Every precious human being's been a precious parent to you

Well my friends. The time has at last come for adios. I don't think I'm the same person I was when I started The Blog, and so it feels weird writing knowing about all the posts that precede me. All the posts. I'm having extreme difficulty reconciling my voice now with my past voice, or the way I view the The Blog now compared with how I used to, and these things I think, in turn, produce a sort of confusion that affects what confidence I have in how my voice has evolved. I used to think of The Blog as extremely private. I don't know why. Obviously it's not. I guess with blogs, there's a sort of private publicness at hand, which I don't know if I completely endorse without rigorous editorial standards. But I've almost completely stopped thinking of it as private. So what I'm saying is, not only do I not have the time to write posts anymore, but I don't know that I think of them the same way that I used to. I'm going to be embracing the fragmented self and kicking it on Tumblr for the time being, because it's fun and easy, and hopefully when I have more time on my hands I'll be collaborating with a friend on a new blog, a place for cohesive thoughts that Matter and are Important. Right now, I feel like I'm going absolutely mental, completely incapable of cohesion. But every time I come back here I feel as if I'm attending to some tumorous old version of myself, some reminder that this has all been linear, that I've been responsible, yes, me, and that I've transcended jack shit. I like to think that we transcend old versions of ourselves, and the internet allows us the illusion of this possibility. Although, lesbihonest, it'll just be more of the same shit, won't it?

http://thatssubjective.tumblr.com/

I'd say it's been real, but this is the internet, and nothing is, and how liberating.

How does this exist

The definition of Internet Gold-



"Cuz me nan's boyfriend, Derek, 'im always tell me nan that he is cunnilinguist. How many languages does that mean 'im speak?"

Oh, I remember you!

Are we really doing this then?

"This time Gucci is back in the slammer for some ridiculous traffic violations including; Driving on the wrong side of the road, running a red light or stop sign, damage to government property, obstruction, no license, no proof of insurance and other traffic charges, according to Curtis Davenport an Atlanta Police Department spokesperson."

"BUT WHERE ARE THE INDIANS??"

A few thoughts on this Dimal Thursday Afternoon, carried over from Wednesday:

-The workmen listening to the radio on the roof; it is turned low and there is lots of static and someone is talking, there is no music. i can also hear a heavy squeaking sound every now and then, which is louder than the radio, and usually accompanied by some light banging.

-Claude balled up somewhere inside the immense, crumpled quilt. I reach my hand in to find him, to make sure he is alive. He is buried deep within it. I make out fur and warmth, and I prod it until I feel him move. I can feel by the way his head is tucked into his body that he is balled up soundly and small, as if he is in a womb.

-The fungus that grew on the side of that pumpkin was actually beautiful even though I thought it was disgusting. I wish I had examined it longer. It's like I was afraid of it. Looking at well-developed fungus can sometimes be like looking at images of space.

-The pumpkin was sitting on a bookshelf, and the fungus only grew on the side that was facing the inside of the shelf, where the light did not hit it. While these things are probably definitely related, I'm more interested in the fact that it endowed the pumpkin with a sort of Jeckyll and Hyde type of quality. Again, I wish I had examined it longer. I spent weeks just staring at the nice side of that pumpkin. I didn't notice that it had begun to rot until a few days ago, and I let it sit there, and was surprised with how quickly the fungus appeared to be developing, taking on more intensified forms which I was only able to detect from the small edge of the fungus that could be seen from the pleasant side of the pumpkin. I could only see a tiny hint of it, but I knew it was growing, and I imagined what it could be like, and perhaps that's why I was so fearful of it, why, when I finally faced it this morning, lifted it down from the shelf to throw it away, I only glanced at it hurriedly, and then held it facing away from me as I carried to to the trash. So that now all I can remember about it are some colours. A deep teal in the middle, seeping out into sprawling patches of lighter blues and greens. Now it sits in the trash, a wall between us, and I still have no idea what it was really like.

-Claude dragging the sock dramatically across the carpet before laying into it. He attacks it wildly for a few seconds, then lies silently and still with it clutched in his mouth, slack-jawed, frustrated with anti-climax. I'd say it makes me feel bad to see him having to resort to hunting my dirty socks in order to express his sense of animalistic purpose, but I'm worse off. What do I get to hunt? Everything's been replaced by words.

