Camille Roy
Camille Roy lives in San Francisco and has published poetry in Mirage as well as journalistic and critical writing in other publications. A story is forthcoming in the Faber & Faber anthology, Deep Down.
Working Notes, Camille Roy:
I wrote this piece from notes in my journal composed on the one-hour commute down Interstate 280 to and from work. That time is nothing time, a period before & after transformation by work, a period of silence, dissociation, minor playfulness on the page. What happens at this border truly doesn't "matter," because it doesn't occupy "time."
But down there, where I am an engineer in the suburbs, I feel I have to not only speak a different language but become one. I am translated. The notes I take in the commuter van are the notes of a woman becoming a different language. Further, my work involves computer languages, which themselves are a sort of translation between a formal logic, expressed in sentences, phrases, paragraphs, and a computer performing tasks. But what is left over, surplus, both unwanted and autonomous, is the sexual. Eroticism as a non-reducible term (or ghost? in a [missing text]
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