Riding Wounded Horses

ahem

2009-11-09T23:46:00.000-07:00

in honor of decade's end, suum cuique.

Baseball: the least onerous of the major religions

2009-03-13T08:44:00.000-06:00

With a certain alienated majesty

2009-03-04T22:05:00.002-07:00

It is often said that thinking the thought prior to the swing
is not in and of itself going to lead to bad results or confu-
sion, so long as the thought is just like a trigger (akin to
the physiological movement of the waggle of the club) and not
something on which to get fixated. Some people play better
three beers deep to get the mind out of the way.

I was always a worrier, congenital or hereditary maybe. The
yips and the bleets - a kind of athletic Tourette's - sometimes
came at inopportune times early in the season, when dirty gray
piles of snow, pitiful and sickly - something you wanted to
end for its own sake and for mercy's too - sat in the little
mini-coulees where young cottonwoods were competing with one
another to see which could last until the eventual drought year
came.

A swing thought is what it's termed.

what has and has not

2009-03-04T08:16:00.003-07:00

grim emotionalism in leading man fashion, sparked by a paper cut
in a computer lab, I witnessed this yesterday.

long standing personal bias in favor of moving slightly to the
right of the street to hit big slush puddle remains fully intact.

noxious yellow and purple gases, certainly stress emissions, seen
drifting up against the ceiling and its reticulated plaster skin.

An arrival - Sundance Magazine - full of beds and jewelry and
well-oiled fashion senses - an error in the mailroom.

Do not sleep on Goodie Mob, do not sleep on Warren Zevon, do
not sleep on Scriabin sonatas, do not sleep on Math Rock Bach,
do not sleep on Jasper Johns, do not sleep on Zebra Cakes with
Chocolate milk, do not sleep on being in airports on horizontal
escalators making eye contact with each specimen headed in the
opposite direction.

2009-02-11T20:09:00.001-07:00

i think it's fair to say that this thing here is now over.

february

2009-02-11T14:45:00.003-07:00

about three days of the year i regret. today is all brisk
wind and elementary particles, vanilla bean at $9 piecemeal
and roast beef slowly realizing itself in the oven. some
college boys were trying to fly a kite in the street last
night and the wash of the light made their voices sound like
the 1970s. shadows from naked tree limbs dance across this
screen here - probably not on yours, though? that is part of
it all, i suppose.

It doesn't change the thing that occurs if no one happens upon the occurrence

2009-01-14T23:42:00.002-07:00

I.

Holy shit crazy Gulf War II it seems like it's been so long we've known
each other - why haven't you left my life yet? And you won't even
when your dad Bush goes, will you? We've witnessed white rappers and
boobs on TV and bubushka music from Brooklyn, vegetable wife saved
by congressmen and -women and I dont want to go on because it makes
my memory hurt . . . And you're still here. HBO did a mini-series
or whatever HBO does now on you, but no fade to black on your fedaheen
or feyaheen - God, it was so long ago that Newsweek explained to me
in discrete summarized details what you were about - I remember fingers
with blue ink and decapitations with crescent moons on flags in the
background, but what else?

II.

Holy shit dominant constitutional paradigm, it looks like your reign is
on the outs, yo!!!! A text is a text is a text, and if it doesn't say
"butt sex is allowed" you best be sure that eight dudes and a lady
aren't going to collectively remonstrate otherwise. High hopes with a
prez who taught you and tried to forestall those who hearkened your
demise, but all the dudes who find your demise logically unassailable
are young and run and have hidden their aneurysm, or old and too god damn
ornery to take a seat. So, goodbye and adios and it's nice to have
invited the exclusionary rule along, but get the fUcK out.

lets make some music make some money some models for wives

2009-01-14T23:27:00.003-07:00

Outre references to back in the day continue not to compel. Mute moments
of introspection don't either. But at least no face makeup. And not too
much nostalgia for doing drugs while listening to music made by people on
drugs. Boxes of wheat thins consumed ever divided by the times I've had a
passport stamped before recently is a biggish percentage, but stamp away
and adjust your notion of "before recently" in order for it to go down.

The fact of it being Thursday just exceeds what can be fathomed. Simply.

Burned hand man

2008-12-13T11:38:00.005-07:00

I once knew a guy who had a burned left hand - top of the hand, I guess -
charred, scaled skin with wiggly lines pushed up in asymmetric patterns.
He was good with a Pulaski, skilled with a saw, gutted his Copenhagen,
and had very little to say about any of it, ever. One time we went down
to Red Lodge to skid out some lodgepole for a corral the Asst Ranger
wanted to build out in a cabin on the southwest corner of the forest so
he could take his wife there for Christmas. This guy with the burned
hand, one of the things he said once is that the assistant ranger was a
spitting fucking substantiated image of Curly from Of Mice and Men.

And so we're cutting down these skinny little lodge pole and skidding em
down the hill, two at a time for the bigger guys but mostly one at a time
for me. The rain turns to snow, and we get the load we want and one
of the others tries to pull down into the ditch in order to pull a U-turn
but the ground's too soft and the truck and trailer full of poles careens
down the side of the ditch, in slow motion like, until it's clear that
both truck and trailer full of poles will tip over. And the guy with the
burned hand is watching this and smiling, knowing what I do not know. That
is what I remember.

Since sliced bread

2008-12-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

IF WU TANG MEMBERS WERE NBA PLAYERS:

http://therapup.uproxx.com/2008/11/if-wu-tang-members-were-nba-players.html

I thought I had understood capitalism. But I had only adopted an attitude - melancholy sadness - toward it

2008-12-04T10:54:00.002-07:00

I thought I understood capitalism until I came across all these guys doing the prognosticating who kept asserting that they weren't wrong, the market correction
was.

I am thinking I will understood melancholy sadness but I was just sixteen and hewed to a regrettable policy of experiential learning.

I thought I understanded capitalism, but I was just giving in to the long subtle
caress that "if you can't beat it join it" puts on when the lights go down and
the slow jams come on and the hairs on my neck .

I thunk understanding capital das melancholia Rat Man Alexander Pope.

I aint broke dont fix the conceptual rigor with which you embrace spiraling
debt + vertiginous deficits = understated eternal sunshine of the spotless conscience.

Sell some of that environment we've been keeping on hand; we've been saving it
up for some time now, ennit?

A little more existential fuchsia in the old interior mental decorating scheme and call that puppy, good, ok?

If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?

2008-11-28T20:29:00.004-07:00

I.

Walking outside, creaky door Saturday afternoon with the first crocus poking
through the dirt, way too soft for ground that hard but there anyway -
eating ho hos and drinking coke classic - little miniball you can actually
palm and imagine dunking with, posterizing your brother or cousin or
that kid down the way you hate to admit you want to be.

Two quarters tucked in the small fifth pocket of your jeans, which will buy
a pack of Starburst and nickel gum whose taste comes all sugary and legit
for five chews and then leaves an unforgiving rock in its wake.

II.

RE: Naivete of naivete of cynicism, or some such shit.

See joan didion in NYRB. I implore everyone to leave "Drink the Koolaid"
to books by Toure and other collections with hip-hop emphasis. Otherwise
let's move on.

beyond the push/pull of hedonism, ascetism

2008-11-25T23:37:00.001-07:00

Find the melancholy dialectic of concrete and prairie on a campus
full of 20 somethings in sweatpants and inner-directed compasses.

OR

Find the line in the book of poems that states: [Proposition regarding
the existence of fun] / when we weren't sure our lives were worth
surviving.

OR

Find sibilance on reruns of Imus episodes from the eighties, back
when shock jock meant something more: much more, much less.
Do it on a radio with a dial that actually turns.

Beg for conjunction

AND

Get "you dipshit" cute with the typesetting.

AND

Find a story involving characters whose lives are an
obscure reggae song and spread it like syphilis in the
house of De Sade.

AND

Run 12 miles today, tomorrow, the day after that, and the next
day too. Regret smoking for so long. Regret not having that
regret sooner.

Beyond emotional infancy: self-help, suffused with Pink Floyd

2008-11-25T21:17:00.004-07:00

****
The tendency to grow comfortably numb, wondering if there really
is anybody out there, becomes an unconscious habit. Like the way things were in the 1970s.

****
Isolation from others begets alienation from a sense of who you are,
in part because who you are depends on being able to interpenetrate
social space. If you can't inhabit that space, if you can't, so to
speak, get outside the wall, you spend your whole life waiting for
the worms. And the worms are death, which you shouldn't wait for.
You can't preempt death, is the thing: you can't preempt, grow used
to, or become accustomed to your own death. You can't experience
that great gig in the sky either.

****
Getting out of your own way means knowing how to avoid pulling
your own strings. Let your strings dangle, let your diamonds
shine - don't dig that hole. Get a good job with good pay, you're okay.

****

Some think hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
Tell that to Henry David Thoreau. He knew something about quiet
desperation - he saw it in those around him, and he tried to overcome
it by going to the woods and writing a long book that was destined
to become cut up into pithy apothegms for greeting card companies.
It goes to show you that when America broke loose of the chains of
English anomie, other constraints stood waiting to be self-imposed.
Thoreau had an axe, evidently, which he borrowed from a neighbor
and returned even sharper for the use of it. Sharpen that axe.
Breathe. Breathe in the air.

Perfidy in Line Waiting, Three Power Chords Ignite A Flame

2008-11-24T22:46:00.005-07:00

*****
I live in a town that Sinclair Lewis wouldn't have known
what to do with in terms of easy reducibility. There is
construction, the weakest approximation of a domed sports
facility this side of Eastern Europe, seven restaurants
featuring sandwiches and fries, and sloped sidewalks.

For some reason I have been listening to music that sounds
like Neil Young in a haze of cough syrup.

The biggest thing that happened to me today was a leaky
coffee mug; I still am at a life stage where I study for
tests.

Taking tests is probably what I am best at.

I am the only individual on the upper level of a library, which
is where the heat stays and the old books go to die.
I thought I read this sentence today: "There is no surfeit
of glory" but I had skipped a line.

*****

Tomorrow I will take this to some other place.

naivete of naivete of cynicism

2008-11-21T09:52:00.003-07:00

A.

when words speak louder than actions . . . - or how to put things on hold
in order for the lame duck to waddle off the stage to make way for the
Orator and his new declarations.

1) Premise: The West Wing paved the way for the Orator's ascendancy in
creating an appetite for a kind of rhetoric that both looked backward
for its style and forward for its substance (such as it is).

2) Premise: Tom Daschle is 5'7".

3) Premise: Speaking in complete sentences will be the new Elitism.

4) Premise: Osama bin Laden releases video re: Obama-Biden sometime
before February.

B.

Rod Stewart is insufferable.

naivete of cynicism?

2008-11-21T09:40:00.002-07:00

Maybe the pragmatists and the wait-and-seers, the ones who won't buy into
all the hype, the clear-eyed and steely-hearted, are really bathing in
illusion? Or enamored with the coolness of naysaying?

The truth is I don’t think I’ve ever found anything as purely ‘moving’ as the end of The Velveteen Rabbit when I first read it

2008-11-12T20:42:00.002-07:00

It turns out that having looming deadlines is about the best catalyst for
non-linear writing as a guy like me can ask for. Hence, declarations:

Sports Illustrated is Saturday morning escape-into-the-lingua-franca. To
be consumed with coffee, but no longer cigarettes.

Waiting for a postcard from Italy from one of your best friends, who has
become an honest-to-goodness devotee of the spiritual life with a shaved
head and second vowel-intensive name, is really a taxing kind of waiting.

Having an English major background and being mildly conversant in Theory
does sometimes (for me) catalyze a need to pick up the latest bit of
Continental (or if not the latest, the most readily accessed). It turns
out the love-hate doesn't dissipate.

"Everyone's married and saving or single and slaving," is something I
heard a stranger utter into a cellphone two days ago after a reuben on
rye and very precisely seasoned waffle fries. I did not like the person
doing the uttering, in part because it was uttered with the same kind
of piety that I associate with people in suits standing before cameras
speaking about public safety.

