Selections from Things You Think About and Fail to Follow Through

I love being way too late to get on pop culture stuff. Like how I decided on the train ride home that I really like the White Stripes, which I should have realized before because I've never disliked any of their stuff from the radio. So yeah. Detroit pride, son. I also listened to all of the Arcade Fire album Neon Bible which I think I am also very late to care about. Train rides are good for that kind of stuff. That having been said, here is a bit of rambly prose I wrote at 2 or so in the morning, thinking about our lovely blizzardy Saturday night.


When the snow falls and you love your friends, you can toast to warmth and liters of beer and make a not-so-grand speech to a roomful of applause. You can switch seats, you can steal food, you never get sick of shouting SURPRISE! You have other surprises too, long and short hair, stylistic differences but there must be at least seven things you have in common. Writing and drinking are two. You don’t want to think about the darker sides, so you won’t. You’ll just stomp through a half-foot of snow with more coming down, shriek and swear, close the gate behind you, sit in a circle and talk of balloon animals, civil war reenactments. When you almost might float or fall into the ocean, you go back out to those wild Brooklyn drifts. No matter how hard the signs to read or the ice in your eyes, you move through the "air," exhausted & wilding out. So much of New York is waiting for a train. After which the night unwinds and you are on a spool, spun out to your doorstep and your frozen kite tail of keys.

Those writers used compression, oh? I’ll feel perfection when I’ve condensed the world into nothing, ten words, three words, one. I want to create film as a private medium, I like everything to be a private medium, which becomes tricky to execute, and not at all profitable. I want to know your body clock, blow up the tiny pictures of your minds and let the journals be buried with the dead. Let the journals be buried with the dead! Let the letters survive, since we must be so goddamned nosy anyway, to satiate the grave-robbers. Why grace the dead with fame, for what reason? I am contradictory, for I care more about the thoughts of the dead than the living most times. I make things indecipherable so only I can decipher them, not at all profitable I say.

Shopping malls and convenience stores do make me uneasy, yet they are easy.

The obligations of learning vs. the damage you create once you’ve learned. you are ready to tear up the hearts of the dead, but they don’t care, but it’s possible that they do.

only he knows bigger words

I'm going to write about John Ashbery because that is what I am supposed to be doing right now anyway, only in a proper way and using good academic terms. But even though i only have about two point five hours to finish this paper, I still think it will be a better use of my time to get excited about it in an informal fashion than to just do jargon jargon jargon jargon all over the place in this sloppy Word doc. Besides, I already fell asleep three times this morning and that can't happen any more.

“I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.”

Ashbery introduces the idea of filtered experience and fragmented knowledge by proposing the alternatives—everything and nothing—as the ideal forms of truth. Although he includes two examples of leaving out (“clean washed sea” and “The flowers were.”), writing is, by default, a filtered medium of thought. Ashbery uses this discrepancy between the “ideal” form of personal truth, and the actual manifestation of identity through the external self.

(that was copy and paste)

He goes on to say that the empty space will be filled by the self--"It is you who made this, therefore you are true." This places language and the self in a sort of cycle, where one picks up where the other has left off. In order to describe how the self can operate within language, parts of identity must also be brought as close to everything and nothing as possible.


“It may become necessary…to retreat again into the hard, dark recesses of yourself where you know no comfort is to be found, but which are preferable nevertheless to this perilous position on the edge of the flood, looking down awestruck into the coiling waters that sometimes strike out and ensnare a parcel of land that had seemed secure.”

beautiful.

writing papers about things i love is both cruel and totally necessary, because i usually don't manage to love difficult things until something forces me to. too bad i don't get graded on my emotional connection to my paper.

I just don't think I should be an academic. I don't know what I would be instead though. I just want to be able to do the things i like (writing, reading, singing, cooking, etc) without some end goal in mind or a grand purpose or anything.


btw, who here reads webcomics, and which ones? i can't be the only one.

Update:

1. So I changed my password again. And its STILL an awesome dictionary word. So there, I don't care if it's unsafe. Sometimes I don't wear my helmet, either. For the record, last year's was "flotsam."

2. I'm writing one of my final papers about spelling reform. It's probably going to be better than my blog post about spelling reform, so maybe if I get ambitious, I'll post this new one too.

