9 june 2009

 

Hal Foster, from the Village Voice:

 

"Postmodernism doesn't signal the closure of modernism as much as its complication, and it can do so for other periods too.  That is, it can be used to deperiodize other periods, to open them up to uneven developments of many sorts (it is therefore less a chronological term than a computer virus in the history mainframe)."

 

This struck as particularly Burroughsian, and also elucidated why post-modernism is procedurally liberal.  Not only is it making Harold Bloom tear out his hair regarding slam poetry, but its also capable of going back and rearranging/reimagining the past.  Here, the solidity of tradition is from two directions, and once you've ceded the past and the future, the present isn't far behind. 

 

31 may 2009

 

i think this summer has been the most exciting and challenging i can recall. because my hours at work have gone down with less business, i have tons, oodles even, of "free" time on my hands compared to the school year. why the scare quotes? because all this time, i want to use it well. for doing things that i believe will make me well-adjusted in various ways. what i did not envision back in the spring as i dreamed all my summer dreams was that this change in the unfolding of time would be much more tumultuous than the school year or any previous summer breaks. since i've always spent may through august working all the time, the pace of the school continued more or less unabated. what this past month has done unlike any other extended period i can recall, is change the pace in which my life was lived for more the greater part of a decade. just the pace. i'm still spending my time doing the same things, just longer and with more attention. but what a difference. what makes all of this mildly scaring (in a fruitful way) is with so much time, that even when not meditating, my nature is quieted and thus more permeable somehow. i've walked down the same streets all year, and noticed new things every day in the past month. how had i been missing this? 

 

26 may 2009

 

St. Augustine, from "The Trinity":

 

Whoever, then, can understand the word, not only before it sounds, but even before the images of its sounds are contemplated in thought-such a word belongs to no language, that is, to none of the so-called national languages, of which ours is the Latin-whoever, I say, can understand this, can already see through this mirror and in this enigma some likeness of that Word of whom it was said:  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God".

 

20 may 2009

 

nuclear? nuclear?             NUCLEAR!?!?!

 

oh...new-cle-ar? new-clear. newwwclear.           NEWCLEAR!

 

10 may 2009

 

ah, summer. it does the body good, these breezes and photons and insects buzzin. and, for those of us (all of us) on the university schedule, time off from things we are required to do (as we are apt to think of them, gently eliding the fact that we kinda signed up for stuff, and eagerly too at the time). what fills this absence? things we WANT to do! so hear is to hoping that everybody's summer is full of those, and that hopefully we can figure out how to break down the distinction between the two.

 

also, for anyone who likes basketball, i gotta say: are the nuggets maybe, possibly, the favorite out west? and if yes, do we need to revise our current conception of physics to cope with this unexpected probability? perhaps bump up the current estimate of dark energy in the universe? NOTHING MAKES ANY SENSE ANYMORE! 

 

6 may 2009

 

i've been wondering if these wiki pages will go on forever, and i think they will, supposing we the people want them to. you know what i mean.

 

also, wondering: what are finals week like for everyone? not in the usual sense, 1) "how are finals going" 2) "uh. you know. can't wait to leave. three tests tomorrow" 3) "omg, me too!".

 

personally, finding this week to be a worthy adversary, because in no period of the year is it harder not to quantize life, which can be experienced and moved and touched, into time, which can only be passed by staring wildly in the dark waiting for a light from the something, anything that we'd imagine the future to be.

 

which is not to say that i don't anticipate an exciting summer, with much to do.  but it seems to unethical to bifurcate myself all week.    

 

but, to peek briefly at the summer, for anyone who will be in state college may-august, hopefully i will see y'all around. everyone heading out, enjoy the summer and be well.

 

 

 

29 april 2009

 

and now, what you (certainly, what i) have been waiting for, the true promise of the internet according to local news op-ed pieces on maladjusted teenagers (who ain't at 16?), EMOTING. 

 

i'm coming to exciting but inconvenient realization that the person who sprung the big ideas for my zine contribution is not in charge of my reality studio anymore. which means i've got some good stuff, but stuff that feels behind me on the path.  still feels worth contributing, but doesn't quite hit me in the chest.