Onward, Frazzled Soldiers

2008-11-11T20:35:00.006-07:00

1.

as per expectations, the New Yorker's election coverage
has been quite good. I particularly recommend Remnick's
the Joshua Generation, which begins:

Barack Obama could not run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on language, on the expression of a country’s potential and the self-expression of a complicated man who could reflect and lead that country. And a powerful thematic undercurrent of his oratory and prose was race. Not race as invoked by his predecessors in electoral politics or in the civil-rights movement, not race as an insistence on tribe or on redress; rather, Obama made his biracial ancestry a metaphor for his ambition to create a broad coalition of support, to rally Americans behind a narrative of moral and political progress. He was not its hero, but he just might be its culmination.

if you were not aware that the new yorker is a magazine
that can be found at newyorker.com, now you are.

2.

Succumbed, not succombed.

Zadi Smith has a piece in the New York Review of Books.
It seems to be about two trajectories that the novel
is on (it seems weird to put it that way, but . .), one
of which seems to originate with white dudes enamored
with the idea of the avant-garde.

Having spent the last year and a half in libraries downing
Mt Dew and wading through texts that have little to do
with the avant-garde or even novels, I do not feel qualified
to comment. I am reading the Sawtelle dog book from that
woman Oprah and her club, as grist for the conversational
mill with the parents. And Yates Revolutionary Road is
designated hitter re: Christmas break. I need to flesh
out the lineup, and would enjoy any suggestions that
lean away from the traditional/lyrical Realism and
countenance something a bit more fucked up.

If you have such suggestions, please do share.

luminous generalities of constitutional exegesis

2008-11-07T20:38:00.002-07:00

Friday night reading of book and listening to music as foreplay
for putting head down on pillow and letting go of consciousness,
having finally (perhaps) arrived at that point where a snowstorm
in November is enough to turn down the volume on self-permissive
blackouts. 28 is the new purgative.

Partially: way to go voters.
Partially: a new shitstorm's on the prowl.
Partially: self-congratulations is a bit rich, seeing as things
got so bad b/c we slept on shit for so long.
Partially: don't ever interrupt my consciousness again - I'm going
back to sleep.

quandary limn plenary synecdoche*

2008-10-25T04:50:00.001-06:00

*Those are the words of the day over the last few days, according to a website devoted to such things.

oo la la

2008-10-15T06:45:00.004-06:00

Early morning reverie, stock experience: picked up from Warehouse 2 on the East Bank of Commonplace, north of What Have You. Coffee, cloud streaks cognizable in the early morning dark that accompanies or elicits the early morning reverie.

Death Dream, idiosyncratic but with generic symbols: a lakehouse scene, with a floating dock on the upper right hand of the frame on which sat a marijuana plant and a Radio Raheem style boombox. Waves lapped against the neighbors’ dock; neighbor in those preppie shoes, sockless, the ones I associate with the East Coast and sailing. This house set back against a hill, looks down on neighbors’ dock and floating dock. My uncle – the one who never wears jeans, only slacks – is discussing the death around which the dream seems to order itself.

Stock photo:

catfish appearing to devour bald guys' head. If you were that catfish, wouldn't you
try to make what seems to be, be?

You smell like the consequence of passion

2008-10-12T15:04:00.003-06:00

1.

Capital gains taxes on the idea of anatomical evolution are
bound to grow. Did you hear about the dude who ran the 4.24
40 at the combine, then repped out 225 63 times? you will.

Sportswriters who still want their ballplayers to steal
smokes in the dugout a la kruk dykstra and the boys are
going to dislike most of the 21st century. Rick Reilly
will continue to concentrate on the sociological flotsam
that attaches itself to unbeaten high school teams from
places like Edina, MN and Enigma, GA and Miles City, MT,
and high school wrestling coaches from New Jersey with
cauliflower ears and ambivalent notions about "progress"
will continue to flog their charges down two weight classes
on pure sadistic principle.

And so evolution walks hand in hand with constancy, which
is partly why we still watch. I just want to say a thing:
Ballesteros has a brain tumor. he once defeated the flat
artlessness of fairways and greens and showed us something
about fantasies of escape and "par" in the process. some
4s are not only better than other 4s, some 4s are better
than there more pedestrian 3s.

2.

Oxford Comma is really based on an Andrew WK song. Andrew
Bird, fly away. Please. Or stop insinuating yourself on
her playlist when I happen to be around.

the new yorker's take on the era in which we live

2008-10-03T09:56:00.002-06:00

From Sasha Frere-Jones article on Timbaland:

There is a long list of fervid, breathtaking productions from the nineties and the early two thousands, many for rappers and vocalists who barely made it into the public consciousness. (Ms. Jade? Playa?)

oleander in bloom, amplified in an unlit room

2008-10-01T21:24:00.002-06:00

Coffee and cigarettes and slack-jawed fatigue, minus the formal dress. Is this painting sad? Is this an age where it makes sense to ask if a painting is sad?
I still haven't heard anyone discuss, with necessary seriousness, what this age
is. Is it just the first decade of a new century/millennium? if so, how is it
"just" that? is it, phonetically, the ots (rhymes with tots or - wait for it -
robots)?

I think this painting is sad, not because of the people in it, but because of the
perspective implied: someone is looking in on the scene, presumably from a slight
distance. And that someone is not you the viewer, nor is it Hopper the painter.
Not a nobody, but a no one, occupies that perspective. If that makes sense.

This doesn't reach the second question - whether it even makes sense to posit that
a given painting is sad - which must be tabled out of sheer inaccessibility to the
scope of the question.

Andy was right. Panda Bear is infectious. But you have to (get to?) sift through
some noise that separates one hook from the next. The metaphorical cachet of this
process boggles.

Unknown to him as outerspace: a link, with a thing at its destination

2008-09-27T00:11:00.006-06:00

almost seems like self-restraint (of a kind where dependent clauses and
elongated, self-reflexive rumination betrays its subject) according to
its self-disciplining logic:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/02/05/070205fi_fiction_wallace?currentPage=all

new variation of an old(ish) theme:

"It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. Or never a battle — the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way."

This is unlikely to stop, FYI. And I'm sorry, to you, dear reader, to whom this is (obviously or not) directed.

Like Gold Bullion or Kruggerand, But Better

2008-09-24T21:51:00.002-06:00

Being insulated from massive economic collapse may be an illusion, but when
it stems from having very little to lose, illusive insulation trumps the
evasive future possible.

Discrete Photon of the Soul #1

Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza and David Carradine-era Kung fu. Ten
years ago add a DuBois but no more, no need: self-perpetuating abstractions
have less purchase.

Discrete Photon of the Soul #2

Ozzie and Vazquez, triple opposite day headcheck cojones callout backfire.

When the book club got to its epistolary novel

2008-09-21T12:10:00.003-06:00

1. Sports

Be advised that the Minnesota Vikings may go 0-7, and the seven babies named
Tavaris in the last six months will soon go by Tavis and/or Smiley and are doomed to multiple Wedgie recesses and a future in which no bras are ever fumbled with and no babies are ever procreated. Nice Gus Frerotte exegesis, stupid Fox North pregame production eggsuckers.

Be advised that another six White Sox players could break their own respective wrists in petulant post-foul ball lapses of judgment and the Minnesota Twins may still not
resurrect themselves into their mid-00s early exit from the postseason form.

I am confused. Does Dan Uggla's All-Star meltdown bear glad or ill tidings vis a vis postseason possibilities?

2. Politics

is not what it used to be. Which may be good. I am not sure - try not to pay attention.

3. Culture

see supra. also, according to a report summarized in a soft news story I read in what passes as a political/cultural magazine, the secret to the Danish levels of happiness, which exceed all other countries' levels of happiness, is having very low expectations on a consistent basis and being pleasantly surprised when they are not met.

Danes pay the highest taxes of any nation in the world (starting at 42 per cent, rising to 68 per cent), enjoy fewer hours of sunshine than Britain, have a higher divorce rate than most Europeans, live only averagely long and smoke and drink far more than is good for them. So what's going on?

In 2006, researchers from the Institute of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark examined a range of possible factors, from genes to cycling habits to cuisine. In a charming report, they offered two explanations: the Danes have never got over their rapture at winning the European football championships in 1992 (their happiness rose to new peaks that year, and has stayed on a plateau since), and - the main finding - Danes, unlike the woeful Greeks and Italians, have very low expectations of the immediate future. "Year after year," the researchers write, "they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.

So - moment of synthesis - the difference between being a Vikings fan and a Danish national lies in the degree to which pessimistic expectations are realized.

agency was had

2008-09-16T09:51:00.002-06:00

the Mildred Bonk academy of misplaced affection - the Don Gately school of absolute identification with the smell of someone else's shit - the words in a notebook, followed by question marks, to be looked up and wondered at - Mr. Gigantic - are you seriously asking me what I think about the English Patient? - Cheers, Lilith and Frasier and when what makes you unique is hollow and banal - the hollow leg and Heidegger - tides being way out - 10 times or less - the late 20th century colonialism of cool and the condition of heartlessness - "you cooze you cunt" - fat sweaty poets and the ontology of diving boards - this last one about abortion: just sort of waiting to see if the next move may have it both ways - Midwestern winter as a pitiless bitch - much less much more - and but so -

Dont put lipstick on a pig

2008-09-05T20:00:00.003-06:00

It would be nice to have pointed to a vacation in Nantucket, the Jersey shore, Minnesota lake house, or some other summer hotspot as the proximate cause of the gap in posts. No such luck. Mostly work and busy work and unreflective rumination on cultural phenomenon I had recently come across, the kind of experience Predrag recently referred to as as "discrete photons of soul or whatever."

Discrete photon of soul #1

Eat the rich

I played golf at a country club this summer. The former greenskeeper of the course was a guy I used to work for, and they had disposed him without much of a pension or a word of thanks for 35 years of work. I continued to work for, and golf with, his family, during the formative 14-18 year old life phase. This period also included the Dead Kennedys, Noam Chomsky, and Camel Lights, in terms of unscripted self-actualization and agonizingly scripted attempts at self-fashioning. So I came to see this country club as an emblem of the Good Stuff that Bad People Had Because the World is an Unjust Place. That emblem had an antidote (mixed metaphors being an appropriate means of capturing the conceptual blurriness of this period) - AND WE HAVE TO FIGHT THAT INJUSTICE! - that seemed cooler than attempting to get ahead to attain the kind of status that would make it easy to reap benefits from the state of affairs, rather than bear burdens.

I guess most of my feelings about country clubs and class were oriented around what feels like a Cool-O-Meter, is what I mean. That's not how I understood it though. It was an ethical stance. but I think it's probably more aesthetic now, the aversion to (ratcheted down from disdain of) the country club. Sort of Caddyshack crossed with the combative boredom of the similarly situated. Check on the injustice, check on complicitness with it, but also check on the fight it rather than become resigned to or escape from it. A good Kierkegaardian would want to explore whether there is also a religious stance on the issue. Not being one, I'm not sure. I'm also not sure what it means that I'm the kind of person who not only devotes a fair amount of time thinking about how he stands vis a vis the concept and semiotic meaning of country clubs, but also thinks that said stance conveys something larger about the drift (or evolution, who the fuck knows?) in perception that makes us strangers of our past selves.

Discrete Photon #2
Night of the Gun

David Carr used to smoke crack. And be a journalist. And beat his girlfriends up. He hung out with Bob Mould and Tom Arnold and various players across the Minneapolis scene of the 80s. And then one of his girlfriends, who had connections with Columbians and acquired access to kilos therefrom, got pregnant and never quite got clean. The twins, when born, were crack babies. He got clean, raised the twins, got back into journalism, and now writes for the Times. This is an addiction memoir that asks whether a person in recovery can access what happened through the prism of his own addled recollections. Not likely seems to be the answer, and Carr's attempt to deal with this by treating his story like any other journalistic fodder (conducting interviews, accumulating sources, etc.) is the book's central conceit. It uses David Foster Wallace and Faulkner and Mailer in epigrams. Incidentally, if unsurprisingly, Carr hearts the Hold Steady. I will save normative commentary for later.

You be good, people! Don't sleep on old EPMD.

uh

2008-07-04T19:49:00.003-06:00

Twins on their customary late June-early July terror. Stay tuned for analysis of revitalized, previously-aptly-named Nick Punto

and a discussion of what new ballpark forebodes

and of the resurgent appearance of announcer's exuberance "SWING and a miss" type d

not necessarily but possibly

2008-06-29T00:48:00.003-06:00

shave, don't shave, sing, don't sing, elaborate or clutch it close: perseverative dose that gifts the quality of ever ongoing giving.

