Its not the pale moon that excites me9/21/2023 ![]() ![]() At first, never without pen and paper and, later, never without her little tape recorders." "Did the Chronicle take its present shape because Monica reached these conclusions? Or is the Chronicle simply the inevitable result of Monica's dedication to an impossible task/a surprising pleasure/a task and pleasure that became an addiction: the Chronicle the true narrative of her existence on Earth: what interests her, what she paid attention to in what crossed her path. "Monica or the Chronicle asks herself/itself (when? when exactly?) another question: ![]() In the same way, it seems to Monica, what's celebrated as 'imagination' seems to have its gaze aimed above the infinite surface of the world. What others lazily call 'realism' just another set of conventions that pays no attention to the impossibly multiple reality occurring around and through the tightly-focused groove it's trekking through. The true way stories exist, open to chance, interrupted by accident, porous, intruded on, distracted, oddly magnetic, attracted to what's ambient around them, the overheard and the-lives-of-others always leaking into what we thought was the story. What's seen and chronicled out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye. Events with at least one thing in common are attracted to one another in a material way, creating little clusters that Monica's always enjoyed cataloguing. Magnetic clustering of stories: 'the magnetic principle' of chronicling over panoramic duration. Stories crossing uninvited through stories on their way to something else. Stories in other stories and other stories in that. It's the natural way of the never-ending horizontal narration that Monica loves. And, while the first digression from the original story is still being chronicled, another digression veers off from that. ![]() In reality, as soon as a story begins to get told a digression veers off from it. That is: what's ordinarily meant by the word 'story' is itself a fiction. "Without knowing why - why exactly - Monica or the Chronicle asks herself/itself: at what point she (or it) realized that there is no story. Monica’s Chronicle, endless sketchbook drawn directly from life yet a model of another idea of fiction and the source of much of Ascher/Straus’s work (most obviously ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party), can be read here in installments as it’s being edited.Īn excerpt from later in MONICA'S CHRONICLE that may be helpful in understanding how central it is to our lifetime of work, particularly for Sheila Ascher's life and work: ![]()
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