 

so, i am listening to Neil, "Tonight's the Night" and trying to figure out a way to somehow work through this issue, perhaps change my angle for a better fit.

 

"Live the questions now.

Perhaps then, someday far in the future

you will gradually, without even noticing it, 

live you way into the answer"

rilke

 

read aloud this incredible poem by charles wright.  the slight but obvious shifts in diction, style, content, feel amongst the three stanzas is just incredible.

 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177322

 

26 april 2009

 

     my waking and dreaming selves smashed together last night, in the most peculiar way. the old man from my dream, never smiling, never talking, never nothing, WAS resurrected exactly as in the dream, only the other speaker was not myself but someone else.  

 

     i cannot stress this enough. he was physically transformed, moving in steps and patterns unnatural to his former self, becoming quite literally a new man. it was not as startling as the dream, ironically because i was too tired see all of what was happening.

 

song of the day:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRCWnfMAmqE

 

25 april 2009

 

     had a dream last night in which an old man, who in my waking life is dead already and will be physically dead soon, was resurrected in body and spirit to a state he probably has never existed in before. we talked (what about?) and i was startled and frightened by him. is that death?

 

     anyone who is out and about tonight and wants to simultaneously raise my spirits and eat pizza, stop by corrinados (formerly goppers) between the hours of 4 pm and 4 am. i will make you something nice.

 

 

21 april 2009

 

very good comp here, aptly titled for today.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Together-Best-Mercury-Years/dp/B0000046XO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1240340499&sr=8-3

 

holy shit

 

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4843

 

20 april 2009

 

Great bit in the NYT today affirming the word authority. Since the dreaded "liberal" and slanderous "socialist" have lost their punch, Saul Anuzis (R-currently unemployed) has decided that "fascist" is next in line, because, well, you need something bad to call the other guys. 

 

What's particularly galling about this instance is that it lays bare so nakedly the zero sum game of politics as they are typically played.

 

Quote: "We've so overused the word 'socialism' that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Fascism-everybody still thinks that's a bad thing".  

 

People that want to complain about a liberal bias in the NYT (which is there, but not in the ways FoxNews would cite, more in the topics they choose to cover than editorial content) would probably miss the tongue-in-cheek and completely hilarious title "But Can Obama Make the Trains Run on Time?", hilarious in its reversal of Mussolini's historical justification in his own time.

 

19 april 2009

 

     Was the nature of the place as a pier, a bridge, or of more loamy abodes such as an island, peninsula, banks, patch of earth at an estuary mouth?

 

     Like a pier, in its extension from the house proper upon stilted supports (stone).  Like a bridge, in the capability for transversal from the house proper onto the drive and by extension wider world of block, avenue, city, state, country, continent.  Like an island, for rarely left. Like a peninsula, because contact with the mainland was to be encouraged for its populace in order to maintain current placement as denizen and avoid status of naturalized alien subject to deportation.  Like a bank, in its inherent and beautiful lack of structural integrity, sedimentation by nature, and yearning for settlement.  Like a patch of earth at an estuary mouth, witness to eternal frustration within one temporal reality broken through with forces beyond the strength of land and sea.

 

 

16 april 2009

 

on dreams, ghost deini aka clyde smith.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH_xG6x-DZQ

 

 

15 april 2009

 

 

            At the outset of My Education, Burroughs pins down the reason for why dreams are boring (presumably to those listening the dreamer speak them): they “refer to the dreamer’s waking life” (2).  Not only is this a problem of misdiagnosis for Bill on the part of psychoanalysts caught in the need to prescribe meaning through self-referentiality (or otherwise fulfilling their job description), it also comes down to the patients, whose dreams are “as boring and commonplace as the average dreamer”.  This “average dreamer” comes off as shabby compared to the (literal) flights of fancy Burroughs elucidates on the following pages. 

