Reports from Storage

There’s something about the strange travels/travails of the commodity in this  Rauschenberg anecdote quoted below. Before the assemblage can be worth scads of money, it has to be first worth nothing, or more precisely, less than nothing. Not the nothing that’s worth nothing, but the nothing that’s not:
[Once he walked 30 blocks uptown with one of his so-called black paintings - canvases with expressionist black brush strokes that incorporated odd bits of detritus - and tried to sell it to a rich collector for $15. "I won't say who," Mr. Rauchenberg said impishly.
"She said she couldn't buy it so cheap," he continued. "I almost gave it to her, at the thought of walking another 30 blocks home with the painting. But I thought, well, if she couldn't afford to pay so little for it, she certainly couldn't afford to take it for nothing." ]
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Noah’s second birthday on Friday. He’s still singing happy birthday to himself, and half-expecting a second round of presents. Yesterday, in the storm, the lights went off at Anna’s parents house. When they came back on, Noah yelled: party time! Pictures to follow. _______________
Relieved to have survived the semester, and to have finished my essay on Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day and Vito Acconci, the Situationist International and De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life—one of the most arduous and tricky pieces of critical writing I’ve ever done. The poem has such speed and momentum that any kind of attempt to break off a passage to work with is like wading into a fast, cold creek.  Plus, I was really outside of my ken--trying to expand it, rather--with the Acconci.
If anybody’s interested in reading it, I’d appreciate the feedback.
Reading Jalal Toufic’s Distracted (a copy of which Lyn kindly gave me). I’ve tried in the past to abuse and misquote the copyright clause in the front matter of books, but now I see it’s already been done about as well as one can. Hilarious, and absolutely true:
“Some parts of this book can be created by others and hence may be produced by them without permissions from the author and the publisher. No part of this book may be paraphrased in any form or by any means.”
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Rainy, rainy here. An Elmo doll facedown in a puddle in the courtyard. But this Diplo remix of Beck’s Guero (on the album called Guerolito) is pretty great.