The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Galerie Denis Cooper presents … Tom Friedman

 

Quote

“David Bohm said, ‘…according to today’s laws of physics, the bumble should not be able to fly…the shape of its wings, their velocity of operation, and their size, compared to the bumble bee’s body, make no sense…it’s a miracle, it’s comical, and it cannot be denied.’ …This is why I am an artist.” — Tom Friedman

 

Elsewhere

A visit with Tom Friedman
Tom Friedman @ Gagosian Gallery
Tom Friedman @ Ceysson Gallery
Tom Friedman, the book (Phaidon Press)
The Obsessive Art of Tom Friedman
Tom Friedman interviewed by John Miller
Tom Friedman in Tokyo
Dan Cameron on Tom Friedman

 

About

‘Tom Friedman’s studio is a sensory deprivation chamber. A small shed about 50 feet from his home in the western Massachusetts countryside, it is windowless and featureless, immaculately tidy, completely empty and painted white.He has compared it to the blindingly white prison cell in the science fiction film THX 1138 (1970).

Friedman works in this environment to get a better view of the shape of his own thoughts. Knotted, looping, self-generating, endlessly expanding and dissipating, these are the raw materials with which he makes his sculptures and drawings. The end result, the object, whether it’s a frail thread of chewing gum stretched between ceiling and floor or a hyper-real dragonfly assembled from hair and clay, is just a diagram and a trace of the stuff he’s scraped from the inside of his head.

Friedman’s works operate as closed, repetitive systems which run until they break down; at this point an eerie sense of the unreal begins to seep from the split gaskets. ‘The idea of pulling things further and further apart is interesting’, he has said. ‘Stretching a piece of gum is an analogy for this idea: as you stretch the gum the connecting thread becomes thinner and thinner. I reached a point where the idea of fantasy started to filter in, because when the connection between things becomes so slight, they are not read as a cohesive whole.’ — Adam McEwen, Frieze (continued)

 

Media


Public Art Fund Talks at The New School: Tom Friedman


Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine, NYC (February 2012)


Tom Friedman at Stephen Friedman Gallery, 2012


Tom Friedman – installation at Magasin 3


Tom Friedman remembers Hudson

 

Serious Playboys
Tom Friedman in Conversation with John Waters
from Parkett

 

John Waters: A friend who doesn’t follow the art world saw your book and said, “You have to have a real faith in contemporary art to look at Tom Friedman’s work.” Do you agree?

Tom Friedman: It seems like people can enter my work on different levels. People who don’t know a lot about contemporary art seem to enter it because of the type of things I do with materials…

JW: Oh I agree! It is good that you have to have faith in the art world to look at someone’s work. Then at least you’re going to really look at it. Your work is self-assured in a humble but strong way, but in some of the pieces you demand faith. When you say, for example, that you stared at a piece of paper for a thousand hours, you are demanding faith from the viewer, don’t you think?

TF: Yeah, I guess faith in my credibility.

JW: What is so amazing about your work is that even the most unsophisticated art person is not pissed off because before they can say “Oh, my kid can do that,” the words get stuck in their throat because their kids most definitely could not do that.

TF: Because I seem to put myself through a sort of torture, people feel that if I’m going to put myself through that, they might as well give a little of themselves.

JW: But is it torture or magic? I mean you were a magician as a kid—I’m sure critics make too much of that—but were you for real?

TF: My brother and I used to put on shows for kids. We were called Ali & Oop. I was Oop.

JW: I was a puppeteer, so we were on the same circuit; kids birthday parties.

TF: (laughter)

JW: All art shows are magic in a way, aren’t they?

TF: Yeah.

JW: And I wonder if talking about it gives away the trick in a way, even what we’re doing now. Real magicians will never tell you how they do the trick.

TF: I try to be incredibly obvious and straightforward, but this sort of conceals itself again. I’m trying to reveal the secret. It’s like a secret that everyone knows.

JW: When you were young did art ever surprise or shock you?

TF: Not really. I didn’t look at art that much. I got started making things as a way of trying to understand the world around me, and it still is that way for me. It becomes a vehicle for my understanding, so each piece represents some kind of discovery that I make about the world.

JW: But you can see how some of your most obsessional pieces are sometimes shocking to others.

TF: I can see that.

JW: Is patience to you a virtue or a compulsion?

TF: I guess both.

