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.