r.i.p. david berman

It’s so hard watching them continue to fall . . .

Oh Where

by David Berman

Where did you go, my dear, my day;
Where, oh where, did you go?
To market, to maker of market, to say
Too much of the little I know.

Where did you go, my dear, my year;
Why did you flee from me?
I went from here to there to here
Loitering breathlessly.

Where did you go, my life, my own,
Decades gone in a wink?
Some things are better left unknown
Some thoughts too thick to think.

‘It is autumn and my camouflage is dying . . .’

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by sean on August 8, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in david berman, music, poetry, silver jews

Posted by sean on August 8, 2019

https://sd-stewart.com/2019/08/08/r-i-p-david-berman/

ursula k. le guin documentary

Ursula K. Le Guin

Streaming free during August on PBS.org.

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by sean on August 6, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in film, ursula k. le guin, writers

Posted by sean on August 6, 2019

https://sd-stewart.com/2019/08/06/ursula-k-le-guin-documentary/

new print publications

These are limited print editions of projects originally serialized online.

Bunker Diaries is a fictional journal kept by an unnamed instructor while teaching a cadre of listless trainees in a desert bunker. It was serialized here in Fall 2012 and has been lightly revised for this print edition. It is no longer available online.

Inner Harbor Field Reports is a compendium of observations made during lunchtime walks around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor between 2014 and 2019 (heavier on the early years of that range). It began as notes embedded in rambling blog entries (which is why this print edition seems like it starts in the middle of something, but trust me, you’re not missing out on any needed context). Eventually I decided to streamline it into pure observational bliss and moved it over to Tumblr. I had a good run there, until Tumblr inexplicably extended the long arm of censorship and shut down my site. Attempts at appeal failed and as my interest was already waning, I decided to end it there.

I enjoyed this project while it lasted, though, and so I thought it would be cool to memorialize it with this print edition. The text remains largely untouched, with only minimal corrections and revisions. The ending is somewhat abrupt, much like the beginning, closing on a sole entry from 2019. Although there is a postscript explaining the genesis of the project, the lack of contextual intro and outro is purposeful, for the intent of this document is only to offer a narrow slice of the ongoing continuum that is life at the Inner Harbor.

Available from the following independent bookstores:

Atomic Books: Bunker Diaries | Inner Harbor Field Reports

Quimby’s: Bunker Diaries | ~~Inner Harbor Field Reports~~

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by sean on May 29, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in bunker diaries, fiction, inner harbor field reports, writing, zines

Posted by sean on May 29, 2019

https://sd-stewart.com/2019/05/29/new-print-publications/

iron triangle

Iron Triangle
dir. Nate Dorr & Maya Edelman
2018, 16min, digital video.

Iron Triangle from Nate Dorr on Vimeo.

A vibrant industrial neighborhood thriving despite city neglect. Immigrant workers, documented and undocumented. A city plan for massive redevelopment: malls, business centers, hotels, condos. Self-serving developers. Eminent domain. A destruction. A limbo. A renewal?

Willets Point is an industrial wedge of northeast Queens consisting for most of the last 70 years of almost entirely autobody shops and scrap yards. Despite city neglect, pitted streets, and a complete lack of storm drains that cause frequent flooding, as of 2006, the neighborhood provided the livelihoods for 1400 to 1800 people, mostly immigrants, many undocumented. In 2007, the City of New York set in motion a major redevelopment plan which would entail displacing nearly all existing businesses in favor of malls, conference centers, and hotels, and over the last decade much of the neighborhood has been bought out and razed. Blocked as an improper commercial use of public land by the New York court system, part of the area continues on, while much has been left as concrete desolation, its future uncertain.

This film, shot spanning the major “urban renewal” operations from 2014 to 2017, documents the conversion of a vibrant, singular small business district into a wasteland, and envisions a different kind of renewal unlikely to be allowed by developers and city officials.

Made possible in part by a residency with Chance Ecologies.

