Irresponsibility

Chris Vitiello

An extended bio from the author.

 

 

I have a biography. I was born on the day the first lunar astronauts splashed down. I grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D. C., and spent a lot of time messing around in a creek between subdivisions and playing with matchbox cars in the dirt with friends. I used to memorize sports statistics, baseball and football box scores, and developed formulae for ranking players at their positions. I liked to sit in the tiny space under a desk in my room because the heating vent was there, and I would tuck a blanket in the desk drawer so the space would become stifling, and I rigged some Christmas lights under there, and I would read Ray Bradbury and those poetry anthologies of the “child’s garden of verse” ilk. I could run really fast. Also I used to watch the Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten over and over again in an alcove in the National Air and Space Museum. I saw a lot of visual art in the museums in our nation’s capital and really imprinted on Louise Nevelson, Joseph Cornell, Alexander Calder, and anything modern that my parents really didn’t like very much, frankly. Like the Rothko room at the Phillips Collection. Or really messy Jean Dubuffet and Robert Rauschenberg things. Eventually I moved more into the Jasper Johns and Marcel Duchamp trajectory. I remember really putting a lot of things together in my head in a John Baldessari retrospective. So I got heavily into irony as production. As much as one can be said to struggle with such a thing, I’ve struggled with default ambivalence ever since.

Along with that Eames film, the two other big things for me were reading the chapter on self-referential sentences in Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas and the Sesame Street book There’s A Monster at the End of This Book. In high school I wrote tons of one-page poems in spiral notebooks. They were all pretty much the same poem. I would sit in a friend’s basement listening to Led Zeppelin and King Crimson and Miles Davis, writing poems and playing air hockey. Not bad.

In college I read a lot of William Carlos Williams and then John Ashbery and then discovered the Language Poets. I went to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, for an M. F. A. and started Proliferation with Mary Burger and Jay Schwartz. We would play with Kinkos photocopiers through the night, making books and artifacts. Francis Ponge’s “Notebook of the Pine Woods” really impacted me then.

All this writing about myself makes me really uncomfortable. My wife Vicki and I married and moved to Durham, NC, where I still live. We have two daughters—Iris was born in 1999 and Sadie was born in 2006. Everything before this paragraph can now be erased.

I am concerned with, among other things: clarification, light, stars, the sky, clouds, wind, trees, birds, deduction, eyes, leaves, people and their observable behaviors, grasses, the soil, flowers and their growth, description and representation, vegetables, skins and peels, seeds, nuts, cross-sections, dictionary definitions, synonyms and antonyms but especially synonyms, utility, analysis, skepticism, kindness, goodness, quantity, measurement, direct commands, questions, and fact statements.

That’s all.

Photograph of the author’s daughter, Iris, by Chris Vitiello.