[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]