However, Burroughs dismissal here seems cheap for a couple of reasons.  One, Burroughs has both the space and the temporal remove of the writing process to craft, stylize, and otherwise capture (accurately or not, how can we know such things) his own dreams.  Second, whose to say that his dreams are any less banal, if fantastically so?  The variety of dreams impresses, even when culled over a period of thirty years, but the act of having them told to us, the readers, quickly pushes the process to its logical end point of simultaneously wishing access to the world of these dream states, and, being frustrated by the inherent lack of clarity and narrative sense in hearing another’s dream, soon wishing that they stop boring us with an intensity of details that cannot be experienced from a third-person perspective.

Part of me wonders whether if this problem is due to the number of dreams present in the book, if presented with one or five or ten dreams I could devote enough time and imagination to bring each life.  But for the book that is in front me.  My Education fails as a novel or singular entity.  A better format might have been serialization.  I am still doubtful whether it would be interesting or exciting or good then, but perhaps better.

 

10 april 2009

 

hopefully for y'all tonight, if not i will address the biometrics/china post tomorrow. sorry to those holding their baited breath.

 

i am in a blast of silence.

 

9 april 2009

 

question out there for y'all in the ether.  through clicking (guess where), i've come to this wikipedia page-->

 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics

 

now, before i post more extensively tomorrow, should we be scared by this? clearly, the following article thinks yes. but let's talk about it.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye

 

 

8 april 2099

 

more linking. eh article and especially shitty title (though Tom Ewing is pretty savvy in general).  addresses the humans vs. robots concept in contemporary pop music, which cool because where else would you find this but the internet? by which i mean to say, not in any contemporary music magazines, at least not ones i've ever seen on sale.

 

http://pitchfork.com/features/poptimist/7584-poptimist-20/

 

also, the spell checking mechanism doesn't recognize Ewing as a legitimate surname.  didn't these people ever watch Georgetown in the 80s?

 

7 april 2009

 

Some tid-bits relating to class discussion.

 

For the evolution of the homosexual gunfighter, see the following video (note: from 3:30 onward here)  Omar is the subject in question. he's the person killing people.  Also, the similarities between the music box and the whistle are great.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRLaf6Ysc2U

 

For Burroughs as a neo-traditionalist, see this article found in today's NYT, with David Brooks leaning towards a Burroughsian emphasis on sensory information versus philosophical logic.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07Brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

 

Finally, some potentially interesting work to be done between Yage Letters and Samuel Beckett now that his letters have been published.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/ONeill-t.html?scp=2&sq=samuel%20beckett&st=cse

 

 

 

4 april 2009

 

  It (supposedly) is getting tougher and tougher to shock us callous Americans, what with all the fornicating and violence and drugs we see on television, which threatens ALL THAT WE HOLD DEAR all the time every day (supposedly).  this of course is bullshit, in the sense that what's most shocking to us is not the in-your-face nudity of Janet Jackson's nipple or expletives squeezing past tape delay or heads lopped off by movie serial killers, but any sort of complexity injected into the general value systems on which this country runs.  clearly, that last sentence would indicate that i think morality in the U.S. tends to skew towards a geometric conception of lines and points, all numerically corresponding to facts whose truth is inherent, axiomatic.

   In class, we've been trying to understand the ways in which burrough's work fights this black/white moral topography through guerrilla warfare (or fighting like raccoons, as he would put it) that attacks from the rear, from below, anywhere but from a frontal assault, on the terms and conditions of the enemy.  however, a lot of his work does attack from the front, or rather feigns frontal attack to demonstrate the absurdity of the opposition. case in point: page 33 of "Place of the Dead Roads" (note: this section comes from a short story written by Kim for "Boy's Life", which, for those of you who never went through the oddity of Boy Scouts, is that organization's official magazine, and a bastion of Judeo-Christian morality, which makes Kim's ambition for publication completely great).  The sheer audacity of the protagonist in Kim's novel a) rounding up Navy men for the purpose of killing Christians and then b) naming that group the S.S. (short for "Shit Slaughter")...I mean, wow, what a fucking move.  What makes it even better is that this novel was published in the Reagan 80s, which is the equivalent of Kim achieving his dream of publication in "Boy's Life".

