2/24/23

Thinking About Words Today

Today I am thinking about words a lot. Written language is interesting to me because it is highly visual and its presentation can be manipulated, but it doesn't depict anything but letters and numbers and punctuation. It's visual in the characters you see on a page, and also in the way that words conjure imagery in a reader's head. And post-internet, there is this sensibility growing within people to prefer writing to speaking or reading to listening. Even if people don't consciously feel this way, it feels easier to watch a movie with subtitles on and people who spend too much time online have a hard time talking to others in the real world without anxiety. Interacting with your phone or your computer demands your eyesight, too. Our sight has always been our sharpest sense but now it feels like everything is depending on it. I'm not really complaining about this but I'm curious about what a response to this observation might be. I am also curious what visually impaired and blind people's takes on this topic are.

On Sunday night I went to a poetry reading at Circle with Grace and Margaret. This was an interesting experience having not ever been to a reading before. I especially liked the first person who read named Carrie who read a poem about (I forgot the specifics but I really enjoyed it!). I thought about how all of the writing that I do is presented as an image and that reading it aloud wouldn't make sense. The final reader that night was named Dylan Angell from North Carolina. He read a number of poems which I enjoyed and then ended with a quote from Ray Johnson which felt significant because his work was the starting point of my research into mail art for my thesis project this semester. Because of that I bought a copy of his book and felt that I had had a meaningful experience that night.

I don't have anything else to share today except this image of a door that I saw after my car broke down. I'm the kind of mood where I wish that someone would wipe my memory and take me to a house on mountain somewhere and let me live there with two or three other people in isolation forever so that I would never have to worry about money or school or calling the doctor or newsletter posts about words ever again. Maybe it's a government program that studies our behavior but provides food and water to us and keeps us healthy. Then I would have nothing to worry about.