JW: In your work certainly, patience has to be one of your tools, as much as the material, isn’t it?

TF: I think my patience comes from faith and also a need to pursue an idea. I have to see it through and make it physical to complete my understanding of it.

JW: Do you ever change your technical approach mid-way through?

TF: Well, yes. I was working on a piece with pins in a sheet. I started it off by doing it one at a time — which became absurdly monotonous. Then I tried to figure out ways of doing it faster. I constructed this screen so the pins would fall through with their heads all in the same way. Then I had to work out a way to orient the pins, so I could pull out a clump and stick them in. I rigged up a device that consisted of a block and a magnet so I could then stick in a whole bunch at one time.

JW: So in a way you came up with a primitive form of mass production.

TF: Right. I do look for ways to make things easier. My work tends towards this very repetitive labor process for some reason, yet it is not really about that.

JW: It is and it isn’t. When I look at one of your pieces, I wonder how could such a thing be done, and buried in that, I think, is a whole hierarchy of labor processes. In most cases, the disappearance of the hand makes something more attractive — unless you flip back into an Arts and Crafts esthetic which values something for its archaic qualities.

TF: That’s something you’ve mentioned quite a few times.

JW: That’s because the machine qualifies what it is to do something by hand in this day and age. It plays out in a lot of different ways. Warhol said, “I want to be a machine,” but that was very romantic, a romanticization of the mechanical.

TF: I always interpreted that statement as striving to reveal the human element by denying it.

JW: By falling short of perfection?

TF: Yes. Striving for that machineness might show the residue of what is human, and that always interested me: the absurdity of wanting to be a machine.

JW: David Robbins has referred to you as “the Manzoni of the ’90s.” Manzoni’s canned shit and his pedestal for the earth — like a lot of his other work — both have a lot to do with how one orients oneself. I think of your inverted map: looking at the world from the North Pole. Then, of course, there’s your speck of shit versus his can.

TF: What I know of his work seems to emanate from thoughts about his self in relation to … the world, I guess.

JW: Yeah, but also in relation to the readymade. His pedestal claims the earth as a readymade and the canned shit claims the results of an involuntary, physiological process. In your work, everything you start out with remains the same. The spaghetti is still spaghetti, the pins are still pins, the map is still a map …

TF: I try to establish a logical connection between what a material is, how it is transformed and what it becomes. It retains its identity, but as symbolic material. It becomes symbolic because you are looking at it.

JW: Does the scale and fragility of your work ever create storage or transportation problems? Take your bubblegum piece, for instance.

TF: The bubblegum just goes in a box and that’s it.

JW: The one that stretches from floor to ceiling?

TF: Oh, that one. I thought you were talking about the bubblegum. [laughter]. Yes, a very long box!

JW: So you just make it again every time.

TF: Well, I’ve only shown it twice. Once at Feature, and then once in a show curated by Ivan Moscowitz. And he installed it.

JW: Oh really? He must have had a lot of patience.

TF: I had very specific instructions. They had to be incredibly detailed. Well, not incredibly detailed but … you know, second by second. The first thing was that I had to figure out a way of making it more predictable. I found this stuff called Friendly Plastic and I mixed a small amount of that into the bubblegum. It made the mixture slightly harder when it was stretched, and so it wouldn’t sag — which is something I was concerned about. But the Friendly Plastic actually complicated the installation because you have to boil it, then you have to wait exactly the right amount of time for it to cool off before you stick it on the ceiling and stretch it to the floor. So when it came down to shipping, it all just went into a small box, a slide box. Other things just get thrown away, like the piece I did with laundry detergent. That just got swept up. The toothpaste — I did a piece with toothpaste on a wall — that just gets scraped off and thrown away.

JW: So a collector ends up purchasing instructions?

TF: Yes — and a lifetime supply of bubblegum. [laughter].

read the totality

 

Work

blackandwhitepaintfig. (2006)
black and white paint on concrete floor
4 x 31 x 75-1/2 inches (10.2 x 78.7 x 191.8 cm)

 

Untitled (1990)
approximately 1,500 pieces of chewed bubble gum molded into a sphere and displayed at head height in a corner, hanging by its own stickiness.

 

1000 Hours of Staring (1992-97)
a blank piece of paper stared at by the artist for 1,000 hours
32 ½ x 32 ½ inches

 

Untitled (1990)
a partially used bar of soap inlaid with a spiral of the artist’s pubic hair
3 x 4 x 1½ in. (7.6 x 10.1 x 3.8 cm.)