-That kid in my class had ~Crèvecœur~ quotes on his phone. First of all, it's been weeks since we talked about ~Crèvecœur~. Second, this is how it went: so we were discussing the importance of laaanguage versus wriiiting in Willa Cather's My Antonia, and he made a point relating it to a passage from ~Crèvecœur~ to which the the professor responded that it was an excellent point and that he should find it and use it. Then he pulled out his phone, literally fiddled with it for like thirty seconds as the conversation carried on, and then when there was a pause and he was like, 'Oh I have that quote here it is guys,' and then read it out in his voice which is just like Hugh Grant's but better, and we are all just like, what a hessian. Like, what went on there? First of all, it's not like ~Crèvecœur~ is so mainstream that you can just find a specific passage that easily and that quickly on the internet, or even in a fucking book. Did he purposely save the passage on his phone because he planned on making that point? Did he have it on his phone anyway? Was it filed away in some easily accessible document that he had the motivation to remember? Does he know exactly in what part of ~Crèvecœur~ this passage is located and thus was able to google the document and locate it effortlessly? Does he have a research assistant to do shit like this for him, ready to strike at any moment? Did he actually have it memorized but was just pretending to read it off his phone so we didn't think he was weird? Is he a literary überhuman? What is most exalted then: him, the speed of the phone, or the passage?

-How did I not know Andy Samberg was doing Rahm Emanuel impersonations?

Though you can't help thinking about it nearly all the time

Came across this story last night and wept. Wept. I get so sentimental about it. I remember the first time I heard it read, I thought that nobody had ever or would ever understand love, at least the way I saw it, like Lydia Davis. I got very emotional about it, and I still do. Her work could very possibly be more of a relieving comfort to me than anything in my life, maybe besides the first few drops of coffee in the morning and whisky after a particularly trying afternoon, which are in themselves, remarkably capable. It's like reading your own thoughts without having to do any of the work, and it's so. beautifully. cathartic. Which is an important thing for a writer to be able to do. Her story "Kafka Cooks Dinner" is pretty much a play by play of what goes down every time I reach out to someone. Books are important, bro. They have many reasons for being, and serve many different purposes, just as each of us seeks different things from them. More about this later.

On the World Series: A Nationalistic Dispute Over the Nature of Perception

As usual, Peter playing the wild card.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

So all plans for fall mixtapes, awesome blog posts, etc etc have been STUNTED due to the fact that I have no time to do anything but work and think about work goddammit I can't even sleep all I think about is rhetorical devices, and deadlines, and scary misogynistic professors, and did Brutus really have that in him or did Cassius put it there goddd just RELAX Cassius seriously, he is like a hyperactive child without his ADD medication. And it's about to get worse. ESSAYS, my friend, and, consequently, spending an outrageous amount of time and energy devoted to a very specific, very arguably inconsequential, set of material. I'm starting to forget why I think literature is important. If I think it's as important as other things. A big part of me feels it's an incredibly narrow niche to settle oneself into For All Of Time. The "Where Will You Be in 10 Yrs" Facebook quiz says I'm going to be a goddamn surgeon! It says I'm going to be someone's hero. And all I want to do is sit on a warm porch somewhere writing history plays. Not enough people writing history plays, these days, and so much good history despite it all!

Thinking about Political Science tho.

I want 2 b herd.

Anyway, this is more or less what my Halloween looked like, but with more PCP obviously, although perhaps the PCP is just implied always:

Claude has three pairs of socks going at once right now. He opens my sock drawer and steals them and hunts them. He rolls around on the floor with them tucked up into this frantic grasp, and teeths them mercilessly, feverishly, the most genuinely untamed thing I've seen ever in real life maybe. Sometimes I put catnip in the socks and he loses it completely. I love him so much, and respect him, perhaps, more than I've ever respected a person, although that's probably not true. He is the best. The Unmoved Mover that Caesar never was. Oh, he's incredible. At the end of everything he just lies there triumphantly on top of this pile of limp socks.

Oh also, I'm going home for Thanksgiving. What, the idea of jetting across the ocean for a few days just to achieve some sort of nostalgic wish-fulfilment in the form of a nationalist archetype is just simply ludicrous, you say? Well I'd have to agree. But I've been irrationally encumbered by this fervid will toward the sentiment of the romanticised American homestead, and these arms, they stretch, unbelievably so, under the guidance of delusion. Speaking of delusion, that's awl LyFe is lolol!! But one must allow oneself to seek false importance in some things, or else this is all just blank space, you know. I mean, I get it, it's blank space always no matter what we tell ourselves, we must look within etc etc. But one must allow oneself the indulgence of at least a couple metaphysical apparitions of Meaning, or else give way to, if nothing else, a vacuous, harrowing boredom.

See this is why I don't have time for this shit anymore. Can't we just keep it light? Purpose is the Cat. And going home for a fake holiday that is symbolic of many things it wasn't, and which I, despite everything, hold instinctually dear.