Those aren’t stars, darling/That’s your nervous system

2008-05-24T17:56:00.002-06:00

Do all public library study rooms smell like homeless people, or just the ones I’ve frequented? It's not even a bad homeless person smell, just distinct.

Entirely too many split infinitives splattered across today’s pages, but that’s less offensive than all the stories where people die in large numbers and their governments won’t allow aid in to help those who haven’t died but who still might. Also - apparently deafness and autism, as well as deafness and impulsivity, exhibit comorbidity. Three hours of reading psychiatric papers and abstracts of psychiatric papers (the jargon is piled ever so high in summary form) made me want to chew my lips off.

And so on.

2008-05-24T00:20:00.002-06:00

I completely forgot what I had just intended to enunciate. Something about how

It's hard for me to write short sentences. Not terribly hard, but hard enough. A shortcoming that makes it necessary to be aware of itself - not like leprosy but not unlike Marv Albert's incident with biting the woman not his wife in the back for sexual pleasure. Also, short sentences: better. Limited adjectives: stellar.

So it is.

hometown

2008-05-23T22:52:00.000-06:00

BRANDON, S.D. — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defended staying in the Democratic nominating contest on Friday by pointing out that her husband had not wrapped up the nomination until June 1992, adding, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

post midnight notions

2008-05-06T23:07:00.004-06:00

"In this election, persuasion isn’t important. Social identity is everything. Demography is king."

- D. Brooks, here

See also: David Foster Wallace, American Usage essay, specifically re: "YOU would say that."

Phenomenon: I don't hear you, I see who you are, and predict what you may happen to believe, deep down; my own response to this mishmash is replicative of how I identify, relate to, and pigeonhole you.

Question: Is this new?

Answer: (tentatively) It can't be, can it? Isn't that part of what 12 Angry Men is about? Isn't that part of what (for the last 20-30-40 years) the argument about difference is about? Is there something fundamentally different about niche-driven fragmentation now that the means of controlling one's input of what kind of world we live in comes with a remote control? Or is it kind of quixotic to think, pace Brooks, that the old demarcations of a town or city were incapable or at least less capable of keeping the various identity-defined subgroups from coming into contact with and influencing each other?

Redescribed phenomenon: I don't hear you, I don't see you, but when I imagine you (and my faculties for doing so are severely constrained seeing as I neither hear nor see nor meet you, except in grocery stores) what you are is transparently intelligible to me and what you believe follows the script I have inherited, regardless of who I am or you are or the circumstances of my inheritance really are.

Answer: Hmmmmmmmmmmm. But so when does the redescription verge on being so precious and self-explanatory as to cast doubt on the upshot of the redescription compared to the description it would seek to supplant?

Shambles.

2008-05-05T23:01:00.006-06:00

Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin - a revisitation. (not a word)

I am not one who finds Wayne Coyne tiresome, really ever, until and unless I find myself tiresome. Coyne's interviews and general persona in the Lips docudrama evoke a sense of the kind of soft hippie adulation of possibility of which it is easy, but not mandatory, to disparage. I find myself tiresome retroactively, mostly, when it's clear that a certain dismissal was made out of hand and in service of that basic seen-it-all-done-it-all presumptiveness that, when identified, produces a shudder.

Coyne seems to be aware of this tiresomeness of things that starts with tiresomeness of one's own circumstances, and he's averse to it without being contemptuous of it. I like that - it comes off as acknowledging that it's possible to be willfully sullen but not really desirable. But it's not really that, either, this thing Coyne has going on, or not just that. "being open to possibility," for what that's worth as a description of a kind of stance toward the world Coyne urges, isn't such a bad notion to keep out in front of you in terms of negotiating the ephemeral happenstance stuff that contributes to one-day-and-the-next. It may be easier or more habitual to sort of assimilate the new into the old and keep it contained within the previous understanding - easier or more natural or more likely to be the response beaten into you by sheer repetition - but it can't be more fun or even more stimulating.

It's not clear how to weave together the way Coyne and the other Lips come off in self-representation with the music they make, nor is it necessarily something worth doing. I guess it's inviting in that the music (and I can only talk about the Soft Bulletin, which still confounds my understanding and digs its hooks into me without even trying, now, six or seven years after first coming to it) makes you wonder what its makers think about the process that led to it. After seeing the docudrama - I write that as if I know what it may connote, which I really don't, but it seems right - the thing that stuck is the absolute investment that Coyne makes in making music mean more than just making music. Not to get all Spin magazine or anything, but it is somehow easier to succumb to something when you know that part of what that thing is, is meant for you, expressly and without reservation or stinting pre-formulated idea about what that moment of contact may consist of. And the other slightly out of reach part of it, a dimension of it that is necessarily a product of conjecture, is - to me, here, about this album at least - a recognition that the creators' only assurance of what they make is to be wholly invested in the making of it and an invitation to contemplate what that investment was like at the time the thing was created.

If this doesn't make sense or relies on too much hazy pronoun antecedent confusion, where "it" could be seven things - well, that's part of the thing - and there may be an object lesson here about successful concept albums and the way they manage to elicit a fairly comprehensive engagement with the different possible concepts to which they may be pointing. And obviously if something is successful enough in what you take it to try to be accomplishing to make you wonder if what you take it to accomplish is what was intended to be accomplished, there's even more to think about.
So do it, if it charms you, is what I mean and what I've been doing.

your twenties choked with flowering vines; your thirties thinned to only what you tended

2008-05-01T22:46:00.003-06:00

Nicorette gum, three pieces linked together, looking like prescription medicine, on top of the cell phone to which only love/hate dichotomies obtain. A post it note sponsored by, and bearing the name of, a small town bank in montana with the word "Baffler" scrawled in pencil across its lower third. A fairly intimidating flashlight, used when the backlight of this computer was out and the technicians at the store insisted that it was hardware, not aleatory fate, that led to the variations in accessibility. A book by a former dean of a law school where the undergraduate degree was taken, published by a press that used to give paychecks and allow inhuman amounts of coffee to be imbibed. a crayon drawing on the white top of the anesthetized IKEA desk, blue cross-hatchings encompassed in a red compromise between oval and circle.

A one pm exam, diluted in part by $.94 worth of coffee and the inevitable head-shaking transition from being nocturnal to being accountable when the sun is bright and cultivating glare. The idea of an exam, really, out there alone, by itself, conceptually disjunctive from the chronological notions of what would be getting done by this time, isn't any clearer than the idea of having to list off increasingly minute letters in sequential order with decreasing amounts of confidence.

Also, regarding economies of scale:

http://g.photos.cx/scale-ac.gif

Oh well. Tornado warnings tonight, snow tomorrow, it may be May now but there's no suggestion that a pause in meteorological and life-arc anomalies are on there way out anytime soon.

2008-04-29T07:36:00.000-06:00

Irascible firebrand

Product.

2008-04-27T22:57:00.000-06:00

4 five hitters, 6 four hitters, 2 two hitters, two shutouts.

emancipate yourself from particulate matter.

2008-04-24T23:25:00.002-06:00

I've been thinking a bit about economies of scale. First, in regards to time: taking a moment and saying, "this is just one moment," and letting the one outlast the other. Second, in regards to sheer geographic scale and how difficult it makes the concept of co-temporaneousness: me here typing, some hours or days or weeks later you reading what gets typed, with me - presumably - off somewhere that is not ether but for all intents and purposes may as well be. I think I was in college when I realized that "for all intensive purposes" was not right.

I visited, as a visitor, crestfallen-like, an emergency room two days ago. The Coke machine was a locus of activity and the automatic doors made a sweeping sound that was neither natural nor un-. Styrofoam cups of coffee were all the rage, as was shoe-gazing. someone told me upwards of five inches of snow is at this moment converging on the part of the Northern Plains I occupy. I am not surprised. Not one bit.

Dinosaurs haven't been quite as living as they used to be up until quite recently

2008-04-05T00:00:00.002-06:00

Baseball is back. Which means I need give the obligatory head nod to those guys at firejoemorgan.com. In the four arguments I've had in the last week about Rick Reilly's putridity, I have cited this website and gotten the (inevitable) comeback: "If they're so good, why haven't I heard of them?" and which garners the (almost equally inevitable, but potentially setting-off-of-larger-disagreements-than-Reilly's-stupid-journalistic-penchants-for-milking-melodrama)
comeback: [fill in]

anecdote as an antidote

2008-04-04T23:22:00.004-06:00

Two friends went to a small town in Iowa tonight to witness the spectacle of professional wrestling. Not surprisingly, jagbombs and full flasks preceded their actual audience participation. I got a phone call about an hour ago explaining as much. It made me want to play Sega, listen to the Meat Puppets, and eat a square piece of pizza off school lunch line all at the same time. Evidently I will be able to view a picture involving this individual, one Booker T.:

What a country. The more apposite part of the anecdote: there was some kind of chair-bludgeoning incident, after which the offending party went after the referee who had stopped the match and then declared the bludgeoned party the winner. While in pursuit of the referee, one of my friends yelled something like, "That's not fair - you're bigger than him." The chair-wielder evidently sidled up to my friend, and conspiratorially informed him: "It's ok . . . It's fake." (Evidently they had good seats . . . I know, with all the questions begging, it's almost too much information to process).

Is there something innately ridiculous about 24 year olds driving two and a half hours to witness a spectacle that enthralled them as pre-adolescents? I guess not. It seems a step up from ultimate fighting, if also a step down. Professional wrestling just may exist in that rarefied air of faux-competition-as-entertainment, where the faux part doesn't detract from the enjoyment of those who shell out $$$ to be there on the spot and do what they can to see how the athletes pull off the trick of seeming to be careful about how they portray themselves getting hurt. It's complicated.

Not for all the clove cigarettes in the world would she countenance that step

2008-03-31T22:24:00.003-06:00

____________________________________________________________________________________
Loneliness was all the rage, a thing to be cultivated. Thousands, most of whom were fundamentally OK with what they were and how much they counted less than a year ago, went to pieces. They went places, did things, and those I knew simply wanted to curl up in a ball away from everyone. Then of course get together to talk about the need to not be together raging inside them and smoke until their tongues chafed whatever area of mouth they contacted.

______________________________________________________________________________________
Extravagant things happened. Some gave way to crushing insecurity, others simply gave way. Posterboard and markers were nearly always on sale. The radiators clunked on falteringly for awhile, then stopped. Clouds of cold breath pushed up against the ceilings, percolating for days on end. Girls with long faces and wide hips fashioned slogans that spoke to their condition.

______________________________________________________________________________________
Fights broke out. Beers were tossed aside or casually broken at the neck, jagged instruments that bespoke bargaining power and casual engagement with strangers’ well-being. Men in pressed jeans and immaculate coifs walked out of bars, blood streaming from long gashes under their faces. They weren't real bars - just symbols - and the blood was more like divorces and the creeping perception that eventually all the pictures would stop. Journalism majors who deigned to stand above the partisanship slipped on the sopping floors of their glass-ceilinged prose and came out, if at all, broken. There really was nowhere else to go, and being nervous and lonely and unsure why didn’t anyone placate much at all.

April: Still the cruelest month?

2008-03-30T22:44:00.002-06:00

1.

A large man in overalls, shirtless nameless and scared shitless that his life's possibilities have hit the proverbial wall (or so I imagine), picks at a scab on his knuckle while waiting in one of those lines we all wait in when summoned to perform some duty in a bureaucratic office with government posters on the wall. I wish I knew what specific duty his is to perform. It smells like boredom and incomprehension in here, but it's not like at the post office, full of envelopes and procedural rigor. and the employees don't have uniforms. the magazines (Field & Stream, U.S. News and Report, Martha Stewart Living) are functionally distractive in only the most nominal sense. Tidbits of conversation at the head of each line carry that soft-edged politeness that comes hand in glove with situations where one stranger attempts to induce another to take an interest in his affairs.

2.

Someone somewhere is shooting at sheep with a paintball gun, for the sake of not having much else going on, at all. Were that it not the case.

3.

F.H. Bradley supposes that each individual agent is trapped in a kind of impermeable circle or bubble against which other agents' bubbles bump up. That does not make for a good night's sleep.

DePaul: becoming people that stand in front of things that you actually want to look at.

2008-03-11T18:12:00.003-06:00

1) The New Yorker fiction this week tackles the problem of a self-as-sieve-for-consumer-purchases. It's almost disarmingly direct in pointing out that the equation "staying cool through having cool things and going to parties with cool people who know about Dadaism and ironic symbolism" ultimately veils you from the world and injects into your life same kind of alienation that befalls less couture lifestyles (blue collar TV watching with bowling on Tuesday?).