 

Untitled (1992)
a sphere of the artist’s feces ½ mm in diameter centered on a cubed pedestal
Pedestal: 20 x 20 x 20 inches

 

Untitled (1995)
a gelatin pill capsule filled with tiny spheres of Play-Doh
¼ x ¾ x ¼ inches

 

Untitled, 1992
approximately 3,000 garbage bags layered one inside the other until no more could be added
63 x 28 x 20 inches

 

Untitled (2000)
construction paper
12 x 114 x 120 inches

 

Untitled (1990)
two identically wrinkled sheets of paper
2 parts, each: 11 x 8 ½ inches

 

Zombie (2008)
newspaper and wheat paste
67 x 28 x 96 in. (170.18 x 71.12 x 243.84 cm)

 

Untitled (1994)
self-portrait carved out of a single aspirin

 

Wooden School Chair (1999-2002)
This sculpture started as an everyday wooden school chair. The artist drilled holes in the chair repeatedly until the majority of the chair was removed.

 

Inside Out (2006)
cardboard box, christmas lights, styrofoam and various media from the artist’s studio

 

Untitled (1993)
a ring of plastic drinking cups, using the smallest number of cups possible to close the ring to form a perfect circle

 

Untitled, (1999)
36 dollar bills combined to make one large dollar bill
14 x 35 1/4 inches

 

Untitled (Hair) (2000)
2 15/16 x 1/2 x 1/2 inches

 

Untitled (2005)
a replica of the artist’s shoes made entirely out of paint
Each: 4 x 11 ¼ x 4 ¾ inches

 

Untitled (2002)
a cardboard box covered with Styrofoam balls
23 ¾ x 27 x 27 inches

 

Untitled (kite) (2012)
wood, paint and monofilament
Diameter of base: 41 1/2 inches
Figure: 1 1/8 x 3/8 inches
String: Dimension varies

 

Untitled (White Bread) (2013)
styrofoam and paint
36 x 36 x 3 7/8 inches
(91.44 x 91.44 x 9.84 cm)

 

Big Big Mac (2013)
styrofoam and paint
38 1/2 X 50 inches
(97.79 X 127 cm)

 

Moot (2014)
paint and styrofoam
Guitar: 41 3/8 x 15 5/8 x 4 3/4 inches
Mic: 54 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 10 1/4 inches
Stool: 23 1/4 x 12 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches

 

REAM (2006)
a 500-page flipbook made in 2006

 

Witch (2008)
paper
51 x 39 inches (129.5 x 99.1 cm)

 

Installation video — watch here

Looking Up (2015)
stainless steel
390 x 130 x 90 inches (990.6 x 330.2 x 228.6 cm)

 

Everything (1995)
all of the words in an English language dictionary written on a piece of paper
36 x 36 inches

 

Circle Dance (2010)
a circle of eleven life-sized dancing figures, cast in a highly polished stainless steel

 

Untitled (1999)
Nine Total cereal boxes cut into small squares and combined to make one large box

 

Untitled (1989)
“painting” using Crest Tartar Control Gel Toothpaste

 

Hot balls (1992)
a collection of differently sized and coloured balls stolen by the artist from various stores over a period of six months

 

Yarn Dog (2006)
yarn and wheat paste
23 x 44 1/2 x 24 1/4 inches

 

Dotted Line (2017)
video projection, silent
Dimensions variable

 

Untitled (Foil Guitarist) (2004)
aluminum and wood with colored pencil on paper Tootsie Pop wrapper
70 x 48 x 30 in