Lastly, and to add another brick onto the "holy shit these are all the implications of Facebook on our current lifestyle" heap, what do we think of the idea of judging, and knowing, that someone is perfect for you simply by looking at their Facebook? Can it be done? How far do these representations of ourselves extend? Can they ever amount to any form of authenticity? Can I myself ever amount to any form of authenticity, in terms of the perceptions of others? There is my authentic self, and there is the person I am able to communicate into being. So much is lost in between. No matter how candid or personal we might become with someone, one can simply never know the actuality of another person. Because it is physically impossible. I have no idea who my friends know. Some half-assed version of Paige, an impression based on some compilation of fragments of myself, limited always by time and place and circumstance. How does Facebook fit into this? Are the internet representations of ourselves really any less "authentic" than who others perceive us to be in "reality," or do we just think they are, because we haven't fully come to terms with the falsities of human interaction, and how they actually remove us further from ourselves? What about Facebook romance? What about real romance?

Christ, somebody get this bitch some segues.

too many clauses should be avoided

Rhetorical Device of the Week: THA ZEUGMA

Someone should really tell that girl she can not pull off that color

Rediscovered this photo, taken by Brigid at some party over spring break, back in New York. I'm going to tell you why it's a good picture. First of all, whose hand is that? It's literally as if Lisa Greco has a phantom artist hand to constantly promote her work while allowing her full use of both her hands. Second, the composition is fantastic. Third, that monster is doing a pretty good rendition, down to the sunburn (it was unusually sweltry that weekend, for April, and I spent a lot of time falling asleep on Lisa Greco's roof). Fourth, lightweight mustard yellow anorak. Fifth, if we can't sell you on Blackberrys being cool, I don't know who can. Speaking of cans, that one's pretty solid.

A Couple Points Regarding the Beginning of the Week

-Somebody needs to upload the intro to Gravediggaz's (unsure of exactly what to do with the apostrophe there) The Pick, the Sickle and the Shovel to Youtube so we can talk about whether it actually makes any sense or not.

-I started reading McSweeney's again, having unconsciously stopped sometime at the end of my senior year of high school. It's probably the funniest shit out there right now. Funnier than 30 Rock. Funnier than Portnoy's Complaint. Funnier than Charlie Croft talking about Native Americans via text message at 8 in the morning. Funnier than the Autobiography Ziggy Stardust's Personal Assistant. Wait. But it's also subtle, and ever wise. Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite recent pieces entitled, "Miles Davis's Container Gardening tips" (written by Ryan Abbott):

"This is it, this is the most important tip, so wrap it in tissue paper and take it out of here when you go. The space around everything is more precious than the items occupying the space...The space around your plants is what defines them. Save that space, relish it, drink it in. Give your plants room to walk, to be seen and heard, to develop deep and hungry roots with their own space to explore and invent, the freedom to create new shades and shapes, arms that reach through the empty air to carve fresh pockets in which to build an entirely new kind of fruit or flower. A type never tasted, something unheard of."

More impressive, however, is James Felming's Selections from the Cosby Codex, which, "represents an attempt to offer the definitive theoretical reading of The Cosby Show, a foundational text in Late Postmodern Western Culture, or a multicultural, post-cognitive text par-excellence," and which I'm not going to quote from because I'm pissed I didn't write it, it's so genius.

-This week's gonna be amazing.

-We're doing a radio show, on Mondays, starting next week. Don't really know who "we" entails at this point. Elliot and I and some meth heads. Forget what time it's at. The title of the show was supposed to be "Songs About Jesus," which is snappy and fun to say (with Nietzschean undertones), but Elliot managed to reword that into some bulkily sarcastic reference to the bible or some shit, which wasn't even the point. Will probably spend the majority of the first show bitching about this and discussing the Camden Family's views on marijuana, which will actually tie in, as Mr. Camden's obstinant response to the herb likely stems heavily from a certain paradigm of "morality" propagated by the church to which he is tied and his views on the implication of God. (In fact this kind of melodramatic outburst proves to be, when observed against the image of Mr. Camden established by the show --for the most part a"cool reverend" (and the WB's closest rendition of Atticus Finch): non-judgmental, understanding, and actually sometimes helpful; the sort of guy that you'd expect to respond rationally and judiciously to this kind of situation-- surprisingly out of character. For more on glimpses of deeply embedded socially constructed prejudices savagely bursting through the astute façades of archetypal television fathers, and the social implications, see Howard Cunningham Flipping Out When Richie Brings a "Beatnik" to Dinner (Happy Days, Episode 1.13.)) Link to show/less lofty details to be posted.

-If you're ever faced with the opportunity to take an English course centering on "Western American Expansion Fiction," decline immediately. You will read one really good Mark Twain book, some Cormac McCarthy (maybe) and Annie Proulx, and the rest will be bull shit yet require an enormous amount of your time and effort, because while a very good book does demand a heightened level of, well, mental work, a bad book is nearly fucking impossible to get through. Yes, I'm looking at you, James Fenimore Cooper: for all your grand ambition, you are a cliché, and a lousy writer, and getting even halfway through Last of the Mohicans was like pulling out my own teeth in front of an enormous screen with American landscapes projected on it. I think it was your underlying fear of miscegenation. (Actually, for an amazingly ruthless roast on Cooper, see Lawrence's essay "Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels," which is full of wit, as well as a couple valid arguments regarding the aforementioned text.) I understand the importance of some shitty texts in the context of the history/evolution of certain kinds of literature. But I don't really get why one should be required to read them. So heed my advice, children. Study Chaucer.

