A Handmade Museum, Brenda Coultas (2003)

Prose sequence "The Bowery Project" -- close observation, refusal to organize

"thought it would come out in the writing like dreams or nightmares, it would manifest and that writing ita ll down was important if just to say here's a document" (diff bw refusal to organize and actual lack of organization)

documentary process, investigation

materials/substance of documentation is trash from Bowery

first/secondhand stories, somewhat like found object but not

chairs, taking up space, making private a public space

p. 24 ("someone built a lean-to from mattresses...someone collected the brass numbers..."

Am I real if nobody sees or represents me

"The transmigration of objects"

Detachment of assumed objectivity; deflects the pain of making sense of cruelty and universal indifference

world of painful deprivation, bodily abuse and spiritual degradation

* she veers back and forth between desire and disgust of the objects---there's sometimes a reason things get abandoned

Counter existential and physical pain through the imagination

[pain's lack of physicality in the world--crucial to its unique power to obliterate speech]

--Coultas demonstrates that pain does leave physical markers tied to the imagination

Historic preservation, but her fascination with material objects is reminiscent of the Old Testament's focus on multiplicity: genesis with its creation of all objects, generations of tribes, etc., create a metatext for our culture that prizes the effusion of material objects.

Bounty is good.

Bounty of discards.

"but still I stock things up" / "hope that through accumulation they'll form a pattern out of chaos"

"please, I am intentionally writing this for you"

"although the garbage was unremarkable"

"and if ever I would leave, it would be for nature. Nature would have to make up for what I'd lose in culture"

"although there is nature in this city"

"there were the things I wish I'd found" "it was the dead I wished I could find on this mythological stretch of skid row. Oh, that and a tin of marbles."

"got down close trying to decipher this knot of stuff, but didn't try to remove any of it."

wasn't interested in own dumpster--

"how primitive teeth are"

LIVING FULL VIEW OF THE PUBLIC, BUT INVISIBLE

haunting

a flowering vacancy

digs at hollow places in her landscapes

9/11--"black boxes"

Also Rural indiana--contrast of dark and light--moves from frantic snapshot

juxtaposition of nature and machine