On a mobile phone, or at least my mobile phone, these curious characters don\u2019t show up. Shy or resistant, maybe, to the indulgences of translation across space. I think Miller probably welcomes this error, though, given the miscellaneous generosity of Groceries, its channeling of the aleatoric processes of both human consciousness and machine learning, the text\u2019s lesson (hidden even from its author) that each time one enters the portal of Groceries, something will have changed.<\/p>\n
As I write this, I admire a similar rectangular box, which has been on my toolbar for an undetermined stretch of time. One day it wasn\u2019t there; then it was. Now it stays put, a box bearing a question mark, an interrogatory come-on. If I let my cursor linger on the hooked, downward-curving line, the dot underneath, a file name appears: \u201ccampanioni_loveyou.jpg\u201d\u2014whose title makes me feel sentimental but also mystified. Am I its unwitting author, or the memento\u2019s beloved subject? I\u2019ve attached meaning to this rectangular box\u2014this file that is likely corrupted and absolutely unreadable by the machine meant to store it. Because of its personalized tag\u2014its declaration of love, the indeterminacy of authorship\u2014I can\u2019t bring myself to send the glitched icon to the trash bin. What if, after all, one day my MacBook undergoes an update, and the question mark intervening in the stream of apps on my toolbar suddenly becomes legible to its user? The box could be another window, through which a whole world, a different world, might appear. This, too, I want to assert, is Miller\u2019s project.<\/p>\n
In the shoreline aisles of Groceries, sometimes the boxes are representations of objects referenced in the text, copies of other copies\u2014embroidered flowers, for instance. Other times, the boxes represent redacted details, omitted punchlines to so-called \u201csayings,\u201d or reenactments of conversations\u2014like those occurring on phone calls\u2014barely audible off-screen. The text\u2019s playful, elfin, nesting-doll-meets-Mad-Libs approach might best be summarized in its speaker\u2019s matter-of-fact acknowledgment: \u201con earth there is a photograph of earth \/ and a photograph of jupiter and a photograph \/ of tonsilitis. it feels like a big inhale.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pages later, Miller\u2019s speaker cites their erstwhile art instructor to celebrate the abandonment of control, linking writing with drawing, the experimental landscape of an essay with an open-ended visual field:<\/p>\n
just go crazy, said my second-grade art teacher
handing me construction paper, glue.
just go crazy, I say now to the flower,
engulfed as I was by her lesson. her lesson to
say more plainly the visual field. to draw to
the lowermost quadrant of the paper.
to draw upon my limits like ribbons of gas,
to \u201cmake these limits assets\u201d
(to write about them in essays).
to see the ending from both sides,
so profound was my derailment.<\/p>\n
This childhood discovery\u2014\u201cto see the ending from both sides\u201d\u2014recalls Stein\u2019s own painterly approach to writing, her Cubist intervention in the visual\/verbal field of words that feels both recreational and deeply private; Groceries, too, coheres through constant flux, accumulating bagged, blurred aura with the intimacy of an inside joke. Miller\u2019s rich simplicity of language paired with the cerebral thoughtfulness of their prose\u2014and the aerobics of repetition and linguistic inversion\u2014calls to mind Stein, of course, and in particular her propulsive exercises of Lifting Belly and Tender Buttons, but also contemporary poets like Holly Melgard, Chelsey Minnis, Kendra Sullivan, and Courtney Bush. Miller\u2019s speaker shifts from extolling the virtues of Microsoft Word to ruminating on the meaning and reason for \u201cdaylight savings time\u201d to, a page later, engaging the fungible lyrical \u201cit\u201d\u2014not I\u2014in an itemized sequence of speculative what ifs:<\/p>\n
if it were a cup of lemonade I would not ask for it.
[\u2026]
if I could say it could I not also sit in it.
if I could see it. could
make it move with my eyes.
or if it grew sideways.
if I could only go near it.<\/p>\n
This progression, from denial or distance to desire and proximity, anticipated touch, the haptic glance, is both episodic and epiphanic. Groceries, like any thing or series of things whose sustenance is owed to their organization and convocation, is interested in pursuing desire as a mode of receptivity and exchange that moves beyond value and consummation. Turning the text\u2019s pages gives readers the experience of overhearing or hearing in passing, details that don\u2019t necessarily add up to a whole but that relate the fragment\u2019s capacity to become its own story. Anything can be anything else\u2014as evidenced by the rectangular variables speckling almost every page\u2014because a story, Groceries reminds us, is also organic, a living thing, a life that doesn\u2019t stop, resistant to the scope of the alphabetical text that here houses it. After all, as Miller\u2019s speaker admits in the penultimate page of their book, \u201cI found the truth took too much time. \/ a story was much simpler to convey.\u201d This sequence, appearing as it does toward the very end, could double as a kind of artistic statement about Groceries\u2019s aspirations as a whole, or at least Miller\u2019s roundabout methodology of making it: \u201cI sidestep everything. \/ I live like an afternoon always.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a mobile phone, or at least my mobile phone, these curious characters don\u2019t show up. Shy or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-335969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}