-"If I wanted to watch an arrogant nerd act passive-aggressive for two hours I'd sit at home and Skype with my ex-girlfriend." A friend, on the Facebook movie, which I am officially done talking about.

-Bacon, egg, tomato, avocado, and Gruyère on toasted fucking wheat bread is the best fucking sandwich of all time I do noooot want to hear it

Beers for years

After two weeks of acting like a dick and a string of embarrassing conversations and monumental hangovers, I propose two weeks sober, at least, followed by an entire lifetime of Puritanical Moderation. Shit's getting out of hand. Bleghhhhhh

Things we could talk about now:

-How every electronic device I bring into this apartment seems to magically break, inexplicably, from somewhere deep inside itself, which cannot be helped (lamps, televisions, electric mixers, etc.)

-How Laura Mulvey's essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," applies to me and my viewing of the season finale of Mad Men

-The trials of domesticating another living thing, and attempting to maintain an affectionate mastership, and taking it all way too seriously

-How to fail at making a birthday cake

-How to waste an entire day failing at making a birthday cake

-Ways to avoid checking last night's awkward texts (outbox)

-The Facebook Movie, reasons I was hyping it so hard, how I spent the majority of my time in the theatre wishing I was watching The Squid and the Whale instead, those dreamy Winklevoss twins, or better yet, that ridiculous video of Mark Zuckerberg taking off his hoodie that is honestly the most lumberingly uncomfortable thing I have ever watched on the internet, and how it's affected the progress of my campaign for matrimony (on hold until further notice)

-Autumn's abrupt arrival and the necessary outerwear

"IS SUBJECTIVITY TEMPORAL OR AFFECTIVE?"

On top of a filing cabinet in room 6.11 of the English department in David Hume Tower, there are a few stacks of enormously thick, oversized leather-bound books, which upon further examination turn out to be a set of complete archives of the New York Review of Books. Shitloads of volumes. I feel like this is some sort of important discovery. Who is using these? Can I use them? Who do I speak to about using them? Does anyone know more about this?

And while we're on the subject: while I used to dispute with Shaun over whether or not Lee Spinks is the biggest hessian in the English department (I was always on team Millard, which is funny), I have indeed been swayed after today's lecture. Holy shit. Dude said more profound things in the last few minutes than most people say in their entire lives--it was literally is if he were competing in some contest to say the most esoterically intelligent things about lyrical poetry in under two minutes. I think everyone in the theatre experienced some sort of existential epiphany; I personally felt like my head was going to explode with them. I don't think there's enough words, at my immediate disposal anyway, to articulate how good this guy is at talking about literature, and making it seem important. I'm pretty sure he knows everything, and could talk about it, beautifully, all the time, forever. Absolute madness. It's like he turns a thing completely over to reveal the absolute truth of it, in perfect clarity.

Nerd alert.

Start the Hype

We had some conflicts with Prince Erudite drawn out on spreadsheets

The other day I showed up slightly early for a class and ended up chatting with my professor for a bit. He asked me how I was finding third year, and I told him I was pretty stressed out. That there only seemed to be time for half of the things I'd like to be doing right now--the monotonous/stressful/awful half-- and that I'm rarely finding the time to consider doing anything other than sit in my apartment, plowing through reading. I told him I'd become very solitary, without even meaning to or noticing it. And he assured me that was okay, and that he could pretty much sum up his entire life with the notion of solitude. He's a total hessian. Has written mad books on everything he's teaching us, which he subtly adds to the secondary reading lists but never mentions. But, why would you want to spend your life all by yourself just thinking about fucking Renaissance rhetoric? What does a life like that imply? Sometimes I lie awake at night absolutely plagued by a vacuous uncertainty that seems to suck all my courage out through somewhere below my navel. It dissipates by morning, but usually creeps back by dusk, as if each passing day were it's own little microcosmic existence inching its way closer to infinite termination with every minute. Ohmygoooooood I don't even LIKE existentialist literature somebody shut my brain off. Have no idea what's going on! Also when did men and women exchange mentalities seriously can't we just go back to the fifties I just want to be objectified and told what to do what is this why does everyone have so many emotions by the way how stoked are you for the Facebook movie it's getting good reviews like when that guy at the Times called it the "best movie about business ever even better than Wall Street even better than Up In the Air" or whatever and I'm probably gonna agree with him because I really never thought Office Space was that funny and the trailer is all super well edited and it has the kid from The Squid and the Whale in it but I mean I bet it's gonna have a lot less prepubescent masturbation than that movie which is good because that means I can prob watch it with my parents whateverrrr duuuuuude just keep drinkin black coffee and listening to Deerhunter and soon it will be Christmas.