The story is not good, nor is it really bad in the sense of being poorly constructed or not offering up a polyglot array of characters (although they come off a bit precious, at that). It's an exercise in realism, to the degree that it portrays a flat, empty existence through the depiction of flat, empty characters, the narrator being the exception, sort of. The narrator discovers (or thinks he discovers) that his fashionable friends are all essentially salespeople whose particular idiosyncratic hipster affectations are actually akin to product placements in the sea of sweet coolness in which they circulate. The conflict of the story - if I recall correctly - revolves around the narrator's sense of disorientation that follows closely in the wake that his friends are all billboards. He gives away his stuff, intends to murder the guy whose machinations first revealed to him that the styles or values he had embraced were really more like window dressing, and - at the end - seems to shrink back from the intention to get past the kind of life to which he had devoted himself.

I'm not sure if I misread the ending here - I took it to suggest, essentially, that knowing you live in a self-constructed jail and accepting it is somehow better (or easier?) than exiting it. The assumption being, exiting one jail is entering another? I don't know. That the story appears in the Fashion issue lends it a little bit more traction, at least through the collision of its fictional world and the world portrayed through the ads of the other magazines.

Here is more food for thought on the general problem the story attempts to get its glossy paragraphs around.

Jeff Spicoli-Style Vans Slip On Shoe, Deposited in Sunless Clime

2008-03-03T15:25:00.003-07:00

1) Current onslaught of cuisine/cooking related materials continues. No Reservations, by that Anthony Bourdain guy with the TV show and the constant cigarette dangling (completed) - does not make me want to become a heroin addict or a line cook. To one degree or another, did inspire militancy and desire for unilateral uptick of my life's intensity (for instance, four hours of sleep, aided and abetted - once again - by neighbor's nascent relationship). Plus makes for vivid version of imagination's constructed notion of New York City blunt, a kind of eccentric honesty and You-couldn't-pay-me-more-to-care-less-ness. Of course I have spent about 17 hours, total, in that metropolis so all notions get filtered through countless viewings of NYPD Blue and the early poems of the Confessional type guys and gals with drinking problems and hangups that stick out like goiters on sleepy southeast asian women on a pilgrimage to some holy goiter-shrinking shrine.

New York theme cont'd - a re-re-reading of Kissing in Manhattan, first discovered in 2003 and devoured in a sitting. Found in library today, to be the accompaniment to warmed up chicken and potato with 2% milk dinner. Also found at library today: 12 old New Yorkers, circa 1982-1985, and subsequently absconded with.

Other book:

Maximum City. About Bombay. Or Mumbai. Good epigrams. Author interview over at the Believer may be worth your time, if you have excess amounts of it.

2) dark muck on slowly evaporating snow drifts, plus every morning starts with ice, metls a bit, then freezes again by the time I'm out ambulatory and socializing. Makes for large yellowing bruises and waking up unsure of where exactly that came from.

UPDATE: having read Kissing in Manhattan in a sitting, once again, it seems like it's worthwhile to at least ask the question: do you, dear reader, have a book or a CD or a movie, even, to which your attentiveness to your own list of TO DO and your day-to-day goings on constantly crumbles in importance? What kind of thing is an obsession when it's completely temporary and sated in a sitting? Is it even one? Discuss.

America has become a phobocracy.

2008-02-29T18:43:00.002-07:00

Michael Chabon, who writes books for a living and who I associate with Pittsburgh, on
Obama's candidacy

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

Since I started talking and writing about Obama I have come to see that this ruling fear, and nothing else, lies at the back of every objection or reservation people raise or harbor regarding the man and his candidacy.

SW but not x SW

2008-02-25T22:31:00.002-07:00

Sometimes I’m sitting in bed reading when it becomes obvious how thin the walls of my apartment are. The exuberant sounds of my neighbor and whoever her friend is on that particular nght quite quickly make it necessary to head to the couch (if sleep is close) or sit here at the computer, awash in idle speculation as to how today may fit into the larger scheme of larger schemes.

1) I would like to travel somewhere with exotic fruits. I met some people from Hawaii while in Phoenix last week and they were quite adamant about access to fruits. Later that night I watched a group of young Goths stand next to a street minister with a megaphone and attempt to shout him down. One had a fairly Nordic looking helmet, made of tin foil and adorned with Magic Marker statements of his love for Beezlebub, affixed to his head. The minister was more New Testament than Old, albeit with a strange fixation on the sinfulness of pet owners who neglected their pets. I ate pineapple and passed on margaritas – one highlight was spent at a dive bar with the previous night’s cabdriver, a 50 odd something ex-Navy man who said he was a part-time cabbie and a part-time drunk and who had rigged up a CPU monitor on his passenger seat with what looked to be a GPS system circa 1984. I kept thinking of Mathew Broderick and the movie War Games, but the navy guy told good stories and I had had more than my fair share of the Pac-10 hormonal debauchery that is Tempe’s college age district, so the stale peanuts and two $2 diesels were the perfect segue to returning to the hotel and staring out the window at the palm trees.

2) I would like to read Maximum City. I recently purchased all non-Catcher in the Rye related salinger books, or at least three of them (are there more?). I am not sure what kind of course of action this foretells. I suspect the neighbors are now basking in post-coital sleep (I’ve been switching from this to “Seymour: An Introduction” for the last hour) and so now sign off.

i'll show you my inbox, if you show me yours

2008-02-18T23:30:00.002-07:00

I very much dislike bringing the white box of technology on which I type this out into the wider world, in part because I may drop it or be walking across a parking lot and have some car speed past shooting slush into the cheap black soft briefcase in which I package it, and in part because I abhor the notion of being in front of a screen for the majority of the day. Pen or pencil are inadequate tools in comparison to ten fingers' clicking, but also not at all inadequate depending on what type of function you envision a tool to fulfill.

As a consequence, amongst the three email addresses I currently occupy, a majority of the messages are from myself, to myself, b/c at various stages, from various campus computers, I wish to save my work and for reasons I would rather not think about there seems to be no central hard drive that is ambulatory across the campus computers. So if I work at computer X, and save at computer X, I must go to computer X to re-up the work. To avoid the inconvenience I end up saving the work and giving it a very time/place specific file designation, e.g. "writing comp Tuesday 9 pm no cover page" and sending it from one of my email hubs to another. All this makes for the dreaded intrusion of solipsism, which is, essentially, Hell. And I don't know what to about my own private hell but explain to you, dear Reader, how it came to be and to note that I don't know what else can be done. This is not a complaint or even an insight, but just one of those things (like fixing a paper jam) that seems to be both essentially absurd and so minuscule as to amount to less than the reaction it engenders really amounts to. Whew.

A mailman died today (more or less my fault) and I had to apologize to the drapes

2008-02-17T20:54:00.003-07:00

Computer pitfalls, the flu, irrepressible urge to take on larger things that require more than what can be offered, and simple winter doldrums all have contributed to the paucity of recent activity among the lame and scabbed over equine friends of whose imaginings this is comprised. Fact, the players have reported. Fact, jesus is Dwight Howard ever an amalgamation of athletic gifts. Allegation to be confirmed or denied, Phoenix is a consummate Pac10 city full of Fembot-esque conformity and dudes who drink beers on verandas with sunglasses on.

1. Link via King Timahoe via NY Times, all the way to

Obama {social realism} - - - > This

2. Cocktail parties involving Nintendo Wii (I'm far enough detached from reality to not know how the system is signified, but I think that's it) are pretty much irreproachable ideas, in my experience.

3. Most of last week I spent delaminating from the inside out. It is better to not do that too often.

4. Beatty claims to be growing a beard. If you know what this means, things in need of being shook are now shaken. I myself have the beard taker offer plugged into the socket, charging up for duty it may or may not be called on to fulfill. It is still winter after all.

5. Back at you.

WHOA

2008-01-31T22:14:00.000-07:00

POSNER, Circuit Judge. John Veysey appeals from his conviction, after a jury trial, and sentence of 110 years in prison for mail and wire fraud, arson, and the related offense of felony by fire. The facts are amazing, but we shall resist the temptation to recount them at length. In 1991 Veysey set fire to his house and inflated the claim that he then filed with his insurer. The insurer paid, and the house was rebuilt. The following year Veysey married a woman named Kemp, increased the insurance on the house, removed the valuable contents of the house, along with himself and his wife, and then cut the natural-gas line inside the house, causing the house to fill up with gas and explode spectacularly, utterly destroying it. He grossly exaggerated the value of the property allegedly lost in the explosion--some did not exist and some he had removed before the explosion. The insurance company (a different one) paid, and he used part of the proceeds to buy another house. The next year he tried to kill his wife by driving his van with her in it into a river. When that failed he killed her by poisoning her, and collected $ 200,000 in the proceeds of insurance policies on her life. He placed personal ads in newspapers, seeking to meet women. He became engaged to one of the women he met through his ads, named Donner, but broke his engagement after failing to procure a $ 1 million policy on her life. He then took up with a Ms. Beetle. This was in 1996 and the same year he burned down his house, again submitting an inflated estimate of the loss and receiving substantial proceeds from the insurance company (a different one, again). He then married Beetle, and they moved into a rented house. She insured her life for $ 500,000 with him as beneficiary. One night in 1998, after drugging her, he set fire to the house, hoping to kill both her and their infant son, on whom he had also taken out a life insurance policy and who was in the house with her. They were rescued, and soon afterwards Veysey and Beetle divorced. The house was rebuilt and Veysey persuaded a woman named Hilkin to move in with him after she had accumulated some $ 700,000 in life insurance and named him as the primary beneficiary. He apparently intended to murder her, but he was arrested before his plans matured. There is more, but these are the highlights.

assuming a certain kind of blowback

2008-01-29T22:51:00.000-07:00

Thing is, it may just matter, in the end, how you procured the necessary calories to make tomorrow something more than a hoped for occasion. And, if it does matter how tomorrow comes, it may also matter which calories, by which means, you made available to yourself. I had a resident advisor who eventually became a roommate who entertained vegetarianism as a kind of challenge. I don't think that counts, in terms of what THIS is. I eat a lot of meat. Used not to. Five years, never did. Then, did. I tend to trust the notion that to the extent you pledge yourself to avoid a certain kind of activity, you become fettered to that conduct, through opposition to it. in some instances, that's what should happen. in others, you spend so much energy avoiding what disgusts you, what disgusts you controls you. And that's not freedom, whatever that is. An ongoing discussion . . .

Candidates, buggered by hubris and the provisional security provided by the passive voice, don't want it all to end like this.

2008-01-22T19:11:00.001-07:00

Moment

Sitting in the basement of the building where I learn my craft, every cubicle seems to house hand sanitizer and the books from the early 1800s behind me leave rust streaks on my jeans when I read with the goal of understanding how it came to pass that street urchins stealing from the pockets of passing clerks and candlemakers were punished by men in wigs.

Word

Palladium - looked that one up today.

Letter

Dear Eli,

It's like the braces finally came off and you stopped humping the pillow at night when you thought everyone was asleep. Don't get too excited - a different kind of sullenness looms.

Poem

At 45, Carver is a large man,
with hair in the throes of going gray, a pudding face,
the beginnings of jowls. He's wearing a patterned polyester shirt,
with an oversized, way-out-of-style collar,
blue jeans and slippers that are coming apart.
More than anything, he looks kind

Event

McCain, the provisional "if it's gonna be a Republican" choice of the disillusioned and cynical Democratic wing, was in Vietnam. Just wanted to remind people of that, b/c it is an election and sometimes we don't spend enough time rehashing the war. It's terribly important to establish bona fides vis a vis references to the late 60s and early 70s, lest we fail to acknowledge the terrific importance of the generation who lived during that time. That generation also gets overlooked a lot.

