
he is not his image
the one on the set i see directly with my eyes – he is mine, the one i know and recognize
the one on the screen is him, but reorganized, set up, framed, projected, and staged to sound the way – the best way he can
and then on cnn he sounds another way, the way the journalist wants him to sound
what remains is a ruin or a remnant of the one i’m in love with
a replica, a souvenir
a piece of (the berlin wall)
but it is not but a fraction of my love on that screen
i want the one at home, the one on my couch, the with sounds, odors, colors, angles- senses
and yet all of that is also only the way i’ve framed my vision, isn’t it?

figure of nostalgia

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingre's
La Grande Odalisque, 1814
Pre-Romantic (Neoclassical)
and overly realist.






The detail in her headscarf alone is stunning, but if you look closely ... Ingres added an extra vertebrae to make her slightly more beautiful to fit his idealized sense of beauty.

Talking about the past - or just living it?

My partner and I were talking last night while I was drifting in and out of sleep ...
do women keep a sea of secrets inside them?
No more than anyone does, we agreed.
But when I talk about my past relationships, and he knows that I work on identity and memory, he often tells me I'm living in the past.
At what point is it reliving the past, and when is it simply sharing experience and being open about what we've lived so that the other knows and understands us in our present? Or are we always constructing a narrative in our present, whether we talk or not talk about what preceded?
It's this line of thinking that several years ago made me conclude that pure memory simply doesn't exist.
I do not believe we can separate our present from our pasts. Living in the present is nice, but it isn't ever really possible to pretend we exist separate from the myriad of experiences that formed us - talked about or silenced.
Yet, to be in an openly communicating mode with a partner, must we share every intimate past moment to be regarded as unsecretive? The balance still eludes me.
When issues are relevant and memories emerge, I share them.
I'm inclined to think that if I repeat those memories and recreate them and attempt to reexperirence them ... this would be a stab at living in the past. I'm also in the process of thinking that denying that the past exists is another form of letting the past control you. Eithe rway, it forms you if you try to control it.
You cannot touch without being touched is Newton's third law.
I cannot press my memory without it pressing me.

current ideas under construction

These are the ideas I'm mulling over for current articles. If you have thoughts, please message me.

-- the connections between exile writers, mother, and homeland and how those relationships are articulated in their litereature.

-- Camus and his use of nostalgia (and especially return) to articulate identity

-- Francophone women and their articulation of home (again the mother comes into this discourse quite heavily).

-- Writing the wounds of Algeria, which is on the underside of nostalgia writing, or what is covered up by the nostalgia. (This article is in progress and the abstract accepted for publication).