Your GAGA ridicule, I hate to love Kevin Drew, but not you. Taking advantage of advantages. Sliding into a more commonly masculine perspective (why? Not sure. Keep catching myself being a meathead.) Turning down male modeling/acting for no specific reason. "It's okay to not understand yourself." Not sure I believe it. I wonder if I believe in God because I use the word believe when talking about it. I wonder if it matters. Not feeling so good about the word "wonder" anymore after Thomas Loebel and Emily Dickinson. I've been looking at pictures of people who don't know they're going to die. Well, I assume they know that they're going to die eventually. But I like it when the photo contains the imminent death and they don't see it coming. I prefer anticipatory punctum to the shock-value catharsis of aftermath. It is 6:30am and I haven't slept yet. I have an optometrist appointment in 3 or so hours. "There's no point in sleeping at this point," he typed pointedly. I was supposed to be communicating via meta-everything with someone and she stopped playing the game. Now I don't know whether it's part of the game or not. Maybe this is, necessarily. I was approached by a beautiful girl on the subway today because me and my brother were loudly singing Bruce Springsteen and she asked me for my number. I wonder if I was actually attracted to her or if I gave it to her because I was attracted to the idea of something like that happening to me. I wonder if it makes a difference. Perhaps I should nip this "wonder" thing in the bud. I'm curious as to whether it makes it a difference. Ah, that's much better. Many of these thoughts are skewed by late-night reading of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Today I helped a lovely girl surprise a lovely boy. A few days ago I did mushrooms and went to a strip club with an infantry officer (who didn't do any drugs, military), a slum lord and several of my treasured cronies. I did not run into anyone from high school this time. I've been downloading music and it makes me feel like shit but I don't care because it's mostly bands that have a good deal of success. I really plan to buy the albums when I have money but I just don't right now. Maybe I will steal them somehow, which I would love to do, but even so, that's just as problematic as downloading except for the fact that it feeds my object identifications. Although I guess the record stores and their insurance write offs probably eat the cost of the stolen record rather than the artists themselves. (Jerry: Do you even know what a write-off is? Kramer: No, but they do...and they're the ones writing it off)I should look into this. Also, typing about planning crime on the Internet is funny because literally everything I'm doing is being monitored at all times (though I'm sure it's not very attentively in my case. I'm not that interesting or important, governmentally speaking.) I am also very interested in the fall of network television. It will begin with NBC almost for sure. I wonder how many years it will take before everyone merges with Google or something. Rogers digital cable (which I can't afford but still have because of basketball. More on basketball later.) has a new feature which I thought was annoying at first but is actually awesome. You can choose a preselected pack of six channels and watch them all at once based on genre. Like, it will find game shows for you. And basketball. And cartoons. Or the news, if you're into watching that on TV. It seems like a stupid way to get your news, though. 60 minutes is good sometimes. Andy Rooney is hilarious. Have you ever seen him rant about kitchen utensils? That's good TV. McLuhan wouldn't think so; it doesn't use Chiaroscuro well enough for him to approve. Also, there's a vague plot. You should probably try to find some of his old CBC interviews from the 60s and early 70s. They're peachy AND brilliant. Also, Gilbert Arenas is not allowed to play basketball for the rest of the season because he and another guy, who isn't good enough for me to remember his name or to continue having much of a career after this massive suspension, brandished guns at each other in their team's locker room. It was over a gambling debt. The suspension is without pay too. I wish I could play basketball incredibly well. I would want to be on a team like the Phoenix Suns because Steve Nash is the role model in that locker room. They have intelligent discussions and teach each other how to eat healthy. I need someone to teach me how to eat healthy, I think. My wind is really bad. I'm probably going to start running or something. Although I've made several attempts to do this before and I never do. I guess that can be said about a lot of the goals I set for myself. I've been writing a lot of new riffs lately. I have a pretty big arsenal of dope riffs right now. I need some lyrics. I'm finding topical inspiration in places that didn't infiltrate my sphere of poesis, as they say, before, but are now seeming more and more beautiful. The words aren't quite there but I can feel them bubbling to the surface. I'm not so worried (about that, at least.) I find myself missing a whole bunch of people right now. I'm sure that if they were around/accessible, I would be too busy to hang out with them anyways. It's not on purpose or anything, I just end up treating everyone like that no matter how much I care about them. And then there are days like today where I don't do much except clean my room up a bit and think about grocery shopping but decide against it because of the cold. Even though I like the cold in all other situations, typically. The cold only becomes an excuse not to do something when I don't want to do something.
Anyways, this has been a nice thing to do to fill the time that I am awake and nobody else is. I guess I could have worked on some essays or articles or poems but they just weren't on my mind. I hope I see you soon.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Man, I like your style.
cogito ergo sum
I know that you're the only one
maybe we can have some fun.
I'm so variable...
I can be the x for anyone.
But oh, I don't know how to tell you so,
I don't know how to let you know
I don't know how to let you sew anything at all.
Man, I like your style.
I know that you're the only one
maybe we can have some fun.