Baseball, Though Lacking Brett Favre and Tom Brady, Does Have Its Own Gestalt

2008-01-13T07:32:00.000-07:00

Paean to Todd Stottlemyre, in the form of his obscenity-laden rant, as poached from that great bastion of baseball partisanship, firejoemorgan.com

Influenza of My Mind, Or I Still Believe In Art God Damn It

2008-01-11T01:05:00.000-07:00

Influenza of my mind begets its own sort of logic. I have some ultra sharp cheddar cheese but that won't (obviously) be enough. Here's a sample of the local, which by definition can't translate (forgive me that) -

Skyforce Eruption Saddeninglyy Deadening
Solipsism Enthralls Sudden Determination
Standard Entropy Statistics Department
Stellar Evolution Studies Development
Strafing Emblems Stifle Dwarf-Stars
Stupefied Excellence Still Devolves
Sam Extends Sodden Darkening
Strange Effing Situation, Dude
Simple Eels Select Embolism
Slit Eagles Soaring Endlessly
Stop Ending Slipped Dark
Slick Edges Sadden Dens
So Earlier Stars Decide
See Every Solid Die
See Every Solid Dead
So Each Senior Dwells
Slick Errors Soar Down
Stop Entry Signs Dented
Slit Emblems Soak Doors
Simple Ears Sear Dividends
Strange Elk Summon Drivers
Sam Equivocates Sorry Dental
Stupefied Engines Stop Driving
Strafing Eagles Simply Downward
Stellar Elucidation Stifles Declension
Standard Efforts Suffered Denouement
Solipsism Entwines Southern Desperation
Skyforce Exacerbates Sanfordite Dennyism

best of times, worst of times

2008-01-03T22:14:00.000-07:00

this is part of our universe

as is this

I went back to the second layer of firmament this weekend, soldiered through the dirty gray slush where the sidewalks become streets, resurrected feelings that outstrip my power to apprehend, told stories about times I had forgotten, ate the shit out of some dank pad see ew, encountered revelations in forms I had unconsciously sequestered to the outer edges of awareness, existed in that slipshod passage of time made possible by a train ride surging past artless but authentic graffiti scrawled on the side walls of 3-flats and endless iterations of signs for Mexican restaurants, slipped dollar bills solicited by destitute HOMELESS ON CHRISTMAS HAPPY NEW YEAR signs, and sat in a library whose arched ceilings and intricate Gothic characters made me feel at home and absent from home at the same time. Happy new year and all that jazz, good eventful times underwritten by good eventful times and strange compassless times. And I read me some Charles Dickens – on the plane from Omaha, the train, the cabs, and the couches of apartments on which I could lay my slightly addled head for four or five hours.

Dickens is basically voice-over, the kind of reading that goes off in my head. Add to that viewings of Planet Earth and the sonorous narration of Charles Attenborough (“It’s like God’s narrating to you after you’ve died) and I was very voice-in-head-struck. Plus I met my Sidney Carton, in the flesh, capable of manifesting that dark night of the soul at four o’clock in the afternoon as the wan light of Windy City winter sun streamed through the windows of a hipster bar with a stripper pole and passable meatloaf. In his Charles Darnay incarnation, my Sidney was all wit and Camels and snide remarks made in the face of authority and helping people across the street and not giving a shit if the thrift store clothes were exactly the kind the cool kids didn’t go there to buy, but just the functional cheap things that provided the requisite amount of warmth and non-police intervention, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at 17 and nanotechnology because the least you owe yourself is a search for moorings, and if you find none, then that blossoms into something – five or six years later – that begins to feel like a blessing to let it all just go. I kind of am thinking of that scene in the Usual Suspects when finster’s dead and baldwin’s character spits (literally) into Pollack’s character’s face: “We pulled more scores, and stole more money, than you’ve ever imagined . . . so FUCK you!” That’s not an exact quote, just the way I remember it, which is in spirit with the general drift of where I want this all to go, b/c he’s the smartest and most haunted person I will ever know and if I ever go to the city again who knows what possible incarnation I may encounter and that's that that's that that’s that.

Ineradicable difference, to a CEO, is just a smelly guy on the bus, to the rest of us

2007-12-26T23:27:00.000-07:00

Progression through unlearning makes every idiot with a mic seek out comparisons

many of which make a man want to eat away all memory and all resonance . . . .

Potential never paid bills, never could look the long run in the face. Drive did some things, but it didn't turn one round ball into another, one stage of grief into an incipient stage of triumph. "World's greatest, undisputed" - ironically it means that when the end comes, there really is no point in carrying on the conversation.

Every search for the new savior kneels down before the swift na-na of hindsight. I'm not talking about Chuck D's soundtrack for Denzel's basketball movie - I'm talking about a player who came up bearing the ersatz traits of the thing we all missed more than we could say, and ended being just another PAC-10 player of whom Hubie Brown might say, "There's some talent there, yes . . . but not the game." And that is just late 90s nostalgia. Dont get me started on Jayson Williams/Bobby Hurley Duke point guard cursedness, unless you are willing to countenance the notion that the distributor for a West Point man is always already vulnerable. Goodness gracious me.

New eras make old highlights more luminous, or is that just a function of old eyes making new light out of old images?

Eat what's on your plate

2007-12-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

graffiti in Miami

Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''

What Ari Fleischer and Scott McLellan wake up to at the 4 am nighsweat time

1. For the second time in five years, I have booked a flight departing at 6 am, having thought I was booking a flight departing at 6 pm. Perhaps a reason I have only booked three flights in the last five years. Fuck me running.

2. Here is the person behind the series, "The Wire." Am I suggesting that this is worth minutes of your life? I am. Do I know you? Not in the Biblical sense, no, but I think he has things to say that you should hear.

3. Cant Stop Wont Stop
Out Stealing Horses
God's Pocket
I am not Jackson Pollock

What are the books on which the cup of coffee precariously sits?

4.
"It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme — I am tempted to say evil — genius . . . It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I’m a little startled myself, but it’s been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares."

What NY Times Critic A.O. Scott, with whom my friend Scott wants to be entombed, says about Johnny Depp's new joint, Sweeney Todd?

Core principles are those without which coherence of self is necessarily compromised

2007-12-17T00:38:00.000-07:00

Suppositions

1. There is currently a 23 year old graduate of an Ivy League university, with a stellar resume and a banging GPA, to whom the task of assessing Chelsea Clinton’s record as a financial consultant has been given. Whom employs the said 23 year old is an open question – there are probably six or seven instances of the genus currently opining about the task on Facebook, and the salaries of each individual tasked with this specific research objective, when combined, possibly dwarfs the average income earned by Americans by a factor of at least four (but maybe not). How to fix America – take the $$ proferred to people who represent and are paid by the people who seek to lead, apply it to the national debt, subtract by a factor of seven times the craziness of Mardi Gras last year, and add the average number of kilowatt hours recorded on a combine owned by an Iowa farmer who is a card-carrying member of the Ethanol Is Good Consortium and who owns at least 3000 acres of fertile corn-hospitable land with which to butter his (or her) bread.
2. There is currently a 55 year old mother of three who lives in or near the Quad Cities and who can summon a precinct captain to her house in less than an hour (weekday, evening hours) with so much as an aleatory doubt about her chosen candidate’s electability.
3. Dan Grable is a prize endorsement for any candidate worth his or her salt.

Cult/Sport/Lit/Heart Hybridity

2007-12-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

If you don't have a sport or a sport spectator moment that either tore you in half or
consummated some essential part of your being for a moment, then you may doubt that there is an area of overlap within which aesthetics and athletics fuse. This is basically some of what's going on behind Billups's new thing, which is here and which may tax your patience but stick with it . . .

end of year and all that pop n jazz

2007-12-13T00:53:00.000-07:00

Here’s the requisite Broken Social Scene pick, which sounds resentful but is not; more evidence of their having done something. “All My Friends” who did ecstasy out in the meadow when the corn had just planted . . . staring into the bonfire and slamming miller lites until the heart stopped its worrisome beating . . . and sliding through every class with just enough effort to hear the hints the teacher gave that allowed for exemplary grades (b/c you’re not dumb) . . . but we didn’t have facepaint or suits. We had ford accords and gravel roads. I would argue that is not a distinction without a difference, but nor is it a completely delusional identification – each to their own obsolescence (and sometimes obsolescence is a good thing – feel me?).

Well, yes, Feist, you are precious, and I cannot deny that. So many primary colors. And the offspring they make. I thoroughly, unequivocally enjoy this. Which is ‘cause I’m old. See 1 2 3 4. And (I’m looking again) is it all one shot – so to speak, given the likelihood of possible alterations? Yes I do believe so.

And here is health “heaven” – who knew so much drama resides in airborne ski possibilities?

One thing punk rock does is make your relatives believe the end is near. On that ground, MIA is punk rock – and if after watching the vid, you don’t want to go to India, you (I assert) are immune to the temptation adventure poses (assuming you, like me, have never entered Southeast Asia):

whoa prinzhorn dance school – I am such a sucker for bass lines – and then you go English on me, looking all proper and like – plus images of labor (sawing, screwing, and burning???). “Beeswax, beeswax” – that could be nothing or else a secret invocation that everything is about to be over. nice maul, nice file, nice hammer, nice mini-ax. E.P. Thompson is thrumming in his dear Britsh grave – and let’s be honest: british accents make it all better. Here you go.

economy of movement. Work it out.

and to the contrary, music composed by an Austin TX band can have resonance across cultures, vis a vis a yellow malleable toy-like avatar of the song it seeks to commemorate.

OH – WUH, OOH!

Cause your style is like dying in my sleep - I don't feel it

2007-12-10T23:11:00.001-07:00

1)

The cold war epithet "real politik" - - - -> = "war on terrorism's "real moral"

Maybe it just comes from an extended session perusing old West Wing scenes on youtube but I have this resurgent sense that we've glossed over the significance of a discussion of torture, but I'd rather ignore it because addressing it would pull me into a morass of conceptual Doublethink, the likes of which I'd rather get caught up in. So, in time-honored fashion, I resort to the block quote, the origin of which should be clear from the use of footnotes and syntactical OCD:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such
thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard
the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims
but as democratic martyrs, "sacrifices on the altar of freedom"?* In
other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability
to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus,
that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices
in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of
our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

n still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every
few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or
thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a
democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without
subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer
to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because
the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high
price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of
the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned
about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between
Franklin's time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national
conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of
(a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and
protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected
leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure
the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo,
Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive
Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the
Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment
that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and
property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate
on whether they're worth it? Was there no such debate because we're
not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually
become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider
whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

FOOTNOTES:
1. Given the strict Gramm-Rudmanewque space limit here, let's just
please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes—an
open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist
10, pluralism, due process, transparency ... the whole democratic
roil.

2. (This phrase is Lincoln's, more or less)

2) I had a dream recently involving a steeply terraced classroom (think upper deck Comiskey, which always gave me the willies) with a computer at each spot, black screen, cordless mouse, and all the students were simply playing with their mouses, having no discernible effect on the blackness of the screen. I entered through the side, and realized I was supposed to be teaching something. But walking to the front, in front of the podium, didn't seem possible. The students were almost grotesquely diverse - every kind of skin color, hair color, style, etc - though they all seemed to be between 18 and 24, or thereabouts. Except they were very small, such that none could touch the floor with their feet. I think it may have a nightmare, as the staring/watching them continued for a long time, and the anxiety re: what I should be doing seemed to be directly proportional to the time I spent watching. Take that and run a 5K with it, if you want.

3) A case for sluttishness, corroborated with scripture

Probably not good to check out at work or in a classroom with lots of 15 year olds

2007-12-10T23:06:00.000-07:00

but still (fake blood + prosthetic arm-based assemblage of weapons + rampant over the top violence)

Being confused is so much more admirable than being sullen

2007-12-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

It’s right to say that a song you can’t get away from inflicts a certain kind of punishment on you, so that you can neither escape, assimilate, or reject whatever hold it aims to have. Good art – the kind that punctures your skein of normalcy and lifts you above the everyday functionality of feeding yourself, answering to the body’s execratory functions, and maintaining whatever degree of fidelity to the expected thresholds of self-presentation in the early 21st century (hygiene, small-talk, answering the phone) – makes promises it cannot keep and makes you feel like its shortcoming is somehow your fault. This is part of the genius of Eminem’s “Stan” – it lets the air out of the dream that a fan’s absolute identification with an artist offers recoupable returns.
For the past two days, whenever time and technology allow it, I’ve listened to “The President’s Dead” by a band called Okkervil River. I have an addictive personality; sometimes I’ll read a book cover to cover, and cover to cover again. Likewise with songs/albums: I’ve had the same CD playing in my car since September, though that’s partially the result of the CD player being very selective in what CDs it will allow to be played; when I was teaching, I listened to the last Sufjan Stevens album from the time I got home to the time I went to bed for two weeks. Other examples (Wallace’s “good old neon,” “usual suspects” at 15, cosmological constants first year in college, Two Gallants for endless walks through stupid streets for the entire second half of August, Les Savy Five’s “Rage in the Plague Age” last week, etc) reinforce my susceptibility to being caught up in the thing itself, working with each new exposure to unearth a newly resonant moment that calls into question whatever notion of the larger whole I had conceived. “The President’s Dead” came alive to me when I first heard the “rat-tat-tat” entrance of the snare drum, effectively ending the acoustic guitar/narrative folk strain of the song’s first part while enacting the “three shots” line. This is an intentionally incendiary song, and though I’ve grown less enamored with being incendiary for incendiary’s sake, I think it works. Have a listen.

the vestigiality of male nipples

2007-11-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

*I just kind of like the word "vestigiality"

1.

