almost something insider forum

A hand moving absently up and down a stranger's back. Lips glimpsed in a rocketing subway car. A body that makes people want things. Maybe something sexual does happen, if you think of sex as a wave that passes between people at odd and inconvenient times and for no reason. I will be planting writing that feels like breath on your neck, or a sidelong glance, or a brush you're not sure is intentional or accidental. The ambiguity can't be resolved and is something you like. I was one of the writers installed last May in the Flux Factory's month-long project, "Novel." I am working on the book I started there, Indestructible Beauty, and on Forgetting, a prose collage combining memoir, fiction, and meditative commentary.

[ Laurie has sent in this text to describe her participation. Included in the attatchment is the full text which she will be using. --Francis ]

almost-something text
from Forgetting

What happens when, instead of reading passages in a book, a magazine, or on a computer screen, people happen upon writing in the course of another errand, like reading the back of a cereal box, or finding a torn-out page from a notebook fluttering on the street, or reading a message on a phone booth wall? Does it leave a different kind of mark? Does reading feel more active and like a form of spying or stealing when plucked from its ordinary contexts?

I will be installing a text into several environments. I’m sending the entire text here, but it won’t appear in this form in the show. Perhaps it can be included in the catalogue or in a guide book.

The text is about a man and a woman who do not know each other well and come together physically. It doesn’t exactly begin or conclude. The narrator remembers incidents and contemplates intense feeling stripped of meaning. She’s amused that her connection to the man feels both startling and patterned—that what’s most startling is the way it repeats her past. She’s interested in the way that forgetting allows actions to feel new—again and again. Perhaps, in encountering the story in fragments and in unexpected places, readers will recall intense emotions they repeatedly forget.

I’ll scribble parts of the text on the walls of the bathroom, break up the story into labels I’ll attach to beer bottles where the ingredients are usually listed, and I’ll plant a small black book of images and passages that tease each other. –Laurie Stone