Possible to be Weary
We’ve seen this happen before. Can you imagine a time when introductions and parting gifts were a necessity. There’s a look at who’s at the door, who’s leaving when it’s time to go. Who came and who went. Something that says “Thinking of You –“
In May 2010, Itza Vilaboy twisted on the technological screw via a blog on the web-based artspace, Light & Wire Gallery. It was the perfect portal to take seriously an inclination based on the thrill of motion, a sailing through space just to get out of bed. This was something to do for fun when enthralled with disappointment. NORA, a novel, is reformatted into a series of letters or “blog posts,” channelling a trans-arts sensibility into the remote actuality of internet address.
Forms are challenged to take on the shape of letter, poem, postcard, post. They are alarming and seem to recreate, as in a sudden memory, the moments when you first received each of these letters (and e-mails and post-cards), messages of such flaunting, guileless presentation, of such unapologetically encroaching intimacy that they present themselves as a demand. You cannot read them without a surprised, possibly guilty flush, as though you had accidentally stumbled upon your own, forgotten cache of letters, and the past, somehow completely, maybe by turns lost or obscured, as if surfeit was stylish, has just pounced upon you and asserted its rights. Here, a tug. There, a caress. A “here I am, what are you going to do about it”, and induce, in equal or varying portions, panic and delight. Simultaneously, while these writings attack with an odd sense of renewed immediacy, this immediacy is tempered by a structure of elision or amnesia. A notion of the contemporary along the lines of the virtual haunted by a fey “perhaps”.
You find yourself in the position of the addressees and the demand felt in these letters is also a demand for understanding and what taking action might mean. Set down in the middle of the relationship, to find yourself sifting through these addresses, trying to figure out what happened, what is happening, who are they, who are they to each other, who are they to me, who do they think I am, and most importantly, how do I answer?
Itza is taking up residence at Zgpress where she will continue to work on NORA as well as upload other works of fiction, essays, art and book reviews. A growing archive of the specifically desirable, not generically available.
Itza Vilaboy is a writer currently living in San Diego. She studied at UC Berkeley (English Literature & Art History) and at Art Center College of Design (Art Theory and Criticism).
THIS IS NOT AN INTRODUCTION
I —
You worry me sometimes.
It freaks me out and elicits a kind of envy because I am an only child and we, only children, often dream of incest.
A menage a trois for one.
The cemetery, the server, the motherboard and all these words shooting out from the tombs like wriggling bits of discarded dental floss beneath the day-glo stucco. I guess that, sometimes, a penis is just a cigar or a fiber optic simulation of a receiving station dressed as a mausoleum.
–
We exist to one another as a bouquet of threads.
Read me.
Because if all these monologues are mere soliloquy, if I build a labyrinth out of dental floss and you never drag your pencil through it, if you find me dead in my bed, the emails on my apple will write my narrative.
–
Email Me
–
— James Krone, Berlin
XCVI
To A Passer-By
Amid the deafening traffic of the town,
Tall, slender, in deep mourning, with majesty,
A woman passed, raising, with dignity
In her poised hand, the flounces of her gown;
Graceful, noble, with a statue’s form.
And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills,
From her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm,
The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.
A flash . . . then night! — O lovely fugitive,
I am suddenly reborn from your swift glance;
Shall I never see you till eternity?
Somewhere, far off! too late! never, perchance!
Neither knows where the other goes or lives;
We might have loved, and you knew this might be!
“I see very well, Messieurs,”….,”that after having perverted you it is my responsibility to restore you to reason, and to do so I am going to resume my story without waiting for your command.”