"Leave a message on my phone I'm only sort of home, the rest of me is sort of in the zone where the dodos roam."

Things that Happened in Manchester:

I fell over on a bus. Somebody lost a ferret. We saw them filming the Pride & Prejudice zombie film. I mean. Don't ask me! We were seriously there for like twelve hours and spent the majority of them just drinking vodka in different locations.

"You don't understand what it's like to disappear! To be nothing; to be annihilated!"

Edward Hermann's character is one of my favorite parts of this film.

Always move forward, never sleep, like a shark, bro

This album has straight defined my year. I rock my Wesleyan sweatshirt on the reg for theez dudes.

The Best Thing on the Internet Right Now

[The Awl]

[Pitchfork]

"In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet. He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life. Then he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve. Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat. The tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople. And then my newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that--manuscript letters written for the home papers. But he was treading on dangerous ground, now. He began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach; and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth; it was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony. I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public." An abrupt digression at the end of a chapter dedicated to the description of sage-brush in Mark Twain's Roughing It. It is a fascinating chunk of writing.

The Nazz

Meet my Cat from Japan.




He's all curious n shit. Has a noble face with silly eyes. Also very good and graceful at catching and killing bugs, even ones that fly. He is very much the kind of cat by which all other cats should model themselves, and in every way a fascinating creature to observe, so full is he of alert, friendly fearlessness in his investigative quest to conquer the apartment. I didn't even have to show him how anything worked. He just had it down, from the minute he got here.

"After all, here we've been, so many years, biffing about at opposite ends of the world."

Welcome back, my intermost net; it's been a long month and a half, but the curses of bureaucracy have finally been lifted. And so I bid adieu to the meditative state. Autumn is upon us, and indeed it elapses with not a minute to spare. Who knew third year would be so overwhelming? No time for nothin' but work work work, and the new season of Gossip Girl.* Many things have happened and many things haven't. These are my new kicks; they're surprisingly empowering.


Also, is anyone else in Edinburgh dying of allergies right now or am I just falling ill with plague?

*Seriously, it's gotten so ridiculous that it's actually inching its way closer to the realm of realism; to a progressively more authentic portrayal of the ludicrous tribulations of the stupidly rich. Especially the way everything is so over-commercialized; they're really beginning to capture an accurate sense of shameless superficiality. What would Aristotle say this enables us to further understand? [See also: how reality television is an analogy for Plato's theory on the deception of Reality] The one thing about this show though, is it would be so badass if the characters had any emotional depth whatsoever--if they were actually tried and phased by any of the terrible shitstorms that rain upon the show. But they never are; they pout for a scene or two and are ultimately on to the next thing, never to truly acknowledge the impact of the devastation except for maybe an awkward anecdote for the sake of recap in the following episode, usually something along the lines of "Wow, do you remember when I had that baby? That was pretty weird and outrageous," which I like to think suggests a quaint self-abasement on the part of whomever writes this shit. But imagine if these vapid peoplepictures engaged in sprawling Shakespearian soliloquies, pregnant with woe and regret and scary existential disorientation, every time disaster struck; if they allowed themselves to teeter seriously on the cusp of stability, and not in a romanticised hold-up-in-my-hotel-suite-drinking-Belvedere-and-snorting-blow-out-of-the-navels-of-several-high-class-escorts-for-an-entire-week kind of way. Now that would be a show. Like, people often complain about the Nate character being really dimensionless and insipid, but come on, didn't his dad go to jail for embezzlement back in the day, inflicting homelessness upon young brownstone-bred Nathaniel, who eventually resigned himself to prostitution in order to pay off their townhouse? Didn't his grandfather, like, disown him at a Vanderbilt family reunion? I vaguely remember his mother bearing a creepy, manic Sissy Spacek resemblance. Now his girlfriend is a certified lunatic. Dude should be a basket case, but instead he's as banal as brown rice, albeit with a hinted-at marijuana dependency. Nate's had the shittiest end of the Gossip Girl stick, and as a result, he's seemingly the most unaffected. But in reality, people--especially those who've been warped by last names like Archibald and van der Woodsen --are that absurdly repressed. I guess what I'm saying is, I wish it were more like a Flannery O'Connor novel. I wish they'd let things be just fucking horrible. [See also: is television like this because we are, or are we like this because television is?]

(None of this changes the fact that Serena van der Woodsen is the hottest girl on the planet/actually sort of gets away with wearing shorts that tiny to nice restaurants.)