I'm so variable...
I can be the x for anyone.
But oh, I don't know how to tell you so,
I don't know how to let you know
I don't know how to let you sew anything at all.
Man, I like your style.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Gardening, Not Architecture.
"Excerpt from Vanity." I don't know why. I'm really less worried about the contents of reality these days. I've been considering its constitution and my own. The weather is abnormal - we have warm winters and less fortunate nations (read: oppressed nations) experience natural disasters. Who controls the weather? Is there a conflict going on in the atmosphere?
------------------------->
Here's an essay I wrote:
Considerations of Silence and Ambient Writing
“My final merit I refuse you….I refuse putting from me the best I am.”
(Whitman 578, pg. 57)
¨
Restraint and silence are as living and breathing as the loudest linguistic expression. Walt Whitman knows this. Leaves of Grass is a consideration of contingency rooted in the irreducibility of an experiential now: “I believe in you, my soul….the other I am must not abase itself to you,/ And you must not be abased to the other.”(73-74, pg. 32) For Whitman, the berth between the experiential and articulation widens to encompass every I. This berth, or “Being’s truth,” for Heidegger, is a function of its own expression between experience and articulation, signifier and signified and is not reducible to language but rather a practice of performing itself, Being. This is why “poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of Being. This topology tells Being the whereabouts of its actual presence.” (Thinker as Poet) Whitman’s objective in Leaves of Grass seems to be to perform the reciprocal function; saying without speaking and imbuing stillness and silence with a value as great as speech and language; Contingency, being, is used to explicate Being.
§
Ferdinand De Saussure does not seem so sure when it comes to defining the space occupied by articulation within the experiential:
Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously – Physical, physiological, and psychological – it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.
Analysis of speech as a whole entity containing language, word pictures and objectival signifieds, according to Saussure, never reveals the true object of scientific linguistic study. (Saussure 296-297) There seems to exist and endless chain of signification in which truth constantly slips:
My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;/This printed and bound book….but the printer and the printing-office boy?/…The well-taken photographs….but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?/…The saints and sages in history….but you yourself?/Sermons and creeds and theology….but the human brain, and what is called reason, and what is called love, and what is called life? (Whitman l. 1075-1091)
Positing that one can indicate reality, the totality of the experiential, reason, love and life itself through words of questioning seems at first like an impossible feat of language; to do this successfully would be to successfully boil speech down to its essence and “discover its unity.” It is correct to assume that the feat is impossible: it is accomplished when Whitman uses chains of signifiers to highlight the unspoken. The indication he alludes to is a non-indication and thus a more meaningful indication (because it cannot be cluttered up with meaning.)
©
The essence of speech is located in the action of speaking but not in the action of saying because “what is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said.” (Thinker as Poet) It follows, then, that silence is its own articulation; the choice not to speak says nonetheless. This is precisely Whitman’s angle: his free verse is not so much the words being used but those which cannot be used because they do not exist, the expressers of the truth of Being. This is what it means to “sing the body electric;” (129) for Heidegger, “singing and thinking are the stems neighbour to poetry,” and must thusly grow close to the topology of Being.
ª
I mentioned earlier that Whitman’s non-indication is more meaningful than an indication without explaining properly why. Silence exists in flux with articulation because they are each the source of each other, each other’s respective anti-environment: “The role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.” (McLuhan 30-33) While Whitman would probably flightily declare that the artist is no different than you or I or the president, which is true, he doubtlessly succeeds in the creation of a literal anti-environment in his poetry. Leaves of Grass uses the contingent to access something transcendent, an actual environment inexpressible through articulation but enacted through the failure of articulation: “Clear and sweet is my soul….and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul/ Lack one lacks both….and the unseen is proved by the seen/ Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.” (l. 43-45) Whitman’s anti-environment is useful in that it makes clear the reciprocal relationship between language and the unsayable; that one cannot exist without the other is a fact worthy of careful consideration.
¨§©ª
Though it probably does not actually exist as a literary term, Whitman’s writing is ambient in its effect. Reading any portion of Leaves of Grass demands immersion; the words drift by and embed themselves as small seeds around a mental garden, moving conceptually outwards rather than upwards. One of the Oblique Strategies cards created by ambient godfather Brian Eno and his colleague Peter Schmidt for the aiding of creative decisions reads: “Gardening, not architecture,” suggesting that nurturing growth through hinting at an unarticulated idea can yield organic results at least as rewarding as forced upwards motion, if not more so. While the tradition of ambient music has always been more about sonic and technological experimentation, its primary focus has always been an unsaying rather than speech itself. Whitman’s poetry is the same; while verbose, his lines function as a way to get at the unsaid in similar fashion to Eno’s fiddling with tape loops in order to articulate through the negation of articulation. Being is understood only through immersion in the reciprocal process of saying and not saying.
-------------------->
The pre-edit edition, anyways. Some of those citations are UGLY. Oh well.
Kerplunk.
------------------------->
Here's an essay I wrote:
Considerations of Silence and Ambient Writing
“My final merit I refuse you….I refuse putting from me the best I am.”