   Finally, to leave you with a similarly aggressively absurd polemic, here is John Frusciante (guitar player extraordinaire for the chili peppers, hermit, producer, and general kook) in his younger days:

 

Cigarettes are one of the greatest things ever invented. And to all you anti-smokers out there, if I ever became president I would make sure that you were put in the electric chair. (Lannus Landing interview 1989) 

 

aha! a nice quote as well about william s. burroughs from john! has nothing to do with the post, but what the heck!

 

William Burroughs always talks about the world is nothing but allies and enemies. And it's important to understand what things around you are the enemies and a lot of the time your worst enemy is your ego. (Funky Monks, 1991)

 

1 april (whoops) 2009

 

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

 

30 march 2009

 

thinking about Burroughs desire to transcend himself (and his desire for us to do the same). seems like we do it anyway through aging, whether or not we care to know.  for instance, does anyone out there identify with who they were 12 months ago?  hopefully, not too much. perhaps i am putting to high a premium on change and self-discovery, but the people i worry about most are those whose way of being is grooved so deeply in their being that the two become indistinguishable.  Not to say that change for change's sake is the mantra here, but rather, the ability to change should the uni/multiverse(s) ask it of you (which I think they are on a nearly constant basis). The trick of living then is to know when to stay put, and when to move on, and, finally, the sandy circular blur between the two. 

 

24 march 2009 

 

Morning:

 

Thought (singular)

   For not wanting to be or considering himself a writer, Burroughs is pretty prodigious.  This fact would seem to further increase his long odds for inclusion in the canon because there seems to be a premium on authors (note different term) producing a few masterpieces as opposed to churning out lots of material, some of which might not reach the level of their best work.  In the case of Burroughs, he's not afraid to work in public, which is a scary place to be writing. 

 

Thoughts on cities of the red night

 

Writing: Unpredictable

 

It is interesting that Burroughs should place such faith in the articulation (in his case, capitalized) of the principles of Mission’s theoretical republic.  This stress on the written word is further emphaized when Burroughs closes the paragraph with “no man may violate the Articles”.  In an American context especially, the use of the term articles here brings to mind two important governmental documents, the Articles of Confederation and the individual articles of the Constitution.  What Burroughs appears to be doing through their invocation is first redefining America as an unrealized democratic success (and thus failure) and simulataneously offer up Captain Mission’s republic as the true alternative.  However, the stress here on “article” proves problematic in relation to the uncorrupted vision Burroughs has of Mission.  Why? Because, as has been seen with both of the particular articles, of Confederation and of the Constitution, written documents of a government’s purpose, role, and responsibilities are highly susceptible to change, mostly through another process of writing, revision.  In fact, as every school child is taught, the Constitution was written primarily with the anticipation that it could be re-written.  And the Articles were revised to the point of omission. 

 

20 february 2009

 

i was paging back through Yage Letters and hit upon this passage.

 

"The Commandante kept telling me how much Schindler like this food-did I like it? I would say "Magnificent", my voice cracking. Not enough I have to eat his greasy food. I have to say I like it."

 

Here, Burroughs seems to be acting the part of the ugly american, as he complains bitterly of the food provided for him while waiting for Schindler to arrive. Rather than expressing rapture with the exotic nature of the South American land and people, he chooses to focus on the ugly and mundane present within, for most of an English-speaking and reading audience, would be a far-away land of dreams. However, what appears at first blush to be disrespectful is actually honest and objective on his part. He has courage to call out the ugliness of the country he’s visiting, and a discernment of the encroachment of both foreign and native forces upon the land. Just as he loathes the generalizations of the villagers praising his own American identity because they ignore his own person (36), he will not heap praise upon the vague idea of South American. Like a newspaper man without the constraints of journalistic propriety, he is reporting the events of the ground as they come to him. This may run against our idea of what it means to be a good traveler, but Burroughs point (or rather the point that can be derived) is that cordiality should not be confused with respect, and manners with the truth. More than searching for mystic drugs in the amazon, his take on the expections of the travel narrative provide a rebuff to these characteristic defects of 1950s society.