3. School sucks the life out of me and I hope to God the city of dearborn hires me as a park aide so I won't have to think i can just pick up garbage and clean up shit and think about the little green bugs in the parks while i make the world pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty....

they added "meh" to the dictionary

blog is dead.
not in general, just this one.

i don't think i'm cut out for blogging. i think bloggers are supposed to be opinionated or something.

a brief disjointed return.

a news story:
now that i am having schooling in writing again, i will have more to write and put in here.
the bad part, requiring discipline in order to write is probably a good sign for my imminent failure as a writer.

i would like to take a moment and chat about some super books i read recently, as well as a couple of the mediocre ones i picked up for some reason and decided to finish.

first, my favorite of recent days and the reason i feel inspired all month:
We Love Glenda So Much, a short story collection by Julio Cortazar.
part of my joy for this collection is that i have been trying to know Cortazar for a good 6 months or so and after feeling stupid trying his novels and losing my brain, i'm glad to have finally hit upon his work in my favorite medium, short story. Cortazar has such a crazy mind, i wish i could live in it, but being that i can't, i consider it a joy to read such lovely passages as this:

"The dogs howled again intermittently, from one of the shacks in the dell the shouts of a woman suddenly cut off at their highest point, the silence next door let a murmer of confused alarm pass in the dozing of tourist women too fatigued and out of it to be really interested in what surrounded them. We stayed listening, far removed from sleep. After all, what's the use of sleeping if later on it could be the roar of a cloudburst on the roof or the shrill lovemaking of cats, the preludes to nightmares, dawn, when heads finally flatten pillows and then nothing can get in them until the sun climbs up the palm trees and you have to go back to living."
--Story With Spiders

doesn't it make you want to sigh? i read it and want my own beach cabin or else make myself lie awake in bed to hear my own neighborhood's sounds, the next-door air conditioner and a bird with a very close nest. i realize that real criticism is beyond me, that reading for me is either loving or confusion or boredom or amusement. i usually can't be bothered thinking of where an author failed or what he must have been thinking. what i read is mostly enough.

other highlighted stories include the title story, We Love Glenda So Much, a tale of fan clubs gone awry but told in a sense of the highest glory and ancient quest for perfection; Clone, a confusing fugue or choir of sorts where i can't even get angry that the concept is greater than the plot; and Stories I Tell Myself, which i of course love because dream and daydream and love and adventure roll all together and come out in a dinner party.

ok, end of good book round 1. good book round 2 will be shorter because allison is borrowing my copy and i desperately want it back for comfort.

like so many of my college brethren, i have caught the kerouac bug. however unlike most i have known, it was not On The Road that made me realize my inner beat (or rather name my inner beat as 'beat' because i feel like i'm insulting myself to say i needed a book to tell me what i am. at any rate). so, my book of choice: Desolation Angels.

those of you who feel like scrolling down a bit will find a post where i basically rhapsodize about a passage from this book, and i guess not a lot more needs to be said. there is a blurb on the cover of my copy that talks about how Desolation Angels best captures the place of God in the beat mystique, and i like that. i worry and wonder about God a lot and its easier to think about when presented in such a poetic and honest way as this. i think maybe its too late, too much writing has happened since then to make it acceptable for me to write the way i do, but kerouac tells me its okay to do stream of consciousness if i want even if its not a stream but a lot of blood squirting out instead.

i guess rather than move on to the mediocre books i should just give a rest, i'm getting crazy and i'm not all that deep anyway. there is only so long i can ramble along in my own head without making you all hate me, probably. and i do still care, somewhat, about that.

good night.

i don't really feel like writing much lately (not in a happy or sad way).

on mental lenses

1. Lying on my right side in the grass when it is quite sunny. I think about how a man-made camera would duplicate the effect of each eye’s lens crossing the other so I see my arm, but I can see the grass through my arm tho it is behind it, actually. I blink each eye separately and the picture shifts from my arm to the flower garden five yards away. The sun is so goddamn warm and bright in my left eye and that is definitely something a movie lens would not get in the right way, in fact I think I’ve never seen a film with crossed-eye impressions of grass and sunburned arms and visions of eyelashes flirting with tiny bugs, tiny bugs crawling ten-story blades of grass in july. I like to smile about this because it is distracting.
2. In a hired black taxi skimming down the FDR drive past Queens and Brooklyn and the glowing Pepsi sign and the water is just as black, too. It’s night, so lights are on and the telescope in my eye can see dry fingers flicking on switches and either standing at the window like mirrors to me or ignoring the same old city night again. We don’t see stars except on deck chairs, and at the pier there is a real telescope. For two quarters you can spy-scan the other side, the other island that is practically a mainland poking into the ocean. The spy-scan is no better than the eye telescope tho because the scan is just that, it is a cursory view and difficult to focus and can’t see hands in pockets or coin jars.