The groundswell

David Letterman played host to Bill Clinton on Wednesday night, and if you missed it, you may have missed the opportunity to appreciate how verbose the man really is. No one is better equipped to locate follow up questions within his own answers, or to make implicit criticism apparent through the selective use of adjectives. I have nothing against Bill Clinton - he's entertaining, informative, authoritative, and unwholesomely needy all at the same time - and I have nothing against blow jobs, and I am not particularly concerned with Bill's wife's campaign's current stasis. That said, I'm sort of sick of dynasties, which feeling is aided, abetted, and exfoliated by the undercurrent of exceptionalism that continues to seep through Miss Hillary's public persona.

It's a bit too easy to follow the pundit crowd and excoriate Hillary for acting as if the others are ganging up on her, not because she's the front-runner and running the most anesthetized campaign imaginable, but b/c she's a she (see, e.g., Maureen Dowd & Peggy Noonan converging into a phalanx, working that left-right, jab-hook combo). Still, I don't think it's altogether easy to sever the people who dislike Hillary b/c of who Hillary is and those who dislike Hillary b/c she's a she, or at the last the kind of she they perceive her to be.

It's not clear where to go from there, as evidence of nepotism and naked, unmitigated ambition do enough, for me at least, to yearn for Obama to make the move that will eventually be made in this election. but the thing is: this election is fucking long, and Newsweek and Time and Fox News and the Spectator and the NYTimes and so on so desperately want to make more of it than it really is, that as a result it seems like we just hear about a shift in momentum to forestall the eventual boredom that's bound to set in eventually. We are habitually conditioned to expect that something interesting is about to happen, and if nothing does, we are habitually conditioned to accept reports suggesting that what appears to be boring is actually a maelstrom of impending tectonic activity.

2.
Abodes

If you build a house, and that house catches on fire when a naturally occurring, swiftly moving fire overtakes the area where that house sits, and it later turns out that where you built the house is also a place where fires happen a lot, it's still sad and all that you lost your house and the pictures documenting different eras of your life that are obviously important and full of almost unimaginable personal significance of the "you don't know it until it's gone" variety, but maybe all the fires that happened before were a good indication that another fire might come again and so, not to belabor the point, maybe it was also not a good idea for you to do what you did. but that's what insurance is for, right?

Old Crow

2007-11-20T04:08:00.000-07:00

This feels like last year, because it's 5 am and I'm drinking coffee and I've been up for an hour b/c that is just how today is going to go.

Restlessness tends to perpetuate itself, and that old time feeling for something different has occasionally raised its large spectral presence, asking to be entertained.

Maybe it's not a coincidence that the issue of restlessness and this feels like last year, but the situation is quite different from last year, in the externals, comes up at the same time. liberating radical syntax is.

A calendar with Xs on it; a white folder with symmetrical, overlapping stains from a coffee cup; a glass with crayons in it; a pocket Constitution; a cactus; a three hole punch; two dictionaries; a pile of paper; antagonistic stapler.

First excerpt of a thing I wanted to do before I am no longer young

2007-11-20T03:56:00.000-07:00

That sentiment is alien to you. You know “faith” and “redemption” as phrases, not forces, and even where you live, which Mrs. Dunwoody in sophomore geography incessantly urges referred to the Northern Plains – which Mrs. Dunwoody is no one’s favorite but at least she doesn’t make you do the Macarena like Mrs. Wendell, who kids say is a lesbian, does in Spanish II – but anyway, the Northern Plains, the square states that your dad likes to call God’s Country – even here you are not alone in having a hard time believing that faith and redemptive power are anything more than husks that house concepts people rely on to make conjectures about things that elicit a need to talk and dampen the fear that they have nothing to say. Mr. Gordon will seem the exception to you then, in how calm and certain and steady he seems about it.

HOLY, AMERICA!

non-cheery, not-wholly-articulate contempation

2007-11-15T23:13:00.001-07:00

soldier student

There are numerous things to say about this, but the primary thing, to me, is this:
Ever since we were told that going shopping was a proper response to an unprecedented crises, the easiest course of action has been our (read: non-soldiers) insistence on going on with day-to-day affairs as if life was normal. That is a disservice. I am not sure if it's accurate to say that reminding yourself that others are sacrificing or being sacrificed (others means soldiers and regular schmucks in Iraq who can't live with any semblance of normalcy) every day may make you more cognizant of your own personal situation and the general situation Over There, but it certainly seems that way, just as it certainly seems that 99% of the cues we come across in our daily lives encourage us to continue on w/o so much as a thought about what we may owe to that larger thing to which we belong.

he is not the kind whose shield wounds others

2007-11-13T22:39:00.001-07:00

Self-belief at 19 is a proposition altogether different than self-belief at 25, just as optimism at 11 is a proposition altogether different than optimism at pimple-laden, broken-voiced 15. Maybe it's the case that the same words at different intervals of time are like the same species incarnated in different individual instances: this "justice" differs from that "justice" like the lion who licks his chops in the Serengeti differs from the lion who sits in a concrete enclosure, licking his balls and waiting for another piece of meat to be slid down the chute. So but maybe the operative term here is concepts, not words: a single concept deployed in a given context is an instantiation of the general class to which it belongs, but whose specific properties both abide by and diverge from that class so as to belong in different degrees. Just think of individuals you know who bastardize a familiar concept like love or goodness or accountability, or who embody it so thoroughly and uncompromisingly that your understanding of what the idea could possibly be dilates in this person's wake. Goodness gracious me, it's complicated.

Mitt Romney's first name is Mitt - I shit you not

2007-11-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal's weekend edition contains a story about Barack Obama and the unbearable lightness of being black enough but not too black, but not too conscious about being black enough or not too black either. It also contains an interview with the resident Mormon, who promulgates the idea that data is what grounds any decision-making process worthy of the name and is described as a man "who refers to what some would call their 'core beliefs' as 'concepts.'"

I am not one to advert for the return of Hunter S. Thompson, mostly because I believe a suicide is evidence enough of the need for an era to run its course. That said, and adding the caveat that anyone of any political stripe who sincerely hopes that one of these people will rise to the occasion is likely to encounter the bleak vicissitudes of misplaced sincerity, I do believe that the general election will be a battle of attrition conducted during a relatively catastrophic economic decline and a thoroughly depressing media-fixation for a savior.

But (pause for effect) this is not to say that something along the lines of an Obama 04 convention speech or a Goldwater incursion won't emerge as the next proximate cause of a return to an interesting, relevant conversation about what can be done to bring some smelling salts to old sad sack America and restore some semblance of a coherent version of civic life that is neither self-defeating nor self-delusional.

Genus: hipster

2007-11-11T21:38:00.000-07:00

From that bastion of collectivist wisdom, Wikipedia:

"In current parlance it can refer to the way one is dressed and may have connotations involving the circumstances of one's class and identity -- and the glaring contradictions of those circumstances."

Derogatorily:

"identifying that a person may be superficially following recently mass produced, homogeneous, urban fashion trends, overly concerned with their image and the contradictions of their identity, potentially anorexic, disingenuously appropriating a pseudo-artistic image or "a collage of other urban identies" from the past, or simply an elitist. Similar to other social groups, hipsters have been accused of exercising peer pressure to persuade other members of the group to adopt certain attitudes and ideas (e.g., that the music of Steely Dan lacks soul)."
supra.

I kind of like Steely Dan, and I don't not eat, and I don't have an urban domicile, but I do like Pavement, so . . .

"11 Clues You Are a Hipster
1. You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration.
2. You frequently use the term 'postmodern' (or its commonly used variation 'PoMo') as an adjective, noun, and verb.
3. You carry a shoulder-strap messenger bag and have at one time or another worn a pair of horn-rimmed or Elvis Costello-style glasses.
4. You have refined taste and consider yourself exceptionally cultured, but have one pop vice (ElimiDATE, Quiet Riot, and Entertainment Weekly are popular ones) that helps to define you as well-rounded.
5.You have kissed someone of the same gender and often bring this up in casual conversation.
6. You spend much of your leisure time in bars and restaurants with monosyllabic names like Plant, Bound, and Shine.
7. You bought your dishes and a checkered tablecloth at a thrift shop to be kitschy, and often throw vegetarian dinner parties.
8. You have one Republican friend whom you always describe as being your 'one Republican friend.'
9. You enjoy complaining about gentrification even though you are responsible for it yourself.
10. Your hair looks best unwashed and you position your head on your pillow at night in a way that will really maximize your cowlicks.
11. You own records put out by Matador, DFA, Dischord, Warp, Thrill Jockey, Smells Like Records, Saddle Creek, and Drag City."
12. You have downloaded R. Stevie Moore videos and have attempted to enjoy them.

1. Yes
2. Not outside of a classroom
3. No, though I did inherit J. Jowers's black Gap sholder-strap bag
4. No, unless the MLB counts.
5. Um, no. I absolutely understand lesbianism is how attractive I find woman qua woman.
6. I go to a bar called Carey's but it's named after a family. Does that count?
7. I took my dishes from a garage sale, after being told I could, after offering $.50 for them.
8. On many planes, I am a Republican.
9. I don't live in a state where gentrification is more than a term people who have lived in Minneapolis toss around.
10. Sometimes I don't shower, yes.
11. Yes, not sure, yes, yes, yes, yes, not sure, yes, yes.
12. No. Am i missing something?

I guess this is all to say if you occupy any kind of social position within a state with less than a million people you can't be a hipster. But that's not true, right? If you own a gun and/or belong to a bowling league can you be a hipster? What if you own smallish t-shirts that fit your smallish frame and once had body piercings but now prefer the bar on the edge of town that sells bait to fish for walleye and don't see anything ironic about that? Contrapositive: last Ipod albums purchased: the National, Les Savy Fav, the Clipse, Sparklehorse, Eddie Vedder soundtrack (very very drunk), Aesop Rock, Low, EPMD, Beirut, the Mountain Goats? Where is Chuck Klostermann when you need him?

End of expectation is death of hope

2007-11-11T01:05:00.000-07:00

go ahead and kiss babies, go ahead and make a connection with that person you think may have something to do with what you want and may help you either get what you want or or make it easier to do what you need to do to get what you want b/c this is AMERICA says Denzel says Andrew Jackson says Capone's consigliare says Tony Robbins says the girl whose aunt owns the corner store where all the heads go to make survival all that much easier, says the NW small town barttender with all the curves and the knowhow about the loggers and their champagne dreams and welfare check incomes with a sink full of dirty dishes and a freezer full of bean and cheese burritos, says the NJ gas staion attendant with the drawn in eyebrows and the high school beauty school dreams but with two kids and an overlong lawn and a Ford Tempo that smokes up the freeway until the local EPA bumper sticker activists call the po you know po - what does she care if the dog pisses on the small grass space between the street and the neighbors - it's a mutt OK, the dog - and but so do you have more sympathy for the insurance salesman in Austin MN who has lost a bunch of white customers in the last five years but who has a subsitute in "slightly" illegal immigrants who have made it to shift managers - what does the Statue of Liberty say about them, much less the statute of limitations - all in all it's about a holistic vision which i dont which powers and pynchon and all thsoe boys do - so i want to go back to CK williams and Wenderoth and the boys b/c those are names i somehow know and I believe in the idea that a person huddled in some corner attached to a desk that's not even made of wood can compose something - a story, an argument trailed by logic, a sentiment even - that makes sit up from my humdrum life and take notice. But that's all. That's as far as i go. And I admit I'd love to go farther - or further, if degree is your bag.

USB ports are not the end all be all of computing

2007-11-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

"He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance."