"Together with Shakespeare and a handful of the greater novelists in English, Chaucer carries the language further into unthinkable triumphs of the representation of reality than ought to be possible. The Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, like Hamlet and Falstaff, call into question nearly every mode of criticism that is now fashionable. What sense does it make to speak of the Pardoner or the Wife of Bath as being only a structure of tropes, or to say that any tale they tell has suspended its referential aspect almost entirely? The most Chaucerian and best of all Chaucer critics, E. Talbot Donaldson, remarks of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales that:

The extraordinary quality of the portraits is their vitality, the illusion that each gives the reader that the character being described is not a fiction but a person, so that it seems as if the poet has not created but merely recorded.

As a critical remark, this is the indispensable starting-point for reading Chaucer, but contemporary modes of interpretation deny that such an illusion of vitality has any value. Last June, I walked through a park in Frankfurt, West Germany, with a good friend who is a leading French theorist of interpretation. I had been in Frankfurt to lecture on Freud; my friend had just arrived to give a talk on Joyce's Ulysses. As we walked, I remarked that Joyce's Leopold Bloom seemed to me the most sympathetic and affectionate person I had encountered in any fiction. My friend, annoyed and perplexed, replied that Poldy was not a person, and that my statement therefore was devoid of sense. Though not agreeing, I reflected silently that the difference between my friend and myself could not be reconciled by anything I could say. To him, Ulysses was not even persuasive rhetoric, but was a system of tropes. To me, it was above all else the personality of Poldy. My friend's deconstructionism, I again realized, was only another formalism, a very tough-minded and skeptical formalism. But all formalism reaches its limits rather quickly when the fictions are strong enough. L.C. Knights famously insisted that Lady Macbeth's children were as meaningless an entity as the girlhood of Shakespeare's heroines, a view in which Knights followed E. E. Stoll who, whether he knew it or not followed E. A. Poe. To Knights, Falstaff 'is not a man, but a choric commentary.' The paradox, though, is that this 'choric commentary' is more vital than we are, which teaches us that Falstaff is neither trope nor commentary, but a representation of what a human being might be, if that person were even wittier than Oscar Wilde, and even more turbulently high-spirited than Zero Mostel. Falstaff, Poldy, the Wife of Bath: these are what Shelley called 'forms more real than living man.'" Eternal hessian Harold Bloom, from his Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer (1985, Chelsea House Publishers), because Chaucer is legit as fuck.

"Oh, I'll show you misogyny."

The feelings I don't have, I don't have.

The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have.

The feelings you say you have, you don't have.

The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

The feelings people ought to have, they never have.

If people say they've got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven't got them.

So if you want either of us to feel anything at all,

You'd better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.

[D. H. Lawrence, "To Women, As Far As I'm Concerned."]

"It reminds me of the drunk guy standing off at the café. Know what he said? 'The most important thing, ladies and gentlemen, is not love, war, money, happiness, a woman. No, the most important thing, is the subtle difference.' Yes, kitten. But hell will freeze over before you grasp that." Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard's Charlotte et son Jules (1960)

Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.

“In Gravity’s Rainbow a character remarks, speaking of the V-rocket, ‘We’ll all use it someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.’ In both novels technology, the instrument that man thinks can further his evolution to the superhuman, is really the death trap that hastens his reduction to the subhuman. The tendency toward the inanimate is, as Nathanael West put it, ‘a tropism for disorder,’ a tendency away from pattern,’ from certitude, from ways of knowing what has happened and what might happen next. Stencil disguises ‘to involve him less with the chase,’ to protect the scrap of humanity which the chase itself provides. What Stencil really fears is that, as in the case of Kilroy, humanity itself is only another disguise. ‘Approach and avoid’ is Stencil’s rule, because to find V. would mean the loss of everything. ‘Disguise is one of her attributes.’ She is metaphor for the connection that makes any meaning, knowledge, or humanity possible; and she may be, in Fausto’s terms, the Greatest Lie of all.” Richard Patteson, “What Stencil Knew: Structure and Certitude in Pynchon’s V.” (Critique Vol. 16, 1974)

From a Beautiful Day in Northern California

Because my Canon is in the midst of an existential crisis (it's actually pretty sad), the other, primary roll from this trip (i.e. of the wedding) was completely fucked. Thus I only have a few shots from this one day I spent driving up the coast with some of my family members, and I would have liked to have gotten more even of that (it was breathtaking), but even these were a battle, as the shutter is broken, works every twenty attempts or so. But I'm pretty happy with them. On a side note, I do need to upgrade my scanner situation; the prints are fucking beautiful.

glad to know you don't discharge a drop of your procreative juice

Been living without the internet for two weeks. It's been incredibly quiet and good. Working on a short screenplay which is bringing me great joy. Getting ready for classes to begin. Reading Moby-Dick whilst sneaking breaks to re-read V. in front of the big, open window, the morning sunshine, the afternoon rain. Strong, musky bloody mary's. Summer is really over.

