Mini Ching by Sheila Heti/Ted Mineo (2013)

Mini Ching.

Excerpt.

2. GRACE (#22)

There are times when the world appears perfectly balanced. Heaven and earth, top and bottom, are in harmony, and surface and depth are aligned. This state of grace is delicate, fragile and transitory. It is not a state one can remain in for long. It implies the beauty of ornament and surfaces. So make this a time when you focus on smaller things. Relish the perfection of everything natural. Find and appreciate tranquillity. Be still. This is not a time to contemplate or make far-reaching decisions.

When you make the transition from this momentary place, how should you proceed?

In preparation for any journey, great or small, one must choose the right clothes to wear on the journey. You must pay attention to your hair, your shoes, your suitcase, everything you are bringing. Any journey to a new place must be set out for in the proper manner, a manner that will show esteem for the new environment, and one’s self in that new place. There is no good in setting off for a new country wearing tennis shoes and pyjamas. First, consider where you are going, then undertake the appropriate rites. The quality of care you give to the smallest details reveals a lot about you, and affects where you end up. So set yourself right before you set off. Set your home right, and put things in their proper places. These small arrangements and decisions are the seeds of significance. They foretell how you will be received in the new land, and what the new land will be. Show respect in all aspects of your being, even the tiniest. Show respect for the place you are entering – which is always the future. Then you will be ushered forth smoothly, not led toward an undesirable realm against your dreams.

Read Every Page of Brillantine, Sheila Heti's Lost Zine

Source.

The Art Fairy Tale

A Fairy Tale - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Two Free Men - Sheila Heti

The King of the Golden River - John Ruskin

Frauds on the Fairies - Charles Dickens's  (1853)

How Should a Person Be, Teenager Hamlet and Don’t Go to School: MFA, Oct. 14, 2010

Granted, it is a bit much to be cataloging articles that include the mention of one's own projects. But it was bound to happen: my theoretical concerns have a lot to do with what's happening in a space beyond these reassuringly (to me) static, impersonal texts. Carl Wilson's most excellent article on being "life-sampled." Of critical interest: relationships as units of exchange.

Source.

"There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going. More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else."

Tonight, in a couple of hours, three of my closest friends are holding a launch party for the results of their three respective long-term projects, a novel and a movie and an album.

They all examine the relationship of life to art, using the people and places right around them as their subjects and sources. (It’s less obvious with the album, but we tend to forget that almost always when a band plays, we’re listening to a set of dynamic relationships in space; the “community band” element of Tomboyfriend emphasizes that.) They also served as each others’ characters and aides-de-camp.

The launch party takes place in a bar basically across the street from the apartment where I lived in the years they worked on their projects. And that seems apt. I was a participant too: I played a plump, pasty-skinned, city-slickened swamp ghost in the play-within-the-movie, the “ex-husband” around the peripheries of the action of the novel, and the music critic doing what he can do for friends-within-a-band. But mostly I was in another room, at middle distance, framed by a window, finishing my own project, my own book about art and life, which likewise involved them, though mostly less visibly. I almost wish I hadn’t finished it so long ago so I could be launching it tonight too. Instead, I marked the occasion by moving out of that apartment.

There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going.

More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else. Most of us aren’t 1970s funk musicians so we’re probably more accustomed to being on the other side. We may be accustomed to being linked or quoted in social media, but being sampled is a more intense sense of self-displacement. To adapt to your life being sampled may be a 21st-century necessity.

That it’s a little harder than you expect gives you sympathy for some of those older artists who take the copyright issue so much more personally than the scope of the financial issues involved. There’s the nightmare vision of being disassembled and reassembled atom by atom in a Star Trek transporter, but put back together in an utterly wrong order. (See also Cronenberg’s The Fly.) Or the subtler nightmare of being reassembled perfectly and yet no longer being “right.” Yet it is also deeply meditative, allowing oneself to be copied, mistranslated: When you think, “Wait, that’s no longer myself,” the next natural step is to wonder whether it was yourself to begin with and whether there is such an animal as yourself or whether you would recognize it if you met it.

So sweetly intoxicating to dare to think not, especially when a crowd of people are daring it with you (out of bravado, perhaps, too proud to be the one to say no, but it doesn’t really matter why, only that you did). It’s becoming the done thing, perhaps, in commercial and fame-economy culture to look at reality as a liquid commodity, worth more in exchange than in savings. But when what you’re buying with it is a dispersal rather than a magnification of self, it seems different enough to matter, which may be as far away from a dominant paradigm as one is usually able to get.

I Dream of Barack, I Dream of Hillary

Shela Heti's contribution as a foreign correspondent (blogger) to the 2008 Democratic Primaries was to catalog the dreams people had of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or both. Interesting for more reasons than can be said here, but a few things I enjoy in reviewing her collection of testimonies:

If one needed corroboration that pre-conscious symbols inform such computational things as voting, here is a fresh delicious whopper for you.

Also, a lovely testament to dreams. No matter how much has been said about them, it is hard to get the final word on just how odd, rich and perfect they are.

I Dream of Barack
I Dream of Hillary

Sample:

126. Female Nanny From New England

In the dream, I am sitting in one of the front pews of a church. The entire congregation is expectant, waiting for something to happen. Then Hillary emerges in front of the pulpit. She is wearing a beautiful purple robe and is looking very queenly and goddess-like. An entourage of smiling people surround her and place a glittering, radiant crown on her head.
  
95. Librarian At A Public School In New York City  

I met Barack in the West Village while he was campaigning. We made out all over the city and he was a very good kisser. His campaign staff, who were totally unphased by this, prevented Michelle and the media from finding out. Turns out Obama was quite the ladies' man. Everywhere we went, women flirted with him openly and thanked him for past good times. I was so thrilled to be with him, I didn't even feel jealous, just lucky to have had him for a day and possibly as president in the near future.