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Chris Cochrane, Morning and love to you, Chris! $500 a ticket, in the 70s? How is that possible. When I first lived in NYC in the early 80s and met you, that space was used for ‘White Parties’, and I remember crowds of completely zonked out clones stumbling around in front of it. I’m really surprised that it’s still a theater, or theater-shaped at least. Huh. xoxo, me. ** Uday, The food wasn’t unusual, just unusual for me: donuts, galette. Your legs have my luck should they need it. Could be very glamorising for them? ** _Black_Acrylic, Leeds Town & Country Club is legendary even outside the UK. Actually, so is the Orbit, come to think of it. Nice. ** kenley, Hey! Oh, wow, Dog Whistle is fantastic! I can see the Sepultura thing. That was such fun. You’re the singer, no? Nice speech/rant there in the middle. I’d love to see/hear more. And Searing is really strong too. What a nice, moody video. So, as to which one is your beloved … wild guess: the drummer or the bass player? You guys are such a music power couple. That’s exciting. I hope the world creates a situation where your band can play over here. For the French visa I have, you don’t have to speak French. I don’t speak French, embarrassingly enough. I think you only have to speak French if you want to be a citizen. Awesome, thank you! Now I’m your fan. ** l@rst, Nice: you at that Mudhoney show. I haven’t watched the whole video, but I will. ** Montse, Hi, Montse. Oh, thank you for the festival tips! I’ll go see if any of them are in the submission period. Hopes about FIRE, yeah, although we’ve had quite bad luck with Queer festivals, I guess because ‘RT’ isn’t sexy? Fingers crossed. Thank you, thank you! Love, me. ** Carsten, ‘Yeelen’ sounds exciting, yeah. I’ll see if I can find it on some illegal site or somewhere. Seems possible. Oh, wait, you say it’s on m.vkvideo.ru. Perfect, easy. I’ll watch it as soon as I’m able. Thanks, pal. ** Bill, I have something of a soft spot for those kinds of films too, maybe not as soft as your spot, but still. I went to Club Lower Links. I might even have done a reading there, maybe at the time of Spew, I’m not sure. I saw that Bottom of the Hill is closing. That’s really too bad. I never went, but I kept something of an eye on their programming, which was very impressive. ** Måns BT, Hey, Måns! Oh, I do know that Moodysson film, but embarrassingly I know it from its English title ‘Together’. I did really like it. I want to watch it again. I should do a Moodysson Day if I haven’t already. Hm. ‘Thriller: En Grym Film’ sounds like a serious must watch. I’ll hunt. Crazy. And ‘Fyra Nyanser av Brunt’. I don’t know it all. Thanks a lot, buddy. I’ll catch up. Spain: I’ve only been to Barcelona and Sitges. I liked Barcelona a lot. I was only there for one day, so I don’t really know of anything to suggest, but, if you go there, I think you’ll be at least somewhat enchanted. Montse, one of our commenters and a great friend of mine, lives there. Maybe if she sees this, she’ll have ideas. Sitges is just a kind of touristy beach town, I wouldn’t bother. Very cool everything back your way. ** Alice, Hi. I played an ‘Ape Escape’ film at some point. Yeah, fun. Lispector is wonderful, yeah. Hugo’s blurb is a total keeper. Wow, I’d buy whatever had that phrase adorning it. Thank you, I look forward to reading it. I’m happy to hear you sounding sparkly and determined. xo. ** Lucas, Haha, that was a lot comments, but they’re a gift too. I only just peeked at your Letterboxd list, but it’s stellar. ‘Jerk’! On the post, you can hook me up with the google doc if you like. People send guest-posts that way sometimes, and it works. Thank you! The shift in your perspective is very interesting, and it sounds worth the hours it involved. The bigger the palette, the greater your frontier, you know? ** Eric C., Hi. Oh, March, probably too late for us to try for, but I’ll check the listing and see. Yeah, too late, damn. 2026: Well, Zac and I going to be pretty concentrated on getting ‘RT’ out and about probably through the spring. It’s a lot of work. And I hope to have the script of our new film finished asap so we can start the exhausting process of finding out how we can get it made. That’s kind of the future I’m seeing. I would like to write some fiction, but we’ll see. What’re you planning for? ** Steeqhen, Sad about the Savoy. My memory of Cork is pretty limited. I was basically confined to the area around wherever that conference on my work was held. It was in some kind of theater, but not the kind where bands would play. The mentoring prospect sounds really interesting, obviously, well, depending on the mentor. 