(Whitman 578, pg. 57)
¨
Restraint and silence are as living and breathing as the loudest linguistic expression. Walt Whitman knows this. Leaves of Grass is a consideration of contingency rooted in the irreducibility of an experiential now: “I believe in you, my soul….the other I am must not abase itself to you,/ And you must not be abased to the other.”(73-74, pg. 32) For Whitman, the berth between the experiential and articulation widens to encompass every I. This berth, or “Being’s truth,” for Heidegger, is a function of its own expression between experience and articulation, signifier and signified and is not reducible to language but rather a practice of performing itself, Being. This is why “poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of Being. This topology tells Being the whereabouts of its actual presence.” (Thinker as Poet) Whitman’s objective in Leaves of Grass seems to be to perform the reciprocal function; saying without speaking and imbuing stillness and silence with a value as great as speech and language; Contingency, being, is used to explicate Being.
§
Ferdinand De Saussure does not seem so sure when it comes to defining the space occupied by articulation within the experiential:
Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously – Physical, physiological, and psychological – it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.
Analysis of speech as a whole entity containing language, word pictures and objectival signifieds, according to Saussure, never reveals the true object of scientific linguistic study. (Saussure 296-297) There seems to exist and endless chain of signification in which truth constantly slips:
My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;/This printed and bound book….but the printer and the printing-office boy?/…The well-taken photographs….but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?/…The saints and sages in history….but you yourself?/Sermons and creeds and theology….but the human brain, and what is called reason, and what is called love, and what is called life? (Whitman l. 1075-1091)
Positing that one can indicate reality, the totality of the experiential, reason, love and life itself through words of questioning seems at first like an impossible feat of language; to do this successfully would be to successfully boil speech down to its essence and “discover its unity.” It is correct to assume that the feat is impossible: it is accomplished when Whitman uses chains of signifiers to highlight the unspoken. The indication he alludes to is a non-indication and thus a more meaningful indication (because it cannot be cluttered up with meaning.)
©
The essence of speech is located in the action of speaking but not in the action of saying because “what is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said.” (Thinker as Poet) It follows, then, that silence is its own articulation; the choice not to speak says nonetheless. This is precisely Whitman’s angle: his free verse is not so much the words being used but those which cannot be used because they do not exist, the expressers of the truth of Being. This is what it means to “sing the body electric;” (129) for Heidegger, “singing and thinking are the stems neighbour to poetry,” and must thusly grow close to the topology of Being.
ª
I mentioned earlier that Whitman’s non-indication is more meaningful than an indication without explaining properly why. Silence exists in flux with articulation because they are each the source of each other, each other’s respective anti-environment: “The role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.” (McLuhan 30-33) While Whitman would probably flightily declare that the artist is no different than you or I or the president, which is true, he doubtlessly succeeds in the creation of a literal anti-environment in his poetry. Leaves of Grass uses the contingent to access something transcendent, an actual environment inexpressible through articulation but enacted through the failure of articulation: “Clear and sweet is my soul….and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul/ Lack one lacks both….and the unseen is proved by the seen/ Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.” (l. 43-45) Whitman’s anti-environment is useful in that it makes clear the reciprocal relationship between language and the unsayable; that one cannot exist without the other is a fact worthy of careful consideration.
¨§©ª
Though it probably does not actually exist as a literary term, Whitman’s writing is ambient in its effect. Reading any portion of Leaves of Grass demands immersion; the words drift by and embed themselves as small seeds around a mental garden, moving conceptually outwards rather than upwards. One of the Oblique Strategies cards created by ambient godfather Brian Eno and his colleague Peter Schmidt for the aiding of creative decisions reads: “Gardening, not architecture,” suggesting that nurturing growth through hinting at an unarticulated idea can yield organic results at least as rewarding as forced upwards motion, if not more so. While the tradition of ambient music has always been more about sonic and technological experimentation, its primary focus has always been an unsaying rather than speech itself. Whitman’s poetry is the same; while verbose, his lines function as a way to get at the unsaid in similar fashion to Eno’s fiddling with tape loops in order to articulate through the negation of articulation. Being is understood only through immersion in the reciprocal process of saying and not saying.
-------------------->
The pre-edit edition, anyways. Some of those citations are UGLY. Oh well.
Kerplunk.
Monday, January 18, 2010
I will be embarking on sonic experiments as of....now.
"Remember those quiet evenings."/"The tape is now the music./"Gardening, not architecture."
These things are all very important. I'm going to get a deck of Eno's Oblique Strategies.
Also, experiments with ambient writing. I've been pretty creatively inspired by the realization that I'm not and will never be a true academic. Though I bet you could have told me that.
"Remember those quiet evenings."/"The tape is now the music./"Gardening, not architecture."
These things are all very important. I'm going to get a deck of Eno's Oblique Strategies.
Also, experiments with ambient writing. I've been pretty creatively inspired by the realization that I'm not and will never be a true academic. Though I bet you could have told me that.
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