 

 

15 february 2009

 

for my letter of the letters that are not really letters of yage, i will be/am/am almost done explaining how william s. burroughs, junky sexual deviant general generational rabble rouser and non-author literary genius, has participated in a the rich history of the bible. i don't want to reveal all the specifics here, but in a few day's it will be all congeal together into that essential oil of truth.

 

and in keeping my colleague dr, benway's "track o' the day", i hereby include this link to tom waits. why? well, listening to wire brought to mind a few thoughts for moi, the first being THE wire, only the best television transmission in the history of the medium, which brought to mind tom waits, whose version of "way down in the hole" ran over the second season's opening credits, which links up with the band wire, who could be described as post-punk, and tom waits in certainly "post" something, perhaps post-technology, post-voice, post-cool, who knows? enjoy.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlW1nyICawI

 

 

10 february 2009

 

first things first. let's put the preface here. the numerical distance between these last two posts is disappointing. ah, well laid plans, posts vanishing into the ether, inspiration falling with the scissor snip of the hammock. yes, it's all very bad.

 

now, onto the (not pre-) face of this post. __our/my topic__: writing as a habit.

 

it seems to this guy that blogging poses some unique responsibilities upon the writer of said blog, the most pressing of which is frequency. the expectation of a blog is that, with its seemingly direct connection between the writer's brain and reception by the reader, pieces are turned into "posts" that should arrive faster due to the abbreviation of the editing process, both by the writer her/himself and lack of editors/spell checkers/censors. that seems to be the expectation anyway.

 

well, how does this jive with the consistent numerator in this process, the writer? welp, it is true that another expectation now ingrained in blog culture is a looseness that contrasts the more formal rules of print journalism as found in newspapers, magazines, etc. on that count, the blog writer is given license to detour, stop and start, or even drive off a fucking cliff whereas the print writer is required to arrive at the destination on a tighter and more fuel-efficient itinerary. however, ideas still need to be produced, and faster. how can the blogger keep up?

 

the most salient answer seems to be habit. so far, the class has provided two polar opposites in habit embodied in burroughs, heroin and writing. the first seems obviously bad and the second (depending on whether you enjoy burroughs work) seems obviously good.

 

BUT WAIT!

 

the process of taking heroin gives him content, drives him towards two continents of exploration, adventure, experience. the repetition of the same old needle into reluctant veins yielding, at certain points of pressure, vast jumps in time and space.

 

the process of writing produces content, drives him towards the cut-up method, experimentation, blending of genres and styles. the repetition of sitting down and putting pen to paper yielding, at certain points of pressure, vast jumps in time and space.

 

so.

 

the lesson here is that the habit of writing is more important than the ideas. why? because the process of writing is where, most of the time, the ideas spring from. AND, while ideas can come and go, the process of writing is something to hang your hat on. in basketball terms, ideas are offense, coming and going from night to night, but the process is D, requiring effort alone and thus consistent, dependable, and able to supersede superior offensive production (see: 2004, 2008 NBA FInals).

 

to get meta on your asses, coming into this here post, i only knew that i wanted to write about the habit as it related to writing. every idea from the preface to this word, RIGHT HERE, no, RIGHT HERE, has emerged through the process of my typing. perhaps crazy smart people can see their ideas in a panorama and their writing a process of making a detailed copy. but for me, and i think most people, including mr. B, writing is a process of plunging headlong into a thicket of impressions containing phantoms of ideas, and then chasing these mental ghosts out the other side.

 

whew. i will edit this in the morning because i'm sic, tired and it's only 10:40, which is making me feel additionally pathetic.

 

 

 

29 january 2009

7:30ish p.m

 

Just watched the video of eisenhower up on the minstrel's wiki.

 

Very remarkable. Just as the commentators mentioned afterwards, I know Eisenhower invented the phrase, but to hear the speech was shocking. It's almost unfathomable to think that any contemporary political leader of any consequence would bite the hand that feeds them with such determination.

