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Photo: Bob Perelman
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… sound of street sweeper accompanying sight of school bus traveling down Ninth Avenue.
Woman waiting, man entering right; woman exiting left.
Brecht: men rowing, side-by-side.
Man reading on bench removes himself to next bench, looks back at bench as if to explain that the sun, not my presence, caused his move.
Side-by-side.
Or that I had wanted to compare Barrett Watten’s “Three” with Brecht’s “Conversations Rowing” (trans. Edwin Morgan) but had not the time to do so.
End.
Or that non-identity offers an alternative to the reciprocity with which Brecht’s “Conversations Rowing” endows a type.
What is China?
If (Watten’s) “Footnote to Tibet” is structuralist, “China” reserves a sociolect. Perelman’s
“China’s” China is orientalist even to itself, in paper stock and typeface that make albums arcades of self-presentation.
Not, non-, un-being, render states incommensurable.
China stares at a wall.
End.
American ending: Elderly woman wheeling shopping cart sits down.
She wears sunglasses, the frames of which construct 2-0-0-9.
… sits down, gets up, walks away.
Marjorie Welish
Marjorie Welish is the author of Isle of the Signatories (Coffee House Press, 2008). Her most recent work is Oaths? Questions? (Granary Books, 2009): a limited-edition constructed book with James Siena — both authors doing art and text. Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Foundation, 2003) is a book from a conference http://slought.org/content/11008/ that includes Bob Perelman’s interview with Marjorie Welish.