My apologies for the delay, I assure you it's digital. I just made a phase shift transition to the Norwegian paradigm. I'm writing to you from a candle-lit gray cloud interior seamlessly melding with the neutral atmosphere ebbing outside the window. It feels strange and familiar to be back on Nordic soil, more like home than home was, but with a whole influx of memories and associations that I had neatly left behind for sake of overstuffed baggage. I'm here to be with my girlfriend, a Norwegian that I became entangled with on a chance encounter in Seyðisfjörður, in the very "living" room where you and I met in fact. She's working on a practice-based thesis concerned with reconciling a highly intuitive and idiosyncratic experience of memory with a handicraft textile manufacturing practice and that combination has proved to be quite stimulating to my own flickering cogito. We met the week following my 6 months as artist/teacher-in-residence at LungA which felt like a warm bath of on my mind, coagulating the nerve endings of my mind into a brine of effluvial questions and buoyant affectations. The school conversations cracked me open, partially against my will but all the better in the wider scope, and this beautiful woman swooped in to impregnate my psyche with the uniquely feminine inquisition that I had been longing for, so I was all game for the adventure and still seem to be, much to my own surprise. Then I built a house with a gang of sensitive artsy Danish guys, some of whom you know well. Exploring the intimate inside of a decomposing Icelandic barn built from an old English cargo ship and then touching ever centimeter of its corpus - and even having it penetrate my own, shards of ancient trees becoming lodged in my eye and filling the cracks of my wounds - for a short time I was bonded to a place and a purpose that I could not have anticipated. The house is fucking beautiful, perhaps you've seen pictures. Ah yes, and before that, and before meeting the woman, but after the school carnival, I was able to enact my private project in public view. I have been working on an "opera" since January... a catch-all term, certainly a metaphor but perhaps more-than, which encapsulates all my various activities of writing and composing and diagramming and processing of conceptualizings and musings on various singularizings of subjectivies, or something like that. Yeah, we put on a performance in the theater in Seydis and it was wild, this crazy eyed fire tongued Swedish serpent on a haphazard child-sized drumset cooing animal sounds to his Norwegian counterpart liking the reeds of his saxophone as he incants proto-syllabic consonants through the brass bellows, and some American friends there too, being all disgruntled and arrogant in their own genius in their own way, with me at the center spitting into a microphone some of those indecipherable alliterations that I like to write. When it was happening it felt strangely professional. When it was over it felt unbelievably fresh. When I was mixing the recordings and listening back to them while walking weeks later it seemed as though we were evoking many important nodes of the network of history. Then I hated it, and everyone involved. Then I came around full circle to realize (or remember perhaps) that it was only a false start, a test which must be appreciated through its useful failures more so than any delusion of successfully completing a project with no articulable genesis. After Iceland, months later, when I return to the desert of the real a.k.a. Umerica and began the next stage of the research, the entire project shifted in energetico-temporal-spatio dynamic territory, transmogrifying into a strange object of consideration, which I am currently ruminating over and deciding out to handle. I think I'm still writing an opera, of sorts, or of sorting, but not how I thought I was. Since then I read Zizek's Parallax View, Barthe's The Neutral, and three books by Manuel DeLanda, yeah then I got back into Derrida's Of Grammatology for a minute before moving on to Levi-Stauss's The Raw and the Cooked. Needless to say all that done cluster fucked me real good, massaging some boundaries and dissolving others about who I am and how I articulate my own ontology and what pragmatic purpose one might purport to wield. I'm about to finish Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies which might be the most important book that I can remember reading since Anti-Oedipus and in some ways even more important than that... it's a diagram, a schematic, outlining in excruciating technical detail how to construct a cerebral technology to transverse the chasms expanding between the islands of disciplinary categories that prevent philosopher-physicists from realizing the multiplicity/modalities of oscillating, scaling, reverberating mind. Shit be fucked uuuuuuuup and I love it. Highly recommended. I never read What is Philosophy but have been meaning to for some time so I went and picked it up from the library yesterday. All those books make me want to go back to school, do some phDing maybe, that European Graduate School keeps haunting me alongside the living nightmarish possibility of pursuing a doctorate in "art practice" instead. I know I don't want to go to school in the states, that's for goddamn sure, mostly. Applications are due at the end of the month and I'm sitting curious to see if I'll go through with it or not. When I was in New Mexico - spent the last 3 months there sucking off the parental teat while staring blankly at the ceiling wondering "am I living, am I working, am I making art?" - I collected hours of footage reminiscent of those quiet slow landscape scans of Terrence Mallick complete with whispered monologue narration. I recorded a bunch of music too, mostly heavy drone and algorithmic gymnastics on the solo electric guitar, and I think they go together somehow. Oh yeah, and I've been recording conversations. It started with me going on long walks up in the mountains of the fjord, speaking out loud simply as a way of externalizing the voices in my head and realizing that they needed to be recorded so that I could decipher their apparent brilliance. Then, yes, of course, I need to activate that supposed insight in relation to others or else it's just schizo babble... better to be a schizophrenic out for a walk than a neurotic on the psychologists sofa right right? I remembered some things about Aleister Crowley's magic of psychic intention, Alfred Jarry's autodictation of public conversations as a kind of signal-to-noise mechanical writing technology hybrid of the mind and the pen like a proto-cyborgian telegraph transcribing the spherics of the noosphere, oh yeah and that little ditty about Jacob Boheme hearing voices in the soap bubbles and seeing alien glyphs in the slime of the human goo that collected on the rocks and how he wrote it all down as a transcendent vision of sublime knowledge far surpassing the humdrum banter of the plebes of his day, and I thought "hmmm am I having a vision or am I a visionary or do I only see the two feet in front of me and so who is leading who?" Yeah so I started engaging, in conversation and in clandestine subterfuge, small careful movements of distraction, leading my mother's gaze across the table as I ash my cigarettes with the right hand and activate the tape recorder with the left, invisibly placing it down in the mists of plain view before asking some pertinent question to see if she would answer honestly. The good side is that I became much closer to my mother and articulated the insurmountable distance between my father's obstinate stance on things. The bad thing is that I have all these goddamn hours of goddamn recordings that I have to goddamn deal with now, but I suppose that's the point. I'm gonna spend the month reviewing, editing, attempting to form a third mind between the self that once was and the self that is currently, supposedly. Editing is violent, rigorous, destructive, and shit it is satisfying. It feels pretty good to switch gears to often and so drastically. I think that's part of why the girlfriend dialogues are working out too: it's a real pleasure to hear her speak so matter-of-factly about her hyper-dimensional affect, how she feels her way through the world emphasizing the tactile sense in a sea of echoes, memory without so much nostalgia, as a kind of baseline to my own demented rationalizing wormhole. Oh yeah ­­­­___ is here too, just arrived today to smash faces with his Norwegian counterpart, a very fine human that was my student at Lunga. I'm gonna make contact to absorb a little bit of Solveig's savant-genius and try to record some of ___'s progressive destruction as grist for my mill, for this opera thing, or is it just life? Or labor? I can never tell anymore. I'm glad to hear about your status. What are you studying by the way? Philosophy? Linguistics? What kind of degree? What about your book, was it published? I let the ball drop with my art book, just never really pursued options and didn't want to pay for self-publishing, but I often think about publishing-as-practice. I want to make more books too. I need to find a publisher, and a record label, and gallery representation, and a benefactor. Anyways, tally ho and keep in touch. I'll be here for some months with no job, just focusing on my own crazy spice mix. After that I dunno. Cheers, and remember to remember!