Thinking about a question I was asked at my lecture, I forget the exact phrasing, but I parsed it as 'Do you think that there is a univeralizable metonymic relationship between Massachusetts and the United States generally?' I said that I didn't know and, moving well into grotesque bullshittery, that I thought perhaps there was, but that it was likely unknowable. I think it's a question that deserves to be taken more seriously than I took it. Implicit in all this, of course, was the idea that the photographs I'd been taking of Massachusetts were a metonym for Massachusetts as a whole. This isn't anything it would ever have occurred to me to think, too much of my own preoccupations and idiosyncrasies in the selection of images to think they might serve as a useful representation of much of anything for people generally. Maybe I'm all wrong about that, I don't know.

It's funny, because I think people see me as arrogating the authority to make statements of general significance quite often and it's really nothing I think of myself as doing, I have some pretty detailed thoughts about things, but again they're very idiosyncratic for the most part, a lot of trips down funny byways, don't generally think they're of much importance or use to anyone but me, if that. I suppose by saying anything about them at all, I'm suggesting that they are- oh, well, wish people wouldn't take things I say that way, wish in one hand & shit in the other, right?

How I would like people to take things I say is a big question. I guess I wish there was more surprise and delight involved. Feel that way about a lot of things.