- the Declaration

The boys of the brigades knew enough to use descriptive language in delineating their complaints, did they not? Redcoats-as-heinous-swarm, sucking out the substance of a people (indeed, a freedom-loving people) at the behest of a King.

One way to stage a revolution: Turn the King into the middleman, and then cut him out of the action.

Proposition #1, made after a long, sleepless, slightly tripped out antibiotic-fueled night perusing the Declaration and its eventual companion, the Constitution:

It's easy to grow complacent in the belief that you actually remember what's in something you've read before. Complacency, in many cases, simply prolongs misapprehension.

Sub-Proposition #1a) Every time you read something you haven't read in five years or more, it means something different, b/c you are something different.

Proposition #2: There are endless opportunities to be surprised by "classic" literature, including political treatises and so on. They are never as dull or airy or limpid as you (if you are me), in your self-regarding manner, had supposed them to be.

Fever dreams

2007-11-05T21:55:00.000-07:00

8:20 - 101.3
8:50 - 102.0
9:30 - 102.1
9:40 - 101.5
10:53 (just now) - 101.1

hard rock radio station temperatures always give me the shivers, and in recent years I've moved away from chicken noodle soup to ice cream despite the palsy that comes shortly after. i had to wait awhile after the ice cream so as to not tarnish the results - that's some scientific method going on there. about once a year - hopefully never more - i come down with some medical condition during which fever dreams come. ever since i was five or six, i have tended to have the same dream before the fever breaks. i am told it involves eyes rolling back in my head, but cannot verify. Tonight is going to be a chore; tomorrow shall be glorious.

Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.

2007-10-30T06:05:00.001-06:00

1. Corporations are not more efficient governments. They are instead increasingly efficient money making machines. And while there's nothing at all wrong with money making machines -- indeed, wealth and growth depends upon them -- there is something fundamentally wrong with trusting these machines to restrain the drive for profits in the name of doing the right thing.

2. A friend sent this by way of encouragement. I like it:

The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic,
and to some extent even antibiotic -- in short, the closest thing to a
genuine panacea -- known to medical science is work. -Thomas Szas

I see Mr. Szas as a tremendously self-disciplined individual, yes?

3. The nicotine cessation project has progressed to the point where I have a cold and feel almost clairvoyant from having ceded over sleep to the energetic chemicals in my body asking whence the change in routine. I predict incredibly autumnal experiences for you today.

4. Two and a half cheers for T-Bone Burnett!

creative exploration defeating boredom

2007-10-28T22:54:00.001-06:00

http://www.wefeelfine.org/mission.html

http://indexed.blogspot.com/

From Three Farmers on Their Way To A Dance:

The paradox of the self-attacking observer is this century’s hallmark, reached simultaneously in countless disciplines. Psychologists now know there is no test so subtle that it won’t alter the tested behavior. Economic tracts suggest that Model A would be inviolably true if enough people realized its inviolability. Political polls create the outcome they predict. Even in the objective sciences, physicists, in describing the very small, have had to conclude that they can’t talk about a closed box, but that opening the box invariably disturbs the contents.

These are the recognizable bywords and cliches of our times. Casual talk abounds with the knowledge that there is no understanding a system without interfering with it. This much I knew well. What did not occur to me until the second time through the Ford biographies is that this position is itself tangled. Generalized, it attacks itself. "All observations are a product of their own times. Even this one."

This recursion is critical, not because it places a limit on knowing, but because it shows the impossibility of knowing where knowledge leaves off and involvement begins. If there is no independent vantage point, if the sitter’s life is not separable from the biographer’s interfering observation, then each of the sitter’s actions must similarly be tied to biographical impulse. The two are inextricably tangled. Describing and altering are two inseparable parts of the same process, fusing into a murky totality

Now the zoologist on expedition to Africa to study the great apes is not freed by this paradox of the observer to make up figures or indulge in poetic whimsy. The scientist is obliged, however, to acknowledge that the presence of a field team and film cameras tells the apes as much about human motives as it tells humans about apes’ behavior in the wild.

With every action, we write our own biographies. I make each decision not just for its own sake but also to suggest to myself and others just what choices a fellow like me is likely to make. And when I look back on all my past decisions and experiences, I constantly attempt to form them into some biographical whole, inventing for myself a theme and a continuity. The continuity I invent in turn influences my new decisions, and each new action rearranges the old continuity. Creating oneself and explaining oneself proceed side by side, inseparably. Temperament is the act of commenting on itself.

it's just change. change happens all the time.

2007-10-28T12:23:00.000-06:00

Fundamentals

There's something in a pop song about a boy who didn't call that warms heart cockles (Hey Boy by the blow). Same with a book about a crime whose victim is an altruist who doesn't the perp caught because he (the victim) had it coming (Samaritan by Richard Price). I am beginning to think there's really only four or five stories, and we just vary how they're told. This would be Hayden Frye-like.

Fungible Experiences

The world series is depressing me. I want more. IM basketball starts tomorrow. I am envisioning ACL tears and rampant palming. Please don't tell me any substantive news - I am on a diet.

Favorite smell on earth: sweatshirt bearing late October autumn smell (a bouquet of outside, leaves, impending winter, etc.) I think it only comes after wearing the said sweatshirt while engaging in some outdoor exertion for at least 50 minutes (arbitrary-sounding, but think about it - that's about right); the smell is more powerful if you somehow come into contact with the ground during this time. This morning I went on a long bike ride and at what point a five year old playing on the sidewalk held me at bay with a plastic sword and suggested i was under arrest and silly to have a blue bike. Then i played with my friend's dog. These are the events that have given the gift of autumn smell on sweatshirt. My longing to be able to play guitar and my love of this smell have been consistent, unmitigated features of my personality for like 15 years now. I bet these guys have that smell (they dont seem particularly happy, though)

Current strategy for living longer: Naked juice and organic chocolate, plus spinach and ricotta stuffed chicken. Don't front on pureed mango, bitches.

Back when I knew girls who baked banana bread

2007-10-24T00:12:00.000-06:00

I suppose it's not unexpected to walk into a coffee shop and come upon a young male playing a Weezer song on an acoustic guitar. And to look at the audience and see a lot of unexamined facial piercing. But so after getting the coffee and thinking about it for a second, I began to feel like a prick for thinking the issue was with the crowd and not the person (this one here doing the writing) assigning blame for populating a space with the stock figures one may expect to find there. Maybe it's a shared responsibility, but I do know it's a sensation I haven't really succumbed to as much as I used to. I lot of shit people did used to make me viscerally angry, and a large subset of those things had to do with what may be called a sense of decorum animated with a conception of what was cool. Overt expressions of exuberance were not a good thing, is one example. Likewise trying really hard to accomplish something and being earnest about it in conversation without also mixing in little self-effacing diminishment of whatever the intended accomplishment is. There's been a lot of ink expended of late (like, say, the last decade) about the self-bounded universe of art and popular culture that takes "ironic cool" as its aesthetic-marketing touchstone. I think I still live in that universe a few days a month (like today with the coffee incident) but mostly it's been a relief to find myself having to devote energy and mindspace to more pressing (and potentially more banal) shit.

What is this about? It started with banana bread, which I genuinely missed. After that I dont know what happened. It's 2 oclock in the morning. i have that excuse. day three of nicotine cessation evidences a rather dramatic turn toward the darker recesses of my personality, but only on the inside. Walking away from people is better than saying whatever it is you want to say, sometimes.

Alarmism as a kind of warm blanket in the cool night of the present

2007-10-23T17:00:00.000-06:00

Not that I’ve ever taken a class on microeconomics, macroeconomics, or political economy, but isn’t our general pattern of earning money and then buying and selling things, combined with the way our government collects money from us and then spends it in ways that may keep it in office, just about as apeshit crazy as it could possibly be? On like a larger order of Things That Do Not Make Sense, it is viable to be trillions of dollars in debt when foreign banks and/or individuals are propping up the dollar because of a sort of psychologically consternating double-bind akin to the Prisoner’s Dilemma? Is it viable to have an eight-year period that combines Republican domination with unfettered growth of government? When will it become ok to say, “you know, the economy’s big enough . . . let’s ride this inertia out for awhile?” I know I know I know – this all can work in the sense that fundamental breakdown is not an immediate risk, much less a foregone conclusion, as far as superstructure goes. Post-industrial economy 3, long-term sanity of a culture 0 – things really went to shit when hoboes became an endangered species, is what my reactionary side wants to plead, but really there are probably no answers one would need to capitalize, it’s just the totality of aggregate circumstances built from frenetic individual lives.
This is not anything but a case of plangent griping about inexorable human infirmity.
Which is to say I drank too much coffee and my stomach hurts.

the man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be

2007-10-21T15:21:00.000-06:00

Having a peripatetic nature means having to come up with excuses for short attention spans and aimless wandering. It means risking the epithet "lost soul" and giving the impression of being allergic to stability and all the evolutionary values said to be genetically selected for. It may also mean a kind of perpetual escape, never knowing a place well enough to have its tentacles overwhelm you and change you in the overwhelming. It may also mean succumbing to weakly constituted romanticism, fueled by a lifetime of stories whose fiction always proves so unbearably enticing. It is the fix for nostalgic addiction.

More to come.

2007-10-20T21:24:00.001-06:00

Things that make sense don't always make it easier to get up in the morning. Having an alarm does, though. At this point, what percentage of individuals in the world have seen a painting that triggered something in them? What if by painting it's allowed to mean "commercial" - or is that too quaint, vis a vis the general acknowledgment that advertising is the new art in terms of its ability to captivate one time for every hundred times it exists as background noise?

i am taking a walk that may turn out to be long.

We still believe in the arbitrary power of the non sequitur

2007-10-20T20:45:00.000-06:00

"

It took centuries of dressing
to make this nakedness "

talib is vanna white, Mos Def is Carey Grant/Jack Nicholson/Chester Himes/James Madison/Mr. Rogers/Baraka/[any other dude worthy of your attention and, if I may suggest, undying respect]

Douchebag

2007-10-11T20:20:00.000-06:00

Hey Douchebag -

You've got a really bad bite. A really bad one, right.

all the William Perrys in the world can't save you now

2007-10-11T11:37:00.000-06:00

Was there such a thing as "a photographic memory" before the camera was invented? What do you call the condition of being intolerant, to the point of paralysis or rage, of having to wait in line? Have you heard of the 7Up, 14Up, 21UP, etc. documentary, which follows a group of British people from different backgrounds in seven year intervals as they grow and carve out their lives? How come we don't see more of that, what with our having the technological means and all? Does everyone have a certain kind of desire that will never be satiated (food, God, sex, silence, orchids, paintings, money, etc.) or are there some people for whom "yearnings" qua yearnings are really at the low end of the spectrum? If there are such people, do you think there lives sort of just hum along until they die? Without proffering another tired version of Manichean soul/body division, would these people who do not really feel all that much desire for anything be more or less evolved than us regular carrot-chasers?

Problem being, your acts of kindness are always so random

2007-10-10T00:10:00.001-06:00

As incongruous as a digital prayer, fireworks shot off in the sky tonight. The display was standard-issue blooming flowers, with the occasional montage of red-white-blue, the better to procure the crowd's oohs. It is homecoming, is why the fireworks. The grocery store clerk, whose fingernails were painted a very banging shade of phosphorescent green, proved a fount of wisdom on what homecoming entails. Visitors that span generations will arrive later in the week to pledge continuing fealty to their alma mater and get very very drunk. The young are already quite restless and the empty cases of Miller Lite are already appearing in lawns just off campus. T-shirts that say "if found drunk and passed out, take to the Dome [football stadium] ASAP" are selling faster than [insert cliche] at the undergrad library. The marketing strategy came from the braintrust that is my class's student government representatives. According to a recent email, "we are looking at something like a two-fold return on the initial investment," so at least the catering at the next class function will have chocolate-covered strawberries. Sigh.

I have a feeling I will make an excellent curmudgeon, starting at like age 32. I do not want to get ahead of myself. I hold out hope that the weekend (which starts tomorrow around here) will be baseball-oriented and based out of a cabin in WI. Unless someone volunteers the use of a cabin in WI, it will just be baseball-oriented. I still can't not be awake, which is distinguished from not being able to sleep in inexpressible but not intangible ways. Also, did you know that the use of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is younger than my father? Stupid me, thinking we've been blessed by Divine Providence since before my Norwegian forebears boated over to become part of us.

