The Amerika Gedenkbibliothek is my favourite library in town. I hang out there a lot. You can take your coffee to your working table, how cool is that! And now there's an action to keep the library also open on Sundays. For the occasion I'm giving the workshop Keep it short! about short format writing and reading, each Sunday in October at 3pm (come by!). During the first session we read a few of Maggie Nelson's 240 propositions on the color of blue in Bluets. We also did some finger exercises in shortness like the surrealist game Cadaver Exquis (exquisite corpse, in which you can se only the sentence of what the previous person wrote). It came out quite poetic. The first sentence we picked randomly from Maggie Nelson's Bluets:
We can not read the darkness.
We can only read the light...
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope for the unseen.
Sitting on a blue chair, she could see through her living room curtains, up into the morning’s gray-blue sky,
with a faint smell of smoke rising from the carpark below
just to cover the smell of dope.
Burn it all down
and start all over, not from A, from À
and all of what A can be. A is never there, really, it’s
only on a badge of an A-team member
It’s always good to have the option B.