35 spots, though, pretty tight. But still. ** Steve, No, haha, I know nothing beyond those pictures. Like I said to Chris, I’m surprised the Fillmore East is still physically extant and not just NYU dorms. I wonder why. ** politekid, Oh, uh, yeah, ‘Southland Tales’ was one of my ‘huh?’s. I actually like ‘Donnie Darko. but only the original theater release version. I tried the director’s cut, and I thought it was pretentious crap. You’ll be back to reading novels in no time. Seriously. This week? I think just ‘RT’ stuff and going to see some films that are playing here and look exciting. Mostly older experimental films. I’m in the middle of trying to work out a London screening for ‘RT’ right now. There are a few prospects, and fingers crossed. ** James Bennett, Hey. The one time I went to Venice my travel-mate friend and I made a pilgrimage to the ‘Death in Venice’ hotel, but it was so disappointing because they didn’t film the interiors there, and it was no great shakes on the inside. ‘Funeral Rites’ is my favorite Genet. I don’t think it trails off, but I haven’t read it in ages. Amazing, that reading technique. Trippy. Tempting. I kept a journal when I was a teenager until my sneaky mother found it and read it and discovered I was a gay boy with a fucked up imagination and sent me to a psychiatrist, and that warded me off ever keep a journal again. For whatever reason, the idea of keeping one is completely uninteresting to me too. Maybe for the same reason I never liked using my biography in m fiction except in ‘I Wished’ and rare strategic situations. ** HaRpEr //, I do like ‘Romy and Michele’. I saw it in the theater when it came out, and I was, like, why is this film not crazy popular? I actually did a post here a million years ago about the Crystal Palace, but it wasn’t very good, so I let it die. But a very interesting thing. ** Malik, Hey! Living in Paris, there are times when I catch myself thinking, ‘I would kill for a Taco Bell’. That’s how rough it is living here as a Mexican food addict. A place where going to a Chipotle constitutes an exciting birthday treat. Have you seen Bakshi’s ‘Mighty Mouse’ reboot cartoons? I don’t remember what age I was when it was on TV, but it blew my mind. My friend the writer Darius James, who wrote a great novel called ‘Negrophobia’ and a terrific book about Blaxploitation films, is obsessed with ‘Coonskin’. He can wax scholarly and poetic about it for hours. Exciting about the new short play and of course the longer one! So happy to hear that! ** Laura, Hi. Where I grew up there was this large area of abandoned mansions situated where they eventually put in a freeway, and I grew up spending endless hours exploring them as a kid and doing drugs in them as a teen. Changed my brain. My TV ‘ban’ is pretty solid. I’ll watch what my LA roommate watches when I’m visiting there and get a taste of some of the trending shows like, oh, ‘Wednesday’ or ‘Succession’ or ‘Adolescence’ and those sorts of things, but I’m never tempted to go any further. That writers group sounds like a complete and total nightmare. Oh my god. I’m waiting for Zac to give me his script feedback, and he promises by sometime next week at the latest. Ideally, that’ll be the final polish, but we’ll see. I’m dying to start getting it ready for a life. ** horatio, Oh, god, you know I just had a horrible flu. Really bad. But the good thing was that antibiotics and steroids murdered it pretty quickly. Don’t hesitate to murder it with those weapons if it starts messing with you too much. ‘Last Night At Lounge Ax’: I’ll definitely watch for that. Thanks! Did you ever see Shellac? If not, needless to say they were crazy good live. Feel better whatever it takes. ** Okay. I’m giving my galerie space over to the super smart and clever and tons of fun artist Tom Friedman today. Please take a stroll and look around. See you tomorrow.