 

Naomi Klein has written a very good book about this topic that just came out recently, if anyone should care to enter a world of trap-door morals and thickets of depravity so dense as to wipe out any idea of weekend fun.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine:_The_Rise_of_Disaster_Capitalism

 

 

29 january 2009

7:30 p.m.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/weekinreview/07lacey.html?_r=1&partner=MOREOVERFEATURES&ei=5040

 

Above is handy link that i think compliments Burroughs encounter with the teenage boy in Peru, and specifically his comments that "you must understand this ia average non queer Peruvian boy". While two instances don't provide any conclusion evidence about a greater tolerance towards what is still (sadly, insanely, though perhaps statistically correct) being considered "deviant" behavior, it is interesting to think about, especially when considering the passage of Prop 8 and the direction we are steering the good ship America.

 

It also occurs to me that I have chosen not to properly punctuate any of my previous posts. Which is funny considering I have not used AIM since sophomore year in high school and hate texting, which seems to be the cause for the most blatant and delightful jettisons of even remotely correct English diction. I guess this will just have to be written off as laziness. Sorry wiki.

 

25 january 2009

 

to add to the delightful circuitousness of the interwebs, i will posit some thoughts here about "the stash's" comments on all the way mae's thoughts on ludlow. to create some continuity, sidestep the effort in creating logically structured paragraphs ordered in a larger whole, and further the interweb's mission of shortening attention spans faster than television ever could, my post will be demarcated by numerical bullets. enjoy

 

1. all the way mae's main contention seems to be that hasheesh (or drugs in general) allow a change in experience that is subjective in so far as it does not effect anyone else except the user of the substance. this is to be contrasted to the primordial man emerging from the cave, whose drastic change from a drearier clime is manifest in the physical world outside his body and thus must be regarded as subjective.

 

now, i would say that these changes do present different types of "highs", by which i mean: there is a difference with taking a drug and experiencing the familiar in an entirely new way and experiencing a new place or environment while sober. however, all the way mae's comment that:

 

 

"Because the change in Plato's Allegory occurs in the observable/quantifiable/objective world, there is no "user" subject to a change in "subjectivity;" the change is obvious, apparent--and would be the same for the next person to exit the cave"

 

 

 

seems, well, wrong (or as wrong as you can get in questions of ontology). would two people who lived hermetically sealed in central pennsylvania all their lives be guaranteed the same reaction upon seeing the atlantic ocean for the first time? no. and how could they? well, the answer to that lies in a misdiagnosis of the conditions of relative sameness that all the way mae seems to be making. just because these central PA folk and the cave people are emerging from an environment that would promote identical thinking and reaction, it would be folly to compartmentalize both constituencies in one representative reaction. if the first cave person's escape into the world of sunlight could be said to be analogous to some sort of higher experience of what life "really" is, this experience has not only philosophical but religious interest. and, with the glut of philosophical and religious world-views, it seems pretty clear that two people, however similar they may be (catholic school students, let's say), can arrive at wildly divergent ends despite their lockstep education.

 

2. to all the way mae's final question, "does subjective experience apply to all texts?", my question back is, "what text does subjective experience not apply?".

 

 

 

15 january 2009?

 

welp, after a few tries at removing the bracket betwixt my ill shaped moniker, i've given up. damn it all, it's staying until i can corral someone more internet savvy than myself.

 

speaking of this here "internet", after a trying two hours of installing a cd-rom (complete with SUPER EASY INSTALLATION!) for an online class, i've come to the conclusion that technological frustration (most likely in the form of the simultaneous blackout of an important college football game) will lead to this looming end of the world on december 12th, 2012 i've been hearing about (mostly from stoned idiots). let's be serious, calendars don't kill people. trying to cope with the sly dependency on technological advances that they cannot barely hope to explain (like the internet, satellite television, HD porn (sub brackets--> does such a thing really exist? and if it does, would rivers cuomo have instead written a song entitled "i'm tired of high definition pornography" instead?)).

 

so this is blogging. it's pretty fucking boring.