Read this in Harper's yesterday morning, an excerpt from Jean-Baptiste Botul's satire The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant (1999) regarding Kant's repressive views on the preservation of, as Base Commander Gen. Jack D. Ripper would put it, our "bodily fluids":

"One must guard one's saliva. To spit is a waste of resources. For example, one may use his saliva to make digestion easier: says Kant, 'One ancillary advantage of this habit of breathing with the lips always closed is that the saliva secreted is constantly wetting the throat, and at the same time the saliva aids the process of stomachal digestion.' It may also act, when swallowed, as a laxative. One can also use saliva against a cough to end the tickle of the larynx. One must, then, according to a technique invented by Kant, 'turn one's attention entirely from this stimulation by forcing oneself to focus attention on a distant object.'"

On the subject of masturbation Kant offers us this gem:

"One must forcefully show him [the teenager] what makes [masturbation] so repugnant, one must show him that by committing this act he makes himself an enemy of the propagation of our species, he should be warned that it will sap him of his physical forces and that he is turning himself prematurely into an old man."

Well I guess that's all there is. I've been drawing up some cartoons, pretty nerdy and pertaining to the life of an English student, which I will definitely post, but most likely not anytime soon. Once (if ever) my internet is returned to me, I'm going to move over to WordPress, so I'll probably put them up there keep a look out.

[Immanuel Kant via Jean-Baptist Botul via Harper's, Sept. 2010]

Reasons why the Internet Rules

Can I tell you something?

New Kanye West track is retarded.

I just get the most painful nostalgia

[The Alt Report]

On Writing, Pt. 1

"I saw him only for a moment, and that was years ago. Boston had been beaten by the White Sox. It was a night game, and when it was over, as the crowd, including myself and my friends, pushed with that suppressed Occidental panic up the aisles toward the exit ramps, he, like the heavy pebble of gold that is not washed from the pan, was revealed, sitting alone, immobile and smiling, among the green seats. He was an old Chinese man, solidly fat, like a Chevrolet dealer, and he wore faded black trousers and a white shirt whose sleeves were rolled up. He sat with one arm up on the back on the seat beside him and smiled out toward the field, where the ground crew was unfurling the tarp across the foreshortened clay diamond and the outfield under the arc lights looked as brilliant and flat as a pool-table felt. And it flashed upon me, as I glimpsed this man sitting alone and unperturbed among the drained seats, that here was the happy man, the man of unceasing and effortless blessing. I thought then to write a novel, an immense book, about him, recounting his every move, his every meal, every play, pitch, and hesitation of every ball game he attended, the number of every house he passed as he walked Boston's three-decker slums, the exact position and shape of every cracked and flaking spot on the doorways, the precise sheen and rust of every floriate and convoluted fancy of ironwork that drifted by his legs, the chalk marks, the bricks (purple-tinted, ochre-smeared red), the constellations of lint and stain in his tiny bachelor's room (green walls, painted pipes coughing with steam, telephone wiring stapled along the baseboard), the never precisely duplicated curl of the smoke off his rice, the strokes of sound composing the hatchings of noise at his back, every stifled cry, every sizzle of a defective neon-sign connection, every distant plane and train, every roller-skate scratch, everything: all set sequentially down with the bald simplicity of a litany, thousands upon thousands of pages, ecstatically uneventful, divinely and defiantly dull.

"But we would-be novelists have a reach as shallow as our skins. We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves. From the dew of the few flakes that melt on our faces we cannot reconstruct the snowstorm." John Updike, "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" from The Early Stories: 1953-1975

First of all, show me a more beautiful writer than John Updike, besides maybe G. G. Marquez and Pynchon at his most sentimental. I'm serious. Second, John Updike writes in first person, so can you. Third, how accurate. This story is extremely good, I think; it's a triptych of stories he never wrote, the first regarding this man, the second his grandmother, which I found very moving, and the third a group of men washed ashore an uninhabited Polynesian island, only to perish. I heard a quote a few months ago, I don't remember exactly where, but it was something along the lines of, "We're all writing Ulysses inside us all day, but what comes out is so much less." I feel like it may have been from a collection of Saul Bellow's correspondence. Anyway, it's true. The gap between what we harbor within our own minds and what we communicate is so frighteningly obtuse. I think it's easy for a writer to become enraptured by the task of pinning this gap down and raping it for information, details, (bountiful, pristine, details). But then what would be the point? Well, when you are actually writing Ulysses, or if your prose is as lyrical as Updike's, I guess you can just get away with it, and that's the point. But for the rest of us, tailoring becomes a tedious skill. Figuring out what you want to say. Weeding through the best possible ways to say it. And the ultimate dissatisfaction, nine times out of ten.