[best viewed at full screen with volume on]

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by sean on April 11, 2019 • Video • Permalink

Posted in city life, film, urban nature

Posted by sean on April 11, 2019

https://sd-stewart.com/2019/04/11/iron-triangle/

the nocturnes – aokigahara

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by sean on April 9, 2019 • Video • Permalink

Posted in emma ruth rundle, music, the nocturnes

Posted by sean on April 9, 2019

https://sd-stewart.com/2019/04/09/the-nocturnes-aokigahara/

excerpt from alejandra pizarnik’s diary

June 1, 1965 – Buenos Aires

The open walls, the walls have been beaten, the cracks, the fissures, the holes – who will close them up? This question, easy to formulate, is impossible to answer. The self in the form of the open slated shutters of a house in children’s stories. Those same shutters, closed, would form a green heart with small hearts which are crevices through which the air passes. But they cannot be closed. Or if they are closed, then something happens to the crevices, since the air doesn’t pass through them and the dwellers of the little house in the forest die asphyxiated. No. No one suffocates since they can’t be closed. Rather they’re injured, injured but not dead, although they would very much like to be dead; they are injured by the sharp wind. I don’t know if it’s because of the wind or because bandits have entered and injured them, stripped them of everything, and abandoned them to their bad luck. They dream of the green heart and of small hearts through which the air was coming. At the beginning it had to be like this. They were not going to be spared sorrows but those sorrows were going to be different from this one, so poor and so humiliating. It is not terrible to suffer but only to suffer for humiliating causes, since this robs all the beauty from the ceremony of suffering which, at first, didn’t differ from the other ceremonies.

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by sean on April 2, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in alejandra pizarnik

Posted by sean on April 2, 2019

https://sd-stewart.com/2019/04/02/excerpt-from-alejandra-pizarniks-diary-2/

the return of gil orlovitz

Rick Schober at Tough Poets Press continues his admirable efforts to introduce the work of Gil Orlovitz to a new contemporary audience. He previously raised funds via Kickstarter to publish a collection of Orlovitz’s stories, poems, and essays. With this latest campaign, he hopes to raise enough capital to reprint Orlovitz’s long out-of-print novel Ice Never F. ~~As of this writing the project is over a third of the way funded, but it still needs support.~~ [Update: Now fully backed and then some!] This book is virtually impossible to find on the used market, so Tough Poets Press is doing a valuable service to the many readers who in recent years have become interested in Orlovitz’s contributions to avant-garde writing in the 1960s. Now is your chance to be part of experimental literary history! Help fund the book’s publication and your name will appear in the Acknowledgments. More important than that, though, you will be assisting in the resurrection of a true American original writer.

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by sean on February 9, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in books, gil orlovitz, writers

Posted by sean on February 9, 2019

https://sd-stewart.com/2019/02/09/the-return-of-gil-orlovitz/

the phantasmagoria of the mist

Unconsciously, but still of free will, he had preferred the splendour and the gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to dwell in vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city doomed from ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to a gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business would have been more suitable and more practical, that he had promised what he could never perform. Even as he struggled to beat back the phantasmagoria of the mist, and resolved that he would no longer make all the streets a stage of apparitions; he hardly realised what he had done, or that the ghosts he had called might depart and return again.

—Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

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by sean on February 8, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in arthur machen, city life, creativity, employment, melancholia, mist, work, writers, writing

Posted by sean on February 8, 2019

https://sd-stewart.com/2019/02/08/the-phantasmagoria-of-the-mist/

thoughtworm in the library of congress

I recently discovered that an issue of my old zine Thoughtworm is now held by the Library of Congress. Apparently, artist and writer Matt Dembicki, whose comics I dimly remember writing a review of long ago, donated his collection to the library in 2016, and Thoughtworm #11 was included in it. This issue has particular significance to me, as it was the first one I created a linocut for in order to print the covers. Linocut would become my cover design method of choice for the remaining issues of the zine. I also later had the linocut design, which depicts my favorite tree, the American Sycamore, tattooed on my left arm. I made a few extra prints of this one, too, and distributed them to friends. While Thoughtworm has made it into quite a number of public and university libraries over the years, I never thought it would end up in the Library of Congress. Pretty cool.