Incomprehensability as a kind of neurological affliction

2007-10-07T20:41:00.000-06:00

convoluted thoughts on matters unrelated to baseball or the legal definitions of negligence, of which I have little present understanding, prompted by reading the news reports on the Jenna six in LA and the deTocquevillian commentaries that followed in their wake -

1) Do you think Reginald Denny ever harbors in his heart a desire to watch the footage of the day he got bricked? Or, more pointedly: a desire to encounter each of his attackers lying prone on the street, asphalt chunks at hand, with no witnesses? I've been thinking about Reginald Denny, in fits and spurts, for about two weeks now. As far as victims of irrational mayhem go, he's both emblem and enigma. I have no particularly strong interest in examining what thoughts might permeate the collective consciousness of a riot, though I did - at 14 - think the Sublime song about the riots was worth listening to. (That says more about 14 year olds than artistic defenses of otherwise indefensible behavior, but . . .) It does seem odd to recall that "environmental factors" were cited as an affirmative defense, if not justification, of what was clearly a brutal act inflicted on a stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color. Ok, then, the other coin's side: what about the guy who did the bricking? Does he brag about it to his friends or regret it in a way that might signal more than the most minimal sliver of atonement?
Is atonement an all or nothing proposition, or does it exist on a spectrum of possibility?

2) A crime that lingers in my memory -

the family doctor, accused of sexually molesting his foster daughter, pleads guilty. at sentencing, his wife stands up and berates the judge, an instance of courtroom drama that reignites the town's internal debate, which has been as about contentious as Midwestern small town debates can be. The local paper covers the story and righteous indignation spills over in letters to the editor invoking violations of the public trust and "what has the world come to?" lamentations. I read it all, eating a bowl of Lucky Charms and feeling uncertain about things I didn't really even want to contemplate but knew, at 12 or 13, were part of what ideas like "justice" and "sin" were all about.
And none of the publicity or whispered conversations in the aisles grocery store overcame the central fact that all the actors in the drama were known to us. This is the guy who diagnosed the six or seven cases of strep throat I came down with as a kid, stitched up cuts, set a broken finger, etc. He seemed like the archetype of the friendly, compassionate small town doctor (Cf. Field of Dreams); the ring finger on his right hand was gone, severed in a farming accident. The divergence between the man I knew and the man portrayed in the paper were paralyzing and created a tension beyond anything even a cursory inquiry into the illusion/reality distinction could bear. Weeks go by, and the story goes dormant, except for the occasional mention of the case by a teacher or adult.
Years later - probably close to a decade even - I learn that a sizable portion of the adults I knew, including those who vilified the doctor in public, had come to the conclusion that he was not the story's villain, but its veiled martyr. According to the revised version, the doctor's biological son, two years older than me, was actually the molester. The doctor confessed to the crime he didn't commit to spare a son he would from then on no longer be able to face. He goes to jail, does his time, and he and the rest of the family meet with the son once a year at Christmas but have no contact other than that. The wife's outburst at sentencing becomes intelligible, if only as a symptom of the fundamentally fucked truth to which she alone probably has access and from which nothing good could be gleaned. When I first heard all this, from a mother of a friend who was more like a brother, growing up, I couldn't really breathe and even now the attempt to parse it all out, as a thing that actually happened, proves to be too exhausting.

pale green things that need sunlight

2007-10-06T23:22:00.000-06:00

That last post was not meant to be hostile, which it appears, now, to be, but more like here's a joke I thought was funny.

If you've read Crime and Punishment and remember the dream about the vodka drunk guy who beat down his horse and defied anyone who attempted to intervene with the truism that it's my property and I'll do with it what I want, then you may understand me when I say that a self is a serious thing to have. And not serious in a bad way, necessarily, and not serious in a "heady" way as a Hippie girl I once knew liked to nominate a certain kind of gravitas appertaining to a given situation, but serious nonetheless, and meaningful, too. What sayeth you? is a question permeating the ether. indeed.

You Want To Be 19? - Go ahead

2007-10-04T14:27:00.000-06:00

a fuck you friday, brought to you by mon-thurs.

"Taut" is a superlative

2007-10-01T00:52:00.000-06:00

1. Back in the day, when January hid the sun behind big gray Gothic buildings and the logic of walking through the packed snow of the park on the way home from an ebullient night prevailed over any instinctual self-regard that stemmed from wearing Vans and gold-toe socks that hugged ankles jealously, it seemed like it might not matter if Kleenex were available, because sleeves were, and the fact that you didn't own a brightly colored scarf was secondary to the fact that you couldn't feel your toes.
Subsequent periods lacked the clean reliance you glean from existing in a stable frame of reference. It became unfeasible, for reasons of being a thousand miles away, to climb into the window of that old abandoned church near Salonica's, which was done with the express intention of being scared shitless. For that matter, scaring myself shitless became less of an imperative and more of an accident, like locking your keys in the car. No one I knew huffed gas or slammed Tussin for fun and no one rode around in cars to kill time, so it wasn't like high school, which was a good thing; there were no bus rides to ethnic enclaves available and I didn't have access to comfortable chairs in a library for napping purposes, so it wasn't like college, which was a necessary step. Somewhere back there, the next placard flipped, as it always does - a qualitatively neutral observation, that, not sepia-toned Scorcesesque pining - and new oddities availed themselves before becoming assimilated back into the ordinary.
Eventually - always "eventually" - having friends who lived in double-wides with non-functioning fireplaces and eating mac and cheese with hot dogs for extra protein made an extraordinary amount of sense, as did sitting in the workplace bathroom with lights off for ten minutes because it seemed like those ten minutes made the rest of the day crawl less slowly by. I guess it's a matter of context, which isn't saying much but is more than saying nothing at all, and being open to the idea of context makes those random memories more tangibly explicable and strange at the same time.

2. There is still time to pay attention to the baseball. That is for certain.

people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

2007-09-28T23:46:00.000-06:00

Policy arguments are boring unless you're a wonk, in which case having sex is a dim possibility and parsing out appropriations bills adheres to a personal kind of logic I like to refer to as self-defeatism. That said, there is much energy devoted of late to the question of whether libertarianism carves out too much space for socially destructive behavior that doesn't victimize anyone specifically but gradually and inexorably erodes the terra firma of a just society. That question is - or may be - relevant, but if you're still reading, let's just be honest and admit that it's better (in our case) to spend time on other things than analyzing the respective merits of various kinds of libertarianism. Like movies or music or the merits of waking up at 6 am every day for months so as to secure a veritable truth, that adulthood means abandoning staying up past midnight.

Nix the policy.

Talib Kweli - Get By

I may be (OK I am) one of those mid to late-twenties specimens who continues to engage in activities that may contribute to a gradual diminution of self-esteem, insofar as self-esteem entails the capacity to not squander away momentary incidences of making the best of what is. And that's what this song seems, to me, to be about: making the best of. And - pardon the repetition - the song seems to really mean it, which I like.

Pete Dexter - Paper Trails, last essay as synecdoche

Being generally adverse to bold claims, I can only urge you to enter your closest Barnes & Noble type establishment (or whichever bookstore offers free reads and dark caffeinated beverages originating from coffee beans) and thereafter read the last essay in this collection. Pete Dexter has made me laugh in person, and though I am not from Illadelph, his stories capture enough of that corner of the world to catalyze thoughts about big cities and the general disarray and commingling they opportune in a way I tend to really very much like.

Hotel Chevalier - wes anderson, freely downloaded from Itunes Store

You see Natalie Portman's butt. Here are some lines from the short, some of which (guess which) resonate:

Have you slept with anyone?
No.
Have you?
No.
That was a long pause . . .

Whatever happens I don't want to lose you as a friend.
I promise I will never be your friend . . .

If we fuck, I'm gonna feel like shit tomorrow.
That's [not taken down]

I love you. I never hurt you on purpose.
I don't care.

It's not clear if W. Anderson's appropriation of standard relationships lines exchanged between self-knowing and altogether aware characters signifies something in the way of an advance in heterosexual relationships between affluent young uns. I kind of was OK with it all, but writing it out here gives (me) pause. I think Jason Schwartzman's facial hair ruins it all, and I think that its presence is implicitly there to give me a reason to be dismissive, and I resent that: it seems unfair to call attention to something and at the same time attempt a pull-rug-out-from-underneath maneuver. Call it a double-bind or just something calling attention itself.

Occurrences: IM participation, sports knowledge, beauty, Jim Rice

2007-09-27T22:02:00.000-06:00

Much to my surprise and momentary elation, it turns out putting "Pedroia" on your intramural seven man football jersey, participation in which consists of smoking Marlboro Lights on the sidelines and periodically calling for the trips formation, may yield the approach of a member of the opposite sex owning objectively jaw-dropping beauty, make you subject to the subsequent inquiry into your views on Pedroia's possible ROY chances, and avail you the opportunity to hear said opposite sex beauty's opinion that Jim Rice is seriously underrated. And then play commences again and buttonhook patterns continue to be effective.

Just to show I care

2007-09-27T14:20:00.000-06:00

from Sam Lipsyte:

"I shudder at the notion of Doctor Stacy Ryson and State Senator Glen Menninger remarking this update at some fund-raising soiree — oh, the snickers, the chortles, the wine-flushed glances, and later, perhaps, the puppyish sucking of body parts at a nearby motor lodge. Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?"

Goongala, goologa - How bout something, you know, for the effort

2007-09-24T07:53:00.000-06:00

Halloween 2007:

Escalator Clause Responds to Market Fluctuations

2007-09-20T23:13:00.000-06:00

I am preparing to eat ice cream and draw a picture with oil crayons. It is about fifteen minutes past midnight. The skin on my face no longer hides beneath inches
of beard, and for the past three days I have been listening to the music of this man obsessively:

Is there such a thing as grotesque voluptuousness? It seems like it might be a possible category, right? Cf. Freud, Lucien

In pursuit of awe

2007-09-18T22:30:00.000-06:00

Here’s a way of looking at it: there are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on Earth were charged with naming his or her share, we’d each get to name a trillion and a half of them.

“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced,” Einstein once said, “there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.” AKA the willful suspension of disbelief.

I promise to tell whatever is expedient and nothing but what is expedient, so help me future experience

2007-09-16T13:55:00.000-06:00

Beautiful Monday morning, walking and internalizing some music, came upon a Super Bouncy Ball and felt compelled to sling it straight down into the concrete above the steps of the National Museum of Music. And it hung up there, next to cottonwood leaves whose time is coming, for some time. I caught it on the third bounce and found I'd captured a spectator, a little black kid age 9 or 10 with a heavy bookbag that gave him a kind of geriatric hunch.
"Do it again."
And I did, and this time the launch angle was a little off so the ball actually moved back behind me at its apex, and threatened to carom off one of the Hellenic-inspired statues in the fountain outside the museum entrance. after a bit of a chase, I grabbed the ball and turned to find the audience had doubled. A professorial type, in gray suit-blue shirt-yellow tie ensemble, who I've previously seen picking up and disposing of plastic bags and other detritus around campus, was standing next to the little kid. I held up the Super Bouncy Ball as if it may be a talisman of sorts, and the older fellow smiled and walked away. I bounced the ball to little guy and walked happily home; thus the week begins.

from oh five

2007-09-16T01:40:00.001-06:00

I guess I am saying: Be cautious about having what you want, and be satisfied with wanting what you have. We will die before simplicity comes back into favor out of necessity, but it is not too early too scorn what you cannot have. Anyway. Good night or good morning, wherever I find you: holy happiness don't be false.

Something or other

2007-09-13T07:18:00.000-06:00

1.
It's a strange thing to hear your downstairs neighbor throwing up at 12:50 am in the morning - late nights are ammunition for reflection unto themselves without that thrown into the mix - and but I don't want to think about the probable sequence of events that led her to the porcelain and led me to be sitting up in bed, pouring over page 388 of a novel that I began at 7 and that I suspect I will not sleep until it is read all the way, right down to the last sentence. And so, wonder of wonders, I hit a key on the minimalist white computer, the screen flashes, and I bear this little snippet, a single word in the vast self-sustaining manuscript of sensations and perceptions that make up the last minute or so of my life, out into the public domain.

2.
In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights.

I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

Philosophy is its own time apprehended in thoughts

2007-09-08T21:56:00.001-06:00

It may still come down to what gets swallowed and what gets spat up.