What a divine description of this moment, though. This moment that every writer experiences, all too often: the way the sun shines on that one day when that woman stands in the doorway to her building with her two obedient dalmatians; the image of that man in the wheelchair and that man sitting beside him on the grass on the hill, just the two of them silently watching the sun set; that house-cat running solitary through the immense, pastoral landscape in the middle of the night; that one bus in the city whose insides glow blue and cast azure shadows over its strange, nighttime inhabitants; the way the earth looks on that day when that blizzard hits and the roads bears no markings and there is no visible difference between the land and the sky, a muted horizon, and it is so silent too. Dozens of these fragments, stashed away in some dusty cavern of the brain's filing system, decidedly unexplored. You can't write about everything.

I think every writer starting out should be handed a copy of Updike's early stories; he's the master of detail, for real. Going through my copy, I find lines annotated that I can't even recall reading. There are smears from tear drops, ash stains, big blotchy pen marks from the days when I respected my books less. But when I think about reading them, I just remember them having this profound impact on the way I thought about writing. They are really solid. He knows what he's doing.

Stuff White People Like: Thinking they know more about hip hop than other white people

Apparently, in his recent review of Big Boi's new album, Sasha Frere-Jones didn't find it important to talk about any of the rapper's work pre-2003, and, furthermore, to properly discuss the album he was reviewing. This isn't the first time Frere-Jones has fallen short in the face of a hip hop review. While that piece on MF Doom last fall was solid, really solid, I always find his reviews to exhibit such a narrow, well, aging white person perspective; they lack a general understanding of hip hop as a genre, and base their critiques on trivial elements usually involving an artist's career, blankly bypassing the heart of the album, the point. In this review, Frere-Jones spends a lot of time discussing the style on Big Boi's most recent Speakerboxxx album and his decision to release Sir Luscious under Def Jam, but doesn't bother mentioning any of Big Boi's, or Outkast's earlier work. I understand that Frere-Jones is attempting to paint a portrait of the artist by spending 3/4 of the article dissecting his previous work, but when you limit the scale of that portrait to that of a single, fairly commercial album released ten years after the beginning of an artist's career, it just seems silly. I appreciate that the New Yorker branches out into the genre when it does, but I just wish it tackled the subject with the same level of no-fucking-around-legitimacy that it does everything else. Like, if they want help, they can just ask, you know? In any case, the last paragraph was pretty good, so here it is:

"The musical DNA of 'Sir Luscious' lies in a simple strategy that Big Boi has used for years: he often raps in double time, no matter what the tempo of the song is. This means that even the slower songs, like 'Fo Yo Sorrows' and 'General Patton' (the latter has one of the better opera samples in recent hip-hop), which hover at around eighty beats per minute, don't drag--Big Boi uses the space in the beat to provide another rhythm with his words. More than once, I thought of the clatter of a lawnmower, where secondary rhythms whisper underneath the main beat. Though there are rappers with more puns and wider purviews than Big Boi--he raps too often about the club, for instance--there are not many who can be simultaneously forceful and careful. Despite any clichés about Southern dispositions, Big Boi is never laid back when he raps: he defines wide-awake."

[The New Yorker, 8/2/2010]

In a nutshell

This is the wedding you wish you were at.

RADIOLAB IS THE COOLEST THING ON THE PLANET. IF YOU DO NOT LISTEN TO RADIOLAB, YOU ARE NOT COOL. LISTEN TO THEIR LATEST EPISODE ON LANGUAGE AND BLOW YOUR NERD LOAD ALL OVER YOUR STACK OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICANS.

I've been all around this great big world, and I've seen all kinds of girls

Spent yesterday hopping from winery to winery, throwing back Pinots and Zinfandels by the dozen. There was this one pristine moment, when we were barrelling down the winding road with all the window's open and a joint going, and everywhere you looked there was just sky and hills rolling in all directions covered with neatly-lined lush vineyards, and behind that small purple mountains, and the sun was so yellow, the air was so soft, everyone was very funny and vulgar and high and pleased with the surroundings, and everything was just fucking great--everything about it screamed run-on sentence with lots of descriptive visuals. I know it's cliche, but hanging around this part of Northern California really gives one the illusion of being amidst a Steinbeck novel, or at least what may once have been one. The way the grapes dangle, bountiful and dark, below the masses of green.

I just discovered this roll of photos from my step-grandmother's funeral almost two years ago, in the Highlands. Really please with these two images.

[flickr.com/yellowcoat]

Leftovers

Just got a few random rolls from the summer back. Here's a few of my favorites from the bunch. The US images were all Portra 400 NC on a shutter speed higher, and the Barcelona images were, I believe Velvia 50. So you can decide if it makes a difference on a Canon A1, I guess.