8 Comments

  1. jay

    Hey Dennis. I really like that “Wooden School Chair” and the two identically wrinkled sheets of paper. It’s a bit Levé “Works” in a cool way, like a set of challenging-to-execute but conceptually simple pieces of art. The distorted cereal box is amazing too, I really love that kind of visual distortion, real-world pixelisation is something I always find charming.

    I’m not sure if this message is going to get through, the wifi in my flat’s been fucked up for a few days. I’ve got a ton of stuff to do for work, so I’ve had to do most of that in a coffee shop, which isn’t amazing. It does mean that my flat feels even more disconnected from the world though, which is so pleasant that I may look into making this a permanent fixture, which I realise sounds very irrational/hipstery.

    Oh, and I got my final box of stuff from my childhood bedroom delivered, which has been kind of a relief. There isn’t much of note, it’s mostly emo CDs and YA literature, but I did find an annotated Nabokov book from when I was trying to improve my English. Really funny, and maybe the most bizarre choice of vocabulary booster ever. Anyway, thanks, cool day today. Hopefully this comes through, see ya!

    P.S. hArPeR, any news on your work being published?

    • HaRpEr //

      Hey. Thanks for asking! Well, it’s been a long and arduous journey seeking publication. It’s mostly just been the quest of finding the right publisher, because the book I’ve written is sort of a tough sell. There are some presses I’m hopeful about. I emailed the pdf to Crop Circles (who are into occult stuff) and although their submissions window wasn’t open, they said they were interested by the idea and wanted to take it into consideration anyway. It’s a very slow process but I think I’m learning more about how publishing works along the way, and if I just stay patient and keep my faith in the book, I’ll get there eventually.

  2. _Black_Acrylic

    My YNY colleague and Seattle resident Morgan will try and make it to the Room Temperature screening at the Grand Illusion! Word is it’s a fab venue.

    Major Tom Friedman fan here. Remember back in 2002 I was a wet-behind-the ears 2nd year sculpture student in Dundee going around with that Phaidon book tucked underneath my arm. Ah certainly an innocent, idealistic time.

  3. Malik

    I actually borrowed that Darius James book from the library a couple years ago! That’s Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude, right? Mostly got it for the piece on Coonskin because I was screening it for a small event, and wanted to read some other texts to get more ideas for the discussion. I strangely never realized the connection to its character design and Yoruba sculpture until James pointed it out. Really broke open another level on the film’s genius.

    I know of Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse series, but haven’t seen it. Luckily the whole thing is on YouTube, so I can catch that any time. The catalog that man has is so strange and unique, even more commendable that he’s still going strong as a painter, still sharp and astute to apply his own work to the world at large, from art to politics. I think his director commentary for Wizards is among my favorites.

  4. Bill

    Years ago I first saw Tom Friedman’s construction paper guy splattered on a gallery floor. It’s still one of my most memorable gallery experiences. I’ve only seen one or two other pieces over the years. His work is so diverse, it’s quite likely I saw something and didn’t make the connection. What great ideas.

    Was at the SF Tape Music Festival Friday. The short Yasunao Tone piece was pretty good, and there was a fine Horacio Vaggione piece, written last year when he was 81. I hope I’ll still be making interesting music if/when I get up there.

    Bill

  5. kenley

    hi dennis! i agree with jay, “wooden school chair” is breathtaking. and i liked reading friedman and waters’ convo. i like his provocation that the value or revelatory element of his pieces is inherently derived from the labour that what went into making them. something something marx

    anyhow, you’re so kind to watch those sets! i’m obviously a big fan of you, so huge honour! yes, i sing in dw, and actually im with the guitarist with the glasses. he’s gonna be so mad you didn’t guess him (hehe, jk, he said thanks for checking his band out!!)

    i passed your compliments along! the searing boys are pretty adamant about how they present themselves, with the incandescent bulbs and incense and stuff. i think it’s really fun seeing diy bands cobble together their own vision for lighting and presentation. like sure, its very punk on its face to play as starkly and as visually unappealing as possible, but for searing it creates this great brooding atmosphere that works with what theyre doing. i’m the opposite tho, i like all the lights on when i’m performing. i think i need to feel i’m part of everything and everyone to be fully present, i guess. i’d love to know if you have any thoughts on how you position yourself or your work. the set dressing of it all, if you will.

    good to know re: french. thank god, my french is intermediate and horribly out of practice. and ooo…ok, i think the searing boys are trying to hop over to europe this summer. their vocalist runs his own label so he’s buddy-buddy with some spanish and italian bands who invited them over. i’ll let you know if/when they have shows solidified. actually that leads me to ask, now for my own sake—does a french visa give you schengen travel?

  6. Hugo

    Hey Dennis.

    Saw Alice quoted my blurb. I think it sells her work pretty well. I think Alice does a whole lot with little things. The short story I read from her is quite something actually. She does a whole lot with only one room and a daydream. It reminded me a lot of “The Instruction Manual” by Ashbery, where there is immense detail poured into an extravagant and deeply moving flight of fancy, and its conflict of existence with the deeply mundane realities around us. Really, Alice is a great symbolist poet working in prose. That is how I would praise her work.

    Also, RE: Journals with what you were saying to James – I’ve kept a journal since 2022, and honestly, I sometimes consider giving it up, but then at the same time, I like forcing myself to narrate things I would otherwise consider unremarkable and then having to think of ways for it to be interesting for myself. My natural instinct in prose is to go big and fall straight into the barely coherent and collagelike. But for you, isn’t this blog already kind of a journal? It seems to fulfill the same kind of need.

    Anyway, wish you the best! Many hugs!

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